"We won't be gone all that long, Thomas," she told him, shaking his hand.

"Of course not," he replied. "Anyway, I imagine I can mind the store for a few hours without you, My Lady."

"I imagine you can," she agreed. "Even if I am stealing your exec."

"That may make it a little harder, but I'm sure I'll survive," Greentree said dryly, and Commander Marchant smiled. He'd become much more comfortable with Honor in the last five T-weeks, as he and Greentree worked with her and her staff. Greentree’s role as Honor's tactical deputy placed an even larger than usual share of the responsibility for managing Alvarez on Marchant's shoulders, and with Honors strong approval, the flag captain had deliberately involved him in as many staff meetings as possible, as well. If anything happened to Greentree, Marchant would inherit his squadron responsibilities along with command of the flagship, and it was highly unlikely that there would be time for Honor to explain her policies or operational postures to her new flag captain if that happened. She'd been pleased by Greentree's determination to keep Marchant clearly in the picture in order to minimize the chance for confusion in such a catastrophic event, and Marchant's enforced contact with her had also given her the opportunity to evaluate his skills. She was pleased by what she'd seen... and also by the opportunity it had given her to make it clear that she didn't hold his distant relatives treason against him. He'd responded by developing not only a sure grasp of the squadron's operations but a strong personal sense of loyalty to her, as well.

"I'll try to have him home before he turns into a pumpkin," she promised Greentree now, and released his hand. Then she turned to the personnel tube and reached for the grab bar. LaFollet and her other armsmen followed immediately behind her, and were trailed in turn by Andreas Venizelos and the other members of her party, in descending order of seniority.

She swam down the tube, then swung herself gracefully into the pinnace’s internal gravity and nodded to the burly, battered-looking flight engineer.

"Good morning, Senior Chief," she greeted him.

"Morning, Ma'am," Senior Chief Harkness rumbled back. "Welcome aboard."

"Thank you," she said, and twitched the hem of her tunic straight as she headed down the aisle to her seat. Horace Harkness was more than a little senior for his present duty, but she'd known he'd be here, given who was on the flight deck.

She set Nimitz in the seat beside her and strapped herself in, then looked back over her shoulder at the rest of her party. There were quite a few of them, and Honor allowed herself a rare, lazy smile which not even Nimitz could have bettered. Poor Alistair, she gloated. If I've managed even half as well as I think I have, he doesn't have a clue what's really coming! But then her smile faded a bit. There was a downside to her arrangements, after all, for the news she had for McKeon was going to make things harder for her down the road. She knew it, yet that inconvenience paled beside her anticipation of his expression when she told him. Besides, he had it coming.

She chuckled at the thought while she watched the others settle into the truncated passenger compartment. As she'd told MacGuiness, seating was limited, for the pinnace was heavily loaded with cargo, in this case, consigned to Prince Adrian's engineer. One of the cruisers air scrubbers had failed, reducing her life-support capacity by ten percent, and although McKeon's ship had enough spares to rebuild the scrubber from scratch, if necessary, the job would take over a week without yard support. No one looked forward to the amount of sheer grunt work involved, but that was a relatively minor concern beside the lost capacity the scrubber represented. Taking it off-line had reduced Prince Adrian's environmental safety margin by thirty-three percent, and no starship skipper wanted to operate with that little reserve for an entire week if it could be helped.

And as it happened, this time it could be helped. Prince Adrian carried sufficient spare parts to repair the scrubber, but the newer, bigger Alvarez turned out to have three complete backup scrubbers tucked away in her capacious Engineering spaces. Exactly where Alvarez's chief engineer had acquired the third one (which put her above establishment) was something of a mystery, and Lieutenant Commander Sinkowitz had been a bit vague when discussing the subject, but Honor was used to the way odds and ends of extra equipment had a habit of turning up aboard ship. Alvarez's higher-volume scrubbers weren't exact matches for Prince Adrian's, but they were close enough that one of them could be adapted to replace the failed unit. Swapping them out would save at least eight days and a lot of sweat, and Greentree had offered to trade McKeon the complete scrubber for the spare parts the Manticoran ship would have used for repairs.

