The Shadow of Saganami

a hundred percent of its designed capacity. The destruction of the Grendelsbane satellite yards-and all the partially built warships in them-only made Hephaestus' frenetic pace even more frenzied.

The concourses were an almost solid mass of humanity, with civilians employed by the various contractors piling in on top of the military personnel assigned to-or simply passing through— Hephaestus . Getting through the massive space station's main arteries in anything remotely resembling a hurry was effectively impossible.

Which, unfortunately, didn't keep some people from trying to, anyway.

One such person-a large, well fed, and obviously (in his own eyes, at least) important civilian-was forging through the press of human bodies like a superdreadnought through a squadron of old-style LACs. He might not have the superdreadnought's impeller wedge, but he was using his beefy shoulders and elbows as a suitable substitute. Since he stood right at a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters in height, most of those who weren't restrained from shoving back out of good manners were intimidated by his sheer size and obvious willingness to trample lesser mortals.

Most of them, anyway.

His bulldozer progress came to an abrupt halt as what he had confidently believed was an irresistible force ran into what was in fact an immovable object. In point of fact, it was a man in a blue and gray uniform he'd never seen before. A very tall man, the better part of twelve centimeters taller then he was. And a very broad man, who must have weighed at least two hundred kilos... none of it fat.

The civilian hit that hundred-and-sixty-five-centimeter chest and bounced. Literally. He ended up flat on the seat of his trousers, the wind knocked out of him, staring up at the ogre he'd just flattened himself against like a bug on a windshield. Mild brown eyes regarded him with vague interest, as if wondering whether or not he might have been the source of the insignificant impact which had drawn their owner's attention.

The beefy young man had already opened his mouth, his face taut with fury, but it snapped shut even more abruptly than it had opened as he truly saw the man he'd run into for the first time. The uniformed giant gazed down at him, still mildly, then stepped carefully around him, beckoned politely for two other pedestrians to precede him, and continued on his own way without so much as a backward glance.

The severely shaken civilian sat there for several more seconds before he pushed himself rather unsteadily to his feet and resumed his own progress... much more circumspectly. He kept an eye out for additional ogres, but he'd never even noticed the tallish, slender young junior-grade lieutenant following in the first ogre's wake. Probably because, despite her own height, for a woman, her head didn't even top her escort's massive shoulder.

'I saw that, Mateo,' Lieutenant Abigail Hearns said quietly, gallantly attempting to put a repressive edge into her voice.

'Saw what, My Lady?' Mateo Gutierrez inquired innocently.

'You deliberately changed course to plow that... person under,' she said severely.

'How can you possibly suggest such a thing, My Lady?' Gutierrez shook his head sadly, a man clearly accustomed to being misunderstood and maligned.

'Possibly because I know you,' Abigail replied tartly. He only shook his head again, adding a sigh for good measure, and she managed not to laugh out loud.

It wasn't the first time she'd noticed that Gutierrez seemed to take special offense when he encountered someone who used physical size or strength to intimidate others. Mateo Gutierrez didn't care for bullies. Abigail had been a bit surprised by how little astonishment she'd felt on the day she realized that for all his toughness and amazing lethality, he was one of the gentlest people she knew. There was nothing 'soft,' or wishy-washy about Gutierrez, but although he went to considerable lengths to hide it, he was the sort of man who routinely adopted homeless kittens, lost puppies... and steadholder's daughters.

Her temptation to laugh vanished as she remembered how she and Gutierrez had met. She hadn't expected to survive the brutal, merciless encounter with the pirates raiding the planet of Refuge. And she wouldn't have, without Gutierrez. She knew, with no sense of false modesty, that she'd held up her own end of that exhausting, endless running battle, but it hadn't been her sort of fight. It had been Mateo Gutierrez's kind of fight, and he'd waged it magnificently. That was what a professional noncom in the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps did.

She understood that part. What she wasn't quite clear on was precisely how a Manty Marine platoon sergeant transmuted into a lieutenant in the Owens Steadholder's Guard. Oh, she was certain she detected her father's inimitable touch, and as a Grayson steadholder, Lord Owens clearly had the clout to 'convince' the Royal Manticoran Marines to allow one of their sergeants to cross-transfer to the Owens Guard. What she couldn't figure out was how her father had convinced Gutierrez to accept the transfer in the first place.

At least she knew why he'd done it, if not how, and she felt a fresh spurt of affectionate irritation at the thought. As a mere daughter, she'd had no standing in the succession to Owens Steading when she initially left home to become the first Grayson midship woman ever to attend Saganami Island. As such, she'd managed to make the trip without the personal armsman which Grayson law required accompany any steadholder's heir or potential heir.

But that had been before the Conclave of Steadholders awakened to the full implications of Benjamin Mayhew's alterations to Grayson's laws of inheritance. Daughters were no longer precluded from inheriting steadholderships, so the Conclave had determined that they should no longer be excused from the consequences of standing in the succession.

Abigail had been furious when her father informed her that henceforth she must be accompanied on any deployment by her personal armsman. At least she didn't have to put up with the complete security team which accompanied the older of her two brothers wherever he went, but surely a serving naval officer didn't need a personal bodyguard! But Lord Owens had been inflexible. As he'd pointed out to her, the law was clear. And when she'd tried to continue the argument, he'd made two other points. First, that Lady Harrington, who was certainly a 'serving officer' by anyone's definition, had accepted that she had to be accompanied at all times by her personal armsmen. If she could, then so could Abigail. And, second, that since the law was clear, her only real choices were whether she would obey it or whether the Grayson Space Navy would withdraw her commission.

He'd meant it. However proud he might have been of her, however completely he'd accepted her choice of a career, he'd meant it. And it hadn't even been a simple matter of a father's intransigence. There were all too many prominent Graysons who remained horrified by the very notion of Grayson-born women in uniform. If she chose to reject the law's requirements, those same horrified men would demand that the Navy beach her. And the Navy, whether it liked it or not, would have no choice but to comply.

And so she'd accepted that she had no choice, and, somehow, Lord Owens had convinced Mateo Gutierrez to become his daughter's armsman. He'd found her the biggest, toughest, most dangerous guard dog he could lay his hands on, and he'd traded unscrupulously on the bonds between her and Gutierrez to convince her to accept him. She'd continued her protests long enough to be certain honor was satisfied, but both of them knew the truth. If she had to put up with a bodyguard at all, there was no one in the entire universe she would have trusted more than Mateo Gutierrez.

Of course, the fact that she'd just been reassigned to a Manticoran warship rather than to a Grayson vessel did tend to complicate things a bit, and she wondered why she had been. High Admiral Matthews had told her it was because they wanted her to gain all the experience-and seniority-she could in a navy which was used to female officers before she took up her duties aboard a Grayson vessel. And she believed him-mostly. But there was that nagging edge of doubt...

'This way, My Lady,' Gutierrez said, and Abigail shook herself as she realized she'd been woolgathering while she walked along. She'd completely failed to notice when their guide line turned down a side passage towards a bank of lifts.

'I knew that,' she said, smiling sideways up at her towering armsman.

'Of course you did, My Lady,' he said soothingly.

'Well, I did!' she insisted. He only grinned, and she shook her head. 'And that's another thing, Mateo. We're assigned to a Manticoran cruiser, not a Grayson ship. And I'm only a very junior tactical officer aboard her. I think it might not to be a bad idea to forget about the 'My Ladies' for a while.'

'It's taken me months to get used to using them in the first place,' he rumbled in exactly the sort of voice one might have expected out of that huge, resonant chest.