David Weber - Honor 02 - The Honor of the Queen

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HONOR

HARRINGTON

The Honor of the Queen

DAVID WEBER

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely

coincidental.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57864-2

Cover art by David Mattingly

Interior map by N.C. Hanger

First hardcover printing, March 2000

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weber, David, 1952-

Honor of the queen / David Weber

p. cm.

ISBN 0-671-57864-2 (HC)

I. Title.

PS3573.E217F54 2000

813'.54-dc21 99-87041

CIP

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Baen Books by David Weber

Honor Harrington Novels:

On Basilisk Station

The Honor of the Queen

The Short Victorious War

Field of Dishonor

Flag in Exile

Honor Among Enemies

In Enemy Hands

Echoes of Honor

Ashes of Victory

Edited by David Weber:

More Than Honor

Worlds of Honor

Mutineer's Moon

The Armageddon Inheritance

Heirs of Empire

Path of the Fury

Oath of Swords

The War God's Own

The Apocalypse Troll

With Steve White:

Insurrection

Crusade

In Death Ground

CHAPTER ONE

THE CUTTER PASSED FROM SUNLIT brilliance to soot-black shadow with the knife-

edge suddenness possible only in space, and the tall, broad-shouldered woman

in the black and gold of the Royal Manticoran Navy gazed out the armorplast

port at the battle-steel beauty of her command and frowned.

The six-limbed cream-and-gray treecat on her shoulder shifted his balance as

she raised her right hand and pointed.

"I thought we'd discussed replacing Beta Fourteen with Commander Antrim,

Andy," she said, and the short, dapper lieutenant commander beside her winced

at her soprano voice's total lack of inflection.

"Yes, Ma'am. We did." He tapped keys on his memo pad and checked the display.

"We discussed it on the sixteenth, Skipper, before you went on leave, and he

promised to get back to us."

"Which he never did," Captain Honor Harrington observed, and Lieutenant

Commander Venizelos nodded.

"Which he never did. Sorry, Ma'am. I should've kept after him."

"You've had a lot of other things on your plate, too," she said, and Andreas

Venizelos hid another-and much more painful-wince. Honor Harrington seldom

rapped her officers in the teeth, but he would almost have preferred to have

her hand him his head. Her quiet, understanding tone sounded entirely too much

as if she were finding excuses for him.

"Maybe so, Ma'am, but I still should've kept after him," he said. "We both

know how these yard types hate node replacements." He tapped a note into his

pad. "I'll com him as soon as we get back aboard Vulcan."

"Good, Andy." She turned her head and smiled at him, her strong-boned face

almost impish. "If he starts giving you a song and dance, let me know. I'm

having lunch with Admiral Thayer. I may not have my official orders yet, but

you can bet she's got an idea what they're going to be."

Venizelos grinned back in understanding, for he and his captain both knew

Antrim had been playing an old yard trick that usually worked. When you didn't

want to carry out some irksome bit of refit, you just dragged your feet until

you "ran out of time," on the theory that a ship's captain would rather get

back into space than incur Their Lordships' displeasure with a tardy departure

date. Unfortunately for Commander Antrim, success depended on a skipper who

was willing to let a yard dog get away with it. This one wasn't, and while it

wasn't official yet, the grapevine said the First Space Lord had plans for HMS

Fearless. Which meant this time someone else was going to buy a rocket from

the Admiralty if she was late, and Venizelos rather suspected the CO of Her

Majesty's Space Station Vulcan would be less than pleased if she had to

explain the hold-up to Admiral Danvers. The Third Space Lord had a notoriously

short fuse and a readiness to collect scalps.

"Yes, Ma'am. Ah, would you mind if I just happened to let slip to Antrim that

you're lunching with the Admiral, Skipper?"

"Now, now, Andy. Don't be nasty-unless he looks like giving you problems, of

course."

"Of course, Ma'am."

Honor smiled again and turned back to the view port.

Fearless's running lights blinked the green and white of a moored starship,

clear and gem-like without the diffraction of atmosphere, and she felt a

familiar throb of pride. The heavy cruiser's white skin gleamed in reflected

sunlight above the ruler-straight line of shadow running down her double-

ended, twelve-hundred-meter, three-hundred-thousand-ton hull. Brilliant light

spilled from the oval of an open weapon bay a hundred and fifty meters forward

of the after impeller ring, and Honor watched skinsuited yard techs crawling

over the ominous bulk of Number Five Graser. She'd thought the intermittent

glitch was in the on-mount software, but Vulcan's people insisted it was in

the emitter assembly itself.

