Besides, watching Nimitz manipulate the others out of their depression helped distract Honor from her own. And her fellow prisoners weren't the only people the 'cat had charmed. Indeed, Shannon Foraker visited Honor, and Nimitz, so regularly that Honor worried about her. Too much familiarity with a Manticoran officer was likely to cause a Peep officer serious trouble, and she felt a little guilty for not having hinted to Foraker that she might want to keep her distance. But the truth was that she was too grateful for the citizen commander's visits to discourage her, and Tourville had decided to use his ops officer as his official liaison with Honor.
Foraker was certainly a good choice, if his object was to be sure he'd picked someone he could trust to see to it that his prisoners were properly treated, but Honor had come to suspect the citizen rear admiral of an additional motive. Despite her promotion, the ops officer hadn't changed much since Honor had met her in Silesia, and she clearly wanted to repay Honor for how well she'd been treated aboard HMS Wayfarer. But what superiors in most navies might have seen as an honorable intention on her part could be extremely dangerous to an officer in the present Peoples Navy, and that, Honor suspected, was the real reason Tourville had made her his liaison. Since she'd been ordered to see to the prisoners' well-being, her superiors could hardly come down on her for being conscientious in the discharge of her duties.
It was unlikely the ops officer realized what Tourville was up to (always assuming, of course, that Honor had figured it out properly), but that blind spot was part of her charm. She had an almost childlike innocence. Not foolishness or stupidity, but a refusal, or perhaps an outright inability, to let her personal relationships be dictated by the ideologically-fired pressures swirling through the People’s Navy. She seemed to possess absolutely none of the constructive paranoia which helped guide many of her fellows through the minefields about them, and the thought of what might have become of her if her skill and talents had made her one bit less valuable to her superiors was enough to send a chill down Honors spine. No doubt it was silly of her to worry herself over what could happen to an officer in an enemy navy, especially when those very talents made the officer in question uniquely dangerous to her own side, but it was hard to remember that when Foraker made a point of reminding Count Tilly's cooks of Honor's special dietary needs or stopped by on her limited off-duty time to play chess with McGinley, or feed Nimitz celery, or give Metcalf the painting supplies which had been recovered from her quarters aboard Prince Adrian.
And however little awareness Foraker seemed to have of potential risks to her, she clearly recognized Honor’s greatest worry, and she'd set out to do something about it. She'd not only brought other Peeps to meet Nimitz, whose charm could be relied upon to loosen up the stiffest courtesy call, but she'd also 'borrowed' the 'cat several times. Officially, she was taking Nimitz out for exercise; actually, she was introducing him to as many people as possible aboard Count Tilly with the obvious intention of convincing them he represented no danger to them.
Honor was immensely grateful for Foraker's efforts, although she would have felt more optimistic about their success if she hadn't discovered that Tourville, at least, knew Nimitz was a danger. The citizen rear admiral had taken to inviting her, McKeon, and 'Colonel' LaFollet, as the three highest ranking POWs, to dine with his officers on a semiregular basis. Honor was grateful for the opportunity to see the others, although she knew those dinners were hard on LaFollet, but they had also offered Tourville the chance to 'let slip' that the Peeps' Naval Intelligence had assembled a file on her.
She'd been startled at first, though a little consideration had told her she shouldn't have been. After all, she routinely saw the files ONI compiled on Peep officers whom the RMN had decided were important enough to keep tabs on. She simply hadn't considered that the Peoples Navy might see her in that light. But they did... and as part of her file, they'd included full details of her career on Grayson. From Tourville’s deliberately casual remarks, it was obvious those details included clips from the gory Planetary Security video of her and Nimitz foiling the attempt to assassinate Protector Benjamin’s family. No one who'd seen that footage could ever make the mistake of underestimating Nimitz's lethality, and while Tourville clearly didn't feel threatened by him, she rather doubted that everyone else who had the rank to see it would share his equanimity.
