She released McKeon's hand and reached out towards Robert Whitman. The armsman took three crisp strides forward and drew a small, gaily wrapped package from his tunic pocket. He handed it to his Steadholder with military precision, then came to attention at her shoulder. Andrew LaFollet braced simultaneously to attention against the bulkhead behind her, and the general air of festivity abruptly focused into something much more intense as Honor extended the package to McKeon.

He took it from her slowly, his expression a silent question, but she merely shook her head and gestured for him to unwrap it. Her armsmen's formality and her own change of demeanor made McKeon's nerves tingle, and he untied the ribbon and quickly ripped away the wrapping to reveal the simple black box under it. He glanced back up at Honor, then opened the box slowly and inhaled sharply. Its velvet-lined interior held a pair of RMN collar badges, but instead of the single gold planet of a captain of the list, each of them bore a pair of planets, identical to the ones on Honors collar. He stared at them for a dozen heartbeats, then shook himself and met Honor's gravely smiling eyes.

"Congratulations, Alistair," she said. "It won't be official until we return to Yeltsin, and I know it's supposed to be bad luck to let the cat out of the bag early. But the Admiralty sent out confirmation just before we sailed, and High Admiral Matthews knew I'd want to be the one to tell you, so he passed me the word. When you suffered your Environmental casualty, I decided your birthday was the perfect time to tell you."

No one else said a thing, and as McKeon felt the curiosity hovering in the cabin like an extra presence he realized that she hadn't told anyone else, either. Only her armsmen and, he looked past her at the smile on Andreas Venizelos' face, her chief of staff had known, and he swallowed hard, then turned his wrist so the others could see into the box. There was a moment of intense silence, and then the applause began.

"Congratulations, Skipper!" Commander Gillespie snatched up his glass, raising it to his captain, and other glasses rose around the table. "Hey, if they're kicking you upstairs, does this mean I get command of the Adrian?" Gillespie demanded.

"Not unless BuPers is really desperate!" McKeon growled back. Gillespie laughed, and McKeon reached into the box to brush one collar pin with a fingertip. "Me, a commodore?" He shook his head wonderingly, and Honor laid a hand gently on his arm.

"You deserve it," she said, quietly but firmly, "and I'm glad for you. Of course, this will make you awfully senior to command a heavy cruiser division, so I'll probably lose you, but I'm still glad. And given the way Eighth Fleets expanding, Admiral White Haven will probably find something for you to do without sending you home."

"I..." McKeon paused, unable to decide exactly what he'd meant to say, then reached down to put his own hand over the one on his forearm. "Thank you," he said, equally quietly. "That means a lot, coming from you."

She didn't reply, only squeezed his arm for a moment, then sat back with a smile, and he cleared his throat.

"All right, you lot! That's enough racket!" He shook his head sternly at his unrepentant juniors. "This is no way for the senior officers of a Queens ship, or their allies!, to carry on. Not only have you demonstrated unruliness and a severe case of lese majeste, but a total ignorance of proper birthday party protocol!" He swept them all with twinkling gray eyes, then pointed at the candle strewn cake. "The guest of honor is supposed to blow out his candles to begin the celebration, and unless you people get your priorities straightened back out, I won't share my cake with any of you!"

It was early the next morning by Prince Adrian's clocks when Convoy JNMTC-76 reached its next port of call. Honor had enjoyed her visit to McKeon's ship, and especially the success of her surprise party. Organizing it on such short notice without tipping off an alert skipper like McKeon had been much more complicated than her casual explanation might have suggested, and she felt rather smug at how well she'd pulled it off. But the truth was that she'd become even more spoiled than she'd realized. Alex Maybach had done his best, but she'd missed MacGuiness' unobtrusive services when she turned in after the party. She'd especially missed the rich cocoa that magically appeared just as she was getting ready for bed, regardless of how late that happened to be, and she was rather looking forward to getting "home" again once the convoy reentered normal-space and Scotty could chauffeur her back to Alvarez.

At the moment, however, she stood with Venizelos on Prince Adrian's command deck, Nimitz on her shoulder, and watched McKeon's crew prepare for translation out of hyper. Andrew LaFollet had found a corner into which to tuck himself, though he looked as if he were suffering from a touch of claustrophobia, and Honor didn't blame him. She really would have preferred to have at least McGinley present, as well, but there simply wasn't room to fit her ops officer onto the cramped bridge without getting in the way of Prince Adrian's command crew. Honor supposed she could have insisted on cramming Marcia in anyway. Some flag officers would have done so, at any rate, but without some overridingly important justification, Honor refused to crowd the people who had to be there to operate the ship, however inconvenient it was for her.

