'You're really enjoying this, aren't you?' he demanded, and the living side of her face smiled serenely.
'Darned right I am,' Lady Dame Honor Harrington said smugly.
Chapter Twenty-Six
'Are you out of your mind?' Rear Admiral Harold Styles rose from his chair, planted his fists on Honor's desk, and glared at her furiously. 'The questionable basis on which you've chosen to insist on retaining command puts you on dangerous enough ground already, Admiral Harrington! If you insist on convening courts-martial in time of war on your own authority, then you'd better make damned sure all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed! Because if they aren't, Admiral, I swear to you that I personally will see you prosecuted to the full extent of the Articles of War!'
Nimitz half-rose on his perch, baring snow-white fangs with a warning hiss as Styles' fury flooded his empathic sense, and Honor felt an answering flicker of rage deep within herself. But it was Andrew LaFollet who drew her attention from Styles' outrage-purpled face, and she raised her hand quickly, flicking her fingers in a wave-off just in time to keep her armsman from grabbing the Manticoran by the scruff of his neck and physically expelling him from the office—preferably with a spectacular set of bruises. A part of her longed to let Andrew do just that, but she couldn't, however much she wanted to.
Not yet, anyway, she thought coldly. But if he keeps this nonsense up for one more minute...
'You will sit back down, Admiral Styles,' she said instead, and each icy word was a polished chip of clarity, without the slurring her crippled mouth normally imposed. Her single working eye was even colder than her voice, and the right corner of her mouth twitched with a warning tick which made LaFollet almost pity Styles, despite his outrage at the admiral's behavior. But Styles didn't know her as well as her armsman did. He saw that twitch as a sign of nervousness, and awareness that she was in a false position, and the righteous fury he'd felt ever since he arrived on Styx and she refused to yield command to him blazed up in him like fire.
'Like fucking hell I will!' he began savagely. 'From the first moment I came ashore h—'
He chopped off in mid-word as Honor came to her feet in a movement too graceful to be called an explosion yet too abrupt to be called anything else. He jerked back in alarm, then flushed even darker, shamed by his reaction, and started to snarl something else when her palm came down on the desk surface with the flat, explosive crack of a cannon shot.
'You will shut your mouth now, Admiral Styles,' she said very softly, leaning forward over the desk in the echoing silence which followed, 'or I will have you placed under close arrest, to remain there until such time as we leave this planet and return to Manticoran jurisdiction. Where,' she went on even more icily, 'I will have you charged with and court-martialed for insubordination, willful disregard of a superior's orders, conduct detrimental to the chain of command, and incitement to mutiny in time of war.'
Styles stared at her, and his mouth worked soundlessly, as if he simply could not believe his ears. Two of those charges carried the death penalty if they were sustained, and Honor felt the sudden chill of terror that ran beneath the surface of his fiery bluster as he recognized the uncompromising sincerity of her threat at last. She glared at him for a brief, shivering eternity, then drew a deep breath and straightened her spine.
'I said to sit down,' she said, spacing the words out with flat, deadly authority, and the rear admiral sagged back into the chair from which he had hurled himself. She remained standing for a slow ten-count, then lowered herself once more into her own chair much more slowly. She tipped it back and sat there, the right side of her face as expressionless as the left while she regarded him coldly, and a corner of her brain blessed Alistair McKeon's forethought.
She hadn't really considered the possibility before Harkness' team of moles managed to nibble their way through the last Peep security fences, but she wasn't the senior RMN officer on Hell after all. Harry Styles was, and that could have created all sorts of problems. The Inferno inmates had given their trust and loyalty to her, not to some officer they didn't even know, but if Styles had the seniority, then, logically—or, at least, legally—the command was his.
McKeon hadn't said anything in so many words, but he'd made his opinion of that possibility abundantly clear by how he hadn't said it. Honor suspected that he must have served under Styles in the past without enjoying the experience, for it was unlike him to feel such barely suppressed dislike for anyone. He was as capable as the next person of making the occasional misjudgment about a superior officer or succumbing to what was still called 'bad chemistry'; Honor knew that even better than most. But she also knew that when it happened, he almost invariably felt uncomfortable, off balance and confused. It was as if he knew something was wrong with his own judgment and simply couldn't figure out what it was.
But whatever his reasons, his obliquely stated warning about Styles had been dead on the money, and she was grateful that she'd taken his advice about how to deal with the rear admiral.
She had been in control of Styx for two local weeks now, and Henri Dessouix had been delighted to discover an entire warehouse full of SS uniforms and, even better, fabric extruders and sewing machines. A little judicious reprogramming of the sewing machines and a few adjustments to the extruders, and he'd been able to turn out proper uniforms for the escaped prisoners.
Some of them—like Harriet Benson or, for that matter, Dessouix himself—had been on Hell so long their memories of what their uniforms should look like had become faded and uncertain. Nor were there any reference works they could consult, since the nations which had once issued those uniforms had disappeared into the ash heap of history... and the maw of the all-conquering People's Republic. But Honor felt confident that no one would complain about any minor details which were gotten wrong, and all of them (with the possible exception of Horace Harkness) had felt enormous relief at getting back into uniform once more. It wasn't simply a matter of stepping back into a world they understood, although there was an undeniable edge of that involved. It was more like a punctuation of the change in status they had won under Honor's command, a formal proof of what they had already achieved and a visible expression of what drew them together and forged them into a cohesive whole.
But at McKeon's very strong urging, Honor had not redonned Manticoran uniform. Instead, she wore the blue-on-blue of Grayson, with the five six-pointed stars of her current Grayson rank. Jesus Ramirez's eyes had widened when he first saw it, but he'd been less surprised than he might have been, for there had been more than enough time for Honor's people to fill him and the rest of the Infernoites in on her Grayson career. And then, as quickly as his eyes had widened, they'd sharpened in approval, for McKeon had been right. There could be more than one Allied flag officer on Hell, but there was no way there would be more than one fleet admiral.
Honor had felt ridiculous flaunting her GSN rank that way, however legal it might be and however thoroughly she'd earned it, but only until she met Styles for herself. After no more than five minutes, she'd decided that the People's Navy had done the Alliance an immense favor by capturing Harry Styles and putting him safely on Hell where he couldn't do the war effort any more damage. She had no idea what he was doing here instead of a regular navy-run POW camp somewhere, unless, perhaps, his rank had led StateSec to see him as some sort of prize catch to be kept in its personal trophy case. He was, after all, not merely the highest-ranking Manticoran officer yet captured by the People's Republic but also the only flag officer they'd captured in the entire first six and a half years of the war. They'd had him for over eight T-years, since the day they'd destroyed his entire picket squadron in the Yalta System in one of the probing attacks with which they had opened the present war. They'd actually caught him with cold impellers— which said a great deal about his competence right there—and his subsequent attempt to defend himself had been nothing to write home about.
Not that he saw it that way, of course. As far as he was concerned, he'd simply been the unfortunate victim of Peep treachery, attacked in time of peace and without a formal declaration of war. Apparently he had failed, in those long ago days of peace, to note the minor fact that the Legislaturalists who had run the People's Republic had never once bothered to alert a potential victim by declaring war before they hit it. He didn't seem to have learned much since, either. Added to which, he was arrogant, opinionated, full of his own importance, conceited, and stupid. And those were his good points, she thought acidly.
'I have put up with all the insubordination I intend to tolerate, Admiral Styles,' she said into the fragile silence. Her voice was still cold, the words precisely enunciated, and she felt his tooth-grinding hatred flowing over her. 'I am in command in this star system, and you, Admiral, are not. You will remember that at all times, and you
