Honorverse favorite passages

Honor smiled. "Resident Commissioner Matsuko is a friend of mine, Doctor Arif. When I wrote her to describe what I hoped to accomplish and asked her for some background on how communication had been opened with the Medusans, she was kind enough to give me full access to her archives. Which is how I happen to know a 'rather junior member' of the team was the one who made the breakthrough suggestion to Doctor Sampson."

Jacques pulled out his com. “Okay. So who makes the call? And who do we start with?”

Victor and Anton exchanged looks again.

“There’s something a little scary about that,” mused Cathy.

“You think?” That came from Berry. But she was smiling when she said it.

“We need to start with President Pritchart,” said Anton. He pointed at Victor. “He’s actually very disciplined, believe it or not. He won’t—can’t—agree to this without the approval of his superiors. And given that they’re bouncing his official status around, there’s no one except Pritchart who could sign off on it. As for who should make the call…”

Victor pulled out his com. “I’ll do it. I’d rather Jacques did, but…a special officer beards his own commander-in-chief.”

“Eloise Pritchart does not have a beard,” said Cathy.
Victor’s gloomy expression was back. “Stick around,” he said, as he keyed in some numbers. “By tomorrow she may have.”

His face got the slightly vacant look of someone who’s talking to someone far away. “This is Special Officer Cachat. Would you please pass on to President Pritchart that I need to speak with her as soon as possible.”
After a moment, he continued: “Yes, I know she’s very busy. This is important.”

Another moment passed. Victor rolled his eyes. “Yes, thank you.” He turned off the com. “Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said, ‘first thing we do, we kill all the bureaucrats’?”

Cathy shook her head. “No. It was lawyers.”

“He got it wrong, then.” He put the com away. “I wouldn’t hold out great hopes that I’ll be able to see her anytime soon. The president’s gofer—excuse me, assistant executive director—made it pretty clear that I was a nuisance with delusions of grandeur.”

“Is that so?” Jacques took his com back out. “Let me try, then.” He entered some numbers and within a short time got the same slightly vacant expression.

“This is Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou, Third Director at Large of the Planetary Board of Directors of Beowulf. What is your name, please?”

A few seconds passed. “Well then, Assistant Executive Director Hancock. I need to speak to President Pritchart.”

A few seconds passed. “I didn’t say I needed an appointment, Ms. Hancock, I said I needed to speak to President Pritchard. If you require an explanation of the word ‘now’ I can have it provided for you by my cousin. That would be Chyang Benton-Ramirez. He’s the Chairman of Beowulf’s Board of Directors.”

A few seconds passed. “Thank you, Assistant Executive Director Hancock.”

To the people around him he said: “She’s getting her.”
A couple of minutes passed. “Eloise? Jacques here. Something very important has come up. I need to meet with you as soon as possible. I’ll be bringing your Special Officer Cachat with me. Captain Zilwicki as well. And General Palane.”

A few seconds passed. “Splendid. Fifteen thirty it is.”
He put away the com and glanced at his timepiece. “Okay, we’ve got a little over two hours. We’d best get moving.”

“Its legal standing is exactly zero, Governor, so let’s not waste each other’s time pretending otherwise, shall we? Under the Treaty of Beowulf, you’re required to grant my medical personnel access in order to determine the legitimacy of your personnel’s diagnosis. You’ve refused to do so, which means your declaration of quarantine has no legal standing whatsoever.”

“I’m afraid I disagree with your legal interpretation on that point, Captain,” Dueñas said inflexibly. “And absent instructions from higher authority, I’m also afraid I’ll have to act on my own understanding of the circumstances and the treaty’s provisions. I’ll be happy to request those instructions, of course, but”—he smiled again, coldly—“it will probably take some months to get clarification from Old Earth.”

“That’s unacceptable, Governor,” Zavala said calmly.

“I’m afraid it’s the best I can do, Captain. Under the circumstances, you understand.”

“Oh, I understand the circumstances better than you may believe I do, Governor. With all due respect, however, I’m not certain you do.”

“Meaning what, precisely, Captain?”

“Meaning I’m under orders to repatriate those vessels as quickly as possible by any means necessary. And if you need me to be more specific, Sir, ‘any means necessary’ does include the use of force.”

“Are you seriously proposing to commit an act of war against the Solarian League on its own territory?” Dueñas demanded.

