The Honor of the Queen - The Eye

The Honor of the Queen
By David Weber [pic] CHAPTER ONE
THE CUTTER PASSED FROM SUNLIT brilliance to soot-black shadow with the
knife-edge suddenness possible only in space, and the tall, broad-
shouldered woman in the black and gold of the Royal Manticoran Navy gazed
out the armorplast port at the battle-steel beauty of her command and
frowned.
The six-limbed cream-and-gray treecat on her shoulder shifted his balance
as she raised her right hand and pointed.
"I thought we'd discussed replacing Beta Fourteen with Commander Antrim,
Andy," she said, and the short, dapper lieutenant commander beside her
winced at her soprano voice's total lack of inflection.
"Yes, Ma'am. We did." He tapped keys on his memo pad and checked the
display. "We discussed it on the sixteenth, Skipper, before you went on
leave, and he promised to get back to us."
"Which he never did," Captain Honor Harrington observed, and Lieutenant
Commander Venizelos nodded.
"Which he never did. Sorry, Ma'am. I should've kept after him."
"You've had a lot of other things on your plate, too," she said, and
Andreas Venizelos hid another-and much more painful-wince. Honor Harrington
seldom rapped her officers in the teeth, but he would almost have preferred
to have her hand him his head. Her quiet, understanding tone sounded
entirely too much as if she were finding excuses for him.
"Maybe so, Ma'am, but I still should've kept after him," he said. "We both
know how these yard types hate node replacements." He tapped a note into
his pad. "I'll com him as soon as we get back aboard Vulcan."
"Good, Andy." She turned her head and smiled at him, her strong-boned face
almost impish. "If he starts giving you a song and dance, let me know. I'm
having lunch with Admiral Thayer. I may not have my official orders yet,
but you can bet she's got an idea what they're going to be."
Venizelos grinned back in understanding, for he and his captain both knew
Antrim had been playing an old yard trick that usually worked. When you
didn't want to carry out some irksome bit of refit, you just dragged your
feet until you "ran out of time," on the theory that a ship's captain would
rather get back into space than incur Their Lordships' displeasure with a
tardy departure date. Unfortunately for Commander Antrim, success depended
on a skipper who was willing to let a yard dog get away with it. This one
wasn't, and while it wasn't official yet, the grapevine said the First
Space Lord had plans for HMS Fearless. Which meant this time someone else
was going to buy a rocket from the Admiralty if she was late, and Venizelos
rather suspected the CO of Her Majesty's Space Station Vulcan would be less
than pleased if she had to explain the hold-up to Admiral Danvers. The
Third Space Lord had a notoriously short fuse and a readiness to collect
scalps.
"Yes, Ma'am. Ah, would you mind if I just happened to let slip to Antrim
that you're lunching with the Admiral, Skipper?"
"Now, now, Andy. Don't be nasty-unless he looks like giving you problems,
of course."
"Of course, Ma'am."
Honor smiled again and turned back to the view port.
Fearless's running lights blinked the green and white of a moored starship,
clear and gem-like without the diffraction of atmosphere, and she felt a
familiar throb of pride. The heavy cruiser's white skin gleamed in
reflected sunlight above the ruler-straight line of shadow running down her
double-ended, twelve-hundred-meter, three-hundred-thousand-ton hull.
Brilliant light spilled from the oval of an open weapon bay a hundred and
fifty meters forward of the after impeller ring, and Honor watched
skinsuited yard techs crawling over the ominous bulk of Number Five Graser.
She'd thought the intermittent glitch was in the on-mount software, but
Vulcan's people insisted it was in the emitter assembly itself.
She twitched her shoulders, and Nimitz scolded gently as he dug his claws
deeper into the padded shoulder of her tunic for balance. She clicked her
teeth and rubbed his ears in wordless apology, but she never took her eyes
from the view port as the cutter continued its slow tour of Fearless's
exterior.
Half a dozen work parties paused and looked up as the cutter ghosted past
them. She couldn't make out expressions through their visors, but she could
imagine the combination of exasperation and wariness some of them would
wear. Yard dogs hated to have a captain peering over their shoulders while
they worked on her ship . . . almost as much as captains hated turning
their ships over to the yard dogs in the first place.
