"Duchess Harrington!"
"Over here, Duchess Harrington!"
"Duchess Harrington, would you care to comment on—?"
"Duchess Harrington, did you know—?"
"Alvin Chorek, Duchess Harrington, Landing Herald United Faxes! Are you going—?"
"Duchess Harrington! Duchess Harrington!"
Honor ignored the newsies' shouts as she moved quickly across the shuttle pad's concourse. It wasn't easy. A last-minute conference aboard Imperator that ran well over its originally allotted time had her running over six hours behind her original schedule, but that had only given the mob more time to gather. Worse, someone had obviously leaked her adjusted arrival time, and the concourse was a madhouse. Capital Field security personnel, joined by hastily mobilized drafts of Landing City Police, formed a cordon, holding the reporters—and what looked, to her jaundiced eye, like at least ten million private citizens—at bay.
Mostly.
A trio of particularly enterprising newsies bolted suddenly out of a service doorway which had somehow been left unguarded. They charged towards her, shoulder-mounted cameras running, shouting questions, then skidded to a sudden halt as they found themselves face to face with a suddenly congealing, solid line of green-clad armsmen.
Armed armsmen.
Unsmiling armed armsmen.
Andrew LaFollet had guessed what might happen, and he'd sent an additional twelve-man team from the Bay House to the concourse. They'd reinforced Spencer Hawke, Clifford McGraw, and Joshua Atkins at the arrivals gate, and LaFollet himself could not have bettered the stony brown stare Captain Hawke turned upon the lead newsy.
"Ah, um, I mean—"
The reporter's brashness appeared to have deserted him. Hawke made absolutely no threatening gesture, but none was needed, and as Honor watched gravely, her own unsmiling expression hid an inner chuckle as she wondered if "Newsy Intimidation 101" was a course listing on an armsman's training syllabus somewhere.
"Excuse me, Sir," Hawke said with exquisite courtesy, "but you're blocking the Steadholder's way."
"We just wanted—" The newsy began, then stopped. He looked over his shoulder at his two fellows, as if for support. If that was what he'd been searching for, he didn't find it. They were busy looking in different directions.
Then, as if by the result of some telepathic communication, the three of them drifted aside as one.
"Thank you," Hawke said courteously, and looked at Honor. "My Lady?"
"Thank you, Spencer," she said with admirable gravity, and the entire cavalcade resumed its interrupted passage to the waiting air limos and escorting sting ships.
Spencer Hawke looked studiously out the limo window as Hamish Alexander-Harrington wrapped one arm about his wife in a crushing hug.
"God, I'm glad to see you!" he said quietly as Honor sat beside him in the limousine seat, her head on his shoulder. She pressed the top of her head against his cheek, and the treecats on their shoulders reached out to rub their cheeks together, as well.
"And you," she murmured into his ear. She let herself relax totally for a moment, then straightened and sat more upright, still in the circle of his arm, but far enough back to see his face.
"Emily?" she asked. "Katherine?"
"Fine, both of them fine," he reassured her quickly. "Emily wanted to come, but Sandra wouldn't hear of it. For that matter, Jefferson was ready to put his foot down if she'd tried." He shook his head and glanced at Hawke with a wry grin. "How the hell have you managed to retain any tattered illusion that you run your own life after having had Grayson armsmen looking after you for so long?"
"Jefferson's only doing his job, love," Honor told him primly, also watching Hawke from the corner of her eye. Her personal armsman seemed to have become remarkably hard of hearing, however.
"And Sandra was probably just exercising simple sanity, given the madhouse out there!" Honor continued.
She jabbed her head at the spaceport buildings, dwindling rapidly behind them, and he snorted.
"Better get used to it," he advised her. "The news broke yesterday. Coupled with what Terekhov did at Monica, Lovat has public morale and enthusiasm soaring to new heights. It's actually rebounded harder because of the contrast to what happened at Zanzibar before the cease-fire. Not to mention the fact that Her Majesty's subjects are in the most murderous mood I've seen since your 'execution' over what happened to Jim and almost happened to Berry and Ruth. And since Terekhov won't be back from Talbott for another month or so, all of it's going to be focusing on you, Madam Salamander."
