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"Of course, Citizen Admiral," Hathaway replied as if she had no suspicion at all that Theisman was speaking for the recording devices all three of them were certain had been tapped into the entire conversation... or that everything before the chief of staffs first mention of the name "Tepes" had been so much window dressing.
"Thank you, Megan. And you, too, Warner," Theisman said very sincerely. "I appreciate it."
Chapter Five
Five days after returning to Grayson, Honor left its surface once more. Her hasty scramble to cope with her responsibilities in such a short period had run her steading staff ragged, and she felt more than a little guilty about that. Especially since all of her Harringtons, from Howard Clinkscales down, had anticipated that she would be on-planet for at least four weeks. Even that would have been on the tight side for her to give proper personal attention to all the problems, and solutions, which had cropped up during her long absence, and she was unhappily certain that she'd left far too much undone.
But she also knew how capable Clinkscales was. In many ways, he was actually better at ru
She gave herself a mental shake and gazed out the view port, stroking Nimitz with slow, gentle fingers as the sky turned indigo blue and then black beyond the armorplast. The 'cat curled in her lap, his soft purr buzzing through his bones and into her own, yet she knew he was much less relaxed than he might appear to other eyes. She felt him in the back of her brain, sharing her emotions and keeping watch upon them... and failing to understand.
She closed her eyes and leaned further back, tasting the faint but persistent trace of Nimitz’s worry. There was no complaint or scolding in it, only a vague discomfort as, for the first time in his experience, he found himself unable to understand her emotions. There had been many times when he'd found human philosophical concepts odd or even downright perverse, just as there were certain forms of human enjoyment, like swimming, whose appeal were completely incomprehensible to him. But however hard he might have found it upon occasion to grasp why Honor felt something, never before had he been unable to understand what she felt.
This time he was. Which, she reflected, wasn't surprising, given how little idea she had of what was happening inside her. All she knew with certainty was that she had become increasingly and acutely uncomfortable in Hamish Alexander's presence.
It wasn't because of anything he'd done or said, and she could hardly blame the man for what he might feel in the privacy of his own mind. But even though his actions and behavior were precisely what they ought to have been, the flicker of admiration behind them refused to go out. It never turned into anything stronger than a flicker, he, at least, had himself under control, she thought bitterly, but it was always present, as if a part of him were automatically suppressing it without quite being able to eradicate it. Yet whether he knew it was there or not, she did, and that traitor part of herself which had sensed their i
For the first time, her link to Nimitz was as much curse as blessing, for try as she might she simply could not pretend she was unaware of White Haven's banked i
And so she'd lost her struggle to remain blind, and, in time, she'd even come to forget that she'd ever tried to remain so. She'd become as accustomed as Nimitz himself was to sensing others' emotions, come to rely on it for guidance. It no longer seemed like spying because, as for the 'cats, every human she encountered was a blaze of emotions, feelings, attitudes which cried out to her. She could screen them, pay less attention to them, but she couldn't make them go away. One of Old Earth's overcrowded cultures, she couldn't remember which, but it might have been the Japanese, had had a saying about nakedness. Nakedness, they had said, is often seen but seldom looked at, and that was how she'd learned to handle the onslaught of other people's emotions. But not this time. This time whatever had struck that reverberation between her and White Haven had destroyed her ability to "see" his emotions without looking at them. Outwardly, she'd managed to be just as correct as he; inwardly, she felt as if she were walking an emotional tightrope, and her inability to find any rational reason to feel that way only made it even more maddening.
And so she was ru
It was an intriguing speculation, but it offered no answers. Nor could it turn her retreat into something besides flight or help her to explain her motives to Nimitz, and she felt... inadequate. As if her inability to do so meant she were somehow failing in her responsibilities. Yet what she felt even more strongly, beyond that raw edge of guilt at having saddled her subordinates with an unfair share of her own responsibilities, was relief. She needed to put distance between herself and White Haven while she figured out how to cope with her confusion and regained some sort of rational perspective. And perhaps that same separation would give him a chance to get over whatever it was he was feeling for her. Part of her brain prayed he would do just that, yet another part, the part which made this separation so necessary, hoped with equal strength that he wouldn't. But what mattered most was the need for her to get a grip on herself, which she manifestly wasn't going to manage with him as her house guest.