From that viewpoint, at least, the existence of her file made it far more likely she and Nimitz would be separated. Indeed, had she been a Peep, she suspected she would have argued against allowing any prisoner to retain a 'pet' she knew had killed people. Admitting that did absolutely nothing to make her feel confident, and she was shocked when she first realized how deeply her future’s looming uncertainties were affecting her.
It wasn't a sort of pressure she'd ever before faced, and it was one she was uniquely unsuited to handle. It would, she'd realized slowly, have been impossible to design a situation which could have turned the normal mainstays of her personality more cruelly against her. The very act of ordering Prince Adrian's surrender had turned her sense of duty and responsibility to her Queen and her Navy into a source of guilt, not strength. The matching sense of duty to her personnel, the sense of mutual obligation and responsibility which existed between any officer and those under her orders, had become another vicious goad, for there was no way she could discharge it. She did her best as their representative, and the decency of officers like Tourville and Foraker had prevented their captors from abusing her people... so far. But that was the point, wasn't it? She had no power to protect her personnel if, no, when, Tourville was replaced by someone else. And above and beyond all those grinding concerns was her bond with Nimitz. What had been the single most important cornerstone of her life for over forty years, the wellspring of stability and love to which she had been able to turn even in her darkest moments, was now the greatest threat she'd ever faced. She could lose Nimitz. He could be taken from her, even killed, at the whim of any Peep Navy or Marine officer, any State Security thug, even a simple prison camp guard. There was nothing she could do to protect him from any of those people, and the desperation that woke within her could only be concealed from her subordinates, for it could not be dispelled.
And because she couldn't dispel her desperation, or her terror, they only grew, like sources of infection which could not be lanced and cleaned. The dark cores of fear grew deeper and stronger, eating into her reserves of strength and undermining her sense of self, and all she could do was try to ignore them. To avoid thinking about them. To pretend they weren't there... when she knew perfectly well that they were.
It was destroying her. She knew it was, felt her growing fragility as the poison of helplessness ate away bits and pieces of her, and she hated it. Hated it. Not just for what it was doing to her, but even more because of what it was preventing her from doing for the people she'd brought to this with her.
She suspected that only McKeon and LaFollet, and possibly McGinley, realized how she was eroding from the core out. She hoped no one else did, anyway. It was bad enough that the people closest to her should be forced to deal with her failures and her preoccupation with her private terrors when they had fears and worries of their own and a right to her support in coping with them. But...
A soft chime sounded, and Honor looked up gratefully, thankful to be pulled from the ever tightening spiral of her self-condemnation, as the compartment hatch slid open. Shannon Foraker stood in the doorway, and Honor started to smile in welcome. But her smile died stillborn as Foraker’s expression registered, and she sensed McGinley and DuChene slowing, then stopping, in their exercises behind her.
'Yes, Citizen Commander?' she said, and as always, the steadiness of her voice surprised her. It should sound as frayed and stretched as she felt, quivering like an over-stressed cable.
'Citizen Admiral Tourville sent me to extend his compliments to you and inform you that we've received new orders, Commodore.' If Honor's voice sounded unnaturally natural in her own ears, Foraker’s came out with an equally unnatural flatness. Even the words sounded wrong somehow, as if they'd been written for her by someone else, and that, Honor realized, was because they had. Foraker was the messenger, but the message was from Tourville, and the citizen commander paused to clear her throat before she continued.
'The dispatch boat has returned from Barnett,' she went on, looking straight into Honor's eyes. 'Citizen Admiral Tourville's dispatches were intended for Citizen Admiral Theisman, the system CO, and his commissioner, but Citizen Ransom of the Committee of Public Safety is currently in the system and she was, of course, shown the message.'
Honor felt her breathing pause. She'd felt a momentary stir of hope at the name Theisman, for she and the citizen admiral had met, and enemy though he was, he was also a man of integrity and courage. But Cordelia
