David Weber - At All Costs

"Well," Hamish said finally, "one of the reasons I came out was to tell you that, although Pat would appreciate it if you'd go through channels next time, if you want Mandel out of the picture, he's gone. And she intimated to me that if he'd gotten out of line, instead of simply being dumb as a post, she'd see to it he was for the long drop, as well."

"No." Honor shook her head. "No, as much as the nasty side of me would like to see that happen, it really was just a matter of his being... unresponsive to novel hypotheses."

"My, what a diplomatic way to put it," her husband murmured. Then he grinned crookedly. "Her second question was whether or not this Commander Simon was acceptable to you?"

"She is. Just speaking to her is like prodding a wound with your finger, because of her name, but she's much more open-minded then Mandel. I don't say she agrees with me-yet, at least-but she hasn't ruled the possibility out. And she hasn't already wedded herself to some theory of her own. And she apparently does believe what the xenologists have been saying about the 'cats and their abilities for the past few years."

"Good, because in that case, I want Samantha to talk to her. I don't suppose we're lucky enough that she reads sign?"

"No, she doesn't."

"Pity. In that case, I'll just have to translate, I suppose." Hamish shrugged. "It may be an interesting conversation, especially when Samantha tells her about the memory song about Queen Adrienne. And at least I'll feel like I'm actually doing something about the bastards who tried to murder my wife."

His voice hardened on the last sentence, and she felt the fury-and fear-behind it.

"They may've tried, and they may have killed a lot of other people, but they didn't kill me, and they aren't going to," she promised him, reaching up to touch the side of his face with her right hand.

"Not with assassins, anyway," Hamish said with a slightly strained smile. "Not with both you and your furry shadow watching out for them."

Honor smiled back, then stiffened.

"That's it," she said softly.

"'It' what?" he asked when she didn't say anything else immediately.

"It's just that if there is some new assassination technology out there, something they used to get to Tim without his disappearing long enough to be adjusted, then they could do it to anyone. Which means literally anybody could be a programmed assassin, without even realizing it."

"Talk about your security nightmares," Hamish muttered, and she nodded grimly.

"But at the moment whatever the programming is kicks in, they do know someone or something else is controlling them," she said, "and no treecat could miss something like that."

"Like food tasters," Hamish said slowly. "Or canaries in coal mines back on Old Earth."

"More or less," she agreed. "It wouldn't be much warning, but at least it would be some. And if the security types guarding the intended target knew to take their cue from the 'cat, it might be enough."

"Palace Security and the Queen's Own have been paying attention to treecats for centuries now," Hamish said. "They, at least, won't have any problems with the idea."

"No, and you need to get Dr. Arf and her commission involved in this. It's exactly the sort of thing she's been looking for, and she's already in position to coordinate with all the 'cat clans to come up with volunteers. We can't put treecats everywhere-there aren't enough of them, even if they were all prepared or mentally equipped to work that closely with so many humans in such proximity-but with her help, we can probably cover most of the major ministerial targets, for example."

"An excellent notion," Hamish approved, then smiled at her in quite a different way.

"What?" she demanded as she tasted the sudden shift in his emotions and a pleasant heat deep down inside her responded to it.

"Well," he said, turning sideways on the couch to take her face between the palms of his hands, "I can now truthfully tell my fellow Lords of Admiralty that I discharged official business when I was out here. So with that out of the way, why don't we discharge a little unofficial business, Ms. Alexander-Harrington?"

And he kissed her.

"So tell me, Boss. Are we sure this is a good idea this time around?" Captain Molly Delaney asked.

Admiral Lester Tourville looked at her with a slight frown, and she shrugged.

"I'm not saying it isn't," his chief of staff said. "It's just that the last time the Octagon sent us off on one of its little missions, it didn't work out so well."

Times had certainly changed, Tourville reflected. An officer who'd said what Delaney just had would have been arrested, charged with defeatism and treason against the People, and almost certainly shot-probably in less than twenty-four hours-under the old regime.

Not that she didn't have a point, he admitted to himself.

"Yes, Molly," he said aloud. "As a matter of fact, I do think it's a good idea. And," he added just a bit pointedly, "what you say to me in private like this is one thing."

"Understood, Sir," Delaney said a bit more formally-but, Tourville was pleased to note, without any trace of obsequiousness.

"I'll admit," the admiral continued after a moment, "that attacking a target like Zanzibar isn't exactly something for the weak-nerved, but at least this time we've got what looks like adequate-and accurate-operational intelligence. And assuming the numbers we've got are correct, we've also got a big enough hammer this time."

"I know," Delaney said, and there might have been just a bit of embarrassment in her smile. "It's just that we got caught with our trousers so thoroughly down around our ankles last time."

"That," Tourville conceded, "we certainly did. Of course, this time we can also be fairly certain Honor Harrington is going to be somewhere else. And while I'm not particularly superstitious, I have to admit that I consider that a good omen."

He and Delaney exchanged grins whose humor was more than a bit strained as they recalled the Battle of Sidemore. It was the second time Lester Tourville had crossed swords with Honor Harrington. The first time, units under his command had crippled her ship and captured her. The second time, she had-he acknowledged it freely-kicked his ass up between his ears.

His calm expression concealed an inner shudder as he remembered the nightmare in the Marsh System. Four hundred light-years from home, with a fleet which was supposed to have a decisive edge over its unprepared, unsuspecting opponents, only to discover that its opponents were anything but unsuspecting... and very well prepared, indeed.

When Harrington sprang her trap, he hadn't expected to get anything out. As it was, he'd somehow managed to extract almost a third of his total fleet. Which, of course, was another way of saying he'd lost over two-thirds of it. And he would have lost it all, if Shannon Foraker's defensive doctrine hadn't worked so well. Most of the ships he'd gotten out had been badly battered, and although he'd managed to evade any pursuit in the depths of hyper-space, the voyage home had been a nightmare all its own. Restricted by damage to the Delta bands, his maximum apparent velocity had been only 1,300 c, which meant the trip had taken over three months. Three months of dealing with damage out of limited onboard resources. Three months of watching his wounded recover-or not-when even his surviving units had lost thirty percent of their medical personnel. And three months without any idea at all how the rest of Operation Thunderbolt had gone.

It was fortunate that the answer to that last question was that it had gone quite well indeed. The success of the other fleet commanders might have rubbed a little more salt into the wound of his own failure, but at least the Manties had been hammered far harder overall than the Republic. It was a pity Javier Giscard hadn't gone ahead and attacked at Trevor's Star, but Tourville couldn't fault that decision-not on the basis of what Javier had known at the time. But the Grendelsbane attack, especially, had been a crushing success, and no one at the Octagon had blamed Tourville or his staff for what had happened to Fourth Fleet in Marsh.