War Of Honor

But if Zachary was disappointed by the absence of planets, the horde of scientists infesting her ship scarcely even seemed to notice it. They were too busy communing with their computers, Harvest Joy's shipboard sensors, and the reports from the expanding shell of sensor drones they'd deployed even before Zachary reduced velocity to zero relative to the dim dwarf.

She was a bit amused by the fact that none of them seemed to have any interest whatsoever in the local star or even in determining where in the universe they might be. All of their attention was focused on their Warshawskis.

Actually, Zachary reflected, that was completely understandable—from their perspective, at least. And, upon more mature consideration, it was a focus she approved of heartily. After all, until they were able to nail down the precise location of this end of the terminus through which they'd come, it would be impossible for Harvest Joy to find her way home through it once more. Given how faint the readings which had guided them to the Junction end of the terminus had been, and how long and how hard the RMAIA had searched for it, Josepha Zachary was completely in favor of staying precisely where she was until Kare and his crew were totally confident that they'd pi

But while they concentrated on that, the merely human hired help who had chauffeured them to their present location were busy with other observations. It was extremely rare—in fact, virtually unheard of—for any modern starship to be required to start completely from scratch in order to determine its location. Navigation through hyper-space depended heavily upon the hyper log, which located a ship in reference to its point of departure, since it was impossible to take observations across the hyper wall into n-space. In this case, however, even the hyper log was useless. There was no way to know how far Harvest Joy had come in Einsteinian terms, because a junction transit could theoretically be of literally any length. In fact, the longest transit "leg" for any known junction spa

In this instance, however, with absolutely no way to judge how far from home they'd come, Lieutenant Thatcher and her assistants had to begin with a blank map. The first order of business was to isolate and determine the exact spectral classes of the most brilliant stars in the vicinity. Once that was done, the computers could compare them to the enormous amounts of data in their memory until they managed to positively identify enough of them to tell Thatcher just where the terminus had deposited them. In the immediate sense of this particular mission, Kare's and Wix's work was considerably more important than Thatcher's, since they might never get home again if the scientists failed to nail down their target. In the grand scheme of things, though, Thatcher's quest held far greater significance for the Star Kingdom as a whole.

The only true utility of the terminus was to go from one place to another, after all, and there was no point in going if one didn't know where one was after one arrived. Besides, while it was theoretically possible that they were so far from Manticore that return would be possible only by retracing their course through the terminus, that was also extremely unlikely. Harvest Joy had a cruising endurance of just over four months before she would have to rebunker. That gave her a radius of over eight hundred light-years even assuming she had to make the entire hyper voyage under impellers, instead of Warshawski sail, which ought to be enough to get her back to civilization somewhere, assuming that Thatcher could figure out where they were.

As for Zachary herself, she had absolutely nothing to do until one batch of hunters or the other, or preferably both, succeeded in their quest.

"So," Zachary said nineteen hours later. "What do we know?"

She sat at the head of the table in Harvest Joy's captain's briefing room and let her eyes run around the faces of the other people assembled around it. There were five of them: Lieutenant Commander Wilson Jefferson, her executive officer; Lieutenant Thatcher; Jordin Kare and Richard Wix; and Dame Melina Makris. Of that five, Zachary had discovered that she liked four, which was probably a bit above the average for any group of people. Unfortunately, the one member of the group she actively disliked—Makris—more than compensated for that happy state of affairs. To be honest, Zachary would have preferred to exclude Makris from this meeting (or anything else happening aboard Harvest Joy ), but the immaculately coiffured blonde was the Government's personal representative. It was painfully obvious that in her own not so humble opinion, Makris also considered herself to be the true commander of this entire expedition, whatever the merely official table of organization said. She'd made that painfully evident from the moment she first came on board, and the situation had gotten no better since. The fact that she regarded the perso

Now Makris proceeded yet again to demonstrate her enormous natural talent for making any Queen's officer detest her. She cleared her throat loudly and gave the captain a pointedly reproving glare for daring to usurp her authority. With that out of the way, she officiously straightened the sheets of hardcopy in front of her, jogged them sharply (and nosily) on the table just in case anyone had missed the point of her glare, and turned her attention to Kare.

"Yes," she said in a hard-edged, slightly nasal voice which suited her sharp-featured face quite well. "What do we know, Doctor?"

It was remarkable, Zachary mused. Makris obviously had a detailed checklist of Things to Do to Piss Off Survey Ship Captains, and she was determined not to leave any of them undone. The captain couldn't decide which irritated her more: Makris' usurpation of her own authority . . . or the peremptory, almost dismissive, mistress-to-servant fashion in which she'd just addressed Kare.

"Excuse me, Dame Melina," Zachary said, and waited until the civilian turned to give her a look of pained inquiry.

"What?" Makris asked sharply.

"I believe that I was speaking."

Jefferson and Thatcher looked at one another, but Makris didn't know Zachary nearly as well as they did. She only tossed her head dismissively with a grimace of distaste.

"I hardly think—" she began.

"Regardless of what you may believe, Dame Melina," Zachary interrupted in calm, measured tones, "you are not in this vessel's chain of command."

"I beg your pardon?" Makris quite obviously couldn't believe she'd heard Zachary correctly.

"I said that you're not in this vessel's chain of command," Zachary repeated. Makris stared at her, and Zachary smiled thinly. "In point of fact, you're a guest aboard my ship."

"I don't believe I care for your tone, Captain," Makris said coldly.

"You may find this difficult to credit, Dame Melina, but I don't particularly care whether you do or not," Zachary informed her.

"Well you'd better!" Makris snapped. "I warn you, Captain—I'm not prepared to put up with insolence!"

"How odd. That's precisely what I was just thinking," Zachary replied, and something seemed to flicker in Makris' eyes. She opened her mouth again, but Zachary leaned forward in her chair before she could say anything more.