McKeon had been grateful for Greentree’s offer, and local hyper-space conditions had made the transfer practical, although the transport window would be brief. They were just over five days out from Clairmont, and they happened to be under impeller drive at the moment, transiting between two grav waves, which made small craft traffic practical. But the transition to the grav wave which would carry the convoy the rest of the way to its current destination would take only another two hours, after which the ships would be required to reconfigure their drives from impeller mode to Warshawski sails. Since nothing smaller than a starship mounted Warshawski sails, no small craft would be able to move between ships again after that until the convoy reentered n-space.

The Grayson and Manticoran navies shared Edward Saganami's dictum that time, as the single absolutely irreplaceable commodity any fleet possessed, was never to be wasted. Greentree and McKeon had set briskly to work to transship their engineering stores within the window they'd been offered, and when Honor had heard about it, she'd taken the opportunity to transship herself and several members of her staff, as well. Discussions with her staffers over the past two days had led her to approve a few small but significant alterations to the squadrons tactical planning, and she wanted to sit down with her second-in-command to discuss them in person. Even if she hadn't been a firm believer in face-to-face discussion, the com lag imposed by Prince Adrian's lead position would have made any sort of electronic conference impractical. And while she supposed she could have waited until they reached Adler, she had her own ulterior motive for paying a visit to Prince Adrian right now, instead. Besides, as much as she and Greentree had grown to like one another, she suspected her flag captain would feel a certain relief to have her out from underfoot for a few hours.

She was impressed by how swiftly and smoothly Alvarez's boat bay officer had coordinated the transfer, but the scrubber was big enough (and awkwardly enough shaped) that he'd been forced to close off the after two-thirds of the pinnace's modular interior to free up the cargo space to accommodate it. That had also required him to remove the seating which usually occupied that space, of course, and accounted for the cramped personnel area which had been Honors excuse to leave MacGuiness behind.

Even without the steward, seats were at a premium. In addition to the precious scrubber unit, Sinkowitz was sending along a half dozen of his own people to assist Lieutenant Commander Palliser, Prince Adrian's chief engineer, in the job of installing it. That used up a third of the available places, and Honor had quickly filled the rest. Besides her armsmen, Commander Marchant, and Venizelos, she was bringing along Fritz Montoya, Marcia McGinley, Jasper Mayhew, Anson Lethridge, and Scotty Tremaine, and she'd added Carson Clinkscales almost as an afterthought. Her flag lieutenants performance had improved markedly over the past three weeks. He remained an accident looking for a place to happen, but he was learning to anticipate and minimize disasters... and to cope with the embarrassment when they happened anyway. Yet that was when he was among superiors he'd come to know, and she'd decided it would do him good to spend a few hours with strangers. His confidence had grown steadily aboard Alvarez, and if his improved efficiency survived the visit to a new environment, it would do his overall self-image a world of good.

Besides, when it came to the ostensible purpose of her visit, Carson's inclusion was at least as logical as Montoya's. After all, there was no practical reason for the squadron's senior medical officer to sit in on a discussion of tactics... even if he did happen to be an old personal friend of Prince Adrian's CO.

The last of the passengers found a seat, and Harkness sealed the hatch. He consulted the telltales carefully, then spoke into the boom mike of his headset.

"All secure aft," he announced to the cockpit.

"Thank you, Chief," Scotty Tremaine’s voice replied. "Disengaging tube and umbilicals now."

The pinnace's hull transmitted indistinct thuds and bangs to its passengers as Tremaine unhooked from Alvarez's systems, and Harkness watched his readouts.

"Green board," he informed Tremaine after a moment. "Clear to undock."

"Undocking," Tremaine said crisply, and the mechanical docking arms retracted as Honors electronics officer drifted the pinnace free of the bay on reaction thrusters.

Honor watched through the view port, smiling at her reflection in the armorplast as the brilliantly illuminated boat bay slid away from her. At least fitting Scotty aboard hadn't been a problem. He'd made it respectfully but firmly clear at a very early date that staff officer or no, he would permit no one else to serve as Honor's small craft pilot. Given protocol's dictate that Honors seniority meant she couldn't fly herself, she was more than willing to let Tremaine have his way, since he happened to be one of the five or six best natural pilots she'd ever seen. But he and Harkness came as a matched set, so letting him onto the flight deck had also made it inevitable that the senior chief would be aboard as her flight engineer. Precisely how Harkness managed to manipulate BuPers in order to turn up wherever Tremaine went remained one of the unexplained mysteries of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Honor wasn't about to attempt to get to the bottom of it, either. They were far too useful a pair for her to risk jinxing the magic.

