On Basilisk Station

'Uh, no, Ma'am.' The beefy lieutenant flushed under her steady regard, then became very busy plugging figures into his console.

She waited patiently, though he should have worked up the heading for Medusa almost by reflex, as that was obviously their most probable destination. An on the bounce astrogator tried to anticipate his captain's needs without prompting, and Stromboli's flush showed his own awareness of that. He bit his lip as he concentrated on his panel, and his eyes refused to meet hers while he worked, as if he expected her to bite his head off at any moment.

She didn't. If one of her officers needed reprimanding, she would attend to it in private, just as she made it a point to deliver praise in public. Surely they ought to be figuring that much out by now! She bit off another sigh and refrained from tapping her toe on the deck.

'Course is zero-eight-seven by zero-one-one at four hundred gravities, with turnover in one-five-point- zero-seven hours, Ma'am,' Stromboli announced finally.

'Thank you, Lieutenant,' Honor said gravely, and he flushed more darkly yet. No need for a reprimand there, she decided. Stromboli was unlikely to embarrass himself that way a second time. She glanced at Killian.

'Make it so, Helm.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Coming to zero-eight-seven zero-one-one. Acceleration four-zero-zero gravities,' Killian replied in a deadpan voice, and Fearless swung onto her new heading and began accelerating. The silence on her bridge was uncomfortable, like that of school children caught out on a pop quiz by a new teacher.

'Punch up Warlock, please, Tactical. Let's find out who our senior officer is,' Honor said, more to break the uneasy quiet than for any other reason—though, now that she thought about it, Basilisk Control should have passed that information along already. More sloppiness. Maybe it was a side effect of being banished here, but she certainly intended to see that it wasn't allowed to infect her ship, as well.

She was reaching for the insulated cup of cocoa in her armrest beverage holder when Venizelos reported.

'Here it is, Ma'am. HMS Warlock, CA Two-Seven-Seven. Three hundred k-tons. She's a Star Knight—class. Captain Lord Pavel Young, commanding.'

Honor's hand froze three centimeters from her cup, then continued its progress. It was a tiny hesitation, no more than a second in length, but Commander McKeon looked up sharply, and his eyes narrowed at her expression.

It was a subtle thing, more sensed than seen, an infinitesimal tightening of her lips. The ridges of her sharply-defined cheekbones stood out for just an instant, and her nostrils flared. That was all—but the treecat on the back of her chair rose to his full height, ears flat, lip curled back to bare needle-tipped fangs, and his hand-paws tensed to show half a centimeter of curved, white claw.

'Thank you, Lieutenant.' Harrington's voice was as courteous and level as ever, but there was something in it—an uneasiness, a cold bitterness at odds with his maddeningly self-possessed captain.

He watched her sip her cocoa and replace the cup neatly, and his mind raced as he tried to recall if he'd ever heard of Lord Pavel Young. Nothing came to him, and he bit the inside of his lip.

Was there something between her and Young? Something which would affect Fearless? Her flash of immobility, coupled with the treecat's powerful reaction, certainly seemed to suggest there was, and with any other captain, he would have found some excuse to ask her in private. Not out of morbid curiosity, but because it was his job to know about such things, to protect his ship and his commanding officer from anything that would hamper their efficiency.

Yet the barriers sealing him off from Harrington had grown too thick for that. He felt them rising into place, holding him in his chair, and then Harrington stood. She rose without haste, but he seemed to sense a jerkiness to her movement, a hidden urgency.

'Commander McKeon, you have the watch. I'll be in my quarters.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. I have the watch,' he acknowledged automatically. She nodded, dark eyes looking right through him with a curious, dangerous hardness, then scooped up her treecat and strode into the bridge lift. The door closed behind her.

McKeon rose and crossed to the command chair, settling into it and feeling the warmth her body had left behind. He made himself look away from the bland lift door and leaned back against the contoured cushions, wondering what fresh disaster was headed Fearless's way.

CHAPTER SIX

The planet Medusa gleamed like a dull ball bearing far below as Fearless slid into her assigned parking orbit for rendezvous with Warlock. It wasn't much of a planet, Honor thought, watching it on the visual display. She was well-aware her concentration on Medusa stemmed from a need to think about anything but the upcoming interview with her senior officer, but her mood had little to do with her conclusion that Medusa had to be the most boring-looking world she'd ever seen.

It was gray-green, relieved only by weather patterns and the glaring white of massive polar ice caps. Even its deep, narrow seas were a barely lighter shade of the omnipresent gray-green—a soupy sludge of plankton and larger plant forms that thrived in a brew the environmental control people would have condemned in a heartbeat back on Sphinx. Medusa's axial tilt was extreme, over forty degrees, which, coupled with its cool primary, produced a climate more brutal even than Manticore-B's Gryphon. The planetary flora was well-adapted to its severe environment, but it showed an appalling lack of variation, for Medusa was covered in moss. Thousands—millions—of varieties of moss. Short, fuzzy moss in place of grass. Higher-growing, brushy moss in place of bushes. Even, God help us all, great, big, floppy mounds of moss in place of trees. She'd heard about it, even seen holos, but this was the first time she'd seen it with her own eyes, and it wasn't the same at all.

She gave a wry grimace of distaste and turned her eyes resolutely to the sight she'd been avoiding. HMS Warlock floated in the same orbit, barely a hundred kilometers clear, and she swallowed a bitter-tasting envy mixed with old hatred as she gazed at her.

The Star Knight class were the RMN's latest heavy cruisers, three and a half times more massive than Fearless and with almost six times her firepower, even before Hephaestus and Horrible Hemphill had butchered her. The big, sleek ship hung there, taunting Honor's elderly command with its mere presence, and knowing who commanded that beautiful vessel made it far, far worse. She'd thought she'd hit bottom when they assigned her to Basilisk Station; now she knew she had.

The duty helmsman brought Fearless to rest relative to Warlock, and she drew a deep breath, wondering if any of her crew guessed why she'd left Nimitz in her quarters. Not that she intended to tell them.

'Call away my cutter, please,' she requested. 'Mr. Venizelos, you have the watch.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Venizelos replied, and watched curiously as his captain stepped into the lift and headed for the boat bay.

Honor sat silently, arms folded, as her cutter crept across the emptiness between Fearless and Warlock. She'd been tempted, in a way, to use one of her pinnaces, but she knew why—just as she knew that that particular bit of ostentation would have been one too many. So she'd taken her cutter, despite the fact that it moved far more slowly than a pinnace would have. Even the most efficient thrusters gave a much weaker acceleration than impellers, and a cutter was too small to mount an impeller drive. It was also too small for the inertial compensator needed to offset an impeller's brutal power, though its gravity generator could compensate for the lower gee-force of its thrusters. Yet despite Honor's own impatience and need to get this over, the trip was short, even at the cutter's relatively slow speed. Too short. She'd spent the last thirty-one hours dreading this moment.

Her pilot completed his final approach, and the cutter shivered as Warlock's