Echoes Of Honor

Rachel’s sisters stared at her, stu

"Oh... my," Katherine murmured finally. She shook herself and looked at Allison.

"This is what I think it is, isn’t it?" she asked very quietly, and Allison sighed.

"It is. And you have my genuine sympathy."

"Sympathy?" Katherine’s brow furrowed. "Surely you don’t mean he might hurt her or—?"

"Oh, no! Nothing like that!" Allison reassured her quickly. "But, well, it’s very unusual, shall we say, for a ’cat to adopt a child. Not unheard of, of course. The very first adoption on Sphinx was of a child about Rachel’s age... or Honor’s. And it’s a very good thing, in most ways, but there are some... adjustments."

"What sort?" Elaine asked, moving to stand behind her sister wife, and Allison smiled crookedly.

"For one thing, he’s going to be even worse than a Grayson’s personal armsman. You’re never going to be able to separate them, not even for baths or doctor’s visits, and you can forget about leaving him home on state occasions! And she’s not going to want to put him down, either."

"Well, I don’t see any reason to try to convince her to tonight," Katherine said after a glance at Elaine.

"I didn’t mean she won’t want to put him down tonight," Allison told her wryly. "I meant she’s not going to want to put him down ever. Physical contact is very important to both sides of an adoption bond, particularly one where the human half is this young, and especially during the initial several months. I thought Nimitz had been grafted onto Honor for the first T-year or so!"

"Oh, my," Katherine sighed on a very different note.

"And another thing, you’ll have to warn the adults who’re likely to enter her orbit to keep an eye on their own emotions." Elaine looked at her sharply, and Allison shrugged. "For the most part, a ’cat makes a wonderful babysitter. No abusive personality is going to be able to fool him, and your family knows better than most how effective a protector a treecat can be." Both Mayhews nodded at that, and Allison shrugged again. "Unfortunately, ’cats are also very sensitive to emotions directed at their persons... or that they think might end up directed at their persons. Which means that he’s going to be very tense around people who are angry in Rachel’s presence, whether it’s at her or something with no co

Katherine’s eyes widened, and Allison chuckled.

"No, no. As far as I’ve ever been able to determine, ’cats have no interest at all in their people’s, um, amatory adventures. But they’re empaths. When all those hormonal mood swings start hitting her, both of them are going to be irritable as hell. The only good thing about it is that by our best estimate Hipper is about fifty T-years old. That means he’s about the age Nimitz was when he adopted Honor. It also means he’s got a lot more maturity than Rachel does, and if he’s anything like Nimitz was, he won’t put up with his person’s whining at all. Not a minor consideration with a teenager, I think."

"Oh, dear." It was Elaine this time, yet there was a bubble of laughter under her sigh, and she shook her head. Then she sobered. "Actually, that may be the least of our worries, Cat," she said quietly. "What about the other girls?"

"Jealousy?" Allison asked, equally quietly, her eyes back on Rachel and Hipper. Rachel’s sisters were coming forward now, going to their knees around her while Jason and Andromeda looked on with bright, interested eyes. Alfred and Benjamin stood to one side, talking softly, and she smiled, then looked back at the Mayhew wives.

"Honor was an only child, so my experiences were undoubtedly different from what yours are going to be, but I don’t think that will be a problem," she assured them.

"Why not?" Katherine asked.

"Because Hipper is a ’cat," Allison explained. "He’s an empath. He’ll be able to feel their emotions as well as Rachel’s, and that’s one of the very best things about childhood adoptions. They may be rare, but they’re very good for the child, because their ’cat teaches them to be sensitive to the feelings of others. You’ll want to keep an eye on her for a few weeks or so, of course. Even the best kids can get smug and start thinking of themselves as better than anyone else when something this special happens, and the bond is going to take a couple of months to start settling. She could really put the other girls’ backs up in that interval, with all kinds of long-term consequences. But unless something like that happens—and I don’t think it will—Hipper is going to spend an awful lot of time playing with the others, too." She shook her head with a grin. "For that matter, he’s going to think he’s in ’cat heaven when he realizes he has four of them to spoil him rotten!"

Book Two

Chapter Eight

"Haa-haaaa-choooo!"

The sneeze snapped her head back so violently stars seemed to spangle her vision. Her eyes watered, her sinuses stung, and Commodore Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Steadholder and Countess Harrington, hastily dropped the metal comb and rubbed her nose in a frantic effort to abort the next onrushing eruption.

It failed. A fresh explosion rolled around inside her head, trying to escape through her ears, and a cloud of impossibly fine down went dancing and swirling away from her. She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to disperse the cloud like a woman brushing at gnats... and with about the same effectiveness. The delicate, fluffy hairs only stuck to the perspiration on her hand, and she sneezed yet again.

The treecat in her lap looked up at her, but without the laughing deviltry his eyes would have held under other circumstances. Instead, it seemed to take all the energy he had just to turn his head, for poor Nimitz was stretched out as flat as his crookedly healed ribs and crippled right mid-limb and pelvis would permit while he panted miserably. Even his tail was flattened out to twice its normal width. Sphinx’s winters were both long and cold, requiring thick, efficient insulation of its creatures, and treecats’ fluffy coats were incredibly warm and soft. They were also silky smooth and almost frictionless... which could be a considerable disadvantage when it came to providing an arboreal’s prehensile tail with traction. Having one’s grip slip while hanging head-down from one’s tail a hundred meters or so in the air was, after all, a less than ideal way to descend a tree.

The ’cats had met the challenge by evolving a tail which was both wider than most people ever realized and completely bare on its underside. Powerful muscles normally kept it tightly curled into a lengthwise tube which showed only its bushy outer surface and hid the leathery skin which gripped even wet or icy branches and limbs without a hint of slippage. It was a neat arrangement which provided maximum heat retention during the icy winter months without depriving a ’cat of the use of his tail.

But that was on Sphinx, and Sphinx was a cool planet, even in summer. The planet Hades (more commonly referred to, by those souls unfortunate enough to have been sent to it, as "Hell") was not. It orbited Cerberus-B, its G3 primary, at a scant seven light-minutes, with an axial tilt of only five degrees, and it had not been designed for treecats. The triple-canopy jungle (although, to be entirely accurate, the local jungle might better be described as quadruple —canopy) provided a dark, green-tinted shade which looked deceptively cool, but the current temperature here near Hell’s equator was actually well over forty degrees centigrade (close to a hundred and five on the old Fahrenheit scale), with a relative humidity closing in on a hundred percent. It rained—frequently—but none of the rain ever made it straight through that dense, leafy roof. Instead, a constant mist of tiny droplets drizzled to the squelchy ground as the water filtered through the overhead cover. That kind of heat and humidity were enough to make Honor thoroughly miserable, but they had the potential to become actively life-threatening for Nimitz.