The Prince Consort-class ships like Prince Adrian were the product of a design philosophy which had been abandoned with the emergence of the later Star Knights. The Prince Consorts' original design was over sixty T-years old, dating back to the very first installment of the naval build-up Roger III had begun to counter the PRH's expansionism, and they hadn't been intended to function as flagships. Instead, in an effort to get as much firepower into space as quickly, and for as low a cost, as possible, BuShips' architects had chosen to omit a proper flag deck and all its support systems and used the freed mass to tuck an extra graser and an extra pair of missile launchers into each broadside. In fact, even their regular command decks had been built to unusually austere standards to help compensate for the increased armament and more magazine space. Instead of the extra, unused bridge volume BuShips normally allocated to new designs to provide room for the proliferation of control systems which always occurred, the Prince Consorts had been given just enough room for their original requirements. Which meant their bridges had become increasingly cramped as inevitable refits jammed in supplementary consoles and displays and panels anywhere a few cubic centimeters could be found for them.

The problem had been recognized at the time, but accepted as an unavoidable consequence of producing ships with maximum firepower for their cost and tonnage, and BuShips had projected a program which would have built the Prince Consorts in groups of seven and paired each group with a Crusader-class ship which did have a flag deck to make a full eight-ship squadron. Unfortunately, what had seemed like a good idea at the time had begun to look very different since the outbreak of the Navy's first serious shooting war in a hundred and twenty T-years.

The original Crusader building program had failed to allow for the unavoidable cycle of overhauls any warship required, with the result that at least twenty-five percent too few flagships had been allowed from the beginning, and Sir Edward Janacek's decision to cut funding for the Crusaders by over seventy percent during his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty had only made bad worse. But Janacek had viewed the Navy's proper role as anti-piracy patrols and defense of the Manticore Binary System itself. Anything more "aggressive" than that had clashed with his Conservative Party prejudice against "imperialist adventures" which were likely to "provoke" the People's Republic, and he'd regarded the deployment of cruiser squadrons to distant stations as the precursor to the gunboat diplomacy he rejected.

One way to hamstring such deployments was to cut down on the number of available flagships, which was precisely what he'd done, although he'd been careful to make the Crusaders' higher cost per unit his official reason. During his tenure, more than half the Navy's total cruisers had been tasked for solo operations chasing pirates on distant stations (for which no command ships were required), and most of the remainder had been concentrated in one spot and attached to Home Fleet, where only a limited number of flagships were needed. As a result, the implications of the shortage of Crusaders had gone largely unobserved at the time.

That, unfortunately, was no longer true. Janacek had been out of office for eleven T-years now, but the pernicious effects of his funding decisions lingered on. Numerically, the Crown Princes were the largest single class of heavy cruisers in the RMN’s inventory, yet their lack of squadron command facilities severely limited their utility. The fact that the bigger, less numerous Star Knights' flag accommodations forced the Admiralty to keep tapping them for the detached command roles the Crown Princes couldn't fulfill properly also meant that the newer ships had suffered higher proportional losses. Prince Adrian and her sisters tended to stay tethered to task force and fleet formations, where someone else could provide the space for a commodore or admiral and her staff. That meant they were normally found in company with ships of the wall, whereas the Star Knights, exposed on frontier and convoy deployments without capital ship support, were much more likely to find themselves engaged with fast battlecruiser/cruiser-level raiding forces. And, of course, every Star Knight lost to enemy action or sent to the yard by battle damage reduced the supply of command ships by yet another unit.

There wasn't actually all that much to choose between the individual offensive power of the two classes, which, given the difference in their tonnages, only went to prove that even the Star Knights' design was less than perfect. Powerful as the Star Knights were, too little of their volume was allocated to offensive systems, in Honor's opinion, and too much was used on defense, probably as a reaction against the perceived shortcomings of their predecessors.

The newer class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts, and BuShips fully recognized the need for a better balance between offense and defense. Unfortunately, the need for cruiser flagships meant the yards were churning out Star Knights as quickly as they could, given the limited amounts of space which could be diverted from capital ship construction for any sort of cruiser, and that had significantly delayed introduction of the new Edward Saganami-class ships. The Saganamis, ten percent larger than the Star Knights and designed to take full advantage of the Navy's current battle experience and to incorporate the best balance of Grayson and Manticoran concepts, should have entered the construction pipeline over three T-years ago, but BuShips had decided it couldn't afford to divert building capacity to a new class (which, undoubtedly, would have its own share of production-oriented bugs to overcome) when the need for volume production was so acute. And so the Star Knights continued to be built to a basic design which was now eighteen years old. To be sure, their design had been on the cutting edge when it was finalized, and, like the Prince Consorts, they had been materially upgraded since, but even with as heavy a refit schedule as deployment pressures would permit, the class was losing its superiority over the Peeps.

In a way, Honor thought, standing to one side while she watched McKeon’s bridge crew, that illustrates the entire problem Earl White Haven and I... disagreed over. (She was slightly, and pleasantly, surprised to feel only the smallest twinge as she thought about the earl.) We've still got the tech edge on a ship-for-ship, ton-for-ton basis, but it's shrinking. We can't afford that, but unless we can somehow find a way to break the traditional building patterns, our advantage is going to continue to erode. It won't be anything dramatic or obvious in the short term, but in the long term...

She gave herself a mental shake and commanded herself to stop woolgathering and pay attention as Lieutenant Commander Sarah DuChene, McKeon’s astrogator, completed her final course adjustments and looked at her captain.