"God, I hate this kind of stuff," she muttered.
"I know you do. Sometimes I wish you were the sort who ate it up with a spoon, instead. But then you wouldn't be you, I suppose."
"Then Nimitz would cut my throat in my sleep, you mean!" Honor laughed. "You have no idea how a ravening mob of newsies affects a treecat's empathic sense!"
"No, but I've been basking in the reflected glow of your glory enough lately for Samantha to give me a shrewd notion the effect isn't good."
"To put it mildly."
The limo banked, and she frowned, looking out the window.
"Where are we going?"
"I'm afraid we're going to Admiralty House," Hamish told her.
"No!" Honor said sharply. "I want to see Emily and Katherine!"
"I know you do. But Elizabeth wants—"
"I don't give a damn what Elizabeth wants!" Honor snapped. Hamish blinked, sitting back and looking at her in astonishment. "Not this time, Hamish!" she continued angrily. "I want to see my wife and daughter. The Queen of Manticore, the Protector of Grayson, and the Emperor of the Known Universe can all get in line and wait behind the two of them!"
"Honor," he began carefully, "she wants to congratulate you, and she arranged to do it at Admiralty House, not Mount Royal Palace, because she wants all the rest of the Navy to be part of it. And she scheduled it originally to give you at least five hours at Jason Bay before the ceremony."
"I don't care." Honor sat back and crossed her arms. "Not this time. I'm going to hug our daughter before I do one more thing. Elizabeth's hung all these honors and rewards and presents on me, but I've never asked her for a thing. Well, today I'm asking. And if she doesn't want to give it to me, then I'm telling, instead of asking."
"I see."
Hamish gazed at her for a moment, remembering the diffident, focused, professionally fearless yet personally unassertive young captain he'd first met in Yeltsin so many years before. That Honor Harrington would never have dreamed of telling the Queen of Manticore to get in line behind her infant daughter. This one, however . . .
He pulled out his personal communicator and activated it.
"Willie?" he said. "Hamish. I told you not rescheduling was a bad idea. She's really, really pissed, and I don't blame her."
He listened for a moment, then shrugged.
"You're the Prime Minister of Manticore. I think dealing with situations like this is part of the job. So you trot into your office, screen Elizabeth, and suggest, ever so respectfully, that we reschedule. Personally, I think she'll see the wisdom of the suggestion. I hope she does, anyway."
He paused, listening again, and Honor could taste his amusement. She could also actually hear Baron Grantville's raised voice rattling the receiver pressed to Hamish's ear.
"Well, that's your problem, brother dear," he said with a grin. "Personally, I'm not stupid enough to argue with my wife—either of my wives—over something like this. So, we're going home. Have a nice day."
He deactivated the com and dropped its back into his pocket, then rapped on the partition between them and the pilot's compartment. It opened, and Tobias Stimson looked back at him.
"Yes, My Lord?"
"Jason Bay, Tobias."
"Very good, My Lord," Stimson said with obvious approval, and Hamish smiled at Honor as the air limo banked again.
"Better?"
"Yes," she said, just a bit darkly. "And the fact that you came around so quickly means you'll live to see another day despite the fact that you were going to drag me off to Admiralty House in the first place."
"Um." He rubbed the side of his head for a moment, then nodded. "Fair enough. In my defense, I'll only plead that the schedule was set yesterday, before you ran late. I'd gotten the timing into my head then."
"Hmph." She looked at him, then gave her head a little toss. "Fair enough, I suppose," she agreed grudgingly. "Just . . . don't let it happen again."
Katherine Allison Miranda Alexander-Harrington was a red-faced, scowling, beautiful baby, Honor thought. And her opinion was, of course, completely unbiased. After all, Raoul Alfred Alistair was at least equally beautiful, even if he was an older man.
She sat with Katherine in her arms, parked in her favorite lounger on the terrace, overlooking Jason Bay. Umbrellas kept the direct sunlight off the babies, and Emily's life-support chair was parked beside her.
