Echoes Of Honor

His face twisted with the last sentence, as if with mingled shame for adding the qualifier and anger that it was true, but he met Cromarty's eyes steadily, and the Prime Minister sighed. He was right, of course. Oh, the slippage was minor so far, but the war had raged for eight T-years. Public support had been high when it began, and it was still holding firm at well about seventy percent—so far. Yet even though the Royal Manticoran Navy and its allies had won virtually every important battle, there was no sign of an end in sight, and the Star Kingdom's much lower absolute casualty figures were far higher than the Peeps' relative to its total population, while the strain of the conflict was beginning to slow even an economy as powerful and diversified as Manticore's. There was still optimism and a hard core of determination, but neither optimism nor determination were as powerful as they had been. And that, little though he cared to admit it even to himself, was one reason Cromarty had pressed for a state funeral for Honor Harrington. She'd certainly deserved it, and Queen Elizabeth had been even more adamant than he had, but the temptation to use her death to draw the Manticoran public together behind the war once more—to use a cold-blooded atrocity to make them personally determined to defeat the People's Republic—had been irresistible for the man charged with fighting that war.

I guess that's why the tradition of waving the bloody shirt is so durable, he reflected grimly. It works. But he didn't have to like it, and he understood the tangled emotions so poorly hidden behind Alexander's eyes.

'I know,' he sighed finally. 'And you're right. And there's not a damned thing I can see to do about it except beat the holy living hell out of the bastards once and for all.'

'Agreed,' Alexander said, then managed a smile of sorts. 'And from Hamish's last letter, I'd say he and the Graysons, between them, are just about ready to do exactly that. With bells on.'

* * *

At that very moment, almost thirty light-years from Manticore, Hamish Alexander, Thirteenth Earl of White Haven, sat in his palatial day cabin aboard the superdreadnought GNS Benjamin the Great and stared at an HD of his own. A glass of bonded Terran whiskey sat in his right hand, forgotten while steadily melting ice thinned the expensive liquor, and his blue eyes were bleak as he watched the replay of the afternoon's services from Saint Austin's Cathedral. Reverend Jeremiah Sullivan had personally led the solemn liturgy for the dead, and the clouds of incense, the richly embroidered vestments and sternly, sorrowfully beautiful music, were a threadbare mask for the snarling hatred which hid behind them.

No, that's not fair, White Haven thought wearily, remembering his drink at last and taking a sip of the watered-down whiskey. The hate's there, all right, but they really did manage to put it aside, somehow—for the length of the services, at least. But now that they've mourned her, they intend to avenge her, and that could be... messy.

He set his glass down, picked up the remote, and went surfing through the channels, and every one of them was the same. Every cathedral on the planet, and virtually all of the smaller churches, as well, had celebrated the liturgy for the dead simultaneously, for Grayson was a planet which took its relationship with God—and its duty to Him—seriously. And as White Haven flipped his way past service after service, he felt the cold, hard iron of Grayson deep in his soul, too. Yet he was honest with himself, as well, and he knew why the iron was there. Why he was even more determined than they, perhaps, to avenge Honor Harrington's murder.

For he knew something neither the people of Grayson, nor his brother, nor his monarch, nor anyone else in the entire universe knew, and however hard he fought to, he could not forget it.

He knew he was the one who had driven her out to die.

Chapter Two

It was very late, and Leonard Boardman really should have been on his way home for a well-earned drink before supper. Instead, he leaned back in his comfortable chair and felt a fresh glow of pride as he watched the HD in his office replay Honor Harrington's execution yet again. It was, he admitted with becoming modesty, a true work of art—and well it should be, after over two weeks of fine-tuning by Public Information's best programmers. Boardman wouldn't have had a clue where to start on the technical aspects of building something like that, yet it had been his script and direction which the special effects experts had followed, and he was well-satisfied with his handiwork.

He watched it all the way through again, then switched off the HD with a small smile. Those few minutes of imagery not only filled him with a craftsman's satisfaction; they also represented a major victory over First Deputy Director of Public Information Eleanor Younger. Younger had wanted to seize the opportunity to attack Manty morale by having their computer-generated Harrington blubber, beg for mercy, and fight her executioners madly as she was dragged to the scaffold, but Boardman had held out against her arguments. They had plenty of file imagery of other executions to use as a basis, and they'd had stacks of HD chips of Harrington from the imagery Cordelia Ransom had shipped home to Haven before her unfortunate departure—in every sense of the word—for the Cerberus System. The techs had been confident that they could generate a virtual Harrington which would do anything Younger wanted and defy detection as a fake—after all, they'd produced enough 'corrected' imagery over the last T-century—yet Boardman had been less certain. The Solarian news services had proven themselves too credulous to run checks on those corrections, but the Manties' were much more skeptical. And their computer capability was better across the board than the People's Republic's, so if they saw any reason to subject the imagery to intensive analysis, they were all too likely to realize it was a fraud. But by letting her die with dignity— with just enough physical evidence of terror to undermine her reputation as some sort of fearless superhero— Boardman had executed a much subtler attack on Manty morale... and given it that ring of reality which should preclude any analysis. After all, if someone was going to go to all the trouble of producing false imagery, then surely they would have taken the opportunity to make their victim look smaller and more contemptible, wouldn't they? But they hadn't. This imagery felt right, without heaping gratuitous belittlement on Harrington's memory, which meant it offered nothing to make anyone on the other side question or doubt it for a moment.

That was important to Boardman as a matter of pride in workmanship, but even more significantly, his victory over Younger had to have strengthened his chances of outmaneuvering her to succeed Cordelia Ransom as Secretary of Public Information. He didn't fool himself into believing Ransom's successor would also inherit the power she had wielded within the Committee of Public Safety, but just the ministry itself would enormously enhance Boardman's personal power... and, with it, his chance of surviving and even prospering in the snake pit atmosphere of the city of Nouveau Paris.

Of course, the additional responsibilities which that power and authority would entail would pose fresh perils of their own, but every member of the bureaucracy's upper echelons faced that sort of hazard every day. The Committee of Public Safety and, especially, the Office of State Security, had a nasty habit of removing those who disappointed them... permanently. It wasn't as bad as it was in the military (or had been, before Esther McQueen took over as Secretary of War), but everyone knew someone who had vanished into StateSec's clutches for lack of performance in the People's cause.

But blame flowed downhill, Boardman reminded himself. And it would be much easier for Citizen Secretary Boardman to divert blame to an underling—to, say First Deputy Assistant Younger—than it had been for Second Deputy Assistant Boardman to avoid the blame someone else wanted to divert to him.

He chuckled at the thought and decided he had time to watch the execution just one more time before he left for the night.

* * *

Esther McQueen was also working late.

As a concession to her new job description, she wore sober and severely tailored civilian clothing, not the admiral's uniform to which she was entitled, but the workload hadn't changed, and she pushed her chair back and rubbed her eyes wearily as she reached the end of the most recent report. There was another one awaiting her, and another after that, and another, in a paperwork queue which seemed to stretch all the way from her Octagan office here on Haven to the Barnett System. Just thinking about all those other reports made her feel even more