Harrington the day before, and he’d been astonished to realize that someone Lady Harrington’s size could have had so tiny a mother. And, he admitted, as he chatted with her and discovered the razor-sharp wit of the woman behind that beautiful face, he’d found himself extremely envious of Dr. Alfred Harrington’s good fortune.
The general beside him said something, drawing his attention back to his tablemate. But before he could ask the Grayson to repeat his question, the crystal clear sound of a fork or a spoon striking a wineglass cut through the background hum of voices. Alexander’s head turned, along with everyone else’s, and all other conversation faded as the diners realized Benjamin Mayhew had risen to his feet. He smiled at them, waiting until he was certain he had their full intention, and then cleared his throat.
'My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen,' he said then, in the easy tones of a trained speaker, 'you were all promised that this would be a ‘nonworking state dinner’—meaning that you’d all be spared the tedium of speeches—' that earned him a rumble of laughter, and his smile grew broader '—and I promise not to inflict anything of the sort upon you. I do, however, have two announcements which I believe should be made at this time.'
He paused, and his smile faded into a sober, serious expression.
'First,' he said, 'High Admiral Matthews has informed me that the Office of Shipbuilding has elected to name the newest superdreadnought of the Grayson Navy the GNS
He paused, as a spatter of applause interrupted. It grew louder, and Alexander turned his head to see several men in GSN uniform come to their feet. Other male Graysons joined them, and then women began to stand, as well, and the spatter of applause became a torrent that echoed and resounded from the Great Hall’s cavernous spaces. The thunder beat in on William Alexander, and he felt himself coming to his own feet, joining the ovation. Yet even as he clapped, he felt something else under the approval. A hungry something, with bare fangs, that sent a chill through him as he realized how accurately Hamish had read these people’s reaction to Honor Harrington’s murder.
Benjamin waited until the applause slowly faded and the audience had resumed their seats, and then he smiled again. Despite the harsh wave of emotion which had just swept the hall, there was something almost impish about that smile, and he shook his head.
'You should have waited,' he told his audience. 'Now you’re going to have to do it all over again, because my second announcement is that yesterday morning, Lady Allison Harrington informed my senior wife that she and her husband are expecting.' That simple sentence spawned a sudden silence in which a falling pin would have sounded like an anvil, and he nodded much more seriously. 'Tomorrow, I will formally inform the Conclave of Steadholders that an heir of Lady Harrington’s blood will inherit her Key and the care of the people of her steading,' he said quietly.
The previous applause, Alexander discovered, had only seemed thunderous. The ovation which arose this time truly was. It battered him like fists, surging like an exultant sea, and he saw Allison Harrington flush, whether with excitement or embarrassment he couldn’t tell, as she stood at the Protector’s urging.
It took a seeming eternity for the applause to fade, and as it did, Alexander saw someone else stand at the Protector’s table. The wiry, auburn-haired man looked remarkably young to be wearing the uniform of a GSN admiral, and his gray eyes flashed as he faced his ruler.
'Your Grace!' he cried, and Benjamin turned to look at him.
'Yes, Admiral Yanakov?' the Protector seemed surprised at hearing the admiral address him.
'With your permission, Your Grace, I would like to propose a toast,' Admiral Yanakov said. Benjamin considered him for just a moment, and then nodded.
'Of course, Admiral.'
'Thank you, Your Grace.' Yanakov reached down and picked up his wineglass, holding it before him while the light pooled and glowed in its tawny heart.
'Your Grace, My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen all,' he announced in a ringing voice, 'I give you Steadholder Harrington...
The roar which answered should, by rights, have brought the Great Hall crashing down in ruins.
Book Four
Chapter Twenty-Two
'Do you think we’ll get the break this month?' Scotty Tremaine asked as he used a brightly colored bandana to mop irritably at the sweat trickling down his face. He tried to keep any trace of anxiety out of his voice, but his audience knew him too well to be fooled.
'Now how would I know that, Sir?' Horace Harkness asked in reply, and his tone, while utterly respectful, managed to project so much patience that Tremaine grinned despite himself.
'Sorry, Chief.' He shoved the bandana into the hip pocket of his trousers—no longer StateSec issue, but produced, like the bandana, by Henri Dessouix, who functioned as Camp Inferno’s chief tailor—and shrugged. 'It’s just that all the waiting around is getting to me. And when you add things like
'Mine either, Sir,' the senior chief said absently, then grunted in triumph as the jammed access panel he’d been working on sprang open at last. 'Light, Sir?' he requested, and Tremaine directed the beam of his hand lamp up into the shuttle’s number one communications bay.
'Hmmm...' Like Tremaine, Harkness now wore locally produced clothing, and he obviously favored the same garish colors Dessouix did. In fairness, Dessouix was limited in his choice of dyes by what grew within a reasonable distance from Camp Inferno, but he did seem to enjoy mugging people’s optic nerves. So did Harkness, apparently, and he looked more like an HD writer’s concept of a pirate than a senior chief petty officer of Her Majesty’s Royal Manticoran Navy—especially with the pulser and bush knife he insisted on carrying everywhere with him—as he frowned up into the small, electronics-packed compartment.
Peep installations tended to be bigger than Manticoran ones, largely because they used more plug- in/pull-out components. Peep techs weren’t up to the sort of in-place maintenance Manticoran technicians routinely performed, so the practice, wherever possible, was to simply yank a malfunctioning component and send it to some central servicing depot where properly trained people could deal with it. Unhappily for the People’s Navy, that assumed one had a replacement unit handy to plug into its place when you pulled it, and that had been a major reason for the soaring Peep unserviceability rates of the first two or three years of the war. The PN had been structured around short, intensive campaigns with plenty of time to refit between gobbling up each successive bite of someone else’s real estate. Their logistics pipeline had been designed to meet those needs, and it simply hadn’t been up to hauling the requisite number of replacement components back and forth between the front-line systems and the rear area service and maintenance depots over an extended period of active operations.
That, unfortunately, was one problem they seemed to be getting on top of, Tremaine reflected while he watched Harkness pull out a test kit and begin checking circuits. They were finally getting their logistics establishment up to something approaching Allied standards, and—
'Uh-oh.' Harkness’ mutter pulled Tremaine out of his thoughts and he peered up past the burly senior chief’s shoulders. 'Looks like we’ve got us a little problem in the transponder itself, Sir.'
'How big a ‘little problem’?' Tremaine demanded tersely.
'All I can tell you for certain right this minute is that it ain’t working, Sir,' Harkness replied. 'I won’t know more till we pull it, but between you and me, it don’t look real good. The problem’s in the encryption module.' He tapped the component in question and shrugged. 'This here’s an almost solid cube of molycircs, and I didn’t see no molecular electronics shop aboard either of these two birds.'
'Damn,' Tremaine said softly. 'I don’t think Lady Harrington is going to like this.'
