Beginnings: Worlds of Honor 6, page 37
part #6 of Worlds of Honor Series
The remaining peak bear heaved itself to its feet, howling in fury, put its head down, and turned upon its fresh enemy. Facing a charging peak bear on the ground was not the sort of situation many hunters were likely to survive, and the picketwood overhead was too dense for her counter-grav to carry her clear in time, but Honor’s coldly, meticulously whirring mind measured speeds and angles with icy precision. There was no way to avoid the thing, and so she stood her ground, instead. The S&W swung back and the glowing dot settled on the oncoming creature. She found the sight picture, saw the lowered head, realized there was an excellent chance that even the mighty S&W’s slug might ricochet from the immensely thick bone of a peak bear’s skull. She started to squeeze the trigger anyway, but something stopped her—just for half a heartbeat. Something she’d seen, recognized without realizing what it was. Some tiny, preliminary muscle shift, perhaps. Something. And then the peak bear raised its head, roaring as its gaping maw closed in on her, and her right hand squeezed without any conscious command from her.
CRAACKKKKK!
The bullet just missed the peak bear’s lower jaw. It struck two centimeters to the right of the exact center of its chest, and the creature’s roar turned into a high, shocked squeal. It staggered, continuing to drive forward but no longer under control. Momentum carried it, not purpose, and Honor Harrington stepped smoothly to one side, pivoting to keep her target in her field of fire as five hundred kilos of mortally wounded peak bear staggered past her. It went down, twitching, struggling to get its legs back under it so it could rise and kill her with its own dying strength. It snarled, spraying blood as it started to come back upright . . . and she put a second shot through its right ear from a range of five meters to be sure it didn’t.
* * *
The mind-voice trickled into his awareness. It took him what seemed a very long time to recognize it, to realize Sharp Nose was still alive. Then he realized that since he was hearing it, he must still be alive, as well, and neither of those things was possible. The last thing he remembered was the snow hunter Dances on Clouds had killed, still rolling forward, tumbling towards him. He had tried to leap clear, but there had been no time. It had felt as if a golden-leaf tree had fallen onto him, and then there had been only darkness.
Now he managed to open his eyes and discovered that he was wrapped in a thin but tough and incredibly warm blanket. It was a two-leg blanket, made of one of their magical substances, and he realized his left forelimb had been straightened and immobilized by the length of branch fastened to it with some of the sticky-sided stuff two-legs used to tie everything in the world together. And then he realized that the blanket in which he was wrapped lay in a two-leg’s lap, and looked up at the brown eyes of the two-leg to which it belonged.
* * *
“—coordinates,” Honor told the Sphinx Forestry Service ranger on the uni-link’s display. “We’re about a hundred and eighty meters north of the near-beaver dam below Jessica Falls on Rock Aspen Creek, and I need a ‘cat-certified vet out here bad. I’ve got one ’cat with a broken forelimb and ribs who’s been unconscious for at least ten minutes, and another one with a smashed mid-pelvis. I think that one has some internal injuries, too, so please hurry. And I guess you’d better send someone along to collect the cubs, too.”
She realized her own voice sounded far too calm as she sat there between two dead adult peak bears with a pair of horribly injured treecats while a pair of orphaned peak bear cubs moaned disconsolately as they tried to understand what had happened.
“The vet’s on her way,” Ranger McIntyre told her. She knew him vaguely and remembered him from her wilderness survival course. He’d always been friendly enough, but he was hardly someone she knew well, yet she’d been astonished by how happy she’d been to see him when he receipted her call.
“You ought to see her air car in the next fifteen minutes,” McIntyre continued. “But let me get this straight, Ms. Harrington. You’re out of there by yourself with two dead peak bears, is that right?”
“I know it’s not peak bear season,” she replied a bit defensively. “But I didn’t have much choice, you know. They were going to kill the ’cats, and then they decided they might as well kill me, too!”
“Oh, I understand that part,” he said. “What I don’t understand is what you thought you were doing out there all alone in the first place. I don’t suppose you happened to tell your parents where you were going, young lady?”
“Of course I did!” she said virtuously. “Sort of,” she added a bit more lamely when the ranger looked unimpressed. “I’d’ve been fine if the ’cats hadn’t gotten into trouble!”
“I’m sure you would have,” McIntyre said in a voice which implied exactly the opposite. Then he inhaled deeply and shook his head. “Although, now that I think about it, I don’t see why I should be particularly surprised by such a boneheaded, stubborn, impulsive antic—especially from you!”
Honor’s eyes widened. She couldn’t think of a single thing she’d done in her entire life—well, up until today—to deserve that resigned tone from Ranger McIntyre. She hugged the injured treecat in her lap very gently—the other ’cat was too badly hurt for her to risk moving any more than she’d had to after she’d used her bush knife to cut away the log under which he’d hidden himself and covered him with her jacket—and stared into the display in confusion.
