cthia wrote:Honor Among EnemiesShe saw Aubrey Wanderman and Rafe Cardones bent over a Tracking yeoman, hands flashing as they slapped emergency seals onto her skinsuit, and her eyes flinched away from the mangled ruin which had once been Carolyn Wolcott and Kendrick O'Halley and Eddy Howard's drifting corpse.
Ever wonder what demons are in Honor's nightmares ?...
JeffEngel wrote:
The Salamander leaves a lot of ghosts behind: most of the crews of the CL and CA Fearless; the crew of HMS Madrigal, ambushed and overwhelmed in a system she'd departed for reasons she can't quite accept in retrospect; more casualties out of HMS Nike and her brief de facto flag at Hancock Station; one man, just one, but that was Paul Tankersley, in the aftermath of Hancock; the first wall of battle of the GSN at Fourth Yeltsin, and the children - children! - murdered to smear her reputation in roles as Steadholder and entrepreneur she never wanted; the crew of HMS Wayfarer in Selker Rift; HMS Prince Adrian and too many old friends, savaged both in honest battle and under StateSec brutality; the people she couldn't save when she had to choose to save her monarchs in Yeltsin; the millions dead in the Second War she couldn't prevent or end any sooner; Andrew Lafollett, who she couldn't even get out of the line of fire in the end, not consistent with his sense of duty and love which put and kept him there in the first place; the millions she had to kill at Second Manticore. And who knows how many more who'll be dead under her command or at her orders before duty finally lets her stop killing.
It's not fair for her to blame herself for any of them, but she's got a generous sense of responsibility and it sponges up all the blood in the neighborhood.
Darn Jeff! Since you've produced a compendium of her source of demons, I'm shocked! The poor girl is suffering chronic nightmares for certain, because of the type person she is. She remembers every single life lost. There was a passage which states that Mac lived with her constant demon-nightmares as well. I wonder if they have at least subsided.
And let's not forget the Reverend Julius Hanks, who was an innocent bystander mistakenly absorbing violence meant for her.