The Honor of the Qween

Michaels nodded slowly. He felt a twinge of guilt, which surprised him, but Masterman was right, and the locals' prejudices would make them far more likely to accept a story no civilized planet would believe for a moment.

'You see, Captain?' Masterman said quietly. 'This will let us change the entire focus of the internal Grayson debate over Manticore's overtures from a cold-blooded consideration of advantages to an emotional rejection based on their own bigotry. And if I've learned one thing over the years, it's that when it comes down to raw emotion against reason, emotion wins.'

* * *

' ... and this is our combat information center, gentlemen.' Andreas Venizelos was short by Manticoran standards, but he stood centimeters taller than the Grayson officers in the compartment as he gestured about himself at the shining efficiency.

Admiral Yanakov managed not to gawk, but his palms itched as he took in the superb instrumentation. The holo tank was over three meters across, and the flat-screen displays around him showed every ship within ten light-minutes of Grayson. Not with single, annotated light codes for groups of vessels, but as individual units with graphic representations of mass and vector.

He stepped closer to one of the ratings and peered over his shoulder. The young—or, young- looking, anyway—man didn't even twitch at his presence, and Yanakov turned back to Venizelos.

'Could you bring up the holo tank, Commander?'

Venizelos regarded him for a moment, then looked past him.

'Captain?'

Yanakov felt his expression try to freeze, then turned. Captain Harrington stood behind him, her strongly carved face showing no emotion at all, and he made himself meet her eyes. The sense of the alien grew greater, not less, every time he saw her uniform, and he suspected she'd delegated the task of spokesman to her executive officer because she felt it, too.

'Would you object to our observing the holo display in operation ... Captain?' Yanakov's voice sounded strained even in his own ears, and he cursed himself for the slight hesitation he gave her title.

'Of course not, Admiral.' Her musical soprano only increased his feeling of unreality. It sounded almost exactly like his third wife's, and the thought of Anna in uniform appalled him.

'Bring up the tank, please, Chief Waters,' she said.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' a petty officer responded with a crispness that seemed odd addressed to a woman. But, Yanakov thought almost despairingly, it didn't sound a bit odd addressed to an officer. Damn it, the very concept of a female officer was an oxymoron!

The holo tank blinked to life, extending its upper edge almost to the deckhead, and the clustered Grayson officers made a soft noise of approval and delight. Small light codes drifted beside every dot: arrows denoting headings, dotted lines projecting vectors, numerals and letters defining drive strength, acceleration, and active sensor emissions. It was how God Himself must see the stars, and pure envy for this ship's capabilities tingled in Yanakov's brain.

'As you can see, Admiral,' Harrington raised a hand to gesture gracefully at the holo, 'we proj—'

She broke off as Commander Harris, Yanakov's operations officer, stepped between her and the tank in search of a closer look at one of the symbols. Her hand hovered a moment, and then her lips firmed.

'Excuse me, Commander,' she said, her tone devoid of all emotion, 'I was just about to point something out to Admiral Yanakov.'

Harris turned, and Yanakov flushed at his cold-eyed, contemptuous expression. Yanakov was having trouble enough with the concept of a senior female officer, but Harris was a hardline conservative. He started to open his mouth, then snapped it shut at a tiny gesture from his admiral. His lips tightened further, but he stepped back, every line of his body a silent expression of resentment, for Harrington to proceed.

'As you can see, Admiral,' she continued in that same, even voice, 'we project the probable weapons range for each warship. Of course, a display with this much detail can be a liability for actual tactical control, so we use smaller ones on the bridge to avoid information overflow. CIC, however, is responsible for deciding which threats we need to see, and—'

Her voice went on, showing no sign of anger at Harris' insulting behavior, and Yanakov listened attentively even while he wondered if he should have dressed Harris down. Certainly he'd have to have a long talk with him in private, but should he have made the point now? It would have humiliated his ops officer in front of his fellows, but how would the Manticorans react to his own restraint?

He glanced up and caught Andreas Venizelos unawares, and the anger in the Manticoran officer's eyes answered his question.

* * *

'I know they're different, Bernard, but we just have to make allowances.' Benjamin Mayhew IX, Planetary Protector of Grayson, snipped another rose and laid it in the servant's basket, then turned to regard his naval commander in chief sternly. 'You knew they had women in uniform. Surely you realized we'd have to deal with that sooner or later.'

'Of course I did!' Admiral Yanakov glowered at the basket, not bothering to hide his conviction that flower arrangement wasn't precisely the most manly art his head of state might have pursued. He was one of the few who made no secret of his feelings, but then, he was also Protector Benjamin's fifth cousin, with very clear memories of an infant who'd still been making puddles on the palace carpet when he himself was already in uniform.

'Then I don't quite understand your vehemence.' Mayhew gestured, and the servant withdrew. 'It's not like you to carry on this way.'

'I'm not speaking for myself,' Yanakov said a bit stiffly. 'All I said was that my officers don't like it, and they don't. In fact, `don't like' is putting it far too mildly, Ben. They hate it, and there are some ugly rumors about her competence.'

'Her competence? Good God, Bernard! The woman holds the Manticore Cross!' Yanakov looked at him in some confusion, and Mayhew sighed. 'You'd better bone up on foreign decorations, cousin mine. For your information, the Manticore Cross is about one notch lower than the Star of Grayson—and it can only be earned for heroism under fire.'

'The Star of Grayson?' Yanakov blinked as he digested that thought. It didn't seem possible someone as good looking and young—

He stopped himself with a mental curse. Damn it, the woman wasn't as 'young' as he kept thinking! In fact, she was forty-three T-years old, barely twelve years younger than Yanakov himself, but still ...

'All right, so she's got guts,' he growled. 'But I'll bet she won that medal in Basilisk, didn't she?' The Protector nodded, and Yanakov shrugged. 'Then it's only going to make the officers who don't trust her more suspicious, not less.' He flushed at his cousin's expression but plowed on stubbornly. 'You know I'm right, Ben. They're going to think exactly what the Havenites are going to say out loud: decorating her was part of a deliberate propaganda effort to cover up what really happened when she lost it—probably because it was her time of month! —and blew away an unarmed merchantman.' His teeth grated in fresh frustration. 'Damn it, if they had to send us a woman, couldn't they at least have sent us one who isn't rumored to be a murderer?!'

'Oh, that's bullshit, Bernard!' Mayhew led the way across the domed terrace into the palace, followed by his blank-faced personal Security man. 'You've heard Manticore's version of Basilisk, and you know as well as I do what Haven wants in this region. Who do you think is telling us the truth?'

'Manticore, of course. But what you or I believe isn't the issue. Most of my people are only too ready to see any woman as potentially dangerous in a command slot. Those who don't automatically assume they must be loose warheads are horrified by the thought of exposing women to combat, and real conservatives, like Garret and his crowd, are reacting on pure emotion, not reason. They see her as a calculated insult to our way of life—and if you think I'm making that up, you should have heard a little conversation I had with my ops officer! Under the circumstances, Haven's version of what happened only validates all three groups' concerns. And don't come down too heavily on my people, either! Some of your civilian types are even worse than anybody in the military, and you know it. Hell, what about Jared?'