The pinnace cleared the bay, and Alvarez dropped her impeller wedge long enough for a stronger kick from the pinnace's thrusters to carry it beyond its own wedge's safety perimeter. Tremaine brought his drive up quickly and smoothly, transitioning from thrusters to impellers, and the pinnace accelerated away from the flagship at well over four hundred gravities. Alvarez's wedge snapped back up behind her, and Honor leaned back in her seat as Tremaine steadied down to overtake Prince Adrian.

The flight would require the better part of the available two hours, for a pinnace's particle shielding limited its top speed to little more than 22,500 KPS more than a merchantman could pull here, and McKeon’s ship was almost nine full light-minutes ahead of Alvarez. Deep down inside, a part of Honor still resented the fact that she'd had to put someone else in that exposed position, but she'd had plenty of time to learn to accept it. Besides, she knew her resentment was silly. It was her job to command the squadron, just as it was Alistair's job to take the point position, and that was that.

Now she leaned back in her comfortable seat, one hand rubbing Nimitz’s ears while the 'cat purred contentedly in her lap, and watched the eerie, beautiful depths of hyper space flicker beyond her view port's thick armorplast.

"So what did you think of my girls' and boys' ideas?" Honor asked, raising an eyebrow at her host as the lift carried them smoothly up-ship towards his dining cabin. Prince Adrian's design was over sixty years old, one consequence of which was that her lifts were more cramped than those of newer ships, and Honor's staffers and McKeon's exec had decided with silent tact to let their seniors have the first car to themselves. Well, to themselves and Honor's armsmen, which was as close to 'to herself' as she was likely to come ever again.

"Impressive. Very impressive," McKeon replied. "That's some particularly nice work on the EW side from Scotty, and your McGinley’s done an excellent job integrating his deception plans with the extra reach of our new passive systems, too. Of course," he added in an elaborately casual tone, "we won't be able to make maximum use of either of those until we get our hands on some of the new missile pods."

"New pods?" Honors brows came back down, not in a frown, but rather in the absence of one, and her voice was cool. "What new pods would those be?"

"The low-image, top secret, burn-before-reading-classified pods with the new long-ranged, multiengined missiles," McKeon replied patiently. "You know, the ones you helped write the final specs on while you were at the WDB? Those pods."

"Oh," Honor said expressionlessly. "Those pods. And just how, Captain McKeon, do you happen to know 'those pods' even exist, much less who wrote the specs?"

"I'm a captain of the list," McKeon explained. "But back in my lowly days as a mere commander, I just happen to have been assigned to field-testing the original FTL drones' utility for light units back before the war. Playing test bed was my first big job with Madrigal, remember? And I'm still tapped into BuWeaps and BuShips. As a matter of fact, I'm still on Admiral Adcock's short list for operator input."

"His 'short list?" Honor repeated. "I didn't know he had one."

"He doesn't, officially. But the Admiral's always been a little leery of giving the back room types too free a rein. He likes to run their concepts by line officers he's worked with before and whose judgment he trusts. Nobody gets a peek unless they're cleared to whatever classification level a given proposal's been assigned, but we're outside the official loop. Which means, since no one with the WDB will ever see our reports, that we can speak frankly without worrying about retaliation."

"I see."

Honor gazed at McKeon thoughtfully. Vice Admiral of the Green Jonas Adcock, the Bureau of Weapons' commanding officer, was one of the RMN's characters. He was also one of the Navy's very few senior officers who had never received prolong, for he and his family had immigrated to the Star Kingdom from Maslow, a planet as technically backward as Pre-Alliance Grayson. Adcock had been too old to accept prolong when he arrived, but there hadn't been anything wrong with his brain. He'd graduated eighth in his Academy class, despite not having encountered a modern educational system until he was nineteen T-years old, and his career had been distinguished. Now, at an age of just over a hundred and fourteen, he was far too physically frail ever to hold a spacegoing command again, but there was still nothing wrong with his brain. He'd taken over BuWeaps eleven years before, just in time for the war, and he'd been an aggressive dynamo ever since. Indeed, he was probably the largest single reason that rationalized versions of the jeune ecole's proposals were beginning to come off the drawing boards as useable hardware.

