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Honor felt her audience, but only distantly as her senses focused on Babcock with crystal, cat-like concentration. Coup de vitesse was a primarily offensive "hard" style, a combination of cool self-control and go-for-broke ferocity designed to take advantage of "Westerners'" larger size and longer reach. It wasn't too proud to borrow from any technique—from savate to t'ai chi —but it was less concerned with form and more with concentrated violence. It made far less effort to use an opponent's strength against her than most Oriental forms did and laid proportionately more emphasis on the attack, even at the occasional expense of centering and defense.
A classmate from the Academy unarmed combat team who preferred the elegance of judo to the coup had once likened it to fencing with two-handed swords, but it worked for Honor. And, like any of the martial arts, it wasn't something one thought through in the midst of a bout. You simply did it, responding with attacks and counters which were so deeply trained into you that you didn't know what you were doing—not consciously—until you'd already done it. So she didn't try to think, didn't try to anticipate. Babcock was too fast for that, and this was a full contact bout. She who let herself become distracted would pay a bruising price.
The sergeant major moved suddenly, feinting with her left hand, and Honor swayed backward, right hand slapping Babcock's right ankle aside to block the flashing side-kick. Her left palm intercepted the elbow strike follow up, and Babcock whirled on her left foot, using the momentum of Honor's block to turn still faster. She slammed the ball of her right foot onto the mat and her left foot came up in a lightning-fast back-kick, but Honor wasn't there. She slipped inside the striking foot, and Babcock grunted as a rock-hard fist drove home just above her kidneys. Honor's other hand darted forward, snaking around the noncom for the throw, but Babcock dropped like a string-cut puppet, pivoted out of Honor's grip, and kicked up through an instant backward somersault. Her feet caught Honor's shoulders, driving her back, and Babcock bounced up like a rubber ball—only to find herself flying away as hands like steel clamps flung her through the air.
She hit the mat, rolled, vaulted to her feet, and recovered her stance before Honor could reach her, and it was the captain's turn to grunt as stiff fingers rammed into her midriff. She buckled over the blow, but her left arm rose instinctively, blocking the second half of the combination and carrying through in an elbow strike to Babcock's ribs that rocked the sergeant major on her heels, and a fierce exultation filled her. She pressed her attack, using her longer reach and greater strength ruthlessly, but the sergeant major had a few tricks of her own.
Honor was never certain precisely how she found herself airborne, but then the mat slammed into her chin, and she tasted blood. She hit rolling, bouncing away from Babcock's follow-through, and rocked up on her knees to catch an incoming kick on her crossed wrists and upend her opponent. Both of them surged upright, and this time they were both smiling as they moved into one another with a vengeance.
"I trust you feel better now?"
Honor's smile was a bit puffy as her tongue explored a cut on the inside of her lower lip, and she wrapped the towel around her neck as she met Admiral Courvosier's quizzical eyes. She should have worn a mouth protector, but despite what promised to be an amazing array of bruises, she felt good. She felt very good, for she'd taken Babcock three falls out of four.
"As a matter of fact, I do, Sir." She leaned back against the lockers, playing with the ends of her towel, and Nimitz hopped up on the bench beside her and rubbed his head against her thigh, purring more loudly than he had in days. The empathic treecat was always sensitive to her moods, and she gri
"I'm glad." Courvosier wore a faded sweatsuit and handball gloves, and he sank onto a facing bench with a wry grimace. "But I wonder if the Sergeant Major realizes how many frustrations you were working out on her."
Honor looked at him more closely, then sighed.
"I never could fool you, could I, Sir?"
"I wouldn't go quite that far. Let's just say I know you well enough to know what you're thinking about our hosts."
Honor wrinkled her nose in acknowledgment and sat beside Nimitz while she dabbed absently at the small, fresh blood spots on her gi.
The situation hadn't gotten better, especially since the Havenite embassy had hit its stride. There was no way to eliminate the courtesy calls between her ships' companies and their hosts, and she knew the Graysons' special discomfort with her was spilling over onto her other female perso
Nimitz stopped purring and gave her a disgusted look as he picked up the direction of her emotions. Honor spent entirely too much time worrying over things, in his opinion, and he leaned up to nip her admonishingly on the earlobe. But Honor knew him as well as he knew her, and her hand intercepted him and scooped him into her lap to protect her ear.
"I'm sorry, Sir. I know how important it is that we all hang onto our tempers—Lord knows I've laid it all out for everyone else often enough!—but I hadn't counted on how infuriated I'd be. They're so—so—"
"Pigheaded?" Courvosier suggested. "Bigoted?"
"Both," Honor sighed. "Sir, all I have to do is walk into a room, and they clam up like they've been freeze-dried!"
"Would you say that's quite fair where Admiral Yanakov is concerned?" her old mentor asked gently, and Honor shrugged irritably.
"No, probably not," she admitted, "but he's almost worse than the others. They look at me like some unsavory microbe, but he tries so hard to act naturally that it only makes his discomfort even more evident. And the fact that not even the example of their commander in chief can get through to the others makes me so mad I could strangle them all!"
Her shoulders slumped, and she sighed again, more heavily.
"I think maybe you had a point about the Admiralty's choice of senior officers for this operation, Sir. The fact that I'm a woman seems to get right up their noses and choke them."
"Maybe." Courvosier leaned back and folded his arms. "But whether it does or not, you're a Queen's officer. They're going to have to face senior female officers sometime; it's part of our mission description to teach them that, and they might as well get used to it now and spare us all grief later. That was the FO's opinion, and though I might have gone about things a bit differently, overall I have to agree with their assessment."
"I don't think I do," Honor said slowly. She played with Nimitz's ears and frowned down at her hands. "It might have been better to spare them the shock until after the treaty was a fait accompli, Sir."
"Bushwah!" Courvosier snorted. "You mean it might have been better if Ambassador Langtry had let us go ahead and warn them you were a woman!"
"Would it?" Honor shook her head. "I'm not so sure, Sir. I think maybe it was a no-win situation—and the fact is that the Admiralty was wrong to pick me. To hear Haven tell it, I'm the most bloodthirsty maniac since Vlad the Impaler. I can't imagine anyone we could have sent who would've been more vulnerable to that kind of attack after Basilisk."
She stared down at her hands, caressing Nimitz's fluffy fur, and Courvosier gazed at the crown of her head in silence. Then he shrugged.
"Actually, Basilisk is precisely why the Admiralty chose you, Honor." She looked up in surprise, and he nodded. "You know I had my own reservations, but Their Lordships believed—and the FO agreed—that Grayson would see what happened there as a warning of what could happen here. And just as they tapped me because I've got a reputation for strategy, they picked you because you've got one for tactics and guts ... and because you're a woman. You were meant to be a living, breathing symbol of just how ruthless Haven can be, on the one hand, and how good our female officers can be, on the other."