They weren't exactly alone. Sandra Thurston and Lindsey Phillips had been waiting with Emily when Honor arrived. Sandra had been cuddling Katherine until Honor and Hamish got there, and Lindsey still had Raoul in her arms, with his sleeping face pillowed on her shoulder. Nimitz and Samantha had draped themselves across the umbrella-shielded table, basking in the children's mind-glows, and Andrew LaFollet and Jefferson McClure had been keeping an eye on Emily and the babies. Tobias Stimson and Honor's three-man personal detail had joined them, and now the six of them stood along the outer edge of the terrace, not exactly unobtrusively but giving them a protected bubble of privacy.
"We do good work," Honor said, smiling as she sampled the still unformed mind-glow of the blanket-wrapped infant in her arms. She reached out, stroking the impossibly soft cheek with the tip of her right index finger, then looked up at Emily.
"Well, Dr. Illescue and his people had a little something to do with the mechanics," Emily replied with a huge smile of her own. "And your mother's willingness to kick me in the posterior played a part, too. Still," she continued judiciously, "I'd have to say, on balance—and only after due and careful consideration, you understand—that you have a point."
"I only wish I'd been there when she was born," Honor said softly.
"I know." Emily reached out and patted her on the thigh. "I guess not all aspects of technology are really progress. I mean, once upon a time the only people who had to worry about not being there when babies were born were the fathers. The mothers were always there."
"I hadn't really thought about it quite that way," Honor said.
"I had," Hamish said, coming out of the house behind them. James MacGuiness, Miranda LaFollet, and Farragut followed him, and Hamish raised his right hand, flourishing the beer steins in it proudly.
"Had what?" his senior wife asked as he reached them and bent to give each of them a quick kiss.
"Thought about whether or not it was really progress," he said, plunking the steins down and watching as MacGuiness carefully poured them full of Old Tilman.
"I got to be there for both of them," he continued, "and that was good. But I was really pissed at the Admiralty for sending Honor off at that particular time. In fact, I was so pissed I decided to take it up personally with the First Lord. The conversation was a little confusing."
"You're always a little confused, dear," Emily told him, watching as he and Honor sampled their beers.
"Nonsense!" he said briskly. "I'm always a lot confused."
"Well, don't confuse the babies," Honor advised.
"Lindsey won't let me," Hamish pouted, and Honor looked across at the nanny in surprise.
"Lindsey won't let you? That sounds suspiciously like she's become a permanent fixture!"
"I have, Your Grace," Lindsey said with a smile. "Unless you'd rather not, of course. Your mother told me you were going to need help, especially with your schedule, and since—as she rather charmingly put it—she had me 'nicely broken in,' she'd feel better if I was available to you and Lady Emily."
"Well, of course I'd rather! But can Mother really spare you from the twins?"
"I'll admit I'll miss them," Lindsey acknowledged, "but it's not like I won't see a lot of them, is it? And your mother has Jenny, not to mention their tutors and their armsmen, to help keep an eye on them. Even a pair of seven-year-olds is going to find it difficult to wear all of them down."
"If Mother is sure about this, I'm certainly not going to argue!"
"And if you'd been foolish enough to do so, Hamish and I would have hit you smartly over the head and confined you somewhere until you came to your senses," Emily said tranquilly.
"Spencer wouldn't have let you," Honor retorted.
"Spencer," Miranda said, settling into an unoccupied chair, "would have helped them. And if he hadn't, I would have."
Farragut leapt up into her lap with a bleek of satisfied agreement, and Honor laughed.
"All right. All right! I surrender."
"Good," Emily said. Then she looked at Hamish. "Was the carnage at Admiralty House very extreme when Honor failed to arrive on schedule?"
"Not really." Hamish swallowed more beer and laughed. "I just got off the com with Tom Caparelli. From what he had to say, Elizabeth was completely in agreement with Honor. She hadn't realized how late Honor was running, and she said something about star chambers, oubliettes, bread and water, and headsmen for anyone who dragged Honor away from Katherine before tomorrow morning."
"Not just from Katherine, I hope," Emily said with a lurking smile, and Hamish chuckled.
"Probably not," he agreed. "Probably not."
"Welcome back aboard, Admiral," Captain Houellebecq said quietly as RHNS Guerriere's side party dismissed behind Lester Tourville.
"Thank you, Celestine."
Tourville met Houellebecq's blue eyes levelly as he shook her hand. He was well aware of the questions behind his flag captain's attentive expression, but he was less certain he had the answers to them all.
