More Than Honor

He looked terrible, his face and what she could see of his body a mass of bruises and dried blood; tear-tracks cut half-clean ru

"I'm . . . no broken bones except for this." He twitched his left hand, and she saw that the little finger was at right angles to the others and swollen to sausage-size.

"Good . . . for . . . you," she wheezed painfully. Christ, but this hurts. No matter. Get going, bitch. "Is the release catch on your shock harness working?"

"I think so. I'd really rather not find out, though, Citizen Admiral."

Fontein looked down. An acrobat in high training might be able to catch something in the half-second before he fell clear and down a long, long way. A middle-aged man of sedentary habits with serious injuries might as well flap his arms hard on the way down, for all the good it would do him.

"Here's my plan," McQueen said, and laughed again, stopping herself with a shudder of agony as things moved and grated in her torso. "Sorry, classical reference. Getting a little light-headed. You swing across and grab my hand with your right. Then, as soon as I've got you, you hit the release—do it fast, so you don't lose momentum. I'll swing you on across to there," she said, indicating a section of wall plating with dangling cables festooned across it. "Then you can go and get help for the rest of us."

Fontein looked at her blank-eyed for a moment. Then he spoke: "You don't give up very easily, do you, Citizen Admiral McQueen?"

"White Haven didn't think so."

He nodded. "On the count of three."

"One." The Commissioner heaved his weight backward, like a child on a swing.

"Two."

She closed out everything except the hand she would have to grasp.

"Three."

It jarred into hers, and she heard a click–snap and falling clatter as her fingers clenched. Then she was screaming, screaming and tasting iron at the back of her throat as Fontein's weight came onto her outstretched arm and wrenched her savaged body against the unyielding frame of the shock harness. Blackness surged over her, welcome as the memory of her mother's arms, then receded into a red-shot alertness. She spat to clear her mouth; that was blood this time. A steady trickle of it, if not an arterial gusher. The bone spears had hit something.

"See," she said to Fontein's shock-white face where he clung to the wreck's wall not more than an arm's length away. "We really do accomplish things when we cooperate, Citizen Commissioner."

Then the blackness returned.

Rob S. Pierre looked down at the stretcher. "Will it endanger her life?" he said.

"No, Sir," the medtech said unwillingly.

"Then I insist." He stepped back.

Esther McQueen's eyes opened, and she sighed once in blissful relief; the stretcher's lights blinked as it swept away her pain. Her eyes moved.

"Gerrard?" she said, her voice faint but steady. The Marine went to one knee and looked at her, his face warring between relief and revulsion. "The butcher's bill?"

"Light, Skipper," he said. "By the time we hit them they were ru

"Ship?"

"Some damage, but Citizen Pierre called them off in time."

She nodded again, and the Chairman of the Committee of Public Safety stepped forward. "Citizen Admiral McQueen," he said. "The People's Republic, the Committee, and I myself are in your debt. Your prompt action . . . we'll talk more about this later. I already intended to have an interview with you today, but tomorrow will do just as well."

"Thank you . . . Sir," she said. The eyes began to wander again, and he stepped back and motioned the techs to take her away.

He looked around the wreckage of the Committee's tower. The other members were dispersing about their various tasks; it would be some time before they got this mess cleaned up and returned to the agenda he'd intended to spend the day on.

"But we will get back to it, by God," he whispered, and looked out the gaping windows over his city.

They were his people out there; weak and foolish and stupid and short-sighted, but they were as others made them. He would remake them, and give them back their pride. If he had the right tools.

He looked after McQueen's stretcher. Any good tool kit needed a knife, a sharp one. If you cut yourself using it, that was your fault, not the tool's.

The Universe of Honor Harrington

David Weber

Honor Harrington was born on October 1, 1859 Post Diaspora, at Craggy Hollow (the Harrington family homestead), County Duvalier, in the Duchy of Shadow Vale, Sphinx. In general, one might say that she was born at the twilight of what had been a long, relatively stable and peaceful period of galactic history. Her native Star Kingdom of Manticore was widely respected as one of the wealthiest star nations in existence (probably the wealthiest, on a per capita basis), and its carrying trade dominated the interstellar freight lines outside the Solarian League itself. The galaxy had not seen a major war in over a century, although there were always places (like the Silesian Confederacy) where ongoing low-level conflicts were the norm rather than the exception. Aside from rumblings out of the economically devastated People's Republic of Haven, which had recently forcibly a

But by 1901 pd, (the time of On Basilisk Station) it had changed, and changed drastically. The PRH's steady economic collapse had driven its expansionism to heights unseen since pre-space days on Old Terra, and the Star Kingdom of Manticore lay squarely in the Peeps' path. The last century's "golden age" was coming to an end with the approach of an interstellar war which would, before it ended, see virtually the entire human-occupied galaxy choosing up sides, with military operations on a scale no one had ever previously contemplated.

This appendix sketches in some of the salient points of the galaxy into which Honor was born . . . and which she, willingly or not, was to play a major part in changing forever.

(1) Background (General)

The first ma

For over seven centuries after the Prometheus became the first ma

The interface between normal and hyper-space was speed-critical, for if velocity at hyper translation exceeded .3 c, the translating starship was destroyed. In addition, a hypership had to reach the hyper limit of a star's gravity well before it could enter hyper, and the hyper limit varies with the spectral class of the star, as shown in Figure 1.