War Of Honor

representative on the RMAIA board. Although she was technically in the Countess of New Kiev's department, everyone knew she'd been appointed on the direct nomination of the Prime Minister. Even if there hadn't been any rumors to that effect, Makris herself would have made certain that every soul unfortunate enough to cross her path figured it out. She was officious, overbearing, arrogant, supercilious, and abrasive ... and those, in Michel Reynaud's opinion, were her good points.

But she also knew precisely how the bureaucratic infighting game was played. Better, in fact, than Reynaud himself did. And she had access to all of the agency's paperwork. Which meant that the moment Kare and his scientific team started requesting additional funds for sensor runs, she was going to go running to the Prime Minister—and the public relations department—with the news that Dr. Jordin Kare had once again discovered the ultimate secret of the universe.

In which case, that same Dr. Jordin Kare was going to shoot her. And not just in a kneecap.

'Let me think about it for a day or so, Jordin,' Reynaud said after a moment. 'There has to be a way to lose the funding in the underbrush.' He swiveled his chair gently from side to side, tapping his fingers on his blotter while he thought. 'I might be able to get Admiral Haynesworth to help us out,' he mused aloud. 'She doesn't like bureaucratic interference any more than I do, and she still resents the hell out of having the project stripped away from her own people. She's in the middle of a routine Junction beacon survey right now, too. Maybe I can coax her into letting us have a little bit of her budget for the extra sensor runs we're going to need if we collect her data at the same time.'

'Good luck.' Kare sounded skeptical.

'It's one possibility.' Reynaud shrugged. 'I may be able to come up with another. Or, much as I hate to admit it, there may not be any way to skate around it. But I promise I'll do my damnedest, because you're right. This is too important for premature release.'

'I'd say that was a fairly generous understatement,' Kare said seriously. Then he grinned. 'On the other hand, and even granting what a tremendous pain in the ass all of this bureaucratic oversight has been, think about it, Mike. We're about to add another terminus to the Junction. And not one of us—especially not me—has the least damned idea where it leads!'

'I know.' Reynaud grinned back. 'Oh boy, do I know!'

Chapter One

'Steeeee-riiiiike onnnnne!'

The small white sphere flew past the young man in the green-trimmed, white uniform and smacked into the flat leather glove of the gray-uniformed man crouching behind him. The third man in the tableau—the one who had issued the shouted proclamation—wore an anachronistic black jacket and cap, as well as a face mask and chest protector like the crouching man wore. A rumble of discontent went up at his announcement, sprinkled with a few catcalls, from the crowd which filled the comfortable seats of the stadium to near capacity, and the man in white lowered his long, slender club to glower at the man in black. It didn't do him any good. The black-clad official only returned his glare, and, finally, he turned back towards the playing field while the man who'd caught the ball threw it back to his teammate, standing on the small, raised mound of earth twenty or so meters away.

'Wait a minute,' Commodore Lady Michelle Henke, Countess Gold Peak, said, turning in her own seat in the palatial owner's box to look at her hostess. 'That's a strike?'

'Of course it is,' Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, replied gravely.

'I thought you said a 'strike' was when he swung and missed,' Henke complained.

'It is,' Honor assured her.

'But he didn't —swing, I mean.'

'It's a strike whether he swings or not, as long as the pitch is in the strike zone.'

For just a moment, Henke's expression matched that which the batter had turned upon the umpire, but Honor only looked back with total innocence. When the countess spoke again, it was with the careful patience of one determined not to allow someone else the satisfaction of a petty triumph.

'And the 'strike zone' is?' she asked.

'Anywhere between the knees and the shoulders, as long as the ball also crosses home plate,' Honor told her with the competent air of a longtime afficionado.

'You say that like you knew the answer a year ago,' Henke replied in a pretension-depressing tone.

'That's just the sort of small-minded attitude I might have expected out of you,' Honor observed mournfully, and shook her head. 'Really, Mike, it's a very simple game.'

'Sure it is. That's why this is the only planet in the known universe where they still play it!'

'That's not true,' Honor scolded primly while the cream-and-gray treecat stretched across the back of her seat raised his head to twitch his whiskers insufferably at his person's guest. 'You know perfectly well that they still play baseball on Old Earth and at least five other planets.'

'All right, on seven planets out of the— what? Isn't it something like seventeen hundred total inhabited worlds now?'

'As a trained astrogator, you should appreciate the need for precision,' Honor said with a crooked grin, just as the pitcher uncorked a nasty, sharp-breaking slider. The wooden bat cracked explosively as it made contact and sent the ball slicing back out over the field. It crossed the short, inner perimeter wall which divided the playing field from the rest of the stadium, and Henke jumped to her feet and opened her mouth to cheer. Then she realized that Honor hadn't moved, and she turned to prop her hands on her hips with an expression halfway between martyred and exasperated.

'I take it that there's some reason that wasn't a— whatchamacallit? A 'homerun'?'

'It's not a homerun unless it stays between the foul poles when it crosses the outfield wall, Mike,' Honor told her, pointing at the yellow and white striped pylons. 'That one went foul by at least ten or fifteen feet.'

'Feet? Feet?' Henke shot back. 'My God, woman! Can't you at least keep track of the distances in this silly sport using measurement units civilized people can recognize?'

'Michelle!' Honor looked at her with the horror normally reserved for someone who stood up in church to announce she'd decided to take up devil worship and that the entire congregation was invited out to her house for a Black Mass and lemonade.

'What?' Henke demanded in a voice whose severity was only slightly undermined by the twinkle in her eyes.

'I suppose I shouldn't have been as shocked as I was,' Honor said, more in sorrow than in anger. 'After all, I, too, was once even as you, an infidel lost and unaware of how barren my prebaseball existence had truly been. Fortunately, one who had already seen the truth was there to bring me to the light,' she added, and waved to the short, wiry auburn-haired man who stood in his green-on-green uniform directly behind her. 'Andrew,' she said, 'would you be kind enough to tell the Commodore what you said to me when I asked you why it was ninety feet between bases instead of twenty-seven and a half meters?'

'What you actually asked, My Lady,' Lieutenant Colonel Andrew LaFollett replied in a gravely meticulous tone, 'was why we hadn't converted to meters and rounded up to twenty-eight of them between each pair of bases. Actually, you sounded just a bit put out over it, if I recall correctly.'

'Whatever,' Honor said with a lordly, dismissive wave. 'Just tell her what you told me.'

'Of course, My Lady,' the commander of her personal security detachment agreed, and turned courteously to Henke. 'What I said to the Steadholder, Countess Gold Peak,' he said, 'was 'This is baseball, My Lady!' '

'You see?' Honor said smugly. 'There's a perfectly logical reason.'

'Somehow, I don't think that adjective means exactly what you think it does,' Henke told her with a chuckle. 'On the other hand, I have heard it said that Graysons are just a bit on the traditional side, so I suppose there's really no reason to expect them to change anything about a game just because it's over two thousand years old and might need a little updating.'