War Of Honor

Besides, she admitted from behind the serenity of her expression, she enjoyed the opportunity to see the massed faces of her students. The joy of teaching and challenging young minds while simultaneously building the Navy's future was an unalloyed pleasure, the one thing she had unreservedly treasured about her almost five-T-year stay here on the Star Kingdom's capital planet. She even allowed herself to believe that she'd finally made a substantial down payment on the debt she'd owed to her own Saganami Island instructors, and especially to Raoul Courvoisier. And it was at moments like this, when she actually saw one of her classes assembled, all in one place at the same time, that the sense of continuity of past and future and of her own place in that endless chain came to her most strongly.

And at this particular moment, she needed that sense.

Nimitz stirred uneasily on her shoulder, and she tasted his unhappiness, but there wasn't a great deal she could do about that, and they both knew it. Besides, he wasn't unhappy with her; he was—as she herself—unhappy at the situation.

A fresh spasm of pain flickered through her, concealed from her assembling students by the calm mask of her face, and she cursed her own i

She ought to have been one of the happiest women in the Star Kingdom, she told herself yet again. Emily Alexander's counterattack had rolled up the High Ridge machine's campaign of slander like a rug, especially when the Queen got behind it and pushed. One or two of the most bitterly partisan 'faxes and commentators continued the attack, but the vast majority had dropped it like a hot rock once Emily's intervention reversed the poll numbers virtually overnight. The abrupt simultaneity with which the campaign had been terminated by almost all participants should have been a flare-lit tipoff to any unbiased observer that it had been carefully coordinated from the begi

But if the attack had been beaten back, it hadn't been defeated without leaving scars. The Grayson public, for example, remained furious that it had ever been mounted in the first place. That would have bothered Honor under any circumstances, but the opposition Keys in the Conclave of Steadholders had seized upon it as an additional weapon in their struggle to roll back Benjamin IX's political power. Their persistent attacks on the Manticoran Alliance—or, rather, on the wisdom of Grayson's remaining bound to that Alliance—had been sufficiently unremitting before the allegations of infidelity ever saw the light of day. That opposition to the Alliance had survived even the execution for treason of Steadholder Mueller, who'd first put it forward, and the inexcusable and stupid arrogance with which the High Ridge Government had treated its allies had lent it a dangerous strength since. Now those same steadholders saw the attacks on Honor as yet another weapon with which to bolster their argument, and the fact that so many of them hated her as the symbol of the "Mayhew Restoration" which they loathed with all their hearts only gave them a sense of bitter, ironic satisfaction when they reached for it.

That was bad enough. Benjamin's letters might argue that the furor would die down with time, but Honor knew him too well. He might actually believe it, but he was nowhere near as confident of it as he tried to make himself appear in his messages to her. And whether he believed it or not, she didn't. She'd told herself again and again that her judgment was never at its best when she confronted the possibility of seeing herself used against friends or things she believed in. She'd reminded herself how often Benjamin's analyses of political and social dynamics had proved superior to her own. She'd even spent hours researching past political crises and scandals, some dating back even to Ante Diaspora Earth, and attempting to dissect their long-term consequences and find the parallels to her own situation. And none of it had changed what really mattered. Whatever Benjamin might believe, whatever might actually be true in the long run, in the short run his enemies had done enormous damage to his ability to preserve the Alliance and keep Grayson in it. And it didn't matter how Grayson public opinion might view these events fifteen T-years from now if the planet was split away from the Alliance and its relationship with the Star Kingdom this year, or the next.

But dreadful as that potential disaster was, one almost as dreadful loomed in her personal life, because Emily had been right. Honor's long-standing relationship with Hamish had been a fatal casualty of the attack. The caution—or cowardice—which had kept either of them from ever admitting his or her feelings to the other had been stripped away. Now both of them knew precisely what the other felt, and the pretense that they didn't was becoming more threadbare and fragile by the day.

It was stupid . . . and very human, she supposed, although the observation offered absolutely no comfort. They were both mature, adult human beings. More than that, she knew that however imperfect they often seemed to themselves, both of them possessed a devotion to duty and their own personal honor codes which was stronger than most. They ought to have been able to admit what they felt and to accept that nothing could ever come of it. Perhaps they couldn't simply have walked away from it completely unscathed, but surely they ought to be able to keep it from destroying their lives!

And they couldn't.

She wanted desperately to believe that her own weakness was the direct consequence of her ability to taste Hamish's emotions. There might even be some validity to that. How could anyone expect her to feel the love and desire flooding out from him, however hard he tried to hide it, and not respond to it? For the first time, Honor Harrington truly understood what drew a moth closer and closer to the all-consuming power of a candle flame. Or perhaps what had drawn treecats to bond to humans before prolong, when they knew that to do so would cut their own life spans in half. Perhaps she could have walked away from what she felt for Hamish, but it was literally impossible for her to walk away from what he felt for her.

Then there was Samantha.

The Sphinx Forestry Service had checked its files at Honor's request, and the SFS report confirmed what she'd suspected. There wasn't a single recorded instance of a mated pair of 'cats who had both adopted humans . . . before Nimitz and Samantha. There'd been mated pairs in which one 'cat had adopted and the other hadn't, although even that had been vanishingly rare, but in those cases, at least only one human had been involved. There'd been no need to choose between two-legs who were not or could not be together, and so there'd been no reason for them to face the possibility of permanent separation from either mate or person. The fact that the situation was unique meant there was no precedent to guide any of them, yet in this, as in so much else, Nimitz and Samantha had set their own precedents, with no regard at all for history or tradition.

She wondered sometimes what might have happened if Harold Tschu hadn't been killed in Silesia before Hamish's awareness of her had shifted so radically. Would she and Harry have been drawn inexorably together? It was certainly possible, but even so, she doubted that it would have happened. He'd been a fine man, and she'd respected him, but he'd also been one of her subordinates. Theirs had been a professional relationship, and so far as Honor could tell, the bonds between each of them and their 'cats hadn't carried over to their attitudes toward one another in any way. Certainly the thought that he might ever have been anything more than a friend, the human partner of Nimitz's wife and the human "uncle" of any of the 'cats' children, had never so much as crossed her mind before his death had erased any possibility of it.