Echoes Of Honor

Chapter Forty

The harsh buzzer woke her. Nimitz complained sleepily as she sat up, and she didn't blame him. They'd just gotten to sleep, but as she always seemed to do in the morning, she'd forgotten she was missing an arm. She woke with the instant awareness—mostly—that forty years of naval service had trained into her, only to try to push herself upright with two hands, not one, and overbalance. The sheets half-wrapped around her, spilling the 'cat over onto his back, and she felt his drowsy indignation as he opened one eye. It glinted like a lost emerald in the reflected light flashing from atop the bedside com unit, and she sent him a silent apology and reached for the acceptance key. The accusing emerald blinked, and then its neighbor opened and a slightly less sleepy sense of amused forgiveness came back to her.

She found the key and pressed it, accepting the call audio-only, then ran her hand over her tousled hair.

"Yes?" Her voice came out clogged with sleep, and she cleared her throat.

"Sorry to disturb you, Admiral, but this is Commander Phillips," a soprano voice said, and Honor felt her pulse stir as she registered the tension trying to crackle in its depths. She knew Phillips was one of Benson's watch officers, but there were over five thousand ex-prisoners on Styx now. She'd been too busy with her own duties— and especially the courts-martial—to pay as much attention as she would have liked to other matters, and she wasn't certain exactly which watch slot Phillips held.

"Captain Benson instructed me to alert you," the commander went on, then paused as if to await her reaction.

"Alert me to what, precisely, Commander?" she asked a bit more testily than was her wont.

"Sorry, Ma'am," Phillips said in a chastened tone. "I didn't mean to sound obscure. I'm the XO on Captain Benson's watch, and she asked me to tell you that the sensor net's picked up a hyper footprint at roughly twenty-one light-minutes."

Honor stiffened, and Nimitz rolled over and heaved himself upright in the tangled bedclothes beside her. Her gaze dropped to him again as he reached out and touched her thigh with a wiry true-hand, and his emotions reached out to hers as well, meeting her sudden tension head-on.

"I see," she told Phillips after only the briefest pause, her voice calm. "How long ago did they arrive? And has the challenge been transmitted?"

"We picked up the footprint about five minutes, Ma'am. We don't have it on light-speed sensors yet, but our near-space gravitic arrays say it's a single impeller source. We don't have a definitive mass, but it's accelerating in-system at over three hundred and ninety gravities, so it's not using a merchant-grade compensator. And, yes, Ma'am. Captain Benson instructed me to order the recorded challenge transmitted just over three minutes ago."

"I see," Honor repeated. She wished Benson had commed her sooner, but that was only because of her pere

"Current range from Hades?" Honor asked after a moment.

"They're fourteen-point-six light-minutes from a zero/zero intercept with the planet, Ma'am," Phillips replied promptly. "They made a low-speed translation—about eight hundred KPS—and their current velocity is up to just over nineteen hundred. That puts them right at a hundred and twenty-nine minutes from turnover with a decel period of a hundred and thirty-eight minutes. Call it four and a half hours from now."

"Thank you." Honor sat for a moment, considering the numbers, then nodded to herself in the darkened bedroom. "Very well, Commander. Tell Captain Benson I'll be there presently. In the meantime, she's to use her own judgment in responding to any additional com traffic. Is Commander Tremaine there?"

"He is, Admiral. And Senior Chief Harkness is on his way. I expect his arrival momentarily."

The undamaged corner of Honor's mouth quirked as the slight, prim note of disapproval in the other woman's voice brought her memory of the officer at the other end of her com suddenly into sharper focus. Commander Susan Phillips had been a computer specialist in the Sarawak System Navy. But she had also been on Hell for over forty T-years, and her training had been sadly out of date, even for Peep equipment, when her camp was liberated and she reached Styx. She'd done extremely well in the quickie refresher courses Honor had organized, but she was still rusty compared to Honor's people from Prince Adrian and Jason Alvarez—or, for that matter, most of the other Allied POWs from the current war.

Phillips knew that, and for the most part, she accepted it with a good grace. But a part of her couldn't help resenting the fact that Tremaine, who was both junior to her and young enough to be her son, had been assigned to her watch specifically to handle any creative communication or electronic warfare requirements which might arise. Honor suspected she would have minded it less if Scotty had been even a little older, although the fact that he was third-generation prolong while Phillips was only second-generation must make it seem even worse to her. The Commander might have found it easier to have Anson Lethridge ride herd on her—he was only two T-years older than Scotty, but he, too, was second-generation prolong and looked considerably older. Unfortunately, Honor needed Anson on first watch.

But the same part of Phillips that resented Tremaine really resented the fact that Harkness, a mere senior chief, had become the chief cyberneticist of Hell.

Well, Honor sympathized in many ways, although she considered the commander's belief that officers could always do things better than senior noncoms foolish. Of course, Phillips came from a very different naval tradition—that of the Sarawak Republic, one of the liberal-thinking targets the Peeps had gobbled up in the early days of the DuQuesne Plan. The SSN had relied upon a professional officer corps, but Sarawak's advanced, egalitarian social theories had inspired it (unlike the dangerous, elitist plutocracy of Manticore) to use short-service conscripts to fill its enlisted and noncommissioned ranks. The result had produced something very like the present-day People's Navy, in which the service simply hadn't had its enlisted draftees long enough to train them up to Manticoran standards. Which meant that Phillips' ingrained belief that officers ought to be better at their jobs than petty officers represented her own experience, not blind prejudice. And to be fair, she was less resentful of Harkness' status than many of Honor's other non-Manticoran officers. Not to mention the fact that she was working diligently at getting rid of the resentment she still harbored. It just seemed to come a bit hard for her.

Which was too bad, Honor thought with a crooked grin, because Harkness wasn't going away. The senior chief might not have a commission, but he'd been doing his job considerably longer than Honor had been doing hers. Besides, after the better part of seven months crawling around inside Camp Charon's computers, Harkness knew them better than anyone else on Hell—including the SS perso

"I understand, Commander," she said now, silently scolding herself for judging Phillips overly harshly. After all, they were from different navies, and it was as unrealistic for Honor to blame Phillips for having different traditions and expectations as it would have been for the commander to hold the same thing against Harkness. "I'll be there shortly. Harrington, clear."