David Weber - Ashes of Victory

She bit into the cookie and looked over to where Nimitz and Samantha snored gently on the perch above the low wall of rough rock which guarded the terrace's seaward side. James MacGuiness had personally overseen the installation of the multibranched perch even before Honor moved into the mansion, and both 'cats loved it. She could taste their sleeping contentment, hovering on the surface of their dreams as if they were purring in the back of her brain.

"Do you remember that awful sunburn you got your first week at Saganami Island?" her mother asked in tones of drowsy content all her own, and Honor snorted.

"Of course I do—and so does Nimitz. I hope you're not planning on administering another 'I told you so' at this late date, Mother!"

"Not I," Allison averred. "I figure that if the burned hand teaches best, then the entire scorched epidermis simply has to get its point across. Even to you, dear."

She turned her head to give her daughter a seraphic smile, and Honor chuckled. Her mother's birth world was dry and dusty by the standards of most human-inhabited worlds. It had enormous continents and few but deep seas. While it lacked the mountains and extreme axial tilt which made Gryphon's weather so... interesting, it also lacked the climate-moderating effect of Gryphon's extensive oceans. That meant she'd grown up accustomed to a pronounced "continental" climate, with long, hot summers and extremely cold winters, but Honor was a child of Sphinx. For her, the long, slow seasons of her chilly home world, with their rainy springs, cool summers, blustery autumns, and majestic winters would always be the norm, which had left her completely unprepared for the climate she'd encountered at Saganami Island. Manticore was much closer than Sphinx to the primary they shared, and Saganami Island, only a few dozen kilometers from where Honor and her mother sat at that very moment, was barely above the capital planet's equator. Allison had warned her about what that meant, but she'd been only seventeen T-years old, out on her own (or that was how she'd thought of the Academy's highly structured environment at the time, at least) at last, and too busy enjoying Manticore's lesser gravity and bone-deep warmth to pay much heed. Which had ended, inevitably, with one of the more spectacular sunburns in human history.

"And why, O revered parent, did you bring the subject up, if not to engage in one of your homilies on the horrid fates which await daughters who ought to listen to their revered parents—especially their female revered parents—and don't? Are you dusting off your skills for use on Faith and James?"

"Heavens, no. It's far too early for that." Allison chuckled. "You know how it is, Honor. If you go into training for anything too early, your skills are likely to peak prematurely. I figure I'll wait at least until they're walking before I start practicing proper parental judo on them. After all, that worked fairly well with you, didn't it?"

"I like to think so." Honor helped herself to another cookie and offered the plate to her mother, but Allison shook her head. Her genes lacked the Meyerdahl modification which produced Honor's accelerated metabolism. There were times, as she watched the gusto with which her daughter and husband shoveled in anything edible that crossed their paths without the least concern about calories, when she rather regretted that. On the other hand, she could go considerably longer between hunger pangs... and took a certain pleasure in sweetly reminding them of that point when they woke her up rummaging noisily through cabinets or refrigerators in the middle of the night.

"Of course," she said now, just a bit provocatively, "I suppose you might be just a little biased about how well it worked out, mightn't you?"

"I might be. But I'm not, of course."

"Oh, of course!"

They chuckled together, but then Allison rolled over on her side and lifted her sunglasses to regard her daughter with unwonted seriousness.

"Actually, Honor, there was a reason I brought it up, but it concerns Nimitz more than it does you."

"It does?" Honor's eyebrow quirked, and her mother nodded.

"In a way. I was thinking about how miserable Nimitz was while he endured the experience with you, and in turn, that got me to thinking about the nature of the link you two share." Honor cocked her head, and Allison shrugged.

"I haven't had a chance to do more than screen your dad and tell him I'm on-planet, so I certainly haven't been able to discuss anything about your case or Nimitz's with him. On the other hand, I don't have to discuss anything to see that Nimitz is still limping almost as badly as ever. May I assume your father and the 'cat docs have decided to move more cautiously than usual because of the loss of his mental voice?"

"That's about right." Honor spoke quietly, and her gaze was troubled as she glanced at the 'cats. She was just as glad they were asleep, because she couldn't stifle a bite of resentful grief over Nimitz's handicap. No, not his handicap: his mutilation . Because that's what it is—even more than what happened to my arm . She gritted her teeth and fought off a murderous stab of rage before it reached the surface. It got close enough to make Nimitz shift uneasily, but she managed to throttle it before she woke him completely, and he settled back down. Besides, there was no one on whom she could take vengeance. Both Cordelia Ransom and the StateSec thug whose pulser butt had actually done the damage had died aboard Tepes , and however much she might long to do it, she couldn't bring them back so she could personally kill them all over again.

"They're about ready to start work on both of us, actually," she went on after a moment, her voice calm. "They've mapped the damage to my face—" she brushed her fingers over her dead cheek "—and it's as bad as Fritz's original examination suggested. We're looking at total replacement, and there's additional damage to the organic-electronic interface, thanks to the power surge that burned out the artificial nerves. It doesn't look as bad as Daddy was afraid it might be, but it isn't good, especially with my history of rejecting implants and grafts alike. At the moment, he's estimating about four T-months for the surgery and grafting, assuming we don't go through another complete round of rejections. But the training and therapy sessions should be shorter this time, since I've been through them once before and already know the drill, so we're probably looking at about seven months, total, for the face.

"The eye is a little simpler, since the optic nerve was never damaged the way my facial nerves were. Even better, the surge when the Peeps burned it out seems to've been weaker. It damaged the electronic side of the interface, but the fail-safes and circuit breakers protected the organic side almost completely, so it's basically just a matter of plugging in the new hardware. But since I'm already going to be stuck in the shop for so long with the face, Daddy's decided to build a few extra capabilities into the new eye. It'll mean I have to learn how to activate and control the new features. Heck, after all the time my old eye's been down, I'm going to have to re learn all the old ones! But he managed to convince me it'll be worth it in the long run. Of course—" the living side of her face crinkled into a smile "—I think it's probably a bit unfair for a physician to take advantage of the fact that he's also your father when he starts in on convincing you of something. I almost expected him to say 'Because I'm your father , that's why!' "

"I can't imagine why he'd say something like that," Allison murmured. "It never worked when you were ten, so why in the world should he expect it to now?"

"He shouldn't," Honor agreed. "Which didn't keep me from thinking for a minute that he was going to try it anyway."