The Honor of the Qween

having no choice but to leave when Honor needed her.

She opened her eyes again. If the Lords of Admiralty chose to go by The Book, she would face a Board, certainly, possibly even a full Court, for recklessly hazarding her command. And even if she didn't, there were going to be captains who felt the risk was unjustifiable, for if she lost Apollo, no one in Manticore would even know that Honor needed help.

But hours might make the difference in Yeltsin, and that meant she would never be able to live with herself if she didn't take the chance.

Her intercom beeped, and she pressed the stud.

'Bridge, Captain.'

'Safety interlocks disengaged, Skipper,' Hackmore's voice said. 'This beat-up bitch is ready to roll.'

'Thank you, Charlie,' Commander Alice Truman said firmly. She checked the maneuvering display. 'Stand by to translate in eight minutes.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Alfredo Yu knew he ought to be studying Engineering's report on Thunder of God's overhauled tractors, but he frowned sightlessly at the data, unable to concentrate on it. Something about the Masadan reaction was out of kilter. It was wrong, and the fact that he couldn't put his finger on just what that wrongness was only made him even more uneasy.

He pushed back from the terminal to pace fretfully and tried to tell himself he was being silly. Of course something was 'wrong' with Masada! He'd failed. Through no fault of his own, perhaps, but he'd failed, and the repercussions of that failure, and its consequences for them, had to be echoing through every Masadan mind and heart.

And yet ...

He came to a stop, eyes unfocused but intent as he tried to chase down that 'yet.' Was it the Council of Elders' silence? The halfhearted way Sword Simonds had protested his excuses for keeping Thunder in Endicott? Or simply the sense of doom looming over them all?

He bared his teeth in a humorless smile at his own contrariness. He'd expected hysteria and a welter of conflicting orders from the Council, and the fact that he hadn't gotten those things should have been a vast relief. This stunned, silent lack of reaction was far better suited to his and Ambassador Lacy's purposes—was that why it worried him? Because it was too convenient?

And why should Simonds' pliancy puzzle him? The Sword must be astounded he was still alive. Surely he had to be wondering when his strange immunity would vanish, and a man who felt Death breathing quietly down his neck, never knowing when it might strike, wasn't very likely to be his old, prickly, meddlesome self, now was he?

As for senses of doom, what else could he expect? Despite the front he maintained for his inner circle of Havenite officers, he himself had no hope at all that Manticore would back off because a single Havenite battlecruiser—especially the one who'd started the shooting in the first place—got in the way. And if he didn't believe it, how could he expect his crew to? There was an air of caged lightning aboard Thunder of God, and men did their duty without chatter and tried to believe they would somehow be among the survivors when it was finished.

All of those explanations for his unease were true. Unfortunately, none of them got at the root of whatever was worrying him.

He turned automatically, almost against his will, to the bulkhead calendar display. Three days since Blackbird's destruction. He didn't know exactly when Harrington's freighters had pulled out, but if they hadn't gone sooner, they must have gone as soon as she discovered Thunder's true weight of metal, and that gave him a rough time window. He might have as many as ten days or as few as eight before the Manticoran relief arrived, and every slow-ticking second of anticipation stretched his nerves tighter.

At least the Faithful seemed to realize they'd lost. The Elders' relatively speedy acceptance of his argument that further attacks would be in vain had been a welcome surprise, and if Simonds' decision to reinforce the fortifications scattered about the Endicott System was pointless, it also beat hell out of a do-or-die assault on Grayson.

They were doing exactly what he and Ambassador Lacy wanted them to, so why couldn't he feel any satisfaction?

It was the futility, he decided. The sense that events were in motion, proceeding down a foreordained path no one could alter. His awareness that it simply didn't matter anymore—that the end would be the same, whatever he did, or coaxed them into doing—made inactivity poisonously seductive.

Perhaps that was why he hadn't objected to the Sword's latest orders. Thunder of God had never been intended as a transport, but she was faster even sublight than anything Masada had, and if the thought of cluttering his ship with still more Masadans was unappealing, at least as long as she played passenger liner she wasn't being ordered back to Yeltsin. And it would at least give him the illusion of doing something.

He snorted. Perhaps he and Simonds were more alike than he cared to admit, for it seemed that was an illusion whose preservation they both craved.

He glanced at the calendar again. The first shuttles would be arriving in another nine hours, and he twitched his shoulders straight and headed for the cabin hatch. He and Manning were going to have a hell of a time figuring out where to put them, and that was good. It would give him something constructive to worry about for a while.

* * *

Admiral of the Green Hamish Alexander, Thirteenth Earl of White Haven, waited by the access tube as the pinnace docked in HMS Reliant's boat bay. His flagship was already driving towards the hyper limit under maximum military power, and if his rugged face was calm, the skin around his ice-blue eyes was tight.

He folded his hands behind him and knew the full shock hadn't yet hit. Prolong made for long friendships and associations, and he'd known Raoul Courvosier all his life. He was twelve T-years younger than Raoul had been and he'd climbed the rank ladder faster, in no small part because of his birth, but there'd always been a closeness —personal, not just professional—between them. Lieutenant Courvosier had taught him astrogation on his midshipman's cruise, and he'd followed in Captain Courvosier's footsteps as senior tactical instructor at Saganami Island, and argued and planned strategy and deployment policies with Admiral Courvosier for years. Now, just like that, he was gone.

It was like waking up one morning to find he'd lost an arm or a leg in his sleep, but Hamish Alexander was familiar with pain. And terrible as this pain was, it was not what filled him with such fear. Beyond personal grief, beyond even his awareness of the outstanding leadership resource the Navy had lost with Raoul, was the knowledge that four hundred other Navy personnel had died with him, and that a thousand more were all too probably waiting for death in Yeltsin even now—if, indeed, they hadn't already died. That was what made Hamish Alexander afraid.

The tube pressure equalized, and a shortish, sturdy commander, her braided blond hair tucked under the white beret of a starship's commander, stepped out of it. Bosun's pipes shrilled, the side party came to attention, and she saluted crisply.

'Welcome aboard, Commander Truman,' he said, returning her salute.

'Thank you, Sir.' Truman's face was drawn and etched with weariness. It couldn't have been an easy voyage for her, Alexander thought, yet there was a fresh, peculiarly poignant sorrow he understood too well in her exhausted green eyes.

'I'm very sorry to have pulled you out of Apollo, Commander,' he said quietly as they moved towards Reliant's lift, 'but I needed to get under way immediately—and I need to know everything someone who was there can tell me. Under the circumstances—' He shrugged slightly,