Worlds of Honor

here is rapidly turning into the central heroine of the entire disaster. The quickie interview they did with her last night has gone out on live feeds and in all the 'faxes, and we've already heard back from Manticore about her.'

'From Manticore?' Susan repeated. 'About me?'

'Yes. You know, you really impressed everyone with the rescue teams. We all feel you showed a lot of nerve and determination, and you did a good job of helping us backtrack your tunnel to find Ranjit and Andrea, too.'

She paused, and Ranjit watched bemusedly as Susan blushed yet again. The woman with the 'cat smiled ever so slightly, almond eyes gleaming as she enjoyed Susan's atypical tongue-tied silence. She let it stretch out for several seconds, then cleared her throat.

'It just happens,' she went on, 'that Major Stimson and Major Berczi are old friends, and the Major explained your, um, military ambitions to us. I believe you also said a little something about them to the newsies, didn't you?'

Susan darted an agonized look at her parents, then nodded, and Harrington shrugged. 'Well, Major Stimson had already mentioned them to me, and I mentioned them to Captain Tammerlane—he's the skipper of my ship—and he passed them on up the chain in turn, and then the interview imagery hit the capital news net, and, well—'

She shrugged, grinning, and Susan turned her eyes to her brother in agonized embarrassment. She stared at him pleadingly, and he shook himself.

'And what–Ma'am?' he asked finally.

'Well, I understand that somehow your sister's plans got bucked all the way up the chain to the Commandant of the Corps,' Commander Harrington told him.

'All the way—?' Ranjit's jaw dropped, and twisted back around to stare at his Susan.

'Yes, indeed. And according to the traffic over at the CP, General Ambristen was rather taken with her exploits himself. Sufficiently so, in fact, that on the recommendation of Major Berczi, Major Stimson, and myself, the Corps has already reserved a slot for her at OCS, assuming—' Harrington darted a moderately severe glance at Susan '—that she gets her grades up, of course.'

'Really?' The word burst out of Susan like an explosion, and Harrington nodded with a chuckle.

'Really,' she assured the girl. 'But it really is contingent on your passing the academic requirements, too. May I assume that you'll be doing a little something about those grades Major Berczi mentioned to me?'

'Yes, Ma'am! I mean– Yes, of course I will!'

'Good. In that case, maybe you and I will serve together sometime.'

'I'd . . . I'd like that, Ma'am,' Susan said, suddenly almost painfully shy. 'I'd like that a lot.'

'Stranger things have happened,' Harrington observed. Then she nodded to Andrea and Ranjit, shook hands once more with both of Susan's parents, sketched an abbreviated salute to Berczi, and disappeared.

Ranjit stared after her for a long, endless moment, then looked at his parents, but they weren't looking at him. They were looking at each other, with expressions that mingled resignation, pride, bittersweet laughter, and the admission that their long effort to divert Susan from the Marines had just turned into an abject failure. It was going to take them a while to deal with that and once more begin paying any attention to the rest of the world, and Susan was in even worse shape. She was simply standing there, staring off into space, and her entire face was one huge, beatific smile. There wasn't so much as a hint of intelligence in her bemused eyes, and Ranjit shuddered. She was going to be extremely difficult to live with for the next few weeks, or months—or years, he thought wryly—once she resumed interactive contact with the world about her. But that wasn't going to happen for a while, so he turned to Csilla Berczi.

'Who was that?' he demanded.

'She's the one who dug the lot of you out of the avalanche,' the teacher replied. 'Well, she and a squad of Marines under her command. Her treecat found Susan.'

'Yeah, it was great!' Andrea chipped in. 'Commander Harrington says he must've sensed her emotions or something and led them straight to her. They were wonderful about getting all the rest of us out, too. But I can hardly believe she went to the trouble of telling her captain Susan wanted to be a Marine and then actually came clear over to the hospital just to tell her!'

'Believe it, young lady,' Berczi told her. 'There are never enough good officers to go around. Commander Harrington knows that—which shouldn't be too surprising, since she's one of the good ones herself!—and she recognized the same things in our Susan that I've been looking at for the last couple of years. Although,' she added judiciously, glancing sidelong at the younger girl's gloriously bemused expression, 'we could all be excused for not seeing them just at the moment, I suppose.'

'Well I'm happy for her,' Andrea said firmly. 'Aren't you?'

'Of course I am,' Berczi agreed, 'and—'

She stopped speaking as Ranjit's deep, heartfelt groan suddenly interrupted her. He, too, had been staring at his sister, but now his eyes were fixed on his parents, and Berczi cocked an eyebrow at him.

'What?' she asked. 'Are your legs bothering you all of a sudden, Ranjit?'

'No, no,' he shook his head, but his expression was that of someone in intense pain, and she looked a question at him. 'It wasn't that,' he assured her. 'It wasn't that at all.'

'Then what was it?' she demanded, and he looked at her mournfully.

'It's just that I really did promise to keep an eye on Susan if Mom and Dad let her come on the trip,' he told her, 'and I just realized. They may not be going to blame me for the avalanche, but when they come back up for air, they're gonna kill me for letting this happen!'

Deck Load Strike Roland J. Green

ONE

If maps could sneer, Major Shuna Ryder would have expected the one facing her to do so. Or maybe something even less polite, such as spitting in her eye.

It certainly displayed as fine a collection of discouraging data as she had ever seen, at least since the efficiency report filed on her when she got crosswise with the detachment commander aboard Warspite. Her career had survived that report, however. So her mission on Silvestria ought to survive the map.

The map was a flat-board digital display, several generations behind even the most primitive holo, but the best that the Canmore Republic could make available to its Manticoran 'advisers.' But then, the Republic was only a few generations removed from paper maps, and she'd even seen one in the Guard Museum that was supposed to be inked on a fish bladder.

All five million people of Silvestria's two nations were perversely proud of the length and depth of their neo-barbarian period. However, Ryder doubted that on a planet with so many trees, they had ever lost the art of papermaking. Although since fish were as thick in the sea as trees were on land, maybe somebody actually had used fish organs.

Certainly both fish and trees were well on their way to restoring a technological civilization on Silvestria. In another generation, the Canmore Republic and the Kingdom of Chuiban would have been able to decide on their own whether to roll out the red carpet for off-world allies, or toss them unceremoniously into the nearest body of water (which was seldom far away, in either nation).

Unfortunately, Silvestria was close enough to the Erewhon Wormhole Junction to be of interest to anyone concerned about the status of Erewhon. This naturally included the Erewhonese, the more so in that they imported vast quantities of aquacultural and forestry products from Silvestria in a fleet of massive bulk carriers that made a