Mission of Honor

In fact, as both of them knew perfectly well, Allison had volunteered to change Raoul. It was, she said, a grandmother's duty. Besides, she liked babies, especially her own personal grandbabies. Of which, as she had pointed out to her daughter upon occasion, she still had only one. Well, two counting Katherine, of course.

"There, baby!" she said, sealing the clean diaper in place and scooping him up for tickling and an enthusiastic hug before she tucked him back into his onesie. "All clean and fresh smelling . . . for now, at least."

He gurgled happily, and she laughed. Despite the volume of which he was capable, he was actually an extraordinarily even-tempered baby. He took particularly vocal exception to having his diapers changed, for some reason, yet other than that he spent a lot more time being delighted with the universe than he did complaining about it. It had been sixty-two T-years and some change since Raoul's mother had been his age, but Allison didn't remember young Honor Harrington being quite as cheerful as he was. Then again, Honor hadn't met Nimitz until she was twelve, and Raoul was for all intents and purposes being raised by treecats, as well as humans. God only knew where that was going to end up!

"I'll go give Jeremiah the heads up," LaFollet told her, and she nodded. Sergeant Jeremiah Te

And they're so damned well meaning and eager about it I can't even work up a good mad , she thought. Even if it does sometimes make me feel like they think I'm another nine-year-old they have to keep track of!

"Lindsey!" she called.

"Yes, Milady?" Lindsey Phillips, Raoul's na

"I think we're ready," Allison told her. "He smells better, anyway."

"Milady, I could have done that, you know," Lindsey told her. "Unless I'm mistaken, it's listed somewhere in my job description."

"No, is it?" Allison smiled at the young woman who was also Katherine Alexander-Harrington's na

"As a matter of fact, you could have," Lindsey told her gravely.

"Ah, if only I'd known!"

Lindsey chuckled and took Raoul, balancing him against her shoulder, and the two women walked out the nursery door and down the short hallway in the comfortable, centuries-old house high in the Copper Wall Mountains. They paused on the veranda, gazing out across the dense green trees of Sphinx and the just visible blue flashes of the Ta

A customized armored air limousine in the green livery of Harrington Steading sat on the parking circle, with LaFollet and Sergeant Te

But there's no point wishing , she reminded herself once again. And however 'complicated' things may seem sometimes, you couldn't change any of it without changing all of it, and then where would you be? Somehow I don't see you giving up Raoul or Katherine just to avoid having to put up with other people's schedules!

"Here we are, Andrew," she said, and Raoul's armsman turned and smiled at her. "I hope we haven't really made you late," she said.

"Actually, we are ru

"Oh, Lord!" Allison rolled her eyes, and Lindsey chuckled. Honor's younger sister was almost nine T-years old, and she'd developed a veritable obsession for banisters after watching half a dozen treecats go tobogganing gleefully down them. Thankfully, her twin brother James seemed to have avoided that particular mental aberration.

"It's all right, My Lady," Andrew assured her. "At least she didn't break anything, this time."

"Would that be that she didn't break any portion of her own person, or that she didn't break anything else ?" Allison inquired, and the armsman chuckled.

"Neither, in this case," he said. "But she did manage to bloody her nose, with predictable consequences for her clothes. So what with picking her up, stopping the nosebleed, her father's discussion of questionable decisions, and then getting her changed, they missed their flight out of Landing and had to re-book. They're in transit now, but Miranda says Lady Claire's pushed her party back an hour to give them time."

"I see." Allison shook her head. "Well, by the time they get here, I'm sure Raoul will have come up with another delay of his own. But until then, let's get your show on the road."

"Of course, My Lady."

* * *

The torpedoes were unaware that anyone had overheard their e-mail. Not that they would have cared if they had known, of course. Nor were they particularly impressed by the meticulous precision, pla

Special caps fitted to protect their sensors from particle erosion and micrometeorites during their long ballistic run in to attack range were blown free while onboard artificial intelligences considered the updated targeting information and concluded that none of it required significant modification of their pre-launch instructions. Their targets were rather large, after all, and they'd already known exactly where to find them.

The tricky part had been synchronizing the attack waves. Manticore-A and Manticore-B were far enough apart that even if the Manticorans' FTL station's range was great enough for transmissions between them (which seemed, to say the least, unlikely), it would take the better part of thirteen minutes for word of what happened around one component of the binary system to reach the other. Because of that, Oyster Bay's pla

Within the Manticore-A subsystem, however, timing was far more critical. Although the planets Manticore and Sphinx were well over twenty-five light-minutes apart at the moment, it was imperative that all the attacks be executed in a time window too narrow to allow for any effective reaction by the system's defenders. And unlike certain members of the Solarian League Navy, the MAN had a very powerful respect for the Royal Manticoran Navy. Not only that, but as they'd studied and updated Oyster Bay's pla