her thighs, and his own contentment flowed into her. She'd always known he could sense her emotions, and she'd wondered, sometimes, if she could truly sense his or only thought she could. A year ago he'd finally proven she could, and now she savored his content like her own as her fingers stroked his spine.
Stillness gathered about her, perfected rather than marred by the crisp, sharp breeze, and she let it fill her as she sat on the rock shelf as she had in childhood, mistress of all she surveyed, and wondered who she truly was.
Captain Dame Honor Harrington, Countess Harrington, Knight Commander of the Order of King Roger. When she was in uniform, her space-black tunic blazed with ribbons: the Manticore Cross, the Star of Grayson, the Distinguished Service Order, the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal with cluster, the blood-red stripe of the Monarch's Thanks with two clusters, two wound stripes... The list went on and on, and there'd been a time when she'd craved those medals, those confirmations of achievement and ability. She was proud of them even now, but they were no longer the stuff of dreams. She'd learned too much about what those bits of ribbon cost.
Nimitz raised his head and kneaded the tips of his claws through her trousers to register his discontent with the direction of her thoughts. She stroked his ears in apology, but she didn't stop thinking them; they were the reason she'd spent the last four hours hiking up here to the refuge of her childhood. Nimitz studied her for a moment, then sighed in resignation and laid his chin back on his true-hands and left her to them.
She touched the left side of her face and clenched her cheek muscles under her fingers. It had taken over eight Sphinxian months—almost a full T-year—of reconstructive surgery and therapy for her to be able to do that. Her father was one of Manticore's finest neurosurgeons, yet the damage the disrupter bolt had wreaked had taxed even his skill, for Honor was one of the minority of humans who did not respond to regeneration therapies.
There was always some loss of function in neural repairs without regen. In her case, the loss had been unusually severe and complicated by a stubborn tendency to reject natural tissue grafts. Two complete nerve replacements had failed; in the end, they'd been forced to use artificial nerves with powerful boosters, and the unending surgery, the repeated failures, and long, agonizing therapy as she struggled to master the high-tech substitutes had almost defeated her. Even now there was an alien, sharp-edged strangeness to reports from her synthetic nerves. Nothing felt quite right, as if the implants were an ill-tuned sensor array—a sensation the undamaged nerves on the other side of her face only made worse by comparison—and she doubted she would ever truly become accustomed to it.
She returned her gaze to the distant house and wondered how much of her melancholy stemmed from the months of strain and pain. There'd been no fast, simple way through them, and she'd wept herself to sleep more than once as the unnatural fire crackled in her face. There were no scars to reveal the massive repairs—no visible ones, anyway—and her face was almost as sensitive, its muscles almost as responsive, as they'd ever been. But only almost. She could tell the difference when she watched herself in a mirror, see the slight hesitation when the left side of her mouth moved, hear the occasionally slurred words that hesitation produced, even as she felt the skewed sensitivity when the wind kissed her cheek.
And deep inside, where no one else could see, there were other scars.
The dreams were less frequent now, but they remained cold and bitter. Too many people had died under her orders... or because she hadn't been there to keep them alive. And with those dreams came self-doubt. Could she face the challenge of command once more? And even if she could, should the Fleet trust her with others' lives?
Nimitz roused again and rose on his haunches once more, bracing his true-hands against her shoulders. He stared into her chocolate-brown eyes—one natural, the other born of advanced composites and molecular circuitry, and she felt his support and love flow into her.
She scooped him up and buried her wind-chilled face in his soft fur, embracing its physical warmth even as she treasured that deeper, more precious inner one, and he purred to her until she lowered him once more and drew a deep, deep breath.
She filled her lungs with crisp air, sucking the early fall chill deep until her chest ached with it, and then she exhaled in one long, endless breath that carried away... something. She couldn't put a name to that something, yet she felt it go, and something else roused in its place, as if waking from long sleep.
She'd been planetbound too long. She no longer belonged here on this beloved mountain, looking down on the place of her birth through its chilled crystal air. For the first time in far too long she felt the call of the stars not as a challenge she feared she could no longer meet but with the old need to be about it, and she sensed the change in Nimitz's emotions as he shared her feelings.
'All right, Stinker—you can stop worrying now,' she told him, and his purr turned brisker and louder. His prehensile tail twitched as he touched her nose with his, and she laughed as she hugged him close once more.
It wasn't over. She knew that. But at least she knew where she had to go, what she had to do, to lay the nightmares to rest at last.
'Yeah,' she told the treecat. 'I guess it is about time I stopped feeling sorry for myself, isn't it?' Nimitz twitched his tail more strongly in agreement. 'And it's time I got back on a command deck, too,' she added. 'Assuming, of course, that The Powers That Be want me back.' This time there was no fresh flash of pain at the qualifier, and she smiled in gratitude.
'In the meantime,' she said more briskly, 'it's also time the two of us got airborne.'
She stood, set Nimitz on the rock, and bent over her long bundle. She unfastened the straps that held it closed, and alloy clicked as she assembled the tubular frame with deft, practiced fingers. She and Nimitz had discovered the wild joy of riding the Copper Walls' glorious winds before she was twelve T-years old, and the 'cat bleeked in encouragement as she stretched the infinitely tough, gossamer thin fabric into place.
It took less than half an hour to assemble the hang-glider and double-check every joint. She slipped into the harness with the specially modified safety straps for Nimitz, and he scampered up her back and clung to her shoulders as she adjusted them about him. She felt his delight and anticipation bubbling with her own exuberance, and her natural eye sparkled as she clipped the harness leads to the glider and gripped the hand bar.
'All right, hang on!' she told him, and launched herself over the edge of the long, lofty drop with a whoop of sheer delight.
The sun was a fading rim of red-orange beyond the Copper Walls' peaks as Honor made the final turn. She floated like a
She grinned and shook her head fondly. Hang-gliding was a planetary passion on Sphinx, but Senior Chief Steward MacGuiness was from the capital world of Manticore. She suspected that he believed all Sphinxians (herself included) were more than a bit mad and needed looking after. He certainly did his level best to rule her life with an iron hand, and while it would never do to admit that she enjoyed the way he fussed over—and at—her, she had to admit (privately) that this time he had a point. She'd been an expert glider for over thirty T-years. As such she should have had the sense to get herself home when she had good light for the landing, which meant she was going to have to endure his ever so respectful reproaches with meek acceptance.
She swept in from the sea, adjusting her weight with finicky precision, smoothing her angle of descent, and the ground rushed up toward her with suddenly breathtaking speed. Then the brilliant light was right in front of her, her dropping feet reached out, and Nimitz chittered with delight as she raced forward, absorbing her velocity with an exultant laugh of her own.
She lost the last of her speed and went down on one knee, resting the glider frame on the red-gold grass before the house, and a cold, whiskered nose caressed her right ear as Nimitz radiated his own content. She unfastened his safety straps, and the 'cat dropped lightly to the ground and sat up to watch her unlatch her own straps and rise, stretching until her shoulders popped and grinning at him like a schoolgirl. Then she collapsed the glider with a few practiced motions—not completely, just into a halfway convenient burden—and tucked it under her arm as she headed for the house.
'You left your com home again, Ma'am,' a respectful, gently reproving voice said as she stepped up onto the glassed-in storm porch.
'Did I?' she asked innocently. 'How careless of me. It must have slipped my mind.'
'Of course it did,' MacGuiness agreed, and she turned her head to give him a brilliant smile. He smiled
