Mission of Honor

'I—'

He stopped, looking into her face, then exhaled.

'I know,' he said, and she tasted the pain behind the words, the realization that despite how desperately important to him she was, she was also only one of literally millions of people who couldn't be 'protected from it forever.' Not that realizing that kept him from wishing with all his heart and soul that he could.

'So tell me,' she said.

He looked at her a moment longer. She felt him steel himself, felt him gathering himself the way both of them had gathered themselves as missiles began to fly and people under their command began to die.

'Debris from the strike on Vulcan got through to the planet,' he said, and his voice was flat, harsh, the words quick and unflinching, offering her the stark honesty of one professional officer to another, now that the moment had finally come. 'One of the tugs—the Quay— did her damnedest, but she couldn't catch it all. One of the strikes, a big one, probably up in the multi-hundred thousand- ton range,' he looked straight into her eyes, 'took out Yawata Crossing, Honor. The entire city.'

Someone punched Honor squarely in the chest. She stared at him, literally unable for several seconds to process the information. Then she sucked in a deep, agonized breath, and he reached out to take her face between both his hands and leaned forward until their foreheads touched.

'All three of your aunts,' he said, and his voice was soft, now, the voice of her lover and husband, shadowed with his own grief at inflicting this upon her. 'Your Uncle Al was away on business, but Jason and Owen were both at home. So'—he inhaled deeply again—'were all the kids. And your cousin Devon, and his wife, and two of the children. Matthias and Frieda. Holly and Eric. Martha.' He closed his eyes. 'Al is all right—or as close to it as a man can be when his wife and kids are. . . And Devon's daughter Sarah, and your cousin Benedict and cousin Leah, were all away. But the rest were all there. It was your Aunt Claire's birthday, and . . . .'

His voice died, and tears trickled down Honor's cheeks as the list went on and on in her mind, adding the other names. All the names. The Harrington clan was a large one, but most of its members had always lived in and around Yawata Crossing, and family affairs—like birthdays—were important to them. They always gathered for moments like that, all of them who could, and she pictured them there, laughing and teasing the guest of honor as they always did. Her father's sisters, their husbands, their children—their grand children. Cousins and in-laws .

'I'm sorry, love,' he whispered. 'I'm so sorry.'

She tasted his love, his shared grief, the pain he felt for her pain and the special guilt he felt for having inflicted it upon her. She knew, now, what monster had ridden his shoulders . . . and why there'd been no mention of collateral damage to Sphinx in any of the official correspondence which had accompanied her recall. Hamish Alexander-Harrington was the First Lord of Admiralty, and whether it had been an abuse of his position or not hadn't really mattered to him. She was not going to learn about something like this through some cold letter or recorded message. No, he'd taken that crushing task upon himself, in person. She knew that now, just as she knew he wasn't done yet.

'Tell me the rest,' she said, and her voice was just as harsh as his had been, ribbed with the steely selfcontrol fighting to hold back the darkness.

'Andrew and Miranda were taking Raoul to Claire's party,' he said, and her heart seemed to stop. 'Your dad and the twins were supposed to be there, too, but there'd been some kind of delay. They were in transit between Manticore and Sphinx when the attack hit. They came through it just fine, and Andrew, Raoul, and Lindsey had swung by your parents' place to pick up your mom. They hadn't gotten to Claire's yet, either, but Miranda—'

He shook his head, and she closed her eyes. Not Miranda, too, God , she prayed. Not Miranda, too!

She heard both 'cats keening their own lament, and a fresh spasm of anguish went through her.

Of course , she thought. Of course Farragut was with her. And no wonder Toby saw to it that Hamish and I could be alone when he told me .

'Andrew?' she heard her own voice ask. 'Raoul and Mother?'

The look he gave her filled her with terror. Her own shocked grief and pain threatened to drown the universe, yet even through it, she tasted his mind glow. Knew he would rather have had his own heart ripped out than bring her this news.

'Raoul and your mother are fine,' he said quickly, then made a harsh, ugly sound deep in his throat. 'Well, as fine as they can be. But they were too close to the Yawata strike. Andrew got the two of them—and Lindsey— punched out in time, and they're all fine, although Lindsey came out of it with a badly broken collarbone. But —'

His hands slid down from her face, and his arms went back around her.

'He ran out of time, love,' he whispered. 'He got the three of them out, but he and Jeremiah were still in the limo when the blast front hit it.'

Honor Alexander-Harrington had forgotten there could be that much pain in the universe. She knew it was a miracle her mother and her son had survived, and she knew she would never be able to express how unspeakably grateful she was for that incredible gift.

Yet that gift came at the price of a dark and personal agony, for it was the last gift, the last miracle, Andrew LaFollet would ever give her. And now, the last—and the most beloved—of her original Grayson armsmen was gone.

I made him Raoul's armsman to keep him safe. To keep him away from me, from the way people keep dying for me . The thought trickled through the tearing anguish. I tried. God, I tried to keep him safe .

But she'd failed. Even then, she knew it wasn't truly her fault, just as she knew that if Andrew had known exactly what was going to happen, he would have done exactly the same thing. That her armsman had died knowing precisely what he was doing and knowing he'd succeeded. That was something. In time, it might actually help her deal with this numbing sense of devastation, but not now. Not yet.

'Your mother insisted that all of them—including your father—go to White Haven, to be with Emily,' Hamish's voice went on after a moment from the dark void which surrounded her. 'That was her official argument, anyway. Mostly, though . . . Mostly, I think, it was an excuse to get your father away from Yawata Crossing. It wasn't as if there was anything they could have done there, Honor. Not after something like that.'

'Of course not.' She felt the tears flowing, and the guilt she'd felt before, the sense of failure, was a knife in her heart. 'Mother was right. She usually is.'

'I know,' he said quietly, changing position to pull her face down against his shoulder while Nimitz and Samantha cuddled tightly against her.

'Somehow,' she heard herself say, and the steel had gone out of her voice, replaced by dead, defeated flatness, 'I never thought about this. Never worried about it—not really. I thought I had, but I know better now. I never really let myself think that it could have happened. That I could have let it happen.'

'You didn't!' he said softly, fiercely. 'There wasn't one, solitary damned thing you could have done to stop this Honor.'

'But we should have. We were supposed to. It's our job , Hamish, and what use are we if we can't even do our jobs?'

Hamish Alexander-Harrington heard the grief, the pain, in that dead soprano voice, and he understood it. Better than he'd ever understood anything in his life, in that moment, he understood exactly what his wife was feeling, for he'd felt it himself. But his arms tightened around her, and he shook his head hard.

'You aren't thinking a single thing I haven't already thought,' he told her. 'If it was anyone's 'job,' Honor, it was the Admiralty's. So, trust me, love, there's not one single, ugly, hateful thing you can think about yourself that I haven't already thought about myself. But we're both wrong. Yes, keeping this from happening is what our lives have been about ever since we put on the uniform. But you weren't even here when it happened, and nobody saw it coming. Nobody was asleep at the switch, Honor. Nobody ignored anything. Every damned one of us did our jobs, exactly the way we were supposed to, and this time, it just wasn't enough. Somebody got past us because they came at us in a way no one could have predicted.'