Yet aside from the guards, these people seemed amazingly unthreatened by her presence. The Protector was younger than she’d expected—at least ten years younger than she, she suspected, allowing for the absence of prolong on Grayson—but his disarming conversation hid neither his self-assurance nor his authority. His brother, on the other hand, was something Honor understood perfectly. She’d met scores of youngsters like him at Saganami Island.

  But it was the Protector’s wives who truly surprised her. She’d known Benjamin and Michael Mayhew had attended off-world schools, but it didn’t take her long to realize Katherine Mayhew was far better educated than she herself, in nontechnical fields, at any rate. Elaine was younger and tended to defer to her tiny fellow wife—she was clearly the more traditional of the two—yet she was just as articulate. That was heartening after Honor’s own experiences, and though she had no idea how typical the Protector’s household might be, she began to suspect how Admiral Courvosier had become so close to Admiral Yanakov despite the high admiral’s stiffness with her.

  Clearly her host had decided business, and any potential unpleasantness, could wait until after supper. Conversation flowed amiably as they worked their way through the sumptuous meal, but it was restricted largely to discussion of the differences between Grayson and Manticore, and Lord Mayhew and Elaine Mayhew were fascinated when she requested a plate for Nimitz. The Security captain looked ready to burst, but Lord Mayhew and his sister-in-law took turns slipping Nimitz tidbits . . . which he accepted as his just due. He was on his best behavior, though. Even when Elaine discovered his fondness for celery, he managed to devour the crunchy sticks neatly despite his carnivore’s teeth, and his obvious comfort with these people was the most reassuring element yet. Honor had brought him along partly to make a point, but even more because of his empathic sense, for she’d learned to rely on him as a barometer of others’ emotions long ago.

  The meal ended at last. The servants withdrew, leaving the Protector’s family alone with their guest and their guards, and Mayhew leaned back in his chair and regarded her thoughtfully.

  “Why do I suspect, Captain Harrington, that the, um, persuasion you used to ‘request’ this meeting was a bit . . . overstated, shall we say?”

  “Overstated, Sir?” Honor asked innocently. “Well, perhaps it was. On the other hand, I thought I might need an argument to catch your attention.”

  Captain Fox wore the wooden expression of a man accustomed to hearing sensitive discussions which were none of his business, but his mouth twitched.

  “You found one, I assure you,” Mayhew said dryly. “Now that you have it, however, what, precisely, can I do for you?”

  “It’s very simple, Sir,” Honor said, grasping the nettle firmly. “In order to employ my squadron effectively in defense of your planet, I need the cooperation of your high command. However able and determined, your commanders simply aren’t sufficiently familiar with my ships’ capabilities to make best use of them without the closest coordination.”

  “I see.” Mayhew regarded her for a moment, then cocked an eyebrow. “Should I assume from your statement that you’ve been denied that cooperation?”

  “Yes, Sir, you should,” she said flatly. “Admiral Garret has assigned me a fine liaison officer in Commander Brentworth, but I have only the most incomplete knowledge of your surviving naval strength, and he’s issued orders for the deployment of my vessels which make very poor use of them.”

  “Issued orders?” There was an ominous note in Mayhew’s voice, and Honor didn’t think it was assumed.

  “Yes, Sir. In fairness to him, I believe he assumed I meant to place my ships under his command when I informed your government through Ambassador Langtry of my intention to assist in Grayson’s defense.”

  “And did you mean to?”

  “I suppose I did, to the extent of tying them into an integrated defense plan. The plan he evolved, however, is far from ideal in my opinion, and he declines to discuss it with me.”

  “After all Admiral Courvosier and Madrigal already did for us?!” Lord Mayhew burst out. He glared at his brother. “I told you Garret didn’t know his ass from his elbow, Ben! He knows how badly we need Captain Harrington’s ships if we’re going to stand a chance, but he’s not going to admit it if it means he has to take orders from a woman. Cousin Bernie always said—"

  “Yes, Mike, I know,” Mayhew interrupted, and looked squarely at Honor. “I take it, then, Captain Harrington, that the real reason for this meeting was to ask me to order Admiral Garret to cooperate with you?”