“First, the Saltash System is not Solarian territory,” Zavala replied. “It’s legally an independent star system, and the Solarian presence in it is—legally—solely to serve as a peacekeeping authority to prevent hostilities between the Republic of MacPhee and the Republic of Lochore. Although the Office of Frontier Security does enjoy certain administrative rights as a result of its agreements with MacPhee and Lochore, that doesn’t make Saltash Solarian territory, no matter how much cash you squeeze out of it every T-year. Second, I’m not the one who’s committed an act of war; you are. In the absence of a genuine and legitimate medical emergency to justify your so-called quarantine, your actions amount to piracy. And I might point out to you, Sir, that piracy is a capital offense. And, third, I’m not proposing to use force if you refuse to release my star nation’s vessels and personnel peacefully; I’m promising to use force.”

“Should you attempt to carry out that outrageous and totally unacceptable threat, Captain, it will be the end of your career! I promise you that! And the consequences for your star nation’s relations with the Solarian League will be severe!”

“I doubt my career will suffer in the least, Governor, and even if I didn’t, it would take a worse threat than that to prevent me from carrying out my instructions. And as for the Star Empire’s relations with the League, I’ll take my chances on that, too. To date, the League’s been the instigator in every incident between the Star Empire and the League, including this one. And as my Empress and her government have attempted to make clear to Old Chicago, the Star Empire of Manticore is not prepared to allow the Solarian League to kill its personnel, insult its sovereignty, or seize its merchant vessels”—his eyes bored into Dueñas’—“without reaction. If you refuse to respond to an effort to resolve the crisis you’ve provoked by peaceful means, then I’m prepared to assume you prefer a more…bellicose resolution. In which case, Governor, my squadron and I are at your disposal.”

“And precisely what do you intend to do if this pipe dream of yours fails to come to fruition?” Dueñas demanded furiously.

“If your crews haven’t abandoned ship within the next twenty-seven minutes,” Zavala said with a flat, implacable calm worse than any shouted threats, “I will construe that as an indication of hostile intent, and I will open fire. The decision is yours, Governor. In either case, my ships will be in orbit around Cinnamon in approximately one and a half hours. Whether or not any of your warships are still intact at that time is up to you. Good day.”

Dueñas was still staring at the display in disbelief when it went suddenly blank.

"Excuse me, Ma'am."

[Victoria] Saunders turned towards the voice. It belonged to Commander Richard Gaunt, her executive officer.

"Yes, Dick?"

"The last of the personnel shuttles will be coming aboard in approximately ninety minutes, Ma'am," he said.

"Good, Dick. Good!" She smiled. "Do we have a headcount yet?"

"It looks like the shore patrol managed to round up just about everyone," he replied. "At last count we're about six warm bodies short, but for all I know, they could be aboard one of the other ships, given how frantic this entire departure's being."

"Tell me about it," she said feelingly, looking at the repeater plot that showed the ungainly gaggle of shuttles and pinnaces streaming after the squadron. It was unheard of for a Queen's ship to pull out so abruptly a sizable percentage of her company had to chase after her this way. But at least Hercules' acceleration rate was low enough the small craft wouldn't have much trouble overtaking her.

"Ma'am?" Gaunt's voice was much lower, and she looked back at him, one eyebrow arched.

"Do you really think all of this," he continued, still pitching his voice too low for anyone else to hear, and gesturing at the icons moving steadily across the plot, "is necessary?"

"I don't have any idea, Dick," she told him frankly. "But I did have the chance to look over Terekhov's projected ops schedule. If everything's going the way he projected, his kidnapped Solly freighter got to Monica about sixteen hours ago. Terekhov'll be arriving at his rendezvous—this 'Point Midway' of his—in about another seventy-two hours, and the freighter will meet him there about a week later. Call it ten standard days from now. And if he decides on the basis of its report to move directly on Monica, he can be there in another six days or so. We, on the other hand, can't reach Monica for twenty-five days. So, if he goes ahead, whatever he does is going to be over, one way or the other, at least one full T-week before we can possibly get there."

"I can't believe he'd really be crazy enough to pull something like that, Ma'am," Gaunt said, shaking his head. "He must know we're coming—the glory hound didn't leave us any choice about that! Surely he's not so far gone he won't wait one more week if it means the difference between going in unsupported and arriving with backup."

