He simply braced back to attention, and Greentree stepped past him into Lady Harrington's quarters. MacGuiness stood just inside the hatch opening into his pantry, and if his eyes were suspiciously swollen, Thomas Greentree was not about to comment on the fact. Unlike Mattingly, the stewards shoulders slumped, and for the first time in Greentree’s experience, he looked his chronological age. His arms hung awkwardly at his sides, as if the capable hands at their ends had somehow forgotten their utility; the lines prolong had kept age from etching into his face showed now, drawn deep by grief and worry; and the captain could actually feel the strength with which he made himself hope, made himself cling to the belief that there was some sort of news, as if by hoping hard enough he could make it so.

"Good morning, Sir," he said huskily, trying to smile a welcome. "Would you care for some refreshment? I'm..." His voice broke, and he cleared his throat. "I'm sure the Commodore would want..."

His hands clenched and his voice died, and Greentree felt a deep, irrational flare of guilt. It was his expression which had cut MacGuiness off, and he knew it. He saw it in the way the steward's face tightened, the way his shoulders hunched as if to fend off some dreaded blow. But there was no way to spare him, and the captain inhaled sharply.

"Admiral Sorbanne has made it official," he said, trying to find kindness by being brutally brief. "As of this afternoon, Prince Adrian is officially overdue and presumed lost." MacGuiness' face went white, and Greentree reached out to rest his right hand on the older man's shoulder. "I'm sorry, MacGuiness," he said much more softly. "At the moment Lady Harrington is only missing. Until we get some report from the Peeps or from the League inspectors, that's all we know. I..." He paused and squeezed the steward's shoulder. "I wanted you to hear it from me, not the rumor mill."

"Thank you, Sir." It came out in a whisper, and MacGuiness blinked hard as he looked around the empty cabin. "It doesn't seem..." he began, then stopped, clenched his jaw, and turned his head away, concealing his face from the captain. "Thank you for telling me, Sir," he said in a strangely breathless voice. "If you'll excuse me, I... I've got some things I have to take care..."

He pulled away from the hand on his shoulder and walked quickly into Lady Harrington's sleeping cabin. The hatch closed behind him, and Greentree gazed at it for several silent seconds, then sighed and turned back to the hatch. He was certain Mattingly must have guessed the reason for his visit to MacGuiness, but that wasn't going to spare Greentree the task of telling him, as well. Of being the official spokesman for the news none of Lady Harrington's people wanted to hear.

Behind him, in Honor Harrington's sleeping cabin, James MacGuiness sat in a chair, staring up at the gemmed scabbard of the Harrington Sword above the crystal cabinet which held the Star of Grayson and the Harrington Key.

He made no sound, and his body never moved, and the tears sliding down his face fell as silently as rain.

Honor sighed, looked up from the book she'd been pretending to read for the last hour or so, and rubbed her eyes wearily. She sat for a moment longer, then laid the book aside, swung her long legs off the narrow bunk, crossed to the center of the single large compartment she shared with Marcia McGinley, Geraldine Metcalf, and Sarah DuChene, and began a series of stretching exercises.

McGinley looked up from the chess problem she was currently working through. She watched Honor for a moment without speaking, then glanced at DuChene and raised an eyebrow. The astrogator nodded in answer to the unvoiced question, and the two of them rose to join Honor. She moved aside to give them a little more space, and the three of them circled about one another in the strangely graceful almost-dance the limited deck space enforced upon their exercises while Metcalf watched them from her own bed. There was no room for her to join them until one of them sat down, and she waited patiently, but Nimitz was unprepared to see a perfectly good, and stationary lap, go to waste. He launched himself from the foot of Honors bed to Metcalf's, and the tac officer chuckled as he sprawled across her legs and turned his belly fur up to be petted.

Honor watched the others from the comers of her eyes as she exercised and wished longingly for even a little more space. There wasn't really enough room for her to have gone through her training katas properly even if she'd been alone. With the others crowding in on her, she probably would have inflicted serious bodily injury on someone if she'd tried. Yet for all the inconvenience of being squeezed so tightly together, the part of her which eroded a little further every day under the dead weight of her helplessness was grateful the others were present. Not that any of them wanted to be here, but at least she and Nimitz didn't have to face the added burden of isolation which proper military courtesy would have imposed upon them in a larger vessel.

