'I'm not afraid of her,' Stefan shot back, and his wife's eyes hardened.
'Then you're an even bigger fool than your brother was,' she said in an even, deadly dispassionate tone. His face tightened angrily, but she met his hot glare with an icy calm which shed its heat effortlessly.
'We've had this discussion before, Stefan. And, yes, Pavel was an idiot. I warned him that going after Harrington, especially the way he did it, was like following a wounded hexapuma into the underbrush with a butter knife. But he insisted, and I was only an employee, so I set it up for him. Now he's dead . . . and she isn't. Not only that, but she's enormously more powerful now than she was then, and she's learned how to use that power. Pavel underestimated her then; if you're not afraid of her now, with all the power and allies she's gained since and the evidence of what happened to him in front of you, then you
'She wouldn't dare come after me,' North Hollow protested. 'Not after the way she shot Pavel. Public opinion would crucify her!'
'That didn't stop her in Pavel's case. What in the world makes you think it would stop her now? The only two reasons she hasn't gone after you already are that her political allies, like William Alexander, have been restraining her from going after anyone at all and that she doesn't know—not for certain—that you were the one who suggested this particular line of attack to High Ridge. If she were certain of that, I'm not at all certain even Alexander or the Queen herself could stop her, given all the history between her and your family. So be afraid of her, Stefan. Be very afraid, because you're never going to meet a more dangerous person in your life.'
'If she's so dangerous, why's she been so meek and mild? There are ways she could have counterattacked without resorting to violence, Georgia! So why hasn't she come out swinging and used all that power you say she's got somehow?' Stefan demanded, but the questions came out petulantly, not challengingly.
'Because we hit her with the kind of attack she's most vulnerable to,' the countess told him patiently. 'She doesn't have the experience to respond in kind to this sort of assault. She's been mostly on the defensive from the outset, because it's not her sort of battlefield. That's precisely why they went out and recruited Emily Alexander to serve as her general. But if you push her too hard, or make the mistake of coming into the open and hurting someone she cares about when she knows who did it, she won't waste any more time even trying to fight your kind of battle, Stefan. She'll come after you directly, her way, and hang the consequences. Your family should know that better than anyone else.'
'Well, we're just going to have to come up with something else, then, aren't we? If Plan A isn't going to put her down for the count after all, what do we suggest to High Ridge for Plan B? Now that Emily Alexander's busted our columnists' balls for daring to suggest that her husband and her 'dear friend' Harrington could be humping each other, how the hell do we get the two of them off our backs? You know they're going to be harder to handle than ever now that we've pissed them off!'
'There's probably something to that,' Georgia agreed. 'And I'm not sure what to propose as Plan B—not just yet, anyway. I'm confident something will suggest itself to me as the situation clarifies. But whatever it is, Stefan, it's not going to be anything she can trace directly back to you or to me. You may not care if she decides to rip your lungs out, but I like mine just fine where they are, thank you.'
'I got the message, Georgia,' North Hollow half-snapped. His expression was surlier than ever, but there was fear behind the surliness, and Georgia was relieved to see it. On the other hand . . .
Fear might keep him from doing something outstandingly stupid, but she'd used enough stick for one night, she decided. It was time for the carrot, and she touched the neck of her robe.
It floated down to puddle about her ankles, and suddenly Honor Harrington was the last thing on Stefan's mind.
Honor stood beside the lectern, hands clasped behind her, and gazed up at the huge lecture hall's tiers of seats as they filled.
The Tactical Department's D'Orville Hall home boasted every modern electronic teaching aid known to man. Its simulators could re-create anything from the flight deck of a pinnace to the combat information center of a superdreadnought task force flagship, and reproduce all of the sights and sounds of the most horrific combat. The online teaching interfaces could put an instructor face to face with a single student, a group of two or three, or a class literally of hundreds. Those same interfaces made reference works, histories, lecture notes, syllabuses, official after action reports, analyses of past campaigns, and class schedules instantly available to students, as well as delivering student course work and exams equally instantly to instructors.
Saganami Island made full and efficient use of all those capabilities. Yet the Royal Manticoran Navy was a great believer in tradition, as well, and at least once per week, lecture courses met physically in their assigned lecture halls. Honor was perfectly willing to admit that the tradition was scarcely the most modern possible way to transmit knowledge, but that was fine with her. As she herself had discovered as a child, too great a reliance on the electronic classroom could deprive a student of the social interaction which was also a part of the educational process. The electronic format could serve as a shield, a barricade behind which a student could hide or even pretend to be someone else entirely . . . sometimes even to herself. That might not constitute a serious drawback in the education of civilians, but Navy and Marine officers couldn't afford walls of self-deception about who and what they were any more than they could afford to leave their social skills underdeveloped. Their professional responsibilities required them not only to interact with others in a corporate, hierarchical service, but to exude confidence and competence when exercising command in situations in which their ability to lead quite literally might make the difference between life and death. Or, even more importantly sometimes, between success or failure. That was the major reason Saganami Island relentlessly stressed traditions and procedures which forced midshipmen and midshipwomen to deal with one another, and with their superiors and instructors, face to face, in the flesh.
Besides, she admitted from behind the serenity of her expression, she enjoyed the opportunity to see the massed faces of her students. The joy of teaching and challenging young minds while simultaneously building the Navy's future was an unalloyed pleasure, the one thing she had unreservedly treasured about her almost five-T-year stay here on the Star Kingdom's capital planet. She even allowed herself to believe that she'd finally made a substantial down payment on the debt she'd owed to her own Saganami Island instructors, and especially to Raoul Courvoisier. And it was at moments like this, when she actually saw one of her classes assembled, all in one place at the same time, that the sense of continuity of past and future and of her own place in that endless chain came to her most strongly.
And at this particular moment, she needed that sense.
Nimitz stirred uneasily on her shoulder, and she tasted his unhappiness, but there wasn't a great deal she could do about that, and they both knew it. Besides, he wasn't unhappy with her; he was—as she herself—unhappy at the situation.
A fresh spasm of pain flickered through her, concealed from her assembling students by the calm mask of her face, and she cursed her own inner weakness.
She ought to have been one of the happiest women in the Star Kingdom, she told herself yet again. Emily Alexander's counterattack had rolled up the High Ridge machine's campaign of slander like a rug, especially when the Queen got behind it and pushed. One or two of the most bitterly partisan 'faxes and commentators continued the attack, but the vast majority had dropped it like a hot rock once Emily's intervention reversed the poll numbers virtually overnight. The abrupt simultaneity with which the campaign had been terminated by almost all participants should have been a flare-lit tipoff to any unbiased observer that it had been carefully coordinated from the beginning, too. Only a command from above could have shut down so many strident voices so instantly. And only people whose deep, principled concern over the 'fundamental questions' being beaten to death had been completely artificial from the outset would have abandoned those principles with such alacrity when they became inconvenient.
But if the attack had been beaten back, it hadn't been defeated without leaving scars. The Grayson public, for example, remained furious that it had ever been mounted in the first place. That would have bothered Honor under any circumstances, but the opposition Keys in the Conclave of Steadholders had seized upon it as an additional weapon in their struggle to roll back Benjamin IX's political power. Their persistent attacks on the Manticoran Alliance—or, rather, on the wisdom of Grayson's remaining bound to that Alliance—had been sufficiently unremitting before the allegations of infidelity ever saw the light of day. That opposition to the Alliance had survived even the execution for treason of Steadholder Mueller, who'd first put it forward, and the inexcusable and stupid arrogance with which the High Ridge Government had treated its allies had lent it a dangerous strength since. Now
