The Honor of the Qween

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

'Captain? Can you hear me, ma'am?'

The voice trickled through her head, and she opened her eyes. Or, rather, an eye. She forced it to focus and blinked dizzily at the face above her.

A familiar, triangular jaw pressed into her right shoulder, and she turned her head to look into Nimitz's anxious green eyes. The 'cat lay beside her, not curled up on her in his preferred position, and he was purring so hard the bed vibrated. Her hand felt unnaturally heavy, but she raised it to his ears, and the anxious power of his purr eased slightly. She stroked him again, then looked back up at a soft sound. Andreas Venizelos stood beside Surgeon Commander Montoya, and her dapper exec looked almost as worried as Nimitz had.

'How am I?' she tried to ask, but the words came out slurred and indistinct, for only the right side of her lips had moved.

'You could be a lot better, Ma'am.' Montoya's eyes sparked with anger. 'Those bastards damned near killed you, Skipper.'

'How bad is it?' She took her time, laboring to shape each individual sound, but it didn't seem to help a great deal.

'Not as bad as it might have been. You were lucky, Ma'am. You only caught the fringe of his shot, but if he'd been a few centimeters to the right, or a little higher—' The doctor paused and cleared his throat. 'Your left cheek took the brunt of it, Skipper. The muscle damage isn't as bad as I was afraid, but the soft tissue damage is severe. It also broke the zygomatic arch—the cheekbone just below your eye—and you broke your nose when you went down. More seriously, there's near total nerve mortality from your eye to your chin and reaching around to a point about a centimeter in front of your ear. It missed your ear structure and aural nerves, luckily, and you should still have at least partial control of your jaw muscles on that side.'

Montoya's was a doctor's face; it told his patients precisely what he told it to, but Venizelos' was easier to read, and his definition of 'lucky' clearly didn't match Montoya's. Honor swallowed, and her left hand rose. She felt her skin against her fingers, but it was like touching someone else, for her face felt nothing at all, not even numbness or a sense of pressure.

'In the long-run, I think you'll be okay, Ma'am,' Montoya said quickly. 'It's going to take some extensive nerve grafting, but the damage is localized enough the repairs themselves should be fairly routine. It's going to take time, and I wouldn't care to try it, but someone like your father could handle it no sweat. In the meantime, I can take care of the broken bones and tissue damage with quick heal.'

'An' m' eye?'

'Not good, Skipper,' the surgeon said unflinchingly. 'There are an awful lot of blood vessels in the eye. Most of them ruptured, and with muscle control gone, your eye couldn't close when you hit the carpet. Your cornea is badly lacerated, and you put some debris—broken glass and china—through it and into the eyeball itself.' She stared at him through her good eye, and he looked back levelly.

'I don't think it can be repaired, Ma'am. Not enough to let you do much more than distinguish between light and dark, anyway. It's going to take a transplant, regeneration, or a prosthesis.'

'I don' regen'.' She clenched her fists, hating the slurred sound of her voice. 'M' mom check' m' profile years 'go.'

'Well, there's still transplants, Skipper,' Montoya said, and she made herself nod. Most of the human race could take advantage of the relatively new regeneration techniques; Honor was one of the thirty percent who could not.

'How's th' rest 'f m' face look?' she asked.

'Awful,' Montoya told her frankly. 'The right side's fine, but the left one's a mess, and you're still getting some blood loss. I've drained the major edemas, and the coagulants should stop that in a little while, but frankly, Skipper, you're lucky you can't feel anything.'

She nodded again, knowing he was right, then shoved herself into a sitting position. Montoya and Venizelos glanced at one another, and the surgeon looked as if he might protest for a moment. Then he shrugged and stood back to let her look into the mirror on the bulkhead behind him.

What she saw shocked her, despite his warning. Her pale complexion and the startlingly white dressing over her wounded eye made the livid blue, black, and scarlet damage even more appalling. She looked as if she'd been beaten with a club—which, in a sense, was exactly what had happened—but what filled her with dismay was the utter, dead immobility of the entire left side of her face. Her broken nose ached with a dull, low-key throb, and her right cheek felt tight with a sympathetic reaction; to the left, the pain just stopped. It didn't taper off—it just stopped, and the corner of her mouth hung slightly open. She tried to close it, tried to clench her cheek muscles, and nothing happened at all.

She looked into the mirror, making herself accept it, telling herself Montoya was right—that it could be fixed, whatever it looked like—but all of her selfassurances were a frail shield against her revulsion at what she saw.

' 'V look' be'er,' she said, and watched in numb horror as the untouched right side of her mouth and face moved normally. She drew a deep breath and tried again, very slowly. 'I've looked better,' she got out, and if it still sounded strange and hesitant, at least it sounded more like her.

'Yes, Ma'am, you have,' Montoya agreed.

'Well.' She wrenched her eye from the mirror and looked up at Venizelos. 'Might as well get up, I guess.'

The words came out almost clearly. Perhaps if she remembered the need to concentrate on speaking slowly and deliberately it wouldn't be too bad.

'I'm not sure that's a good i—' Montoya began.

'Skipper, I can handle things un—' Venizelos started simultaneously, but they both broke off as she swung her legs over the side of the bed. She put her feet on the deck, and Montoya reached out as if to stop her.

'Captain, you may not be able to feel it, but you've taken one hell of a beating! Commander Venizelos has things under control here, and Commander Truman's doing just fine with the squadron. They can manage a while longer.'

'The doc's right, Ma'am,' Venizelos weighed in. 'We've got everything covered.' His voice sharpened as Honor ignored them both and heaved herself to her feet. 'Oh, for God's sake, Skipper! Go back to bed!'

'No.' She gripped the bed for balance as the deck curtsied under her. 'As you say, Doctor, I can't feel it,' she said carefully. 'I might as well take advantage of that. Where's my uniform?'

'You don't need one, because you're getting right back into bed!'

'I had one when I came in.' Her eye lit on a locker. She started towards it, and if her course wavered just a bit, she ignored that.

'It's not in there,' Montoya said quickly. She paused. 'Your steward took it away. He said he'd try to get the blood out of it,' he added pointedly.

'Then get me another one.'

'Captain—' he began in even stronger tones, and she swung to face him. The right corner of her mouth quirked in an ironic smile that only made the hideous deadness of the left side of her face more grotesque, but there was something almost like a twinkle in her remaining eye.

'Fritz, you can get me a uniform or watch me walk out of here in this ridiculous gown,' she told him. 'Now which is it going to be?'

* * *

Andreas Venizelos rose as Commander Truman stepped through the hatch. Honor didn't. She'd carried Nimitz here in her arms instead of on her shoulder because she still felt too unsteady to offer him his usual perch, and she had no intention of displaying her knees' irritating weakness any more than she could help.

She looked up at her second in command and braced herself for Truman's reaction. She'd already seen MacGuiness' shocked anger when he brought her the demanded uniform and saw her face, and Venizelos wasn't making any effort to hide his opinion that she was pushing herself too hard, so she wasn't too surprised when Truman rocked back on her heels.