“Oh, don’t look so innocent at me, young lady!” McIntyre snorted. “This is a tradition in your family!”
Honor blinked, and then her eyes went wider than ever as she realized what he was talking about. But that was ridiculous! She hadn’t been adopted by either treecat—she didn’t want to be adopted by either treecat! She’d only been doing what needed to be done, and it was—
She made the mistake of looking down.
Two grass-green eyes looked back up at her, brighter and deeper and simultaneously darker than any sea she had ever seen. She fell into them, as if they had no bottom, no end. And as she fell, she felt something—someone—reaching back to her. It was as clear, as sharp, as any voice she had ever heard, and yet she couldn’t hear it. It was there, and it wasn’t there. Imagined, and yet more real than anything else she had ever experienced. It was nothing at all like Stephanie Harrington’s description from her journal . . . yet it was simultaneously perfectly and exactly the same.
But I can’t be adopted, a little voice in the back of her brain wailed. It’ll mess up everything! All my plans. All my . . . .
That voice faded into silence, inconsequential beside that other voice, the one she heard without hearing. The dream was still there, the plans and hopes, the determination, but she was going to have to make a few changes, because now the dream had to include this, for it was unthinkable that it could not.
Ranger McIntyre was still saying something over the com, but she was no longer listening. She was listening to something else, and her hand was gentle as she touched the treecat’s—her treecat’s—silken, tufted ears as if they were what they had just become . . . the most precious thing in her universe.
* * *
Sharp Nose’s mind voice was shadowed with pain and weaker than usual, yet amusement flickered in it.
Sharp Nose bleeked a soft, pain-shadowed laugh and reached out to caress his brother’s mind-glow gently. Laughs Brightly’s mind-glow had always been strong; now it was brighter than sunlight on water, and it was growing stronger still by the moment.
he said softly,
Laughs Brightly replied, ears twitching as he heard the whine of a rapidly approaching two-leg flying thing. He knew, without knowing exactly how he knew, that it was a healer, summoned by his person, yet that was unimportant, and he drew the bright, welcoming joy of her about him like a still softer and endlessly warmer blanket on a day of ice and snow.
he repeated,
OBLIGATED SERVICE
Joelle Presby
OBLIGATED SERVICE
Grayson Midshipwoman Claire Bedlam Lecroix palm-locked the entrance to the GNS Ephraim’s third auxiliary repair bay behind her and stormed around her machinery looking for something to punch. The hard surfaces mocked her. She had to settle for nestling her just-delivered package on a counter and mashing her fists into the soft bundle several times.
The punches didn’t give her anything like the satisfaction of beating the surface of the lap pool at Saganami Island. No one ever swam in Grayson’s toxic oceans, but the Manties with their clean, safe planets had no such aversions. Claire had thrived in Manticore’s upside-down society starting with a mental pretend game where she was an actress playing a male officer, and while she was in the role she’d even believed it didn’t matter. In the reality of the Ephraim, Claire muttered to herself, “Yes, Aunt Jezzy, I know I should have known better. Yes, Lucy, dreams are catching. You warned me it would be hard to come back to reality.”
She checked the door one more time, not wanting to have someone walk in while she talked herself down from the latest frustration. Then she smacked the bundle with a few more solid punches.
For the required physical training, Claire had avoided actual swimming classes lest Steadholder Burdette or, worse, Aunt Jezzy, hear of the indecently skintight swimsuits. Instead, taking Lucy’s strong encouragement to heart she had signed up for one self-defense course after another. Those classes had taught her to fight back, and in the water, Claire had stayed afloat only by sheer violence, slapping and kicking against its unchangeable surface.
The Ephraim had no pool, and returning to her own culture was significantly less of a relief than Claire had imagined it would be just a year ago, when her Saganami Island class graduated. The Manticoran middies had started their first cruises, with plans for the ensign promotion parties at the end; she had reported to the Ephraim and managed maintenance projects while the ship failed inspection after inspection. Now she smashed the ensign uniforms that she might never get to wear. Then she drew a deep breath, shook herself, and undid the bundle again to check for telltale wrinkling in the uniform fabric.
The Grayson Space Navy uniforms, a gift of the Lady Wives of Steadholder Burdette in three complete skirted sets, hung smooth from Claire’s shaking fists. Of course they did. The steadholder’s ladies wouldn’t know how to find a store that sold anything less than luxury clothing. And of course the gift assumed she’d be able to afford a tailor for the final bespoke finishes. The uniform board might have allowed the new skirt option in deference to the dignity of the female service member, but they weren’t fools. The skirts were split for full freedom of movement and decency in a zero-grav environment, and the tail ends belled up to cuff into the tops of the uniform boots just like the trouser uniform variant. They were supposed to cuff, that is. These unhemmed skirt ends would fill a boot top and leave no room for the foot.