Saunders regarded her XO with a slight, rare frown. Gaunt was an efficient executive officer, the sort who always got the details right and developed an almost uncanny ability to anticipate his CO's desires. But he was also a stickler for sometimes petty details, and he had a powerful attachment to doing things by The Book. A certain... narrowness, coupled with an aversion to risk taking. He disliked the "glory hounds," a term he used a bit too easily for her taste, and Victoria Saunders had come to question whether or not he had the combination of flexibility and moral courage to wear the white beret of a starship commander. Especially in a war like the present one.

His last comment had just settled the question, and she was guiltily aware that an executive officer was what he would remain. That was what happened when a CO endorsed an officer's evaluation with the fatal words "Not recommended for independent command."

"Perhaps you're right," she said, looking at the man whose career she'd just decided to kill.

He wasn't, of course. But there was no point trying to explain that to someone of his seniority who didn't already understand.

A Sphinxian would have considered the raw, autumn wind no more than brisk, but it was cold for this far south on the planet of Manticore. It swept in off Jason Bay, snapping and popping at the half-masted flags above the dense, silent crowds which lined the procession's route from Capital Field into the center of the City of Landing. Aside from the wind noise, and the whip-crack pops of the flags, the only sounds were the slow, mournful tap, tap, tap of a single drum, the clatter of anachronistic hooves, and the rattle of equally anachronistic iron-rimmed wheels.

Captain Junior-Grade Rafael Cardones marched at the horses' heads, his spine, ramrod straight, and his eyes fixed straight ahead as he led them down the stopped-time stillness of King Roger I Boulevard between lines of personnel from every branch of the service, all with black armbands and reversed arms. The crowd watched in unnatural, frozen stillness, and the solitary drummer—a fourth-term midshipwoman from Saganami Island in full mess dress uniform—marched directly behind the black-draped caisson. The amplified sound of her drum echoed back from the speaker atop each flagpole, and every HD receiver in the Manticoran Binary System carried the images, and the sounds, and the silence which somehow seemed to surround and swallow them both.

A midshipman from the same form walked behind the drummer, leading a third horse—this one coal black, saddled, with two boots reversed in the stirrups—and more people followed him, but not a great many. A single, black-skinned woman in the uniform of a captain of the list and the white beret of a starship commander walked behind the horse, gloved hands holding the jeweled scabbard of the Harrington Sword rigidly upright before her. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, the sword's gems flashed in the fragile sunlight, and eight admirals—Sir James Bowie Webster, CO Home Fleet, and all seven uniformed Lords of the Admiralty—were at her heels. That was all. It was a tiny procession compared to the pomp and majesty the stage managers of the People's Republic might have achieved, but it was enough, for those twelve people and those three horses were the only sight and sound and movement in a city of over eleven million human beings.

Hats and caps were removed throughout the crowds of mourners, sometimes awkwardly, with an almost embarrassed air, as the cortege passed, and Allen Summervale, Duke of Cromarty and Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, stood beside Queen Elizabeth III on the steps of the Royal Cathedral and watched the slow-moving column approach. Very few of those watching the wheeled conveyance pass by had known what a "caisson" was before the newsies covering the funeral told them. Even fewer had known that such vehicles had once been used to tow artillery back on Old Earth—Cromarty had known only because one of his boyhood friends was a military history buff—or the significance they held for military funerals. But every one of those spectators knew the coffin the caisson bore was empty. That the body of the woman whose funeral they had come to share would never be returned to the soil of her native kingdom for burial. But that was not because she had been vaporized in the fury of naval combat or left to drift, forever lost in space, like so many of Manticore's sons and daughters, and despite the solemnity, and the quiet, and the grief flowing on the cold wind, Cromarty felt the anger and the fierce, steady power of the mourner's fury pulsing in time with the drum.

A sound like ripping cloth and distant thunder grumbled down from the heavens, and eyes rose from the procession as five Javelin advanced trainers from Kreskin Field at Saganami Island swept overhead. Bold, white contrails followed them across the autumn-washed blue sky, and then one of them pulled up, climbing away from the others, vanishing into the brilliant sun like a fleeing spirit, in the ancient "missing man" formation pilots had used for over two thousand years to mark the passing of one of their own.
.....

.....

