Worlds of Honor

'Do you really want to do that?' she demanded, eying him suspiciously, and he shrugged.

'Heck, no! That's why I only suggested it after you stuck a pulser in my ribs!' She laughed, and he grinned, then went on more seriously. 'I'm not saying I'd want to spend the whole trip stuck there, of course. But I can spare a day or two to keep my sister company in her exile without wrecking my entire social calendar, you know. And that part of it I do want to do. Okay?'

'Okay,' she said almost shyly, then dropped her gaze to the snow at her feet for a long moment. 'And . . . thanks, Ranjit,' she added after a moment in a gruff little voice, and gave him a fierce, rare hug before she went scampering off.

' . . . so the weather looks like it's thinkin' about bein' more than a little `iffy,' ' Commander Anthony Agursky, Fourteenth Baron of Novaya Tyumen, drawled, and let his eyes sweep around the officers in the briefing room aboard Broadsword. The commander had been pulled out of his comfortable office at the Bureau of Ships and sent out to take charge of the Skyhawk evaluation program, and the brand new heavy cruiser was the senior ship of the small squadron the Navy and Marines had assembled for that purpose. She also had the most room for extra personnel and the biggest (and most comfortable) briefing rooms . . . and visiting officer's quarters. Those qualities would have made Broadsword the inevitable choice for someone like Novaya Tyumen, even if Captain Tammerlane hadn't been the impromptu squadron's senior officer. After all, he was an Agursky of Novaya Tyumen. In fact, one might say he was the Agursky of Novaya Tyumen—a point he rarely chose to allow anyone to forget—and that made the newest and best ship available no more than his just due.

The commander was a man of average height and build, but with coal-black hair and a complexion that was intensely pale, almost pallid. He also had a particularly pronounced version of the exaggerated drawl some segments of the more recent generations of the Star Kingdom's aristocracy had begun affecting. Coupled with a certain supercilious air and a taste for dandyism when it came to the tailoring of his uniforms, that drawl had inspired many an unwary soul to mark him down as some sort of over-bred, self-absorbed, slow-witted drone who'd gotten this far solely on the basis of his prominent family's undoubted political influence.

Which, Honor Harrington reminded herself, could be a very unfortunate mistake for someone to make, because one thing he isn'tis 'slow-witted.' On the other hand, she allowed herself a mental grimace, though no sign of it showed on her face, three out of four isn't all that bad. 

'Yes?' Novaya Tyumen asked now, as a hand rose.

'You said `iffy,' Sir,' Lieutenant Hedges said. 'Does that mean we may drop below approved minimums?'

'If we dropped below approved minimums, then the weather would scarcely be `iffy' any longer, now would it, Lieutenant?' Novaya Tyumen observed in that irritating drawl. 'In that case, conditions would be definitely unacceptable, and the mission would be scrubbed, no?'

'Ah, yes, Sir.' Hedges glanced at his own superior from the corner of one eye, but Honor simply sat there, her expression one of composed attentiveness. She and Novaya Tyumen had enjoyed two or three icy exchanges already. She liked Hedges, and she didn't intend to leave him twisting in the wind if what she expected happened, but she did intend to choose her ground with care. She might be Broadsword's executive officer, but she was also junior to Novaya Tyumen, and BuShips and BuPlan had placed him in command of the evaluation exercise. That made for a somewhat convoluted chain of command, and she'd already discovered that Novaya Tyumen was one of those officers who always pushed the outer limit of his current authority to the max.

Hedges wasn't aware of everything that was happening between her and Novaya Tyumen, but he'd obviously figured out there was something more than showed on the surface. Now he glanced at her again, as if seeking some sort of sign, then cleared his throat.

'What I meant to inquire, Sir, was whether or not we should plan for the possibility that we might have to scrub if weather conditions do worsen even further.'

