Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply, and when she opened her eyes once more, they were calm. She reached out, mentally and emotionally, to her new command, and something deep inside her sighed in relief as she felt responsibility's familiar weight settle upon her shoulders... and push her maddening preoccupation with other matters out of the front of her brain. It didn't cause her distractions to magically disappear, but at least it gave her a respite which might, if she was lucky, last long enough for those competing elements to subside into their proper places.
A soft, musical chime warned her that the pinnace was beginning its final approach to Alvarez, and she watched out the port as her pilot turned onto a closing spiral designed to give her a direct view of the ship.
Alvarez lay quietly in her parking orbit, her double-ended, hammerhead hull's sleek flanks gleaming with the green and white lights of an 'anchored' starship. At just over three hundred and forty thousand tons, she was less than five percent the size of Honor's last command, but HMS Wayfarer had been a converted merchant ship, a huge, slow, unarmored bulk-carrier's hull with weapons crammed in wherever space permitted. Alvarez was a warship, a heavy cruiser, designed to hit and run and equipped with the systems redundancy which Wayfarer had lacked. Despite her smaller size, she could survive and remain in action after suffering far heavier damage, and she was much, much faster and more maneuverable.
She also marked the beginning of a change in the way warships would be built, Honor reflected. Like RMN cruisers, Alvarez carried all her broadside weapons on a single deck, but she showed considerably fewer weapons hatches than her Manticoran contemporaries, and there was a reason for that.
Alvarez was the first Grayson-designed heavy cruiser, and while her electronic warfare suite and defensive systems were roughly equivalent to those of the RMN's Star Knight class, upon which her design was based, the Graysons had had their own ideas about her offensive systems. It had taken a large dose of... call it 'self-confidence,' Honor mused, for a navy with no history of deep-space warfare to depart from the combined conventional wisdom of the rest of the explored galaxy when writing the specifications for its first modern warship, but the GSN had done it. Alvarez carried less than half the energy weapons of a Star Knight, which substantially reduced the number of targets she could engage simultaneously. It also cost her a small but possibly significant percentage of her antimissile capability, since starships often used broadside energy batteries to back up their purpose-built point defense weapons during long-range missile duels. But by accepting that reduction in weapon numbers, the combined Grayson-Manticoran design team had been able to mount twenty percent more missile tubes and fit in graser projectors heavier than most battlecruisers mounted. Conventional wisdom held that an equal tonnage of heavy cruisers could not fight a battlecruiser and win... but Honor suspected conventional wisdom was wrong where the Alvarezes were concerned.
Not that Honor intended to match any of her ships against Peep battlecruisers. She'd experienced more than her fair share of unequal fights against superior opponents, and she was more than willing to leave such affairs to others for a while.
Her lips quirked at the thought, and she surveyed the volume of space about Alvarez as the pinnace approached the cruisers midships boat bay. Although their parking orbits were comparatively tight, the units of CruRon 18 were far enough apart to reduce most of the squadrons other ships to tiny gleams of reflected sunlight. But one ship, HMS Prince Adrian, lay less than thirty kilometers off Alvarez's port quarter. That was only proper, as she belonged to the officer who, as the senior-ranking captain of the squadron, would serve as its second in command, and Honors smile grew warm with memories.
Adrian was smaller, much older, and less heavily armed than her flagship, but Captain Alistair McKeon had commanded her for almost six T-years now. If there was a more efficient ship in the Fleet, Honor had yet to see it... and she knew there was no more reliable CO, or friend, in any fleet.
Prince Adrian vanished beyond the corner of her view port as the pinnace cut its impeller wedge and went to reaction thrusters, and Honor reached up to tug her uniform beret out from under her left epaulet. She smoothed it out, and her smile faded as she twitched its soft fabric into the proper configuration, for it was black. For the first time in twenty-one T-years, she was about to assume a spacegoing command as an RMN officer without the white beret which designated a starship’s commander. Indeed, she would never wear the white beret again, and the thought produced a fresh pang. Intellectually, she knew how lucky she'd been to command as many ships as she had, but she also knew she would always long for just one more... and that she would never receive it.
But that was the price of seniority, she told herself more briskly, settling the beret on her head. She adjusted it just so as the boat bay tractors reached out to the pinnace, then rose as a gentle vibration and another soft chime announced engagement of the mechanical docking arms. She lifted Nimitz to her shoulder, brushed her fingers over her braided hair and beret once more, and then, without even realizing it, ran those same fingers lightly over the six gold stars, each indicating a different hyper-capable command, on the breast of her tunic as she turned to face the hatch.
Captain Thomas Greentree, GSN, commanding officer of GNS Jason Alvarez, did his best to look unconcerned while Lady Harrington swam the tube. He was proud of his ship and his crew, confident they were up to any demand, but he was also acutely aware of just whose flagship Alvarez was about to become. Greentree had his reservations about the Manty newsfaxes, which he considered both intrusive and impertinent (not to mention sensationalist), and their decision to nickname Honor Harrington 'the Salamander' because she always seemed to be where the fire was hottest offended him. No decently brought up Grayson would ever have pinned a name like that on a lady, he thought moodily, yet what bothered him most was that it was so apt. Graysons might have been unlikely to think of it, but they certainly used it once someone else thought of it. For that matter, even Greentree sometimes caught himself applying it to her, mentally, at least, though he always jerked himself up short the moment he realized he had.
But the real reason his personnel, and, he admitted, he himself, used that nickname was less because Lady Harrington was drawn to the fire than that the fire was drawn to her. She was like the bird in the ancient tales from Old Earth, he thought. Like the albatross, a harbinger of storms. That she had proved herself able to deal with those storms time and time again only made her even more impressive, and the Grayson Space Navy knew even better than most how well deserved (and hard earned) her reputation was. Greentree was proud that his ship had been chosen to carry her flag, yet with that honor came the opportunity to fall short of her standards, and he'd expected at least another three weeks to prepare for her arrival. Alvarez had just completed a scheduled major overhaul, and the yard had replaced her original electronic warfare section with all new hardware. The capabilities the new systems promised were exciting, but Greentree and his engineers were still working their way through the inevitable teething problems, and his tactical officers were just beginning the necessary simulator training.
There were similar, if less drastic, upgrades in most of the ship's departments, but Greentree was profoundly grateful that Alvarez's flag bridge, at least, had been left untouched. And while he was being grateful for things, he reminded himself, he should remember to list the fact that Lady Harrington’s full staff was on board to greet her. From her reputation, she would be tactful enough to stay off his neck until he got his problems sorted out, and the presence of her staff would allow her to keep herself too busy getting the entire squadron organized to notice any internal chaos aboard her flagship until he could get it squared away.
He certainly hoped she would, at any rate, he thought, and drew a deep breath as the side party snapped to attention and an old-fashioned bugle sounded the opening notes of the Steadholders' March. Lady Harrington caught the green grab bar and swung gracefully from the access tube's zero-gee into