Despite the vast gulf between Honor's rank and theirs, McGinley, Metcalf, and DuChene were the next most senior female POWs, and it was impossible for the Peeps to offer any of their prisoners, even Honor, private quarters. Citizen Captain Bogdanovich had apologized on Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville's behalf for crowding the four of them together, but Count Tilly was only a battlecruiser. There was only so much space to go around, and however spartan, the compartment, intended by the ship's designers to provide berthing space for six junior officers, was preferable to a cell in the brig.

At first, Metcalf and DuChene had been more than a little uncomfortable at being thrown in with Honor... and Nimitz, of course. They'd seemed to feel it was somehow their fault that she'd been denied the privacy they were convinced she deserved, and the difference in their ranks had only made things worse. She'd done her best to disabuse them of the notion that they were to blame for anything that had happened, and McGinley’s presence had helped. Neither Metcalf nor DuChene had ever served with Honor before. Aside from the brief contacts they'd had during her visits aboard Prince Adrian, they'd been total strangers, but McGinley, as Honors operations officer, offered a sort of bridge. She held the same rank as the other two, yet she was also comfortable with her role as the second most important member of Honor's staff, and her existing working relationship with Honor had gradually extended itself to Metcalf and DuChene. Nothing could make their situation anything other than irregular and awkward, but the others had settled down after the first few days.

The difference in their ranks remained, of course, even in their new and strained circumstances. Honor was not simply their superior but their CO, the senior officer of all the Allied POWs, which required her to remain aloof from the others. She could never hope to be "one of the girls," but they'd fallen into an almost comfortable relationship, and Honor was glad, for she was self-honest enough to admit that in her current situation she needed any sense of stability she could get. Her contact with the other POWs was virtually nonexistent, and a sense of being disconnected, of never knowing exactly what was happening to people for whom she still felt responsible, added to the gnawing fear of the future which continued to eat at her.

Nimitz, on the other hand, seemed almost content... but appearances were deceiving. He couldn't hide his sense of being trapped from Honor, although his cheerful opportunism would have fooled anyone who lacked her link to his emotions. He'd gotten to know McGinley well aboard Alvarez; now he imposed shamelessly upon her for petting and grooming. In fact, he'd deigned to accept the ministrations of all three of Honors junior officers. She might almost have felt abandoned if she hadn't realized how he'd turned petting or playing with him into a sort of occupational therapy for them... and if his willingness to luxuriate unabashedly in their attentions hadn't been such a major factor in overcoming Metcalf's and DuChene's original discomfort.

Besides, watching Nimitz manipulate the others out of their depression helped distract Honor from her own. And her fellow prisoners weren't the only people the 'cat had charmed. Indeed, Shannon Foraker visited Honor, and Nimitz, so regularly that Honor worried about her. Too much familiarity with a Manticoran officer was likely to cause a Peep officer serious trouble, and she felt a little guilty for not having hinted to Foraker that she might want to keep her distance. But the truth was that she was too grateful for the citizen commander's visits to discourage her, and Tourville had decided to use his ops officer as his official liaison with Honor.

Foraker was certainly a good choice, if his object was to be sure he'd picked someone he could trust to see to it that his prisoners were properly treated, but Honor had come to suspect the citizen rear admiral of an additional motive. Despite her promotion, the ops officer hadn't changed much since Honor had met her in Silesia, and she clearly wanted to repay Honor for how well she'd been treated aboard HMS Wayfarer. But what superiors in most navies might have seen as an honorable intention on her part could be extremely dangerous to an officer in the present Peoples Navy, and that, Honor suspected, was the real reason Tourville had made her his liaison. Since she'd been ordered to see to the prisoners' well-being, her superiors could hardly come down on her for being conscientious in the discharge of her duties.