Honor had enjoyed several far-ranging discussions with him while she'd been assigned to the Weapons Development Board, and she'd been impressed by his ability to think outside the boxes. She also liked and respected him, and, looking back with the advantage of what McKeon had just said, she realized he'd picked her brain on current operational problems even more thoroughly than she'd realized at the time. But he'd never suggested that he maintained an unofficial network of evaluators.

On the other hand, she'd been a member of the Board herself during their talks, and from what McKeon was saying, the admiral had taken pains to keep the WDB’s members from realizing that he was using line officers to critique their proposals before he signed off on them. Which, she admitted to herself, was probably wise of him, given the egos of some of the officers who'd served on the Board. Sonja Hemphill came to mind, for "Horrible Hemphill" would have been furious to find that her proposals were being independently evaluated (or, as she would no doubt have phrased it, "second-guessed") by her juniors, no matter how experienced those juniors might be. Honor wasn't certain that Hemphill would have taken overt revenge upon any junior officer rash enough to object to one of her pet projects, but the jeune ecole's leader would never, ever, have forgiven the officer in question. And other officers Honor had known most certainly would have punished any outside, unofficial evaluator who disagreed with them.

"Were you cleared to tell me about this?" she asked after a moment, and McKeon shrugged.

"He never told me not to, and I'll be very surprised if you don't start hearing from him yourself, now that you're off the Board. From what he said to me before Adrian pulled out of Manticore for Yeltsin, you really impressed him. In fact..." McKeon grinned "...he sounded a mite perplexed over how you landed on the Board in the first place. He's fond of mangling an old clich

"Am I to understand," Honor said, once she was certain she could keep her voice steady, "that he regards the WDB as somewhat less than effective?"

"Oh, no! Not the Board," McKeon assured her. "Only the officers who keep getting assigned to it. But you, of course, are the exception that proves the rule."

"Of course." Honor regarded him sternly for several seconds, then shook her head. "He should never have encouraged you," she observed. "You were quite bad enough before you had friends in high places."

"Like you, Your Ladyship?" McKeon’s obsequious tone would have fooled anyone who didn't know him. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless, who'd been with Honor long enough to realize that McKeon was one of her two or three closest friends, were sufficiently accustomed to his sense of humor to take it in stride. Whitman, however, had never met the captain before, and Honor felt her newest arms-man's immediate, instinctive flash of anger at McKeon’s familiarity. But she also felt him get that anger under control almost instantly as he took his cue from his fellow armsmen and Honor herself, and she smiled at him before she glanced back at McKeon and grimaced.

"Maybe in Yeltsin," she told him, only half humorously, "but it might not be very smart to let too many people back in the Star Kingdom know we're friends. I haven't been entirely rehabilitated yet, you know."

"Close enough," McKeon said, and his voice was suddenly serious. "Some idiots will always listen to assholes like Houseman or the Young’s, but the people whose brains still work are starting to figure out that your personal enemies are a batch of..."

He bit off whatever he'd been about to say, but his expression was so disgusted, and angry, that Honor reached out and rested a hand on his shoulder.

"You're probably not the most unprejudiced judge of them," she replied in a tone whose lightness fooled neither of them, "but I like your evaluation. And Nimitz certainly agrees with you."

"An excellent judge of men, and women, is Nimitz," McKeon observed. "I always said so."

"He just likes you because you slip him celery."

"Why not? How could anyone who doesn't recognize a deeply sincere bribery attempt when he sees one possibly be a good judge of character?" McKeon grinned at her, and she shook her head sadly.

"And to think," she sighed, "that the Lords of the Admiralty saw fit to make someone of your dubious moral character a Queens officer."

"But of course, Milady!" McKeon said, grinning even more broadly as the lift came to a halt. "Surely you didn't think Nimitz was where I started bribing people, did you?"

The lift doors slid open, and Honor and McKeon headed down the passage, walking side by side and laughing while her armsmen brought up the rear.