Ashes Of Victory

'How sad,' Rice murmured with a beatific smile.

'I must say, however,' Cromarty put in, fingering the unfinished lump of nickel iron in the beautifully worked cage of golden filagree which hung from his belt, 'that this `memory stone' custom of yours is a lovely one, Your Grace. I wish we had one like it back home, though I suppose we're too hopelessly secular for it. Whatever else he may be up to, I'm grateful to Steadholder Mueller for introducing me to it.'

'Even Samuel Mueller has his moments I suppose,' Benjamin conceded. 'And you're right. It is a deeply meaningful ritual among us, and whatever I may think of Mueller, I owe him a debt for reminding me of it, as well. It's time I cast a memory of my own into the stars, I think. Especially now, when it's so fitting to remember all the people who have given their lives in this war.'

'Absolutely,' Elizabeth agreed, gently touching the matching memory stone at her own belt. 'Absolutely.'

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

'Bleek!'

Honor looked away from her heads-up display and grinned as Nimitz registered his protest. The 'cat was curled into his own, custom-designed flight couch, mounted beside hers on Jamie Candless' flight deck, and his ears were half-flat as the plaintive strains of one of her flight engineer's favorite songs wafted over the runabout's speakers.

'Mommas, don't let you babies grow up to be spacers...'

She listened for a moment, then sent a wave of agreement back to the treecat. Wayne Alexander had settled in quite nicely on Grayson. Better in some ways, in fact, than Honor would ever have anticipated. He seemed fascinated by the tenets of the Church of Humanity Unchained, and she suspected he might well convert to the Grayson faith in the not too distant future.

Not that he didn't retain a goodly number of rough edges. The intractability and stubborn intellectual honesty which had gotten him sent to Hell in the first place were still very much a part of him, and he loved a vigorous debate. That much the Graysons found good, for it was a fundamental part of their natures, too, as they applied the doctrine of the Test to their lives. What drove some of his new neighbors absolutely mad, however, was his ability to argue both sides of any question, often in the same debate, with perfectly good cheer, just to keep things moving in suitably lively fashion.

But one part of Grayson's culture which he'd adopted enthusiastically was its classical music, which was based on something from Old Earth which had once been called 'Country and Western.' Honor had been rather taken aback by it when she first met it, and it had taken her years to acquire any true taste for it. By now, she was actually quite fond of certain composers, but Alexander's allegiance was given to the Primitive School, and she'd never much cared for the Primitives.

'... spacers love smokey old bar rooms and clear crystal vacuum...'

'Sorry, Stinker,' she told Nimitz under her breath, 'but I did tell him he could program the entertainment banks.' The 'cat gave her a pained look, and she grinned. 'All right. All right! I'll talk to him about it, promise!'

Nimitz sniffed and groomed his whiskers at her, and she chuckled, then turned back to her controls.

The Jamie Candless had proven all she'd hoped for, though she'd had precious little time to play with her new toy. Despite her eleven thousand two hundred-ton mass, Candless was almost as maneuverable as a pinnace, and Silverman's had gotten permission from the Navy to build in a next-to-last-generation military compensator. They never would have gotten it if they'd been building the ship for anyone else, but this time Honor had decided to go right ahead and trade on who she was, and the result was a ship which could crank close to seven hundred gravities. Without one of the lightweight fission piles used in the new LACs, Candless had precious little internal volume to spare, and her maximum designed passenger load was only eight, but she was also designed with the latest system-management AIs. In an emergency, Honor could have managed the entire runabout by herself from the flight deck, but she was too experienced a spacer try it except in an emergency. Besides, Alexander would have had a fit if she'd tried to take 'his' boat away from him!

She chuckled again, then leaned back and surveyed the jewel-speckled vista of eternity through the bubble armorplast canopy. That was a feature Silverman's — and Andrew LaFollet — had argued about. Silverman's had wanted the flight deck in its 'traditional' place, which meant the approxiate center of ass, because their designers were traditionalists and that was where flight decks were supposed to be. LaFollet, on the other hand, had wanted it there because the much smaller cockpit Honor had insisted upon was too small to cram in a flight chair for anyone but Honor and Nimitz. Which meant, of course, that there was no way he could watch her back when she sat at the controls.

Honor had actually sympathized with her armsman rather more than with Silverman's, but she had been adamant. As she'd pointed out to Andrew, his presence could hardly affect anything which was likely to pose any sort of threat to her from inside her cockpit, so there was no real point in his standing guard over her while in flight. And much as she might have emphasized with him, she'd also pointed out rather sternly that a traditional flight deck would have restricted her view of the same displays which formed her work-a-day shipboard world. Candless was for her to play with, a way to get away from that same work-a-day world, and cramped as the runabout's passenger space might be, there was plenty of room for Andrew to ride along with Wayne. So she'd demanded the pinnacelike modification, and she was glad she had, even if Andrew had been on the grumpy side for days afterward.

The roof of Candless' wedge was clearly visible, stretching above and ahead of her and extending for kilometers to either side, and she watched the stars ahead of her abruptly shift position and color as the wedge's leading edge swept across them. The focused gravity of the impeller band clawed at photons with a force of almost a hundred thousand MPS?, and stars red-shifted visibly as it interposed itself between them and Honor. It was something she'd seen countless times, but it was also something she never tired of, which was why she'd insisted on building a ringside seat for it into Candless.

She checked her instruments again. For her, the current trip was play time, a treat she'd decided to give herself because she'd earned it, but for others it was anything but a vacation, and she looked at the two golden icons on her small plot. They were only a few hundred kilometers clear of Candless, but nothing else was anywhere close to either of them, and a sphere of Shrike-B LACs held station on them, two hundred thousand klicks out, to make certain nothing else could be.

Queen Elizabeth had announced her desire to tour the Blackbird Yard even before she left for Yeltsin's Star. There had been lots of reasons for her to make the trip out to Blackbird, most political, but some personal. Blackbird had been the site of the battle in which Honor's small squadron effectively wiped out the Masadan Navy eleven years earlier, which made it a logical place for the Queen of Manticore to visit. It was also the place where the survivors of HMS Madrigal's crew had been systematically raped and murdered by their Masadan captors, and that made it a place Elizabeth Winton the woman felt a deeply personal obligation to visit. And the yard itself was a cooperative venture, encouraged by the most-favored-nation status the Crown had extended to Grayson, between the Hauptman Cartel, Sky Domes of Grayson, and the Sword's Office of Financial Development, which made it a perfect symbol of all the Alliance had accomplished. Besides, Elizabeth had heard a great deal about the Blackbird Yard from William Alexander, and she wanted to see it for herself.

The original plan had been for her to make the trip along with Benjamin Mayhew aboard HMS Queen Adrienne, the yacht in which she had traveled to Yeltsin's Star. That scheme had been altered, however, in light of how extremely well the ministerial-level meetings were going. Cromarty and Prestwick had corresponded often, but this was the first time they'd actually met, and they'd quickly established a congenial relationship. The Earl of Gold Peak had established an almost equally good relationship with Lawrence Hodges, Benjamin's Councilor for Interstellar Affairs, and the four of them had been closeted with their staffs virtually nonstop since the Manticorans' arrival.

Elizabeth was glad she'd insisted Cromarty and her uncle bring along complete staffs, even if doing so had packed Queen Adrienne to capacity. The Prime Minister had argued, at first. Few people,