It was unlikely the ops officer realized what Tourville was up to (always assuming, of course, that Honor had figured it out properly), but that blind spot was part of her charm. She had an almost childlike innocence. Not foolishness or stupidity, but a refusal, or perhaps an outright inability, to let her personal relationships be dictated by the ideologically-fired pressures swirling through the People’s Navy. She seemed to possess absolutely none of the constructive paranoia which helped guide many of her fellows through the minefields about them, and the thought of what might have become of her if her skill and talents had made her one bit less valuable to her superiors was enough to send a chill down Honors spine. No doubt it was silly of her to worry herself over what could happen to an officer in an enemy navy, especially when those very talents made the officer in question uniquely dangerous to her own side, but it was hard to remember that when Foraker made a point of reminding Count Tilly's cooks of Honor's special dietary needs or stopped by on her limited off-duty time to play chess with McGinley, or feed Nimitz celery, or give Metcalf the painting supplies which had been recovered from her quarters aboard Prince Adrian.

And however little awareness Foraker seemed to have of potential risks to her, she clearly recognized Honor’s greatest worry, and she'd set out to do something about it. She'd not only brought other Peeps to meet Nimitz, whose charm could be relied upon to loosen up the stiffest courtesy call, but she'd also "borrowed" the 'cat several times. Officially, she was taking Nimitz out for exercise; actually, she was introducing him to as many people as possible aboard Count Tilly with the obvious intention of convincing them he represented no danger to them.

Honor was immensely grateful for Foraker's efforts, although she would have felt more optimistic about their success if she hadn't discovered that Tourville, at least, knew Nimitz was a danger. The citizen rear admiral had taken to inviting her, McKeon, and "Colonel" LaFollet, as the three highest ranking POWs, to dine with his officers on a semiregular basis. Honor was grateful for the opportunity to see the others, although she knew those dinners were hard on LaFollet, but they had also offered Tourville the chance to "let slip" that the Peeps' Naval Intelligence had assembled a file on her.

She'd been startled at first, though a little consideration had told her she shouldn't have been. After all, she routinely saw the files ONI compiled on Peep officers whom the RMN had decided were important enough to keep tabs on. She simply hadn't considered that the Peoples Navy might see her in that light. But they did... and as part of her file, they'd included full details of her career on Grayson. From Tourville’s deliberately casual remarks, it was obvious those details included clips from the gory Planetary Security video of her and Nimitz foiling the attempt to assassinate Protector Benjamin’s family. No one who'd seen that footage could ever make the mistake of underestimating Nimitz's lethality, and while Tourville clearly didn't feel threatened by him, she rather doubted that everyone else who had the rank to see it would share his equanimity.

From that viewpoint, at least, the existence of her file made it far more likely she and Nimitz would be separated. Indeed, had she been a Peep, she suspected she would have argued against allowing any prisoner to retain a "pet" she knew had killed people. Admitting that did absolutely nothing to make her feel confident, and she was shocked when she first realized how deeply her future’s looming uncertainties were affecting her.

It wasn't a sort of pressure she'd ever before faced, and it was one she was uniquely unsuited to handle. It would, she'd realized slowly, have been impossible to design a situation which could have turned the normal mainstays of her personality more cruelly against her. The very act of ordering Prince Adrian's surrender had turned her sense of duty and responsibility to her Queen and her Navy into a source of guilt, not strength. The matching sense of duty to her personnel, the sense of mutual obligation and responsibility which existed between any officer and those under her orders, had become another vicious goad, for there was no way she could discharge it. She did her best as their representative, and the decency of officers like Tourville and Foraker had prevented their captors from abusing her people... so far. But that was the point, wasn't it? She had no power to protect her personnel if, no, when, Tourville was replaced by someone else. And above and beyond all those grinding concerns was her bond with Nimitz. What had been the single most important cornerstone of her life for over forty years, the wellspring of stability and love to which she had been able to turn even in her darkest moments, was now the greatest threat she'd ever faced. She could lose Nimitz. He could be taken from her, even killed, at the whim of any Peep Navy or Marine officer, any State Security thug, even a simple prison camp guard. There was nothing she could do to protect him from any of those people, and the desperation that woke within her could only be concealed from her subordinates, for it could not be dispelled.

And because she couldn't dispel her desperation, or her terror, they only grew, like sources of infection which could not be lanced and cleaned. The dark cores of fear grew deeper and stronger, eating into her reserves of strength and undermining her sense of self, and all she could do was try to ignore them. To avoid thinking about them. To pretend they weren't there... when she knew perfectly well that they were.

