It was a com screen. Prince Harold's name blinked in the date/time hack in the lower right hand corner, identifying the recipient of the recorded transmission, and more than one midshipman flinched physically as he found himself staring into the vestibule of Hell.
Nike's bridge was hazed with thin smoke, eddying towards the holed bulkheads and the bottomless hunger of vacuum beyond. Electrical fires blazed unchecked, Astrogation was so much blasted wreckage, and bodies littered the deck. Edward Saganami's face was streaked with blood as he faced the pickup, and more blood coated his vac suit's right side as it pulsed from a deep wound in his shoulder. The tactical display was still up behind him. Its icons and damage sidebars and the lurid damage codes on the damage control schematic flickered and wavered as its power fluctuated. But they were still there, still showed the other battlecruiser maneuvering for the final, fatal shot Nike could no longer avoid.
"We're done, James," Saganami said. His voice was hoarse, harsh with pain and the exhaustion of blood loss, yet his expression was almost calm. "Tell the Queen. Tell her what my people did. And tell her I'm sor-"
The simulator went black. There was utter silence in the lightless auditorium. And then, slowly, one final image appeared. It was the golden cross and starburst of the Parliamentary Medal of Valor on its blue, white, and red ribbon. The same colors gleamed among the ribbons on Dame Honor's chest, but this Medal of Valor was different. It was the very first PMV ever awarded, and it hung before them for perhaps twenty seconds.
And then the lights came up once more, and Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Commanding Officer of the newly reactivated Eighth Fleet, Manticoran Alliance, looked out over the Royal Manticoran Naval Academy's four hundred and eleventh senior class. They looked back at her, and she inhaled deeply.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," she said, her soprano voice ringing out clear and strong, " the tradition lives! "
Sixty more seconds passed in ringing silence, and then-
"Dismissed, Ladies and Gentlemen," she said very quietly.
Chapter Two
She took one last look around her dorm room.
It was an absolute given that she'd forgotten something. She always did. The only question was how inconvenient/embarrassing it was going to be when she discovered what she'd forgotten this time.
She snorted at the thought, grinning as she imagined how Berry would have teased her about it. Berry insisted that Helen was the only person in the galaxy who carried her own pocket universe around with her. That was the only way she could possibly lose some of the things she managed to… misplace. Of course, Berry was almost compulsively neat in her own life, although no one ever would have guessed it from how sloppily she usually dressed. But that was only the current teenage style, Helen supposed. And, her expression sobered, it wasn't one Berry was going to be following any longer.
She shrugged, shoulders hunching as if she could somehow shake away her worry over her adopted sister. More like an adopted daughter, really, in many ways. It was silly, and she knew it. Yet somehow she'd thought she would always be the protector of the brutalized waif she'd rescued from the warrens of Old Chicago, and now… she wouldn't.
But there were always things that wouldn't happen, she told herself. Like her mother, who should have been at her graduation… and wouldn't be. She felt a familiar stab of pain and loss, and dashed away a tear. Silly that. She hadn't wept over her mother's death in years. Not because she no longer cared, but because even the most bitter wounds healed, if you lived. They left scars, but they healed and you went on. It was just the Last View, she thought fiercely. Just watching, as so many classes had, as Edward Saganami and his entire crew died to save the merchantships under their protection… and remembering how Captain Helen Zilwicki had done the same.
But that had been years ago, when Helen herself was only a child. And despite the deep, never to entirely fade anguish of it, her life truly had gone on, with other losses and other joys. If she'd lost her mother, she still had the bedrock love of her father, and now she had Berry, and Lars, and Catherine Montaigne. In a universe where it was the people you loved that really mattered, that was saying a lot. One hell of a lot , she thought fiercely.
She drew a deep breath, shook her head, and decided there was no point standing here trying to guess what she'd forgotten, or lost, or misplaced. If she'd been able to figure it out, it wouldn't have been forgotten-or lost, or misplaced-in the first place.
She snapped down her locker's lid, set the combination, and brought the built-in counter-grav on-line. The locker rose smoothly, floating at the end of its tether, and she settled her beret perfectly on her head, turned, and marched out of her dormitory room forever.
"Helen! Hey-Helen!"
She looked over her shoulder as the familiar voice called out her name. A small, dark-haired, dark-eyed midshipman bounced through the crowd headed for the Alpha-Three Shuttle Concourse like a billiard ball with wicked side spin. Helen had never understood how Midshipman Kagiyama got away with that. Of course, he was over ten centimeters shorter than she was, and wiry. Helen's physique might favor her dead mother's side of the family more than it favored her massively built father, but she was still a considerably more… substantial proposition than Aikawa. His smaller size let him squeeze into openings she could never have fitted through, but it was more than that. Maybe it was just that he was brasher than she was. He certainly, she thought, watching him move past-or possibly through-a gesticulating herd of civilian businessmen, had much more energetic elbows than she did.
He skidded to a stop beside her with a grin, and she shook her head as the daggered glares of the affronted businessmen unaccountably failed to reduce him to a fine heap of smoldering ashes.
"I swear, Aikawa," she said severely. "One of these days, somebody's going to flatten you."
"Nah," he disagreed, still grinning. "I'm too cute."
"Cute," she informed him, "is one thing you definitely aren't, Aikawa Kagiyama."
"Sure I am. You just don't appreciate cute when you see it."
"Maybe not, but I'd advise you not to count on your OCTO to see it, either."
"Not at first, maybe. But I'm sure he'll come to love me," Aikawa said cheerfully.
"Not once she gets to know you," Helen said deflatingly.
"You cut me to the quick." Aikawa pressed a hand to his heart, and looked at her soulfully. She only snorted, and he shrugged. "Worth a try, anyway," he said.
"Yeah, you can be very trying," she said.
"Well, in that case, maybe I can hide from the OCTO behind you," he said hopefully.
"Hide behind me?" Helen arched an eyebrow.
"Sure!" His eyes glinted with barely suppressed delight. "Unless… Is it possible ? Nah, couldn't be! Don't tell me you didn't know we're both assigned to Hexapuma !"
"We are?" Helen blinked. "I thought you told me last night that you had orders to Intransigent ."
"That was last night. Today is today." Aikawa shrugged.
"Why the change?" she asked.
"Darned if I know," he admitted. "Maybe somebody decided you needed a good example to live up to." He elevated his nose with a superior expression.