She twitched her shoulders, and Nimitz scolded gently as he dug his claws

deeper into the padded shoulder of her tunic for balance. She clicked her

teeth and rubbed his ears in wordless apology, but she never took her eyes

from the view port as the cutter continued its slow tour of Fearless's

exterior.

Half a dozen work parties paused and looked up as the cutter ghosted past

them. She couldn't make out expressions through their visors, but she could

imagine the combination of exasperation and wariness some of them would wear.

Yard dogs hated to have a captain peering over their shoulders while they

worked on her ship . . . almost as much as captains hated turning their ships

over to the yard dogs in the first place.

She swallowed a chuckle at the thought, because while she had no intention of

telling them so, she was impressed by how much Vulcan-and Venizelos-had

accomplished during her two-week absence, despite Antrim's passive resistance

to the node change. Replacing an impeller node was a major pain, and Antrim

obviously hoped he could skate out of it, but that ambition was doomed to

failure. Beta Fourteen had been a headache almost since Fearless's acceptance

trials, and Honor and her engineers had put up with it long enough. It wasn't

as crucial as an alpha node, of course, and Fearless could easily maintain

eighty percent of max acceleration without it. Then, too, there was the little

matter of the price tag for a replacement-something like five million dollars-

which Antrim would have to sign off on. All of which no doubt helped explain

his reluctance to pull it, but Commander Antrim wouldn't be aboard the next

time HMS Fearless had to redline her drive.

The cutter curled back up over the hull, crossing diagonally above the after

port missile battery and the geometric precision of Radar Six. The long,

slender blades of the cruiser's main gravitic sensors passed out of sight

under the lower lip of the view port, and Honor nodded in satisfaction as her

chocolate-dark eyes noted the replacement elements in the array.

All in all, she was more than pleased with how Fearless had performed over the

last two and half T-years. She was a relatively new ship, and her builders had

done her proud in most respects. It wasn't their fault someone had slipped

them a faulty beta node, and she'd stood up well to an arduous first

commission. Not that anti-piracy patrols were Honor's first choice for

assignments. It had been nice to be on her own, and the prize money from

picking off that Silesian "privateer" squadron hadn't done her bank balance a

bit of harm. For that matter, the rescue of that passenger liner had been a

piece of work anyone could be proud of, but the moments of excitement had been

few and far between. Mostly it had been hard work and more than a little

boring once she got over the sheer excitement of commanding her first heavy

cruiser-and a brand spanking new one, to boot.

She made a mental note of a scuffed patch of paint above Graser Three and felt

a tiny smile tugging at her lips as she contemplated the rumors about her next

assignment, for the alacrity with which Admiral Courvosier had accepted his

invitation to the traditional recommissioning party suggested there was more

than a bit of truth to them. That was good. She hadn't seen the Admiral, much

less served under him, in far too long, and if diplomats and politicians were

normally a lower order of life than pirates, it should at least be an

interesting change of pace.

"You know, that young man has a really nice ass for a round-eye," Dr. Allison

Chou Harrington observed. "I bet you could have some fun chasing him around

the command deck, dear."

"Mother!" Honor stepped on an unfilial urge to throttle her parent and looked

around quickly. But no one seemed to have overheard, and, for the first time

in her memory, she was grateful for the chatter of other voices.

"Now, Honor," Dr. Harrington looked up at her with a deadly gleam in those

almond eyes so much like Honor's own, "all I said was-"

"I know what you said, but that 'young man' is my executive officer!"

"Well, of course he is," her mother said comfortably. "That's what makes it so

convenient. And he certainly is a handsome fellow, isn't he? I'll bet he has

to beat them off with a stick." She sighed. "Assuming he wants to," she added

thoughtfully. "Just look at those eyes! He looks just like Nimitz in mating

season, doesn't he?"

Honor hovered on the brink of apoplexy, and Nimitz cocked his head reprovingly

at Dr. Harrington. It wasn't that he objected to her comments on his sexual

prowess, but the empathic 'cat was only too well aware of how much his

person's mother enjoyed teasing her.

