David Weber - At All Costs

"Um."

Hamish gazed into space for a few moments, then looked back at her.

"I don't doubt a single thing you've said," he told her, "but I've got to tell you, I viewed the same footage from the bridge visuals." His face tightened. "It scared the shit out of me, too, even though I knew you hadn't been hurt before they ever showed it to me."

He shook his head, jaw muscles bunching for a second, and she slipped her arm around him and squeezed tightly.

"But the point I was going to make," he continued more normally after a couple of heartbeats, "was that watching what happened, I can see why someone who didn't realize how you can get inside somebody else's head would discount the possibility that Lieutenant Mears was trying to stop himself. He moved so fast, Honor. So smoothly. As if he'd not only planned out what he was going to do, but actually rehearsed it ahead of time. I don't know if you really realize sometimes just how fast your own reflexes are, but you killed him just fractions of a second before he would have killed you. And I don't think anyone else could have done it, trick finger or not."

Honor looked down at her gloved left hand.

"I know it was fast," she said. "If I'd had even a fraction of a second more warning-if I'd been able to do more than just shout Simon's name-we might...."

She stopped and made herself inhale.

"I'll always wonder if it would have been better not to shout," she said, admitting to Hamish what she wasn't certain she would have been able to admit only to herself. "Did I distract him? Did I make him look at me, in exactly the wrong direction, when he might have seen something, noticed something?" She looked into Hamish's eyes. "Did I get him killed?"

"No." Hamish shook his head firmly. "Yes, you may have distracted him, but distracted him from what? From watching a young man he'd seen literally thousands of times walk into Flag Bridge on a perfectly legitimate errand?" He shook his head again. "Not even a Grayson armsman would have expected anything like this, love."

"But he was my friend," Honor half-whispered. "I... loved him."

"I know."

It was Hamish's turn to squeeze her, and she leaned into his embrace.

"Nonetheless," he went on, "the fact that you had to so little warning suggests a couple of things to me."

"Such as?"

"First, there's no way he was a Peep agent. He never could've concealed that from you-or Nimitz-for this long. Second, whatever happened to him, he hadn't been personality adjusted."

"Why not? I mean, why can you be so confident of that?"

"Partly because Mandel, however pigheaded you may've found him, was right. Adjustment takes time-lots of time, even without the safeguards built into our military security protocols. And partly because someone who's been adjusted knows he has. On some level, he's aware of the fact that he's not fully in control of his own actions. In fact, I made a quick flight out to your parent's house on Sphinx with Samantha and had her consult the Bright Water memory singers about the attempted assassination of Queen Adrienne."

"You know, I'd actually forgotten about that," Honor said in a chagrined voice.

"You've been under a lot of stress," Hamish told her. "But Samantha got the memory song of the entire episode. She says the assassin knew what was happening to him from the moment he came into Seeker of Dream's mental reach. It wasn't like... turning on a switch. Seeker of Dreams picked him up before he ever got into visual range of the Princess, and he knew there was something badly wrong the instant he tasted the assassin's mind-glow. That wasn't the case here."

"No, it wasn't," Honor agreed. "He was perfectly cheerful when he stepped through the hatch. Everything was normal, exactly the way it always was. And then, suddenly, he went for Simon's pulser."

"So he wasn't adjusted," Hamish said thoughtfully, "but he was programmed."

"I suppose you could say that. But how could that be done?" Honor shook her head. "That's what I keep coming back to, again and again. How in the name of God could someone program another human being that way without the human in question even being aware it had happened?"

"I don't know the answer to that one," Hamish said grimly, "but here's another one. Why did it happen now? Why not before this?"

"You're suggesting whatever was done to him was done during his last trip to Manticore?"

"It seems likely, although CID's been over his entire visit with a fine tooth comb without finding anything out of the ordinary. And leaving that point aside for the moment, why that moment, in that place? Why not in a staff meeting, or when you invited him to dinner?"

"Opportunity, maybe," Honor said thoughtfully. He looked at her, and she shrugged. "I think it was the first time he and I and a single armsman were in the same place at the same time. Or, at least, when there was a single armsman he had a legitimate reason to come within arm's length of so naturally that not even a Grayson armsman would think it was anything out of the ordinary."

"And why would that be significant?"

"Because," she said grimly, "my armsmen are the only people constantly in my presence who're armed. To kill me, he first had to have a weapon, and, secondly, he had to... disable my bodyguard. By taking Simon's weapon the way he did, he accomplished both."

"I see." Hamish frowned, then shrugged. "You may be onto something there. I don't know. But I do know where something like this happened before."

"Where-Oh! Colonel Hofschulte!"

"Exactly. Pat Givens has already sent a message to the Andermani requesting all their case files on Hofschulte, because it sounds like exactly the same thing. A totally trusted, totally loyal, longtime retainer who just suddenly snapped and tried to kill Prince Huang and his entire family. My understanding is that they very carefully considered the possibility of adjustment, but that Hofschulte was never out of sight long enough for that to happen. Which, again, sounds exactly like what happened here."

"But why should the Havenites have tried to kill the Andermani Crown Prince?" Honor asked in puzzlement.

"That I can't tell you," Hamish admitted. "I just know the modus operandi appears to be extremely similar. I can see some possible advantages for them, I suppose, in killing him now that they're at war with the Andies as well as us, but then?" He shook his head. "Of course, StateSec was still running their entire intelligence machine at that point. Maybe they did have some sort of motive we just can't see from here."

"That's hard to imagine," Honor said thoughtfully. "I wonder...."

"Wonder what?" Hamish asked after a few seconds.

"What? Oh!" Honor gave herself a shake. "I was just wondering if there's someone else out there, someone who's developed a technique that would let them do something like this, and made it available on a hire basis?"

"Possible." Hamish considered. "Quite possible, really. Because I can't think of anyone besides the Peeps who'd have both the motive and the resources to pull something like this off."

"I can't either," Honor agreed, but her expression was troubled.

Yes, assassination had always been a favorite tactic of the People's Republic, whether it was being run by InSec or StateSec. But it wasn't the sort of tactic she would have associated with Thomas Theisman. On the other hand, Eloise Pritchart had come up through the Havenite Resistance, and her Aprilists had been credited with several dozen assassinations of key Legislaturalists and InSec personnel. And however Honor wanted to look at it, she, as the commander of the Allied fleet which had done the most damage to the Republic's civilians, as well as its military, was clearly a legitimate military target.

And assassination didn't kill anyone deader than a bomb-pumped laser.