Uncertainty and shock were two emotions he was unaccustomed to feeling, but they summed up his own initial reaction to the Octagon briefing handily. He'd known Lovat had been an unmitigated disaster, and the personal loss of so many friends—including Javier Giscard and the entire company of Sovereign of Space—had hit home with excruciating force. But his worst nightmares had fallen short of the new weapons capabilities the Manties had revealed. The reports on those had brought back other nightmares, of the days when he and Javier had watched Operation Buttercup rumbling down upon them as they waited to defend the same star system where Javier had just died.
And then, hard on the heels of that shattering news, had come Tom Theisman's proposed operation. The Octagon had been playing its cards close to its vest for weeks now, and Tourville had wondered why so many of his own units had been redeployed so far forward. Now he knew; it placed them at least fifteen days closer to the Manticore System. Which was not, he conceded, an especially comfortable thought. On the other hand, he'd had to entertain quite a few uncomfortable thoughts over the past several years. And if nothing else, Theisman's "Operation Beatrice" showed an impressive audacity, even if the decision to actually execute it was based on the logic of desperation. Still, if Theisman's assumptions about the availability of the new weapons was valid—and Op Research's conclusions matched those of the Secretary of War on that head—then this all-or-nothing throw of the dice might just work.
Of course, it might not, too. And although he'd regained his mental balance, questions about the proposed operation's mechanics and basic assumptions were still rattling around inside his own brain.
"Molly," Houellebecq said, reaching out to shake Captain DeLaney's hand in turn. "I see you managed to get the Admiral back home again, after all."
"It wasn't easy to drag him away from Nouveau Paris' nightlife," DeLaney replied, with a smile which looked almost natural, and Houellebecq returned it before switching her attention back to Tourville.
"Everyone's waiting in the briefing room, as you requested, Admiral."
"In that case," Tourville said heartily, "let's get down to it."
"Of course, Sir. After you." Houellebecq stepped back half a pace and waved one hand at the lifts.
"Be seated," Tourville said briskly before the assembled staffers and flag officers could climb more than halfway to their feet. They settled back obediently, and he strode to his own place at the head of the table. He seated himself, followed by Houellebecq and DeLaney, and gazed out over their assembled faces.
"Our next meeting is going to be just a bit larger than this one," he said after a moment. "We're going to be rather substantially reinforced over the next couple of weeks."
"Reinforced, Sir?" Rear Admiral Janice Scarlotti asked.
Scarlotti was a short, sturdy, no-nonsense brunette, and Tourville felt the corners of his eyes crinkle in a smile. She'd obviously heard the same rumors as everyone else. Unlike his other officers, however, she'd never heard of tact, and she'd plainly been waiting to pounce.
"Yes, Janice," he said patiently. "Reinforced. As in additional ships assigned to our order of battle."
"I gathered that, Sir," Scarlotti replied, apparently completely oblivious to his irony. Personally, Tourville suspected she was fully aware of it. She was much too smart and competent to be as totally socially clueless as she chose to appear. Of course, there had been the old Shannon Foraker . . .
"What I was wondering," Scarlotti continued, "is exactly what sort of reinforcements we're going to receive?"
"According to the Octagon's latest numbers, we're going to be reinforced to a total strength of something over three hundred of the wall," Tourville said calmly.
More than one of the officers around the table sat back in his or her chair as the number hit them squarely between the eyes. Even Scarlotti blinked, and Tourville smiled thinly.
"I'm well aware of the sorts of rumors which have been circulating around the fleet," he said. "Some of them have been so wild as to be outright ridiculous. For example, the one that says we're going to launch a direct attack on the Manticoran home system in response to Lovat. The very idea is preposterous."
Several people nodded, and he smiled toothily under his brushy mustache as he saw relief in a few of the expressions.
"I was completely confident of that when Admiral Theisman invited Captain DeLaney and me down to the Octagon to brief us on something called Operation Beatrice, of course," he continued. "It was a very interesting conversation. He and Admiral Marquette and Admiral Trenis laid Beatrice out with remarkable clarity.
"Now Captain DeLaney and I are going to brief you on it."