  “Yes, Sir, more or less,” she said.

  “You mean ‘more’ more than ‘less,’ I suspect.” The Protector propped his right elbow comfortably on the arm of his chair. “If I direct him to cooperate, I expect he’ll accept the order—officially, at least—but he’s not going to forget that you went over his head to get it, Captain.”

  “Protector Benjamin,” Honor said evenly, “what you do within your own navy is no business of mine. My sole concern is to protect this planet in accordance with what I believe to be my Queen’s desires. To accomplish that, I need the cooperation I’ve requested. If Admiral Garret can give it to me, I’m entirely prepared to work with him.”

  “But he’s not prepared to work with you. My impetuous, big-mouthed brother’s right about that, I’m afraid—which means I’ll have to relieve him.”

  Honor hid an inner quiver of relief, but all she said quietly was, “You know the Admiral better than I, Sir.”

  “Yes, I do, and it’s a pity he’s so set in his ways.” The Protector rubbed his cheek, then nodded. “Very well, Captain. Admiral Garret will cease to be a problem.” He looked at his brother. “You’re the one who’s so informed on naval affairs, Mike. Who’s the next most senior officer we’ve got left?”

  “With command experience, or on the staff?”

  “Command experience.”

  “Commodore Matthews, unless you want to bring someone out of retirement,” Lord Mayhew said without hesitation, “and he’s a good one, Ben.” The younger Mayhew smiled almost shyly at Honor. “You won’t have any problems working with him, Ma’am.”

  “Commodore Matthews it is, then,” the Protector said, and despite herself, Honor sighed with relief. Mayhew heard it and smiled at her.

  “I gather you’re not really accustomed to high-stakes diplomacy, Captain Harrington?”

  “No, Sir, I certainly am not,” she replied with feeling.

  “Well, you did rather well, then,” he told her. “In fact, you may have done even better than you realize, considering the domestic situation.” Captain Fox made a small sound, and the Protector grinned up at him. “Contain yourself, Fox,” he teased. “There are no spies from the Council here.”

  Fox abandoned his wooden expression to give his Protector a very old-fashioned look, then glowered at Honor and resumed his parade-ground stance beside Mayhew’s chair.

  “Tell me, Captain,” Mayhew said lightly, “are you a student of Old Earth history, by any chance?”

  “I beg your pardon, Sir?” Honor blinked at the question, then shrugged. “I’d hardly claim to be an authority on the subject, Sir.”

  “Neither was I, before my father sent me to Harvard, but you remind me rather strongly of Commodore Perry at this particular moment. Are you familiar with his career?”

  “Perry?” Honor thought for a moment. “The . . . American commander at the Battle of Lake Champlain?”

  “Lake Erie, I believe,” Mayhew corrected, “but that was Oliver Perry. I was referring to his brother Matthew.”

  “Oh. Then I’m afraid the answer is no, Sir.”

  “A pity. He was a bit on the pompous side, I’m sorry to say, but he also dragged the Empire of Japan kicking and screaming out of its isolation in the Fourth Century Ante Diaspora. In fact, it was Japan that got me interested in Perry, though the parallel between Grayson and the Japanese only goes so far, of course. They wanted to be left alone, whereas we’ve been trying for two centuries to get someone—anyone!—to ‘drag’ us into the present, but I’m beginning to suspect you’re going to have as big an impact on us as Perry had on them.” He smiled faintly. “I trust we’ll avoid some of their worst mistakes—and they made some big ones—but the social and domestic consequences of your visit may prove even greater than the military and technological ones.”

  “I see.” Honor regarded him cautiously. “I trust you don’t believe those consequences will be unhappy ones, Sir?”

  “On the contrary,” Mayhew said as the dining room door opened and two uniformed Security men stepped into the anteroom-like entry alcove. He glanced up casually as the newcomers walked towards Captain Fox and a second pair followed them into the dining room. “I expect they’ll be highly beneficial, though it may take some of us a while to—"

  Fox frowned as the new arrivals approached him, then relaxed as one of them extended a dispatch case. He reached out to take it . . . and Nimitz suddenly catapulted from his stool with a snarl like tearing canvas.