He drew another deep breath as the procession finally entered the square before King Michael's Cathedral. The Star Kingdom's constitution specifically prohibited the establishment of an official state religion, but the House of Winton had been Second Reformation Roman Catholics for the last four centuries. King Michael had begun the construction of the cathedral which now bore his own name out of the royal family's private fortune in 65 After Landing—1528 Post Diaspora, by the reckoning of humanity at large—and every member of the royal family had been buried there since. The Star Kingdom's last state burial in King Michael's had been thirty-nine T-years before, after the death of King Roger III. Only eleven people from outside the royal house had ever been "interred" there, and of that eleven, three of the crypts were empty.

As the twelfth non-Winton crypt would be, Cromarty thought grimly, for he doubted, somehow, that Honor Harrington's body would ever be recovered, even after the People's Republic's defeat. But she would be in fitting company even then, he told himself, for the empty crypt which would be hers lay between the equally empty crypts of Edward Saganami and Ellen D'Orville.

The procession stopped before the cathedral, and a picked honor guard of senior Navy and Marine noncoms marched down the steps in perfect, metronome unison, timed by the endless, grieving taps of the drum. A petite, black-haired Marine colonel followed them, her movements equally exact despite a slight limp, and saluted the captain with the sword with parade-ground precision. Then she took the sheathed blade in her own gloved hands, executed a perfect about-face while the honor guard slid the empty coffin from the caisson, and led them back up the steps at the slow march.

The drummer followed, still tapping out her slow, grieving tempo, until her heel touched the very threshold of the Cathedral. Then the drumbeats stopped, in the instant that her foot came down, and the rich, weeping music of Salvatore Hammerwell's "Lament for Beauty Lost" welled from the speakers in its stead.

Hutch wrote:I was just browsing and opened "Echos of Honor" and relaized that this passage hadn't been added to this thread (and wondered how I could have forgotten it).

So here it is.

***Snip***

He drew another deep breath as the procession finally entered the square before King Michael's Cathedral. The Star Kingdom's constitution specifically prohibited the establishment of an official state religion, but the House of Winton had been Second Reformation Roman Catholics for the last four centuries. King Michael had begun the construction of the cathedral which now bore his own name out of the royal family's private fortune in 65 After Landing—1528 Post Diaspora, by the reckoning of humanity at large—and every member of the royal family had been buried there since. The Star Kingdom's last state burial in King Michael's had been thirty-nine T-years before, after the death of King Roger III. Only eleven people from outside the royal house had ever been "interred" there, and of that eleven, three of the crypts were empty.

As the twelfth non-Winton crypt would be, Cromarty thought grimly, for he doubted, somehow, that Honor Harrington's body would ever be recovered, even after the People's Republic's defeat. But she would be in fitting company even then, he told himself, for the empty crypt which would be hers lay between the equally empty crypts of Edward Saganami and Ellen D'Orville.

***Snip***

Here's a good question--who is "in" those three empty crypts? Edward Saganami would be one I'm certain, but who else?

Hutch wrote:I was just browsing and opened "Echos of Honor" and relaized that this passage hadn't been added to this thread (and wondered how I could have forgotten it).

So here it is.

<SNIP>
As the twelfth non-Winton crypt would be, Cromarty thought grimly, for he doubted, somehow, that Honor Harrington's body would ever be recovered, even after the People's Republic's defeat. But she would be in fitting company even then, he told himself, for the empty crypt which would be hers lay between the equally empty crypts of Edward Saganami and Ellen D'Orville.

<SNIP>

Here's a good question--who is "in" those three empty crypts? Edward Saganami would be one I'm certain, but who else?

akira.taylor wrote:We don't know the third of the eleven (there are now 4 empty crypts). What makes me a little curious is the fact that Honor's is between Saganami and D'Orville, not next to them (I would have thought they would lay them out sequentially).

...[Michelle] made a face as Dicey hopped up into her lap. The cat landed with a pronounced thump, butted her chest twice with his broad, scarred head, then settled down possessively with a deep, rumbling purr.

“This monster is your cat, isn’t it, Chris?” she demanded.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Billingsley acknowledged imperturbably.

“I just wondered,” she said, rubbing Dicey between the ears in token of abject surrender. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

Hutch wrote:

akira.taylor wrote:We don't know the third of the eleven (there are now 4 empty crypts). What makes me a little curious is the fact that Honor's is between Saganami and D'Orville, not next to them (I would have thought they would lay them out sequentially).

Vince. D'OH!! Thanks for the catch.

akira, thanks for saving at least some of my dignity (if not my intelligence, that is a lost cause).

Have to do some re-reads of House of steel to see if there are any clues there.