Echoes Of Honor

even glancing at the ’kittens. His grass-green eyes were locked on the Mayhews.

No, Allison thought with sudden understanding. Not on the Mayhews; on a Mayhew.

The realization flicked through her in an instant and she began to open her mouth, but not quickly enough. Hipper suddenly shook himself and leapt forward in a cream-and-gray blur, streaking across the library towards the children.

Rachel Mayhew’s personal armsman saw him coming and reacted with the spinal-reflex quickness of his training. Intellectually, he knew no treecat would ever threaten a child, yet his reflexes were another matter, and his hand flashed out to sweep the girl aside and place himself between her and the potential threat.

But he didn’t quite manage it, for even as Hipper had started forward, Rachel’s head had snapped around as if someone had shouted her name. Her brown eyes settled on Hipper with unerring accuracy, and as her armsman reached for her, she dodged his arm with astonishing agility. She crouched, opening her arms with a blinding smile of welcome, and Hipper catapulted from the floor into her embrace.

She was only eleven years old, and at 10.3 standard kilos, Hipper was one of the largest treecats Allison had ever met. Which, coupled with Grayson’s 1.17 g gravity and the conservation of momentum, had predictable results.

Rachel went back on her bottom with a thump as the ’cat landed in her arms, and Allison’s hand flashed out. She caught Rachel’s armsman’s wrist out of sheer reflex, without even thinking about it, and only later realized that she’d stopped his hand on its way to the pulser at his hip. But it didn’t really matter. Even as she gripped it, she felt his muscles relax in sudden, explosive relief as everyone in the library heard Hipper’s high, buzzing purr of delight and watched the ’cat rubbing his cheek ecstatically against Rachel’s.

Rachel’s sisters stared at her, stunned, and the adults were little better. Only Miranda moved. She scooped up Farragut and came over to kneel beside Rachel, but the girl never even noticed. At that moment, Hipper was her entire universe, just as she was his.

'Oh... my,' Katherine murmured finally. She shook herself and looked at Allison.

'This is what I think it is, isn’t it?' she asked very quietly, and Allison sighed.

'It is. And you have my genuine sympathy.'

'Sympathy?' Katherine’s brow furrowed. 'Surely you don’t mean he might hurt her or—?'

'Oh, no! Nothing like that!' Allison reassured her quickly. 'But, well, it’s very unusual, shall we say, for a ’cat to adopt a child. Not unheard of, of course. The very first adoption on Sphinx was of a child about Rachel’s age... or Honor’s. And it’s a very good thing, in most ways, but there are some... adjustments.'

'What sort?' Elaine asked, moving to stand behind her sister wife, and Allison smiled crookedly.

'For one thing, he’s going to be even worse than a Grayson’s personal armsman. You’re never going to be able to separate them, not even for baths or doctor’s visits, and you can forget about leaving him home on state occasions! And she’s not going to want to put him down, either.'

'Well, I don’t see any reason to try to convince her to tonight,' Katherine said after a glance at Elaine.

'I didn’t mean she won’t want to put him down tonight,' Allison told her wryly. 'I meant she’s not going to want to put him down ever. Physical contact is very important to both sides of an adoption bond, particularly one where the human half is this young, and especially during the initial several months. I thought Nimitz had been grafted onto Honor for the first T-year or so!'

'Oh, my,' Katherine sighed on a very different note.

'And another thing, you’ll have to warn the adults who’re likely to enter her orbit to keep an eye on their own emotions.' Elaine looked at her sharply, and Allison shrugged. 'For the most part, a ’cat makes a wonderful babysitter. No abusive personality is going to be able to fool him, and your family knows better than most how effective a protector a treecat can be.' Both Mayhews nodded at that, and Allison shrugged again. 'Unfortunately, ’cats are also very sensitive to emotions directed at their persons... or that they think might end up directed at their persons. Which means that he’s going to be very tense around people who are angry in Rachel’s presence, whether it’s at her or something with no connection to her at all. And finally, you’re going to have some very interesting experiences when she enters puberty.'

Katherine’s eyes widened, and Allison chuckled.

'No, no. As far as I’ve ever been able to determine, ’cats have no interest at all in their people’s, um, amatory adventures. But they’re empaths. When all those hormonal mood swings start hitting her, both of them are going to be irritable as hell. The only good thing about it is that by our best estimate Hipper is about fifty T-years old. That means he’s about the age Nimitz was when he adopted Honor. It also means he’s got a lot more maturity than Rachel does, and if he’s anything like Nimitz was, he won’t put up with his person’s whining at all. Not a minor consideration with a teenager, I think.'

'Oh, dear.' It was Elaine this time, yet there was a bubble of laughter under her sigh, and she shook her head. Then she sobered. 'Actually, that may be the least of our worries, Cat,' she said quietly. 'What about the other girls?'

'Jealousy?' Allison asked, equally quietly, her eyes back on Rachel and Hipper. Rachel’s sisters were coming forward now, going to their knees around her while Jason and Andromeda looked on with bright, interested eyes. Alfred and Benjamin stood to one side, talking softly, and she smiled, then looked back at the Mayhew wives.

'Honor was an only child, so my experiences were undoubtedly different from what yours are going to be, but I don’t think that will be a problem,' she assured them.

'Why not?' Katherine asked.

'Because Hipper is a ’cat,' Allison explained. 'He’s an empath. He’ll be able to feel their emotions as well as Rachel’s, and that’s one of the very best things about childhood adoptions. They may be rare, but they’re very good for the child, because their ’cat teaches them to be sensitive to the feelings of others. You’ll want to keep an eye on her for a few weeks or so, of course. Even the best kids can get smug and start thinking of themselves as better than anyone else when something this special happens, and the bond is going to take a couple of months to start settling. She could really put the other girls’ backs up in that interval, with all kinds of long-term consequences. But unless something like that happens—and I don’t think it will—Hipper is going to spend an awful lot of time playing with the others, too.' She shook her head with a grin. 'For that matter, he’s going to think he’s in ’cat heaven when he realizes he has four of them to spoil him rotten!'

Book Two

Chapter Eight

'Haa-haaaa-choooo!'

The sneeze snapped her head back so violently stars seemed to spangle her vision. Her eyes watered, her sinuses stung, and Commodore Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Steadholder and Countess Harrington, hastily dropped the metal comb and rubbed her nose in a frantic effort to abort the next onrushing eruption.

It failed. A fresh explosion rolled around inside her head, trying to escape through her ears, and a cloud of impossibly fine down went dancing and swirling away from her. She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to disperse the cloud like a woman brushing at gnats... and with about the same effectiveness. The delicate, fluffy hairs only stuck to the perspiration on her hand, and she sneezed yet again.

The treecat in her lap looked up at her, but without the laughing deviltry his eyes would have held under other circumstances. Instead, it seemed to take all the energy he had just to turn his head, for poor Nimitz was