Worlds of Honor

"Well it is gorgeous!" Susan told him firmly as he chuckled, and he nodded.

"Yes, it is," he agreed, and draped his left arm around her while he balanced two sets of skis on his right shoulder. "This should be fun," he added, and she nodded eagerly.

High above the Olympus Valley's floor, uncountable tons of fresh snow lay smooth and white under the brilliant sun, and the only sound was the faint sigh of the wind that swept swirling snow devils across the pristine peaks. The snow pack was always deep in the Atticas, but it was deeper than usual this year, although the sun had been unseasonably warm for the last few weeks. The overburden of fresh snow lay on a base which had been weakened and softened ever so slightly by that warmth, and no one knew it at all.

Honor settled into the copilot's couch aboard Broadsword's Number Three Pi

She grimaced as she admitted that to herself, and a soft almost-scold sounded gently in her ear. She turned her head, and her normal dispassionate on-duty expression softened into an urchin-like grin as Nimitz cocked his head at her from the back of her couch. The treecat waited until he was certain he had her attention, then reached out one deceptively delicate-looking true-hand and brushed it lightly over her cheek.

"It's all right, Stinker," she told him. They were alone on the flight deck for the moment while they awaited the pi

The 'cat made a chittering sound and shook his head in an unmistakable gesture of disagreement with her statement, and her grin turned wry. She never had been able to fool Nimitz. The two of them had been together for over twenty T-years, and she relied upon the empathic 'cat's reactions to others as a barometer and evaluation system most people never even realized she had, but there were times when their adoption bond could be a drawback. Or, no, not a drawback. Never that! But there were times when it could have . . . inconvenient consequences, and this was one of them, for Nimitz knew precisely how she felt about Anthony Agursky. Unfortunately, the 'cat also knew why she felt that way . . . and why Baron Novaya Tyumen hated her, as well.

Nimitz made another sound, softer this time, with a dangerous edge of darkness. Honor had never been certain exactly how deep into her own emotions he could see. She suspected that his sensitivity went deeper than even most " 'cat experts" believed, just as she felt stubbornly certain that there were times when she hovered on the very brink of sensing his emotions in return. She never had, of course. No human had ever been able to duplicate a treecat's empathy, not even those fortunate few who, like Honor, had been bonded to and adopted by one of them. On the other hand, some people could at least feel the existence of the empathic bond, and Honor was one of them. She had no word for the sensation—not surprisingly, she supposed, since it used none of the senses humans had ever assigned names to—but she could always point unerringly to wherever Nimitz was, whether she could see him or not. She might be wrong about the distance between them; she was never wrong about the bearing.

Then again, she wasn't exactly typical, even among adoptees. Childhood adoptions like hers were extremely rare, just for starters. More than that, her family's association with the 'cats went back literally to the very first adoption. Indeed, Honor's middle name memorialized the first Harrington adoptee, who had also been the first human being even to suspect the 'cats existence. Not content with that, she'd gone on to reorganize the Forestry Commission from the ground up and write (literally; Honor had seen her handwritten first draft) the Ninth Amendment to the Star Kingdom's Constitution, which recognized the treecats as Sphinx's indigenous sentient species and guaranteed their corporate claim to just over a third of Sphinx's surface in perpetuity. She'd campaigned long, hard, and victoriously to get the amendment enacted, and then spent the rest of her lengthy life enforcing it, and the extensive Harrington clan which had followed her probably boasted the highest percentage of adoptees of any single family on Sphinx.

An awful lot of those adoptees had been compulsive journal-keepers, and Honor had viewed every scrap of information any of her ancestors had ever recorded about their relationships with their 'cats. She was also an only child, and that meant she and Nimitz had been allowed an extraordinary amount of time to themselves when she was a girl. Not even her parents knew everything the two of them had gotten into, just as they didn't know that she had accompanied Nimitz home to meet the rest of his clan on more than one occasion. All of which meant that, despite her relative youth, she probably knew more about treecats, on a practical level, at least, than almost anyone else in the Star Kingdom. But for all that, she could no more have explained how the 'cats' empathy worked, or precisely how and why they bonded with humans—or why with one particular group of humans and not another, or just exactly what Nimitz did to help her cope with stress and anxiety—than she could have flown.

Yet she didn't have to be able to explain those things to understand the 'cat's hatred for Novaya Tyumen. Treecats were direct, uncomplicated souls, so she supposed she should count the fact that she'd at least convinced Nimitz not to hiss and bare his fangs at the commander as a victory, especially since she was well aware that what he really wanted to do was reduce that pale, supercilious face to slashed ruins. If she were honest about it, that was what she really wanted him to do, as well, but that was probably a little excessive of her. After all, she and Novaya Tyumen had never even met until they wound up assigned to the Skyhawk evaluation exercise.

Perhaps not, but their first, brief conversation on the day he came aboard Broadsword had been enough to tell her he was another of Pavel Young's allies. She'd run into several of them over the years, and she'd never enjoyed the experience. Young would never forgive her for beating him bloody in the Academy showers that dreadful night, just as she would never forgive him for trying to rape her in the first place. Unfortunately, Young was the eldest son and heir of the powerful Earl of North Hollow. The very thought that anyone with that much influence behind him might face any meaningful consequences for his actions had been laughable, and Honor had known it. Any effort to see him punished would only have created a scandal the Academy didn't need, and she'd told herself that the beating she'd administered had been punishment enough. Even at the time, she'd wondered if she were trying to convince herself of something which wasn't really true because she'd known she would never tell a soul what had actually happened. She hadn't known the answer to that question even then, and she hadn't come any closer to finding it since, but it was certainly true that he'd walked away with no additional punishment other than a sizable dose of humiliation. She'd expected no more, and she'd even managed to accept it—after a fashion—as one of those horrible, unfair things people simply had to put up with in an imperfect universe. But it hadn't ended there for either of them. Young's later actions had made it abundantly clear that he intended to use his own and his family's co