Denver Summervale
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Denver Summervale, a duelist and assassin and former captain in Royal Manticoran Marine Corps, is a fictional character in the Honorverse. He appears in the novels: On Basilisk Station and Field of Dishonor.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
For a long time The Honorable Denver Summervale was the proverbial black sheep cousin of the Manticoran Prime Minister Allen Summervale, the Duke of Cromarty. Well before attaining the rank of captain with the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps he had attained a far seedier reputation as it had been rumored by numerous sources that he was a paid duelist. Although the Code Duello is accepted in the Star Kingdom as a legal means to settle disputes, to take money and instigate conflicts with a specified mark made him little more than an assassin.
Denver Summervale's unremarkable military career in the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps ended when he finally took the life of one young Marine Lieutenant Thurston. While there was not sufficient evidence to charge him of a crime the Corps felt completely justified (and rightfully so) in cashiering him. He spent the next thirty years living on the income provided as a paid duelist, while working as a smuggler on the side, until he is recognized aboard the HMSS Hephaestus by Sgt. Major Iris Babcock, Colonel Tomas Ramirez, and Captain Paul Tankersley (a paramour of Honor Harrington's). His appearance, obviously, on a major military installation where many former colleagues of his might recognise him draws immediate red flags. His purpose there is not readily apparent until; by way of crude and slanderous insinuations about Honor Harrington's character in her actions at Hankock Station; he instigates a physical confrontation with Captain Tankersley then in "outrage" challenges him to a duel and introduces him to a Mr. Livitnikov (the reader is led to assume that he is a lawyer) who acts as Summervale's legal witness and second on the dueling grounds. Forced to accept, Captain Tankersley meets Summervale under the auspices of the Dreyfus Protocol and, after managing to wound the experienced duelist, was killed.
It is later revealed on a recording obtained by Colonel Ramirez that Summervale was hired by Lord Pavel Young through his aide Georgia Sakristos, to challenge and kill both Paul Tankersley and then, upon being in turn challenged, Honor Harrington.
Denver Summervale challenges Harrington to a duel after he is roughed up by her in Dempsey's Bar. She chooses to meet him under the rules of the Ellington Protocol, which is a surprise considering her relative lack of actual dueling experience. Despite conventional knowledge giving her little chance of defeating Summervale, Harrington makes a spectacle of the event, shooting him four times in the stomach before he has a chance to raise his gun, then finally killing him with a shot to the bridge of his nose.
