Worlds of Honor

Their mother had come down on Ranjit and Susan's side, however. Liesell had insisted that Susan was old enough for the trip and pointed out that the group would be accompanied by six adults, most of whom were child care professionals and all of whom were experienced skiers. Moreover, the Athinai Resort, the largest and best known on Gryphon (which meant in the Manticore Binary System) was accustomed to this sort of field trip. That was one of the main reasons it had been chosen when the outing was pla

Which was how he came to find himself looking out Susan's window and mentally kicking himself for raining on her parade.

"I mean they look a lot like the ones on this side," he told her now, waving a hand at the peaks beyond the armorplast and making his tone an apology for his earlier dismissiveness. "They're pretty spectacular, but—"

"I didn't mean the mountains," Susan said. "Look! See the pi

"Pin—?"

Ranjit unlatched his seat harness and crossed the aisle to kneel beside Susan's seat in order to get a better look through her window, and his eyebrows rose. She was right. Those were pi

"What are they doing?" he wondered aloud.

"Making a drop," Susan said promptly. She didn't—quite—add "of course," but he heard her anyway and jabbed a "sure they are" sideways glance at her, then darted his eyes back to the pi

He could see more details of the sleek, hungry-looking craft now, and his pulse went just a bit faster as they scorched over the peaks. They were paralleling the valley's long axis, heading down it on a direct reciprocal of the air bus's course, but at a considerably higher altitude to clear the four and five thousand-meter summits of the valley's walls. They were also flying a nape-of-the-earth profile that was much tighter than they could have managed in pure airfoil mode, because they were bouncing up and down over peaks as if they were te

No, Ranjit realized. Not just a single pi

"Told you they were making a drop," Susan said with exasperating complacency, and Ranjit gave her another, sharper look. She only smiled sweetly, then batted her sea-green eyes at him and, despite himself, he felt his own lips twitch in an answering grin.

"You were right this time," he conceded, "but I think it was a lucky guess."

"Lucky guess?" Susan repeated, then tossed her head with a snort. "If you'd been paying attention," she told him pityingly, "you'd've noticed that those were the new Mark Twenty-Six Skyhawks. Didn't you see the extra pulser under the nose and the ventral and after gun turrets? Or the extra underwing hard points?" She snorted again, harder. "I bet you didn't even notice the new chaff dispensers or the ECM pod on the vertical stabilizer!"

"Ah, no," Ranjit admitted. "I must have missed those somehow."

"Well you shouldn't have," she said severely. "Because if you'd happened to recognize what they were, you might have recalled that according to my last issue of the Royal Marine Institute Record, the Mark Twenty-Sixes've been specifically optimized for the Marine Corps' use."

"They had Navy markings, Sooze," Ranjit pointed out, but there wasn't much hope in his voice. Susan was only an average student in most of her courses, but she had a mind like a docking tractor when her interest was truly engaged, and she was seldom wrong about anything to do with one of her pet obsessions, however trivial her information might have seemed to any normal person. In fact, if he wanted to be honest about it, he couldn't actually recall the last time she had been wrong about one of them. Not that he intended to bring that up at this particular moment.

"Well of course they did," Susan said, turning to give him the full advantage of her pitying expression. "Every pi

"You know, you can be amazingly irritating when you put your itty-bitty mind to it," Ranjit observed, and she gri

"You only say that when I prove you're a doof," she shot back. "Of course, that does seem to happen a lot, doesn't it?"

"Just take your victory and go home with it while you still can, kid," he advised her, and punched her shoulder lightly.

"Ha! One of my many victories, you mean!"

Ranjit smiled again, but he also let it drop. He'd had too much experience arguing with her to do anything else.

Much as he loved his sister, he was convinced that her genetic code must have dropped a stitch somewhere. She was a slight, slender child who shared with Ranjit the dark complexion they'd both inherited from their father, but unlike her brother, she had their mother's green eyes to go with it, which made for a startling contrast even (or especially, perhaps) after so many centuries of genetic homogenization. That was what people always noticed first about her; it was only later that they realized her design schematic included nothing remotely resembling a reverse gear. Susan Hibson had a whim of steel and absolutely no idea of how to give in—gracefully or otherwise—to anyone, anywhere, over anything, and Ranjit couldn't remember the last time she'd truly set her mind on a goal and failed to achieve it.