'I see.' Novaya Tyumen tipped back in his chair and regarded the lieutenant for several seconds, then swiveled his eyes to Honor. She gazed back at him calmly, but the treecat perched on the back of her chair lashed the very tip of his tail back and forth.

Hedges doubted Novaya Tyumen could see that tail from where he sat, yet there was something ominous about his outwardly neutral expression as he gazed at Hedges' immediate superior. Some sort of unspoken hostility seemed to lie between him and Harrington, like dark, black swamp water over a bog of quicksand. As far as Hedges could tell, it came primarily from Novaya Tyumen's side, although it was hard to be sure. The very qualities of self- possession and poise which served Harrington so well in other ways made her emotions damnably hard to read when she chose to conceal them.

'I should hope, Lieutenant,' the baron said after a moment, projecting his voice to the entire briefing room yet never taking his eyes from Honor's face, 'that every officer in this compartment always plans for the possibility of havin' a mission scrubbed. Or revised. Or any one of the other thousand-and-one things that can change between a final briefin' and an operation's actual execution. Is there some special reason you or your ship might find this a little more difficult than the rest of us?'

Hedges inhaled sharply, and the temperature in the compartment seemed to drop several degrees. He felt other officers stiffen in their chairs at the unexpected, contemptuous bite in the commander's drawl, and fought down a sudden, dangerous desire to tell this aristocratic ass just what he truly thought of him. But Novaya Tyumen was not only his superior officer; he was also the son of one of the clique of nobles who ran the Conservative Association in the House of Lords. Someday he would pass his barony on to his own heir and replace it with his father's earldom, and everyone in the compartment knew it. Worse, the baron struck Hedges as precisely the sort of person who would delight in using the enormous political pull his birth gave him to swat an irritating junior, and his tone suggested that any answer to his question would be the wrong one.

Hedges started to answer it anyway, if with rather more circumspection than he truly wanted to exert, but another voice spoke before he could.

'I believe that what Lieutenant Hedges intended, Sir,' Honor said coolly, her crisp Sphinx accent cutting across Novaya Tyumen's drawl like a chill alpine wind, 'was to ask you, as the primary mission coordinator, to share your own contingency planning with us all. Since you've had the weather information longer than any of the rest of us, your thoughts on the subject are undoubtedly more . . . complete than our own.' She smiled slightly, but her eyes were dangerous and she heard a soft popping sound as Nimitz's extended claws penetrated the fabric of her chair back. 'I'm sure we'd all find them a most useful starting point for our own thinking,' she added.

There was nothing overtly challenging in her tone or choice of words, but no one missed the implication, and Hedges suddenly found himself wishing he had never opened his mouth. Novaya Tyumen's dark eyes flashed angrily in his pale face, his lips tightened, and his right hand—the only one visible, since the left was in his lap— clenched into a fist on the briefing room conference table as those eyes locked with Harrington's.

'I see,' he said after a moment, and his drawl was in total (if transitory) abeyance. Then he twitched his shoulders and smiled. It wasn't a very convincing smile, more of a grimace that bared his teeth at Honor, but his voice sounded closer to normal when he spoke again. 'In that case, Commander Harrington, I suggest we continue with the briefin'. Perhaps his questions will be answered in passin'. And if they aren't, there should be plenty of time to discuss them afterward, don't you agree?'

'I feel confident of it, Sir,' Honor replied. Her level soprano was unruffled, but once again Hedges seemed to sense the clash of bared steel between his superiors, and he wondered just what the devil he had stumbled into the middle of.

'Very good. In that case, I'll ask Ensign Haverty to give us the full weather brief,' Novaya Tyumen said, 'and we'll follow that up with the mission parameters. Ensign Haverty?'

He nodded to the ensign, then leaned back in his chair, his expression outwardly affable, but his hard, dark eyes never wavered from Honor Harrington's face.

Huge clouds swirled across the surface of the planet Gryphon. From orbit, an observer could clearly see the storm front's ominous cloud wrack flowing up the long, deep trough of the Olympus Valley like some dangerous