It was destroying her. She knew it was, felt her growing fragility as the poison of helplessness ate away bits and pieces of her, and she hated it. Hated it. Not just for what it was doing to her, but even more because of what it was preventing her from doing for the people she'd brought to this with her.

She suspected that only McKeon and LaFollet, and possibly McGinley, realized how she was eroding from the core out. She hoped no one else did, anyway. It was bad enough that the people closest to her should be forced to deal with her failures and her preoccupation with her private terrors when they had fears and worries of their own and a right to her support in coping with them. But...

A soft chime sounded, and Honor looked up gratefully, thankful to be pulled from the ever tightening spiral of her self-condemnation, as the compartment hatch slid open. Shannon Foraker stood in the doorway, and Honor started to smile in welcome. But her smile died stillborn as Foraker’s expression registered, and she sensed McGinley and DuChene slowing, then stopping, in their exercises behind her.

"Yes, Citizen Commander?" she said, and as always, the steadiness of her voice surprised her. It should sound as frayed and stretched as she felt, quivering like an over-stressed cable.

"Citizen Admiral Tourville sent me to extend his compliments to you and inform you that we've received new orders, Commodore." If Honor's voice sounded unnaturally natural in her own ears, Foraker’s came out with an equally unnatural flatness. Even the words sounded wrong somehow, as if they'd been written for her by someone else, and that, Honor realized, was because they had. Foraker was the messenger, but the message was from Tourville, and the citizen commander paused to clear her throat before she continued.

"The dispatch boat has returned from Barnett," she went on, looking straight into Honor's eyes. "Citizen Admiral Tourville's dispatches were intended for Citizen Admiral Theisman, the system CO, and his commissioner, but Citizen Ransom of the Committee of Public Safety is currently in the system and she was, of course, shown the message."

Honor felt her breathing pause. She'd felt a momentary stir of hope at the name Theisman, for she and the citizen admiral had met, and enemy though he was, he was also a man of integrity and courage. But Cordelia Ransoms name brought any sense of hope crashing down, and she fought to keep the dread out of her expression as she made herself meet Foraker’s level gaze.

"Most of your enlisted personnel and junior officers will be transported directly to a Navy holding facility in the Tarragon System," Foraker told her. "You, however, with your senior officers and some of your more senior petty officers, will be returning to Barnett with us aboard Count Tilly."

The citizen commander paused once more, as if she wanted to find some way, any way, to avoid completing her message. But there wasn't one, and her voice was even flatter when she continued.

"Citizen Ransom has instructed Citizen Admiral Tourville personally to conduct you to Barnett, Commodore. According to her message, she wishes to interview you in person before determining the precise disposition of your case."

"I see." Honors soprano didn't even waver. It was as if she stood to one side, watching a stranger use her body and her voice. She'd seen ONFs briefings on the Committee of Public Safety and its members. She knew Cordelia Ransom's record, and knowing it, she couldn't lie to herself about the reasons Ransom might wish to "interview" her... or what sort of "disposition" Ransom would make of her. Yet in a strange sort of way, she realized distantly, she was almost relieved. At least now she could no longer torment herself with false hopes.

She heard Nimitz's feet thump as he jumped down from Metcalf’s lap and crossed the deck to her. She bent without looking away from Foraker and scooped him up, hugging him to her breasts so fiercely she was surprised he didn't squeal in pain, and the universe seemed to have stopped about her. There was only Foraker, the misery in her eyes confirming the fact that she shared Honors own estimate of what her future held, and the living, infinitely precious warmth of the treecat in her arms.

But then she realized she was wrong. There was one more thing which, even now, she could not evade. There was duty. Duty to her Queen, whom she could not disgrace by showing weakness. Duty to her people, whom she could not fail by collapsing at the moment when they would need her most. And finally, there was duty to herself. The duty to gather whatever fragments of her frayed and eroded strength remained and meet whatever came with at least a pretense of dignity.

"Thank you, Shannon. And please extend my thanks to Citizen Admiral Tourville, both for informing me and for all his many kindnesses," Lady Dame Honor Harrington said serenely, and she smiled.