Echoes Of Honor

he also had to admit that the people who’d predicted that ways to deal with it would be devised in time had been correct in the long run—or would have been, if not for the hysteria of the idiots who’d thrown out the baby with the bath before those ways were worked out—but still...

Yet whatever his remote ancestors might have thought of fission, Gearman loved the piles in his new ships. They were smaller, lighter, and actually easier to operate than a fusion plant would have been, and the increase in endurance was incredible. In his previous stint in LACs, he’d been even more paranoid about reactor mass levels than most warship engineers because he’d had so little margin to play with. Now he didn’t even have to consider that, and the sheer, wanton luxury of it was downright seductive. Not that there weren’t a few drawbacks—including the procedure for emergency shutdown in case of battle damage. If a fusion plant’s mag bottle held long enough for the hydrogen flow to be shut off, that was basically that. In a fission plant, however, you were stuck with a reactor core that was its own fuel... and which would do Bad Things if the coolant failed. But the Grayson tech reps seemed confident where their fail-safes were concerned. Which wasn’t to say that every engineer from the Star Kingdom would agree with them. After all, their entire tech base was so much cruder, accepted so many trade-offs...

He gave himself a mental shake. Grayson’s technology had been much cruder than Manticore’s, yes. But they’d made enormous progress in closing the gap in just the nine and a half years since joining the Alliance, and 'crude' didn’t necessarily mean the same thing as 'unsophisticated,' as the new generation of inertial compensators amply demonstrated.

And as these new fission plants are going to demonstrate all over again, he told himself firmly, and looked up as Captain Harmon turned her attention to Lieutenant Commander Stackowitz.

'I’ve talked Captain Truman into signing off on the expenditure of some real missiles for live-fire exercises tomorrow, Barb,' she told her staff operations officer.

'Really, Skipper?' Stackowitz brightened visibly. 'Warshots, or training heads?'

'Both,' Harmon said with a shark-like grin. 'Training heads for the shots at the Minnie, of course, but we get to use warshots for everything else. Including,' the grin grew even more shark-like, 'an all-up EW exercise. Five squadrons worth.'

'We get to play with Ghost Rider?' Stackowitz’ eyes positively glowed at that, and Harmon nodded.

'Yep. The logistics pipeline just delivered an entire new set of decoy heads with brand-new signal amplifiers—the ones you were telling me about last month, in fact. We’ve got to share them with Hancock Base, but there’re more than enough of them to go around.'

'Oh boy,' Stackowitz murmured almost prayerfully, and then gave McGyver a grin that eclipsed the COLAC’s. 'I told you they were going to make a difference, Bruce. Now I’ll show you. I’ll bet you five bucks they cut Minotaur’s tracking capability against us by thirty-five percent—and that’s with CIC knowing what we’re doing!'

'I’ll take five dollars of that,' McGyver agreed with a chuckle, and Harmon shook her head.

'Some people would bet on which direction to look for sunrise,' she observed. 'But now that those important financial details have been settled, let’s get down to some specifics about said exercise. First of all, Barb—'

She leaned forward over the table, and her staffers listened intently, entering the occasional note into their memo pads while she laid out exactly what it was she wanted to do.

Chapter Nineteen

The Earl of White Haven stood in the boat bay gallery and stared through the armorplast at the brilliantly lit, crystalline vacuum of the bay. It was odd, he thought. He was ninety-two T-years old, and he’d spent far more time in space than on a planet over the last seventy of those years, yet his perceptions of what was 'normal' were still inextricably bound up in the impressions of his planetbound youth. The cliche 'air as clear as crystal' had meaning only until someone had seen the reality of vacuum’s needle-sharp clarity, but that reality remained forever unnatural, with a surrealism no one could avoid feeling, yet which defied precise definition.

He snorted to himself at the direction of his thoughts while he listened with a minuscule fraction of his attention to the earbug in his left ear that brought him the chatter between the boat bay control officer and the pinnace maneuvering towards rendezvous with his flagship. His mind had always tended to drift through contemplative deeps whenever it had nothing specific with which to occupy itself, but it had been doing it even more frequently than usual of late.

He turned his head to watch the Marine honor guard moving into position. Those Marines comported themselves with all the precision he could have desired, but they wore the brown and green uniforms of Grayson, not the black and green of Manticore, for the superdreadnought Benjamin the Great — known informally (and out of her captain’s hearing) to her crew as 'Benjy'—was a Grayson ship. Barely a T-year old, she was quite possibly the most powerful warship in existence. She certainly had been when she’d been completed, but warship standards were changing with bewildering speed. After the better part of seven centuries of gradual, incremental—one might even say glacial—evolution, the entire concept of just what made an effective ship of war had been cast back into the melting pot, and no one seemed entirely certain what would emerge from the crucible in time. All they knew was that the comfortable assurance of known weapons and known tactics and known strategies were about to be replaced by something new and different which might all too easily invalidate all their hard won skill and competence.

And no one outside the Alliance even seems to suspect the way things are changing... yet, he thought moodily, turning back to the still, sterile perfection of the boat bay.

A part of him wished the Alliance hadn’t thought of it either, although it would never do to admit that. Actually, he’d come close to admitting it once, he reminded himself—at least by implication. But Lady Harrington had ripped a strip off his hide for it, and he’d deserved it.

As always, something twisted deep inside him, like a physical pain, at the fleeting thought of Honor Harrington, and he cursed his traitor memory. It had always been excellent. Now it insisted on replaying every time he and she had ever met—every time he’d counseled her, or chewed her out (though there’d been few of those), or watched her drag what was left of herself home after one of those stupid, gutsy, glorious goddamned attempts to get herself killed in the name of duty, and she’d never been stupid, so why the hell had she insisted on doing that when she must have known that if she kept going back to the well over and over, sooner or later even the Peeps would get lucky, and—

He jerked his mind out of the well-worn rut, but not before the dull burn of raw anger had boiled up inside him once again. It was stupid—he knew it was—yet he was furious with her for dying, and some deeply irrational part of him blamed her for it... and refused to forgive her even now, over eight T-months later.

He sighed and closed his blue eyes as the pain and anger washed back through him yet again, and another part of him sneered contemptuously at his own emotions. Of course he blamed her for it. If he didn’t, he’d have to blame himself, and he couldn’t have that, now could he?

He opened his eyes once more, and his jaw clenched as he made himself face it. He’d known Honor Harrington for nine and a half years, from the day he’d first met her right here in this very system... and watched her take a heavy cruiser on a death-ride straight into the broadside of a battlecruiser to defend someone else’s planet. For all that time, he’d known she was probably the most outstanding junior officer he had ever met, bar none, yet that was all she’d been to him. Or so he’d thought until that night she stood in the library of Harrington House and jerked him up so short his ears had rung. She’d actually had the gall to tell him his rejection of the Weapons Development Board’s new proposals was just as knee-jerk and automatic as the autoresponse pattern in favor of any new proposal which he’d always loathed in the jeune ecole. And she’d been right. That was what had hit him so hard. She’d had the nerve to call him on it, and she’d been right.

And in the stunned, half-furious moment in which he’d realized that, he’d also looked at her and seen someone else. Someone very different from the outstanding junior officer whose career he had shepherded because