  Honor’s head whipped around as the treecat landed on the back of the Security man closest to her. The guard howled as the treecat’s true-feet sank centimeter-long claws bone-deep into his shoulders, and his howl became a shriek of raw, terrified agony as Nimitz’s uppermost limbs reached around his head and scimitar-clawed fingers buried themselves to the knuckles in his eyes.

  Blood and fluids erupted down the shrieking guard’s cheeks, and his hands rose frantically to clutch at his assailant. But his sounds died in a horrible, whistling gurgle as the clawed hand-paws of the treecat’s middle limbs ripped his throat open to the spine.

  The dead man crumpled like a felled tree, but the ‘cat was already somersaulting away from him. His rippling snarl rose even higher as he slammed into a second newcomer, all six sets of claws ripping and tearing, and Fox and his men stared at him in horror. They’d been surprised by the length of his sixty centimeter body when he uncoiled from Honor’s shoulder, but he was narrow and supple as a ferret, and they hadn’t realized he massed over nine kilos of bone and hard muscle. It wasn’t really their fault—Honor had grown so accustomed to his weight over the years that it scarcely even inconvenienced her, and they hadn’t made sufficient allowance for how easily her own Sphinx-bred muscles let her carry him.

  Yet whatever their reasoning, they’d dismissed him as a simple pet, without guessing how powerful and well-armed he actually was. Nor had they even suspected his intelligence, and the totally unexpected carnage stunned them. But they were trained bodyguards, responsible for their head of state’s safety, and their hands jerked to their weapons as the beast ran amok.

  Captain Fox grabbed the Protector without ceremony, yanking him out of his chair by brute force and throwing him behind him as he went for his own sidearm. Lord Mayhew recoiled as the dead man’s blood splashed the tablecloth and spouted over him, but he, too, reacted with admirable speed. He grabbed both his sisters-in-law, shoved them under the table, and fell across them to protect them with his own body.

  Honor saw it all only peripherally. She’d always known Nimitz could feel her emotions, but she’d never knowingly felt his.

  This time she did—and as she also felt the emotions of the fresh “Security detachment” through him, she exploded out of her chair. The heel of her hand slammed into the face of the newcomer closest to the Protector, and cartilage crunched horribly as she drove his nose up into his brain—just as his companion dropped the dispatch case, raised his other hand, and fired at pointblank range into Captain Fox’s chest.

  The handgun made a whining noise and a sound like an axe sinking into a log, and the Security captain flew backward, his pistol less than half-drawn. His corpse knocked Mayhew to the carpet, and a corner of Honor’s mind cringed as she recognized the sound of an off-world sonic disrupter.

  She reached out and caught the killer by the nape of the neck with one hand and reached past him to clamp her other over his gun before he could get a clear shot at Mayhew. She missed the gun but captured his wrist, and he dropped the weapon with a howl of anguish as her fingers squeezed and the hand on his neck yanked him off the floor. His eyes started to roll towards her in disbelief as he hurtled through the air, and then she slammed him back over the table. Dishes flew, crystal shattered, and his eyes bulged, shock become agony as the point of her elbow smashed down. It hit his solar plexus like a hammer, driven by all of her weight and strength, and she whipped away from him, leaving him to die as his lungs and heart forgot to function.

  Nimitz’s second victim was down, screaming on the floor as he clutched at the remnants of his face, but there were more whining disrupter shots in the hall—mixed with the single, explosive crack of a regular firearm. A horde of fresh “Security” men charged through the door, all armed with disrupters, and Honor snatched a heavy metal tray from the table. It flew across the room, as accurate as Nimitz’s frisbee but far more deadly, and the leading intruder’s forehead erupted in blood. He went down, tripping the man behind him, tangling them all up briefly, and then the chaos became total as the Protector’s bodyguards suddenly realized who the enemy truly was.

