More Than Honor

point of Mincio's scholarly life. She wasn't really able to appreciate it, though, because for the first time since her father died Edith Mincio wasn't primarily a scholar.

Nessler lifted the air car. He and Mincio were in the front seats; Beresford and Rovald shared the back. There was space for a fifth passenger, but none of them cared to chance adding even deKyper's slight additional weight. The drive had labored just to carry three the day before.

They'd barely cleared the walls of Singh's courtyard before they saw the Melungeon air car curving down toward the landing field. Lord Orloff's vehicle had a fabric canopy with tassels which whipped furiously in the wind of passage.

'Ah!' said Nessler as he leaned into the control yoke to turn the car. 'I think we'd best join them before going on. You may have to drive Rovald to the site yourself, Beresford.'

'I guess I can handle that,' the servant said. 'Seeing as I've been driving air cars since I was nine. And didn't your father whip my ass when he caught me, Sir.'

Orloff and his entourage were about to enter the Melungeon cutter when Nessler settled his borrowed car nearby. Orloff beamed at them and cried, 'Nessler! Come and see my Colonel Arabi. Then the two of us can go back to the camp and play cards, not so?'

'Mincio and I would be delighted to visit your ship, Captain Orloff,' Nessler said cheerfully. He strode to the Melungeon and embraced him enthusiastically. Mincio noticed that this time Nessler's arms were outside Orloff's instead of being pinned to his chest by the Melungeon's bear hug. 'There's no problem with my servant and technician going to your camp to record the pylon before you remove it, is there?'

'Foof!' said Orloff. 'Why should there be a problem? Alec, go back to camp with my honored guest's servants and see to it that the dogs there treat them right. It's only the other ranks there now, you see.'

'And perhaps tomorrow when we've had a chance to rest,' Nessler added, 'I'll be in a mood for some poker. I hope you don't have a problem with high stakes?'

Lord Orloff's laughter thundered as he patted Nessler ahead of him into the pinnace.

Mincio had no naval experience, so the view of the approaching cruiser wouldn't have meant anything to her even if the cutter's view screen had been in better condition. If the fuzzy image was an indication of the Colonel Arabi's condition, however, the cruiser was in very bad condition indeed.

'Why, if I didn't know better,' Nessler said as he looked over the coxswain's shoulder, 'I'd have said that was a Brilliance–class cruiser of the People's Republic of Haven! That's very good. Did the Grand Duchy purchase the plans from the Peeps, or . . .?'

'Not plans, no,' Orloff said from the command seat to the right of the coxswain. 'We bought the very ship! Nothing is too good for Melungeon, and nothing on Melungeon is too good for Maxwell, Lord Orloff.' He pounded his broad chest with both fists. 'My very self!'

The cutter passed into the cruiser's number two boat bay and settled into the docking buffers. The mechanical docking arms clanged rather more loudly than Mincio had expected, and the personnel tube ran out to the cutter's lock.

The sale of warships to minor states would be a useful profit center for a government like that of Haven, which needed massive production capacity for its own purposes. Post-delivery maintenance wouldn't be part of the deal, however.

'We bought the Colonel Arabi not twenty years ago,' Orloff continued as crewmen manually opened the cutter's hatch. The powered system didn't work. 'Direct from the yard on Haven, not some dog of a castoff. Have you ever seen so lovely a ship in your life, Sir Hakon Nessler? My ship!'

The view of the boat bay gallery beyond through the personnel tube didn't strike Mincio with anything but an awareness of squalor, but Nessler seemed genuinely impressed as he followed Orloff down the tube. 'This is much more than I'd expected,' he said. 'Lord Orloff, I'll admit that I didn't think the Melungeon navy had so very modern a vessel in its inventory.'

Orloff's officers were obsequious to both him and Nessler, but they showed no such reserve toward Mincio or one another. After Mincio had been pushed aside by a woman with three rings on her sleeves and a dueling scar across her forehead, she waited to disembark after all the ship's officers.

'Get to work on the forward lasers, Kotzwinkle,' Orloff said. 'Whichever one you think. And I don't want to spend all day here, either! A drink, Nessler?'

'So . . .' Mincio said as she caught up with the others as they left the boat bay. The Melungeons were intent on their own business; she was in effect speaking only to Nessler, though without any suggestion of secrecy between them. 'This ship is actually the equal of the Peep vessel on Air?'

'Oh, good God, no!' Nessler said in amusement. 'This is a light cruiser. The ship on Air is a heavy cruiser, quite a different thing, and newer as well. Though—' in a lower voice, still amused '—there may not be a great deal to choose between the professional standards of the crews. And it is a great deal better than I expected.'

Orloff turned and thrust one of the two beakers of brandy he now held into Nessler's hand. 'Come! Look at my lovely ship.'

Mincio followed the pair of them, glad not to have more Musketoon to deal with. Nessler had swallowed a catalyzer before boarding. It converted ethanol to an ester which linked to fatty acids before it could be absorbed in the intestine. So long as Nessler had a supply of suitable food—the bowls of peanuts on the Melungeon card table would do fine—nobody could drink him under the table.

The catalyzer didn't affect the taste of Musketoon, however. If Mincio had a choice, she'd prefer to drink hydraulic fluid.

Several of the officers went off on the business of the ship, shouting angry orders at the enlisted personnel still aboard. With Nessler at his side, Orloff led the rest of his entourage on a stroll through the vessel. Mincio followed as an interested though inexpert observer.

The voyage from Melungeon to Hope was long and presumably a difficult piece of navigation, so the officers and crew had to have at least a modicum of competence. More than a modicum, given the Colonel Arabi's terrible state of repair.

No expertise was needed to notice the ropes of circuitry routed along the decks, sometimes to enter compartments through holes raggedly cut in what had been blast-proof walls. Equipment didn't fit the racks and was interconnected by exposed cables. Sometimes a replacement unit was welded onto the case of the original.

Above all, everything was filthy. Lubricants and hydraulic fluids had obviously won their battle to bleed over every surface within the closed universe of any starship. Only constant labor by the crews could remove the slimy coating. There was no sign that anybody aboard the Colonel Arabi even made the effort. Mincio saw 20-centimeter beards of gummy lint wobbling everywhere but in the main traffic areas.

They entered an echoing bay. For the most part the Colonel Arabi had given Mincio the dual impressions of being very large and simultaneously very cramped. This was the first time she had the feeling of real volume. Crewmen flitted half-seen in the shadows; only a fraction of the compartment's lighting appeared to function.

'Here we will store the pillar,' Orloff said, gesturing expansively with both hands. 'Three months it took to open the space! Our dockyard on Melungeon, it's shit!'

He spat on the deck at his feet. 'Cheating crooks, just out to line their pockets!'

'That bulkhead separated the forward missile magazine from a main food storage compartment, did it not?' Nessler said. 'Removing the armor plate from a magazine would have been a serious job for any dockyard, Lord Orloff. And I wonder . . . don't you have flexing problems as a result of the change? That was the main transverse stiffener, I believe.'

'Faugh!' Orloff said. 'We had to have room for the pillar, did we not? What use would it be to come all this way if we couldn't carry the damned pillar?'

As Mincio's eyes adapted to the lack of lighting she made out the forms of two huge cylinders, each nearly the size of the Colonel Arabi's cutter. They were missiles, sublight spaceships in their own right, each with a nuclear warhead as its cargo.

Perhaps a nuclear warhead. Based on the rest of what she'd seen of the Melungeon navy, the warhead