Mission of Honor

Chapter Thirty-Five

Honor Alexander-Harrington sat silently on her flag bridge as HMS Invictus decelerated steadily towards the planet of her birth. Nimitz was on the back of her command chair, but not lying stretched along it as he usually was. Instead, he sat bolt upright, gazing into the visual display with her. The two of them might have been carved out of stone, and the silence on the bridge was absolute.

Honor's expression was calm, almost serene, but inside, where thoughts and emotions ought to have been, there was only a vast, singing silence, as empty as the vacuum beyond her flagship's hull.

She no longer needed to look at the plot. Its icons had already told her how short of reality her dread had fallen. The space about the system's two inhabited planets was crowded with shipping, showing far greater numbers of impeller signatures than would have been permitted in such proximity when Eighth Fleet departed for the Haven System. But those ships weren't the evidence her fears might have been too dark—that the damage had actually been less severe than she'd dreaded. No, those ships were the proof it had been even worse, for they were still only sorting through the wreckage, better than two weeks after the actual attack, and warning beacons marked prodigious spills of debris—and bodies—which had once been the heart and bone of the Star Empire of Manticore's industrial might.

It's odd , a corner of her brain whispered. There was wreckage after the Battle of Manticore, too, but not like this. Oh, no. Not like this. This time every single warship we lost was caught docked, not destroyed in action. And most of the dead are civilians this time .

A sense of failure flowed through her, steadily, with all the patience of an ocean, and with it came shame. A dark guilt that burned like chilled vitriol, for she had failed in the solemn promise she'd made when she was seventeen T-years old. The vow she'd kept for all the years between then and now—honored with a fidelity which only made her present failure infinitely worse. This was exactly what she'd joined the Navy all those years ago to prevent. This was the wreckage of her star nation, these were the bodies of her civilians, and all of it was the work of enemies she was supposed to have stopped before they ever got close enough to play atrocity's midwife.

Nimitz made a small, soft sound of protest, and she felt him leaning forward, pressing against the back of her neck. She knew, in the part of her brain where conscious thought lived, that he was right. She hadn't even been here. When this attack came sweeping through her star system like a tsunami, she'd been over a light-century away, doing her best to end a war. She wasn't the one who'd let it past her.

But however right he might have been, he was still wrong, she thought grimly. No, she hadn't been here. But she was a full admiral in her queen's service. She was one of the Royal Navy's most senior officers, one of the people who planned and executed its strategy.

One of the people responsible for visualizing threats and stopping them.

Invictus settled into orbit, farther out than usual to clear the debris fields which had once been Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan , and she gazed at the image of her home world, so far below.

'Excuse me, Your Grace,' a voice said quietly.

Honor turned her head and looked at Lieutenant Commander Harper Brantley, her staff communications officer.

'Yes, Harper?'

It was wrong, she thought, that her voice should sound so ordinary, so normal.

'You have a communications request,' Brantley told her. 'It's from the Admiralty, Your Grace,' he added when she arched an eyebrow. 'The request is coded private.'

'I see.' She stood, held out her arms, and caught Nimitz as he leapt gracefully into them. 'I'll take it in my briefing room,' she continued, cradling the 'cat as she walked across the bridge.

'Yes, Ma'am.'

Honor felt Waldemar Tьmmel watching her. Her young flag lieutenant had been hit even harder than most of her personnel by the news from home, given that his parents and two of his four siblings had all lived aboard Hephaestus . Their deaths hadn't yet been confirmed—not as far as anyone aboard Invictus knew, at any rate—but there was no optimism in his bleak emotions. She'd done her best to reach out to him during the voyage back to Manticore by way of Trevor's Star, tried to help him through his anxious grief, but she'd failed. Worse, she didn't know if she'd failed because that grief was too deep or because her own mingled grief and guilt had kept her from trying hard enough.

Yet despite everything, he continued to do his duty. Partly because its familiar demands were comforting, something he could cling to and concentrate upon to distract himself from thoughts of his family. Even more, though, she knew, it was because it was his duty. Because he refused to allow what had happened to his universe to prevent him from discharging his responsibilities.

Now she felt him wondering if she would need him in the briefing room, and she looked at him long enough to shake her head. He gazed at her for an instant, then nodded and settled back into his bridge chair.

Spencer Hawke, on the other hand, never even hesitated. He simply followed his Steadholder across her flag bridge and into the briefing room, then arranged himself against the bulkhead behind her.

Honor felt him there, at her back. Technically, she supposed, she should have instructed him to wait outside the briefing room door, given the security code Brantley had said the message carried. That thought had crossed her mind more than once over the years, in similar situations, yet it had never even occurred to her to actually do it with Andrew LaFollet, and she knew she would never do it with Hawke, either. He was a Grayson armsman, and he would guard his steadholder's secrets with the same iron fidelity with which he guarded her life.

She seated herself, set Nimitz on the conference table to one side of her terminal, and brought up the display.

'Put it through, Harper,' she told the com officer when his image appeared.

'Yes, Ma'am,' he replied, and disappeared, to be replaced almost instantly by a brown-haired, brown-eyed man of average build in the uniform of a captain of the list. She recognized him immediately.

'Good afternoon, Jackson,' she said.

'Good afternoon, Your Grace,' Captain Jackson Fargo replied quietly. 'It's good to see you home again, although I wish it were under other circumstances.'

'I know.' She smiled briefly at the man who headed Hamish Alexander-Harrington's Admiralty House staff. 'It's good to see you again, too, with the same proviso.'

'Thank you, Your Grace.' Fargo gave her a small half-bow, then cleared his throat. 'The First Lord asked me to screen you. He's actually on Sphinx at this moment. Well, more accurately, he's aboard a shuttle which happens to be headed in your direction at this moment. His ETA is about twelve minutes, and he asked me to tell you he would very much like to join you aboard your flagship when he arrives, if that would be convenient.'

A tiny flicker of joy flashed like distant lightning across the horizon of the emptiness within her, and she felt herself smiling ever so slightly.

'I believe, Captain,' Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington told him, 'that I'll be able to find the time somehow.'

* * *

God, he looks terrible!

The thought flicked through Honor's mind the instant Hamish swung across the boarding tube's interface and into the internal gravity of Invictus ' boat bay.

She felt Nimitz's agreement and tasted a fresh stab of the treecat's own concern as Samantha looked across at them from her perch on Hamish's shoulder. Nimitz's mate looked worn, exhausted. Her normally immaculate pelt was almost disheveled, and her tail hung down Hamish's back like the banner of a defeated army.

Hamish looked almost as bad, Honor thought. But then she realized that wasn't really true. His shoulders were as square as always, his back as straight, his head unbowed. He carried himself with assurance, and only someone who knew him well might have noted the fresh lines on his face, the fresh silver at his temples, the shadows in his blue eyes. But Honor didn't need those physical signs. She could taste—share—his inner exhaustion, and beneath his duty to show the confident face the public—and his subordinates—needed to see, there was a