"Commander Venizelos is not a treecat, and I do not have the least intention

of chasing him with a club," Honor said firmly.

"No, dear, I know. You never have had very good judgment where men are

concerned."

"Mother-!"

"Now, Honor, you know I'd never dream of criticizing," the twinkle in Allison

Harrington's eyes was devilish, yet there was a trace of seriousness under the

loving malice, "but a Navy captain-a senior-grade captain, at that-ought to

get over those silly inhibitions of yours."

"I'm not 'inhibited,' " Honor said with all the dignity she could muster.

"Whatever you say, darling. But in that case, you're letting that delicious

young man go sadly to waste, executive officer or not."

"Mother, just because you were born on an uncivilized and licentious planet

like Beowulf is no reason for you to make eyes at my exec! Besides, what would

Daddy think?"

"What would I think about what?" Surgeon Commander Alfred Harrington (retired)

demanded.

"Oh, there you are." Honor and her father stood eye to eye, towering over her

diminutive mother, and she jerked a thumb downward. "Mother's casting hungry

looks at my exec again," she complained.

"Not to worry," her father replied. "She looks a lot, but she's never had any

reason to roam."

"You're as bad as she is!"

"Meow," Allison said, and Honor fought back a grin.

For as long as she could remember, her mother had delighted in scandalizing

the more conservative members of Manticoran society. She considered the entire

kingdom hopelessly prudish, and her pungent observations to that effect drove

certain society dames absolutely berserk. And her beauty, and the fact that

she doted on her husband and never actually did the least thing for which they

could ostracize her, only made it worse.

Of course, if she had been inclined to follow the mores of her birth world,

she could have assembled a drooling male harem any time she cared to. She was

a tiny thing, little more than two-thirds Honor's own height and of almost

pure Old Earth Oriental extraction. The strong, sharply carved bone structure

which had always made Honor feel plain and unfinished was muted into exotic

beauty in her mother's face, and the prolong process had frozen her biological

age at no more than thirty T-years. She really was like a treecat herself,

Honor thought-delicate but strong, graceful and fascinating, with just a hint

of the predator, and the fact that she was one of the most brilliant genetic

surgeons in the Kingdom didn't hurt.

She was also, Honor knew, genuinely concerned about her only child's lack of a

sex life. Well, sometimes Honor was a bit worried about it, but it wasn't as

if she had all that many opportunities. A starship's captain simply could not

dally with a member of her crew, even if she had the desire to, and Honor was

none too sure she did. Her sexual experience was virtually nil-aside from a

single extremely unpleasant Academy episode and one adolescent infatuation

that had trickled off in dreary unhappiness-because she'd simply never met a

man she cared to become involved with.

Not that she was interested in women; she just didn't seem particularly

interested in anyone-which might be just as well. It avoided all sorts of

potential professional difficulties . . . and she rather doubted an overgrown

horse like her would provoke much reciprocal interest, anyway. That reflection

bothered her a bit. No, she thought, be honest; it bothered her a lot, and

there were times her mother's version of a sense of humor was less than

amusing. But this wasn't one of them, and she surprised them both by putting

an arm around her and squeezing in a rare public display of affection.

"Trying to bribe me into being good, huh?" Dr. Harrington teased, and Honor

shook her head.

"I never try to do the impossible, Mother."

"That's one for your side," her father observed, then held out his hand to his

wife. "Come along, Alley. Honor ought to be circulating-you can go make

someone else's life miserable for a while."

"You Navy types can be a real pain in the . . . posterior," Allison replied

with a wickedly demure glance at her daughter, and Honor watched fondly as her

parents vanished into the crowd. She didn't get to see them as often as she

would have liked, which was one reason she'd been so happy when Fearless was

sent to Vulcan for refit, instead of Hephaestus. Vulcan orbited Honor's own

homeworld of Sphinx, ten light-minutes further out than the capital planet of

Manticore, and she'd taken shameless advantage of the fact to spend time at

home, wallowing in her father's cooking.

But Alfred Harrington was quite right about her responsibilities as a hostess,

and Honor squared her shoulders for the plunge back into the festivities.

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摘要：

HONORHARRINGTONTheHonoroftheQueenDAVIDWEBERThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright(c)1993byDavidWeberAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBook...

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