David Weber - Field Of Dishonor

"I—" He cleared his throat and willed iron into his voice. "I do," he said more clearly, and Castellano nodded.

"Lady Harrington?"

"Understood." The single word came out low-voiced but clear, with none of his own panic, and North Hollow fought the need to dash sweat from his eyes.

"You may chamber," Castellano said, and the earl winced at the crisp, metallic sound behind him. The slide of his own pistol slipped in his sweaty fingers. It took him two attempts to chamber a round, and patches of dull crimson burned on his cheekbones as he lowered the weapon once more.

"Walk," Castellano commanded, and North Hollow closed his eyes, fighting to keep his spine straight, as he took the first step and the terror roared inside him.

One shot. That was all he had to survive before he could declare "honor" was satisfied and escape. Just one shot at a full sixty paces; surely she would miss at that range!

Another step, cold feet wet in his soaked shoes, earthy-smelling sod squelching underfoot, wind plucking at his sweatsoaked hair, and the memory of Denver Summervale's death replaying in hideous detail behind his eyes.

A third pace, and he saw Summervale jerk from the first hit, saw the ease with which Harrington pumped bullet after bullet into him, saw his head explode with the final round, and horror gagged him. She wouldn't miss. Not at sixty paces or at six hundred. She was a demon, a monster whose sole function was to destroy him, and she wouldn't—couldn't—fail in her task.

A fourth pace, and he felt himself listing to the side as the pistol in his hand weighted his heart and soul. He blinked desperately against the mist filming his eyes, fighting to breathe.

A fifth pace. A sixth. A seventh, and with each of them the terror grew, blotting away the previous clarity of his racing thoughts, crushing him in a vise of steel. He heard a soft, endless whimper and realized vaguely that it was his own, and something happened deep inside him.

Honor felt him behind her, walking away from her, and kept her eyes fixed on the horizon. The newsies were out in force once more, huddling against the wet wind as they crouched behind their cameras and microphones, but she paid them no heed. She was focused, focused as never before, even against Summervale. She would have only one shot, so it must be perfect. No shooting from the hip, no rushing. A centered, balanced turn, careful on the treacherous wet grass. Take his fire, dare him to hit her with his own rushed shot, then capture him in her sights. Hold him there. Take up the slack. Exhale. Steady her arm and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, until—

"Down!"

Only one voice would have shouted that word at a time like this, and for only one reason. It came out with the same hard, unwavering authority she'd heard once before, snapping into her brain like lightning, unthinkable to dispute and impossible to disobey. She didn't think. She didn't even realize until later that she'd heard or recognized the voice at all. She simply moved, hurling herself down and to the right before the first echo reached her.

Pain. Agony roaring in her left shoulder as something exploded behind her. Crimson spraying out before her in a steaming fan that beaded the sodden grass with rubies. Another explosion and something screaming past her. Another, and then she struck the ground in another crescendo of pain while a fourth and fifth explosion crashed behind her and she rolled to her left, biting back a scream of white-hot torment as her shoulder hit the grass, and the reactions of thirty-five T-years of martial arts training brought her back to her knees in the muddy, bloody grass.

Pavel Young stood facing her, less than twenty meters away, his gun hand wavering before him in a cloud of gunsmoke. Blood pumped from her shattered shoulder, splinters of bone glittered white in the wound, her left arm was a dead, immobile weight of agony, and her brain was clear as frozen crystal. The corner of her eye saw Castellano, his face twisted in fury, his pulser already swinging down to fire. There could be only one penalty for Young's action, and the Master of the Field's gun hand flashed toward its target. But shock at the unbelievable breach of every rule of conduct had held him for a fraction of a second, and he moved so slowly. Everything moved so slowly, like figures in a dream, and somehow her own hand was already up before her, the pistol in full extension.

Young stared at her, wide-eyed and mad, still clutching his empty weapon, and the automatic bucked in her hand. A crimson rose blossomed on Young's chest, and she rode the recoil up, brought her hand back down, fired again. And again. And then Castellano's pulser finally snarled. The burst of darts ripped through Pavel Young in a spray of blood and shredded tissue, but he was already dead, with three ten-millimeter rounds, in a group small enough to cover with a child's hand, where once his heart had been.

Honor Harrington stood in the captain's cabin of HMS Nike, her cabin no longer, and watched James MacGuiness dismounting Nimitz's life-support module from the bulkhead. Most of her personal possessions had already been removed, and Jamie Candless moved past her with the sealed carry-all that held her last uniforms. Andrew LaFollet stood outside the cabin hatch with Simon Mattingly, and Nimitz bleeked softly at her from the back of a couch.

She looked down at the 'cat, trying to smile, and the tip of her index finger stroked between his ears. He looked back up at her, rising high on the couch back. One true-hand gripped her tunic for balance, and the other reached up to touch her cheek with exquisite gentleness. She felt his concern, but for once she could not respond with assurance that all would be well.

She tried—again—to shift her immobilized left arm and winced with the stab of pain that rewarded her forgetfulness. She was lucky, though it had been hard to convince Nimitz of it. He'd known the instant she came back aboard and nearly torn the sickbay hatch down, then crouched taut and anxious just beyond the sterile field, purring as if to burst, while Fritz Montoya put her under to repair her shoulder. He hadn't been able to use all original parts; the bullet had shattered her left scapula, then torn up and out through the point of her shoulder, demolishing the joint in passing and barely missing the main artery. Quick heal could do a lot, yet Fritz had been forced to rebuild her shoulder socket to give it something to work around, and his face had been knotted with disapproval while he worked.

But Honor wasn't concerned about her shoulder. Fritz Montoya, as she knew from painful personal experience, did good work, and, extensive as the repairs had been, they were all routine procedures. Yet there were wounds no doctor could heal, and she bit her lip against a pain not of her body as she touched the plain black beret on her bare desk and faced the brutal amputation of her future.

She didn't regret her actions. She couldn't, and she'd known the price going in. She'd thought it worth paying then; she thought so still. It was only that the pain was so much worse than she'd thought possible.

She didn't mind the vote excluding her from the House of Lords, or the group of news services tearing her apart for her "brutality" in gunning down a man with an empty gun. Pavel Young's life had been forfeit from the moment he turned upon her. In the eyes of the law, it mattered less than nothing whether it had been Lieutenant Castellano's fire or hers that executed sentence upon him, but it mattered to her.

She'd expected to feel pleasure at his death, yet she didn't. Cold, merciless satisfaction, yes. A sense that justice had been done at last, a grim sense of completion that it had come at her hand and one of lightness at the sordid ignobility of his end. It was something she'd had to do, a scale that had to be righted, but there was no pleasure in it, and the emptiness of her tomorrows stretched bleakly before her. In a sense, Young, too, had won. He'd taken Paul from her, and she'd sacrificed the career she'd spent thirty years building, the joy of doing the one thing in the universe she'd been born to do in the service of her Queen, to destroy him.