  Gunfire thundered across the dining room, bullets crisscrossing with the solid-sound fists of disrupter bolts. Bodies went down on both sides, and aside from the disrupters, there was no way Honor could tell who was friend and who was foe.

  But Nimitz was unhampered by any confusion. The high-pitched snarl of his battle cry wailed in her ears as he hurled himself into the face of another assassin like a furry, six-limbed buzz saw. His victim went down shrieking, and the man beside him swung his weapon towards the treecat, but Honor flew across the carpet towards him. Her right leg snapped straight, her boot crunched into his shoulder, breaking it instantly, and a hammer blow crushed his larynx as she came down on top of him.

  All the Mayhews’ guards were down now, but so were many of the assassins, and Honor and Nimitz were in among the others. She knew there were too many of them, yet she and Nimitz were all that was left, and they had to keep them bottled up in the entry alcove, away from the Protector and his family, as long as they could.

  The killers had known she’d be here, but she was “only” a woman. They were totally unprepared for her size and strength—and training—or the mad whirl of violence that wasn’t a bit like it was on HD. Real martial arts aren’t like that. The first accurate strike to get through unblocked almost always ends in either death or disablement, and when Honor Harrington hit a man, that man went down.

  More feet pounded down the hallway and fresh gunfire crackled and whined as Palace Security reacted to the violence, but the remaining assassins were between Honor and the reinforcements. She tucked and rolled, taking the legs out from under two more men, then vaulted to her feet and drove a back-kick squarely into an unguarded face. A disrupter bolt whizzed past her, and iron-hard knuckles crashed into the firer’s throat. Nimitz howled behind her as he took down another victim, and she smashed a man’s knee into a splintered, backward bow with a side-kick. He fired wildly as he went down, killing one of his own companions, and her boot pulped his gun hand as she turned on yet another. She snaked an arm around his neck, pivoted around her own center of balance, and bent explosively, and the crack of snapping vertebrae was like another gunshot as he flew away from her.

  Shouts and screams and more shots echoed from the hallway, and the assassins turned on Honor with panicky fury while their rearmost ranks wheeled to confront the reinforcements. Someone thrust a disrupter frantically in her direction, but she took out his gun arm with one chopping hand, cupped the other behind his head, and jerked his face down to meet her driving kneecap. Bone crunched and splintered, blood soaked the knee of her trousers, and she twisted towards a fresh enemy as the real Security people broke through the doorway at last.

  A sledgehammer smashed into her face. She heard Nimitz’s shriek of fury and anguish as it hurled her aside, twisting her in midair like a doll, but all she could feel was the pain the pain the pain, and then she crashed down on the side of her face and bounced limply onto her back.

  The pain was gone. Only numbness and its memory remained, but her left eye was blind, and her right stared up helplessly as the man who’d shot her raised his disrupter with a snarl. She watched the weapon rise in dreadful slow motion, lining up for the pointblank final shot—and then her killer’s chest exploded.

  He fell across her, drenching her in steaming blood, and she turned her head weakly, hovering on the edge of the blackness. The last thing she saw was Benjamin Mayhew and Captain Fox’s autopistol smoking in his hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Captain? Can you hear me, Ma’am?”

  The voice trickled through her head, and she opened her eyes. Or, rather, an eye. She forced it to focus and blinked dizzily at the face above her.

  A familiar, triangular jaw pressed into her right shoulder, and she turned her head to look into Nimitz’s anxious green eyes. The ‘cat lay beside her, not curled up on her in his preferred position, and he was purring so hard the bed vibrated. Her hand felt unnaturally heavy, but she raised it to his ears, and the anxious power of his purr eased slightly. She stroked him again, then looked back up at a soft sound. Andreas Venizelos stood beside Surgeon Commander Montoya, and her dapper exec looked almost as worried as Nimitz had.

  “How am I?” she tried to ask, but the words came out slurred and indistinct, for only the right side of her lips had moved.

  “You could be a lot better, Ma’am.” Montoya’s eyes sparked with anger. “Those bastards damned near killed you, Skipper.”