She swallowed a chuckle at the thought, because while she had no intention
of telling them so, she was impressed by how much Vulcan-and Venizelos-had
accomplished during her two-week absence, despite Antrim's passive
resistance to the node change. Replacing an impeller node was a major pain,
and Antrim obviously hoped he could skate out of it, but that ambition was
doomed to failure. Beta Fourteen had been a headache almost since
Fearless's acceptance trials, and Honor and her engineers had put up with
it long enough. It wasn't as crucial as an alpha node, of course, and
Fearless could easily maintain eighty percent of max acceleration without
it. Then, too, there was the little matter of the price tag for a
replacement-something like five million dollars-which Antrim would have to
sign off on. All of which no doubt helped explain his reluctance to pull
it, but Commander Antrim wouldn't be aboard the next time HMS Fearless had
to redline her drive.
The cutter curled back up over the hull, crossing diagonally above the
after port missile battery and the geometric precision of Radar Six. The
long, slender blades of the cruiser's main gravitic sensors passed out of
sight under the lower lip of the view port, and Honor nodded in
satisfaction as her chocolate-dark eyes noted the replacement elements in
the array.
All in all, she was more than pleased with how Fearless had performed over
the last two and half T-years. She was a relatively new ship, and her
builders had done her proud in most respects. It wasn't their fault someone
had slipped them a faulty beta node, and she'd stood up well to an arduous
first commission. Not that anti-piracy patrols were Honor's first choice
for assignments. It had been nice to be on her own, and the prize money
from picking off that Silesian "privateer" squadron hadn't done her bank
balance a bit of harm. For that matter, the rescue of that passenger liner
had been a piece of work anyone could be proud of, but the moments of
excitement had been few and far between. Mostly it had been hard work and
more than a little boring once she got over the sheer excitement of
commanding her first heavy cruiser-and a brand spanking new one, to boot.
She made a mental note of a scuffed patch of paint above Graser Three and
felt a tiny smile tugging at her lips as she contemplated the rumors about
her next assignment, for the alacrity with which Admiral Courvosier had
accepted his invitation to the traditional recommissioning party suggested
there was more than a bit of truth to them. That was good. She hadn't seen
the Admiral, much less served under him, in far too long, and if diplomats
and politicians were normally a lower order of life than pirates, it should
at least be an interesting change of pace.
* * *
"You know, that young man has a really nice ass for a round-eye," Dr.
Allison Chou Harrington observed. "I bet you could have some fun chasing
him around the command deck, dear."
"Mother!" Honor stepped on an unfilial urge to throttle her parent and
looked around quickly. But no one seemed to have overheard, and, for the
first time in her memory, she was grateful for the chatter of other voices.
"Now, Honor," Dr. Harrington looked up at her with a deadly gleam in those
almond eyes so much like Honor's own, "all I said was-"
"I know what you said, but that `young man' is my executive officer!"
"Well, of course he is," her mother said comfortably. "That's what makes it
so convenient. And he certainly is a handsome fellow, isn't he? I'll bet he
has to beat them off with a stick." She sighed. "Assuming he wants to," she
added thoughtfully. "Just look at those eyes! He looks just like Nimitz in
mating season, doesn't he?"
Honor hovered on the brink of apoplexy, and Nimitz cocked his head
reprovingly at Dr. Harrington. It wasn't that he objected to her comments
on his sexual prowess, but the empathic 'cat was only too well aware of how
much his person's mother enjoyed teasing her.
"Commander Venizelos is not a treecat, and I do not have the least
intention of chasing him with a club," Honor said firmly.
"No, dear, I know. You never have had very good judgment where men are
concerned."
"Mother-!"
"Now, Honor, you know I'd never dream of criticizing," the twinkle in
Allison Harrington's eyes was devilish, yet there was a trace of
seriousness under the loving malice, "but a Navy captain-a senior-grade
captain, at that-ought to get over those silly inhibitions of yours."
"I'm not `inhibited,' " Honor said with all the dignity she could muster.
"Whatever you say, darling. But in that case, you're letting that delicious
young man go sadly to waste, executive officer or not."
"Mother, just because you were born on an uncivilized and licentious planet
like Beowulf is no reason for you to make eyes at my exec! Besides, what
would Daddy think?"
"What would I think about what?" Surgeon Commander Alfred Harrington
(retired) demanded.
"Oh, there you are." Honor and her father stood eye to eye, towering over
her diminutive mother, and she jerked a thumb downward. "Mother's casting
hungry looks at my exec again," she complained.
"Not to worry," her father replied. "She looks a lot, but she's never had
any reason to roam."
"You're as bad as she is!"
"Meow," Allison said, and Honor foug