Echoes Of Honor

Is it possible Benjamin and Gustav Anderman were both just a little confused about which age they really lived in? he wondered. After all, Anderman thought he was what’s-his-name—Frederick the Great, reincarnated—didn’t he? I wonder who Benjamin thought he was?

But whoever or whenever Benjamin had thought he was, or the fact that his palace had been modernized several times in the last six centuries—and despite the fact that the Mayhew family had moved delightedly to the much younger Protector’s Palace next door sixty years ago—the Old Palace was still older than the entire Star Kingdom of Manticore... and its harsh fortress skeleton still showed unyieldingly. The banquet hall’s roof towered three stories above the marble-flagged floor, with square-cut rafters a meter on a side and blackened with time. Some of the ba

Yet for all its age, the Great Hall was also strangely modern, with state-of-the-art lighting, central heat (and air conditioning), and air filtration systems which would have done any space habitat proud. And the people sitting at the tables presented an equally odd mixture of the ancient and the modern. The women looked right at home in the Great Hall—like something out of a historical documentary in their elaborately embroidered, tabard-like vests, floor-length gowns, and elaborately coiffured hair—and the men in formal Grayson attire looked almost equally archaic. Alexander had no idea why any society would preserve the "neckties" the men wore (he understood they had gone out of fashion several times over the planet’s history; what he didn’t understand was why in Heaven’s name they’d ever come back into fashion again), but it certainly made the Manticorans and other off-worlders scattered through the crowd stand out. Yet here and there among the Graysons were islands which appeared less anachronistic to his Manticoran eyes. Many of the women, including both of the Protector’s wives, wore far simpler gowns which Alexander’s well-trained fashion sense realized were modeled on those Honor Harrington had introduced. And some of the men had abandoned Grayson attire for more modern garb, as well.

But what really caught the eye was the sheer number of men who wore military uniform of one sort or another... and how much smaller the percentage of women in uniform was. Environmental factors had frozen Grayson’s population for centuries, but it had been increasing steadily for the last fifty or sixty T-years, and the curve of population growth had shot up sharply in the last decade. By now, the planet’s total population was somewhere in the very near vicinity of three billion, which came close to matching that of all three of the Star Kingdom’s planets. But given the peculiarities of Grayson birthrates, only about seven hundred and fifty million of those people were male. Which, coupled with the social mores which had ba

And at the moment, every one of them seemed to be sitting in the Great Hall for di

It gave Grayson rather a different perspective on the Havenite Wars, Alexander reflected. High Admiral Matthews had touched on it several times during his guided tour of Blackbird, yet it was something else Alexander hadn’t adequately considered before this trip. He should have, for Hamish had certainly alluded to it frequently enough, but it was another of those things someone had to see and feel for himself before his mind made the leap to understanding.

The Star Kingdom had spent a half century prior to the outbreak of hostilities building up its navy and alliances against the day of reckoning which had to come. Manticore had approached the battle against the PRH with a long-term wariness, a sense of the inevitable (though some Manticorans—and Alexander could name a few from certain prominent political circles—had done their level best to hide from the truth), which was actually almost a disadvantage, in an odd sort of way, once the shooting started. It was as if certain chunks of the Manticoran public felt that all the time and effort and money they had invested in getting ready for the war should somehow have gone into a metaphysical savings account as a sort of down payment which would somehow excuse them from making still more investment in actually fighting the war now that it had begun. They weren’t tired, precisely. Not "war weary"—not really, and not yet—but they seemed... disappointed. They’d spent all that time getting ready to resist the sort of lightning campaign Haven had used to smash all of its previous opponents, and they’d expected the same sort of quick decision, one way or the other, as in all those earlier campaigns.

But it hadn’t worked that way. Alexander and Allen Summervale had known it wouldn’t be a short, quick war—not if they were lucky enough to survive at all—as had their monarch and the military, and they’d done their best to prepare the public for the reality of an extended struggle. Yet they’d failed. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that they hadn’t succeeded completely. There were people out there who understood, after all, and Alexander suspected the numbers were growing. But that sense that the war should have been over by now, especially with the Royal Navy and its allies smashing Peep fleet after Peep fleet, worried him. It was an unformed groundswell at this point, but William Alexander had been in politics for sixty T-years, and he had developed the discerning eye of a skilled navigator. There was a potential storm out there on the horizon, and he wondered just how well the ship he’d spent six decades helping to build would weather it if—or when—it broke.

But Graysons saw things differently. They’d come to the Havenite wars late... yet they’d spent the last six centuries preparing for—and fighting—another war. Looking back, one might call the crushing defeat Honor Harrington and Alexander’s older brother had handed the Masadan descendants of the Faithful the true first shot of the current war. But for Grayson, it had been only a transition, a turn from confronting one enemy to confronting another. They knew all about long wars, and they were no more concerned by the potential length of this one than they had been over the interminable duration of the last. It would take however long it took... and Grayson was grimly determined to be there until the very end.

And that determination was producing some changes in Grayson society which would have been flatly denounced even as little as five years earlier. There were still no Grayson women in uniform, but the military women "on loan" to the GSN from the RMN and serving in other navies were steadily grinding away that particular prohibition. And Grayson women were begi