Perhaps the ladies assumed she had magically achieved Admiral Alexander-Harrington’s height between this gift and their last present of her midshipman uniforms? They had little understanding of steaders’ lives and even less knowledge of life in the Bedlam family. It wasn’t actually unreasonable for them to expect a midshipwoman who was possibly almost an ensign to pay for hemming. Even Claire had expected herself to be an ensign by now—nearly a year and a half after Saganami Island class of 1920 graduation.
She took deep breaths again, trying to swallow her fury at her overdrawn bank account. Thank the Tester, she had checked the balance from her station-side bachelor officer quarters room instead of bouncing a payment at a seamstress shop’s checkout line. She knew the shopkeepers saw the mottled skin from roughly treated childhood skin cancers and marked her immediately as unlikely to be able to repay any credit that might be extended to someone who wasn’t a grasper.
The shop owners themselves could easily feature in Burdette street preacher sermons that warned good people against grasping after the false god of riches and rumors of prosperity, but people rarely considered that such insults could also be stuck to them. Graspers ended up alone and vulnerable in someplace like Birdies, not running a successful orbital-based business. And didn’t graspers deserve it, since they’d hidden from their life’s Test instead of facing it—unless, as Claire hoped, you could sometimes beg forgiveness to choose your own Test?
She briefly considered asking for a loan from one of her cousins at Birdies and crushed the thought. There would be no certainty she could pay them back any time soon. Besides, the rest of the family might realize she knew that the working girls were holding back on the family. Lucy could be counted on. She still held tight to the anger that had inspired her to leave Burdette Steading, but their mutual cousin Mary occasionally broke down and went back home.
Worse, Mary repented with disturbing regularity and confessed everyone else’s sins along with her own. Everyone else usually meant just Lucy, but Claire didn’t want to be looped in for those inevitable follow-on rounds of family recrimination.
If Aunt Jezzy had cause to entirely empty Claire’s account like the transactions showed, there would be a reason, and it would be neither a cheap reason nor an entirely paid-for reason. At least not yet. Of course, her cousin Noah might have found the account and debited it directly himself. Claire gritted her teeth and tried to remind herself that the teenage head-of-household was due his privileges.
Noah had approved her authorization to work outside the home and signed all the renewals without a fuss. Who was she to hold his age against him?
Claire gently laid the uniforms out on the cleaner portions of the work counters and looked for a way to do the hemming herself. An industrial cutter made for materials far tougher than smart fabric made short work of the long tubes, and she gathered up the scraps.
The cut bits had quite a lot of stretch to them; she smiled at the idea of offering them to Lucy to use as a costume in one of her dance routines just to see the laughter in her eyes when she refused them. But Mary would miss the joke and want to do a team routine with Lucy, each with one well-covered ankle. The Birdies Club would bill it as a midshipwoman’s uniform, and those boys in the audience would love it.
Claire stuffed the scraps firmly in the waste bin.
* * *
Claire arrived breathless at the XO’s wood-paneled outer office, answering the summons before the other two officers named in the page. The assistant tactical officer jogged in moments later. He glanced at her and away with a slight pinch to his lips.
“Have you done something wrong recently I should know about?”
She tried not to clench her teeth as she answered the real question. “I don’t know what this is about, Sir.”
Ambling in from the passageway, the Auxiliaries Officer shook out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. His tailored gray-green suit matched his eyes and the fabric’s undertone brought out the gleam of the silver sprinkling his dark hair. He had definitely been on his way off the ship, dressed in civilian clothes and looking to impress someone. Ephraim held the dubious honor of an extra engineering department billet, the AuxO, created by the Office of Personnel to repair if not prevent the ship’s frequent maintenance issues. The AuxO winked at her and playfully punched the ATO on the shoulder.
“Claire’s too straight-laced to cause trouble. I bet you the XO just needs something fixed.”
She hoped his prediction was right. She ran through the mental list of potential Navy sins that might warrant XO-level censure: a few sign-offs behind on her qualification studies for ensign (okay, a lot behind), the package in her arms, and the drunk who had mistaken her for Lucy.
The inebriate had apologized to the duty officer yesterday once he’d sobered up, and her cousins carefully kept their blood relationship to her a secret, even from the AuxO who was one of their better tippers.
The sign-offs? Why would the XO start to care about that now?
It had to be the ensign uniforms. Claire risked a glance down that might draw attention to the officer insignia she hadn’t earned yet and maybe never would. Could the XO blame her just for having received the package?
Actually, yes, she was pretty sure he could. They would treat it just like Midshipman Harris’s care package from old schoolmates with the images of women undoubtedly in the same profession as Lucy and Mary.
The two male officers exchanged banter, oblivious to Claire’s unease. The ATO even let himself smile, and if it faded a bit when his eyes tripped over her, he didn’t let the opportunity pass to quiz the AuxO on the dress-up. Their back-and-forth revealed that he was to meet the mothers of a possible fiancée to show them around Blackbird Yard. He flashed a quick smile at Claire, and she returned it even though he was clearly just practicing for the upcoming visit.
