More Than Honor

She closed out everything except the hand she would have to grasp.

'Three.'

It jarred into hers, and she heard a click–snap and falling clatter as her fingers clenched. Then she was screaming, screaming and tasting iron at the back of her throat as Fontein's weight came onto her outstretched arm and wrenched her savaged body against the unyielding frame of the shock harness. Blackness surged over her, welcome as the memory of her mother's arms, then receded into a red-shot alertness. She spat to clear her mouth; that was blood this time. A steady trickle of it, if not an arterial gusher. The bone spears had hit something.

'See,' she said to Fontein's shock-white face where he clung to the wreck's wall not more than an arm's length away. 'We really do accomplish things when we cooperate, Citizen Commissioner.'

Then the blackness returned.

Rob S. Pierre looked down at the stretcher. 'Will it endanger her life?' he said.

'No, Sir,' the medtech said unwillingly.

'Then I insist.' He stepped back.

Esther McQueen's eyes opened, and she sighed once in blissful relief; the stretcher's lights blinked as it swept away her pain. Her eyes moved.

'Gerrard?' she said, her voice faint but steady. The Marine went to one knee and looked at her, his face warring between relief and revulsion. 'The butcher's bill?'

'Light, Skipper,' he said. 'By the time we hit them they were running on empty; the Chairman's Guard bled them bad.'

'Ship?'

'Some damage, but Citizen Pierre called them off in time.'

She nodded again, and the Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety stepped forward. 'Citizen Admiral McQueen,' he said. 'The People's Republic, the Committee, and I myself are in your debt. Your prompt action . . . we'll talk more about this later. I already intended to have an interview with you today, but tomorrow will do just as well.'

'Thank you . . . Sir,' she said. The eyes began to wander again, and he stepped back and motioned the techs to take her away.

He looked around the wreckage of the Committee's tower. The other members were dispersing about their various tasks; it would be some time before they got this mess cleaned up and returned to the agenda he'd intended to spend the day on.

'But we will get back to it, by God,' he whispered, and looked out the gaping windows over his city.

They were his people out there; weak and foolish and stupid and short-sighted, but they were as others made them. He would remake them, and give them back their pride. If he had the right tools.

He looked after McQueen's stretcher. Any good tool kit needed a knife, a sharp one. If you cut yourself using it, that was your fault, not the tool's.

The Universe of Honor Harrington David Weber

Honor Harrington was born on October 1, 1859 Post Diaspora, at Craggy Hollow (the Harrington family homestead), County Duvalier, in the Duchy of Shadow Vale, Sphinx. In general, one might say that she was born at the twilight of what had been a long, relatively stable and peaceful period of galactic history. Her native Star Kingdom of Manticore was widely respected as one of the wealthiest star nations in existence (probably the wealthiest, on a per capita basis), and its carrying trade dominated the interstellar freight lines outside the Solarian League itself. The galaxy had not seen a major war in over a century, although there were always places (like the Silesian Confederacy) where ongoing low-level conflicts were the norm rather than the exception. Aside from rumblings out of the economically devastated People's Republic of Haven, which had recently forcibly annexed a half dozen neighboring systems, there seemed little reason to expect that to change.

But by 1901 pd, (the time of On Basilisk Station) it had changed, and changed drastically. The PRH's steady economic collapse had driven its expansionism to heights unseen since pre-space days on Old Terra, and the Star Kingdom of Manticore lay squarely in the Peeps' path. The last century's 'golden age' was coming to an end with the approach of an interstellar war which would, before it ended, see virtually the entire human-occupied galaxy choosing up sides, with military operations on a scale no one had ever previously contemplated.

This appendix sketches in some of the salient points of the galaxy into which Honor was born . . . and which she, willingly or not, was to play a major part in changing forever.

(1) Background (General)

The first manned interstellar ship departed the Solar System on September 30, 2103. Although no other ship followed for almost fifty years, 2013 ce, became accepted as Year One of the Diaspora, and January 1 of that year became January 1, 01 pd for purposes of interstellar dating.

For over seven centuries after the Prometheus became the first manned starship, FTL movement remained impossible, leaving generation ships (followed in the fourth century pd by the development of practical cryogenic hibernation vessels) as the only means of long-distance interstellar expansion. The original starships used fairly straightforward reaction drives with hydrogen catcher fields to sustain boost after the initial onboard reaction mass was exhausted. Later generations attempted more esoteric propulsion systems, but though they graduated to fusion and photon drives, they remained locked into the sublight reaction principle until 725 pd, when the first crude hyper drive was tested in the Solar System.

The interface between normal and hyper-space was speed-critical, for if velocity at hyper translation exceeded .3 c, the translating starship was destroyed. In addition, a hypership had to reach the hyper limit of a star's gravity well before it could enter hyper, and the hyper limit varies with the spectral class of the star, as shown in Figure 1.

The original hyper drive was a man-killer. The casualty figures over the first fifty years of hyper travel were daunting. Worse, vessels which were destroyed were lost with all hands, which left no record of their fates and thus offered no clue as to the causes of their destruction. Eventually, however, it was determined that most had probably been lost to one of two phenomena, which became known as 'grav shear' (see below) and 'dimensional shear' (violent energy turbulence separating hyper bands from one another). Once this was recognized and the higher hyper bands were declared off limits, losses due to dimensional shear ended, but grav shear remained a highly dangerous and essentially unpredictable phenomenon for the next five centuries. Despite that unpredictability and continuing (though lower) loss rates, hyperships' FTL capabilities made them the vessel of choice for survey duties and other low-manpower requirement tasks. Crews of highly paid specialists willing to accept risky employment conditions were enlisted for survey work and for the early mail packets, but the loss rate continued to make any sort of interstellar bulk commerce impractical and insured that most colonists still moved aboard the much slower but more survivable cryogenic ships. As a consequence, the rate of advance of colonization did not increase terribly significantly during the period 725-1273 pd, although the ability to pick suitable targets for colonization (courtesy of the FTL survey crews) improved enormously.

The best speed possible in hyper prior to 1273 pd was about fifty times light-speed, a major plus over light-speed vessels but still too slow to tie distant stars together into any sort of interstellar community. It