"Ready to translate in eight minutes, Sir."

"Very good. Communications, inform the flagship," McKeon said.

"Aye, aye, Sir. Transmitting now." Lieutenant Russell Sanko, Prince Adrian’s com officer, depressed a key to send the stored burst transmission. "Transmission complete, Sir."

"Thank you. Very well, Sarah. The con is yours."

"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the con. Helm, prepare to translate on my command."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Standing by to translate," the cruisers helmswoman replied.

Honor walked quietly over to stand beside McKeon’s command chair, careful to stay out of his way but placed to watch his repeater plot more comfortably, and he looked up to give her a small smile. Then he turned to Lieutenant Commander Metcalf.

Honor nodded to herself as he and the tac officer began a quiet discussion. Unlike her flagship, Prince Adrian had no internal FTL transmitter. The technology hadn't existed when she was built, and finding room to retrofit the impeller node modifications required to project the gravity pulses upon which the system relied would have required complete rebuilding, not just a refit. Any ship could use its standard gravitic detectors to read an FTL message (assuming it knew what to look for), and Prince Adrian’s recon drones, built to a more modern design than their mother ship and with enormously smaller impeller nodes, mounted less powerful transmitters for long-range reconnaissance missions. But the ship's onboard transmission capability was limited to light-speed, which meant that, since Alvarez was still nine light-minutes astern of Prince Adrian in hyper-space (which translated to an n-space distance of almost nine light-days), the message Sanko had transmitted would take approximately six minutes to reach the flagship, during which Alvarez and her charges would continue to advance through hyper at sixty percent of light-speed (which translated to an apparent velocity of 2,500 c in normal-space terms). The main body of Convoy JNMTC-76 would reach the point at which Prince Adrian had translated into n-space seven minutes after that, but rather than follow McKeon immediately out of hyper, the other ships would decelerate to zero and wait another two hours before beginning their own translations. The delay was designed to give Prince Adrian time to sort out her sensor picture and move far enough in-system to be sure no nasty surprises awaited them.

That precaution was almost certainly unnecessary here, and some convoy commanders would have skimped on it, but the safety of those ships and all the people and material aboard them was Honor's responsibility. Time wasn't in such short supply that she couldn't afford to spend a couple of hours insuring against even unlikely dangers, and McKeon’s quiet double-checking of his tactical sections preparations with Metcalf showed that he shared her determination to do things right.

"Translation in one minute," DuChene announced, and Honor felt a shared, unstated tension grow about her. No hardened spacer ever admitted it, but no one really enjoyed the speed at which warships routinely made transit from hyper. Prince Adrian wasn't contemplating a true crash translation, but she'd translate on a steep enough gradient to make every stomach aboard queasy, and her crew knew it.

"Translating... now!" DuChene said crisply, and Honor grimaced and gripped her hands more tightly together behind her as the bottom dropped out of her midsection.

"Hmmm... ."

Citizen Commander Luchner, executive officer of PNS Katana, looked up at the soft, interested sound from his tactical section. Citizen Lieutenant Allworth was hardly in the same league as Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville’s new tac witch, yet, but he was learning from her example. For that matter, so was Luchner. Katana had been part of the citizen rear admiral's task group for almost a year, and that task group had done well, by the Peoples Navy's standards, during that period. But Foraker, now... She'd brought something new, an almost innocently arrogant confidence, to the task group, and it seemed to be contagious.

Luchner hoped so, anyway, as he watched the citizen lieutenant make very slow and careful adjustments at his panel. Allworth’s eyes were rapt, focused on his readouts with unusual intensity, yet that wasn't particularly noteworthy. The tac officer managed to find something to interest him on any given watch. But he seemed to be taking longer than usual to decide that he'd picked up some natural phenomenon, and Luchner walked over to stand beside him.

"What?" he asked quietly.

"Not sure, Citizen Exec." Allworth might be emulating Citizen Commander Foraker's professional competence, but he had no intention of imitating her occasional, dangerous lapses into counterrevolutionary forms of address. Not until my reputation is as good as hers, anyway! he thought absently. "It could be nothing... but then again, it could just be a hyper footprint."

"Where?" Luchner asked more sharply.

"About here, Citizen Exec," Allworth said, and a tiny icon appeared on his plot. It was a good nineteen light-minutes away along the periphery of the G0 primary's twenty-two-light-minute hyper limit, and Luchner frowned. That was too distant for Katana's onboard sensors to have detected, but Allworth continued speaking before he could object. "We've got it on our number eleven RD," he explained.

"And what, pray tell, is one of our recon drones doing over there?" Luchner asked.

"Citizen Captain Turner asked us to take that side of Nuada's zone, Citizen Exec," Allworth replied respectfully. "Her main gravitic array was already down, and now her secondary array's developed some sort of glitch. Her engineers have shut down most of her normal passive sensors while they try to sort things out, and she's relying solely on RDs until they can figure out what the problems are. But trying to cover her entire zone with drones would overload her telemetry section. Until she gets her sensor glitches straightened out, she can't cover more than two-thirds of her assigned area, so I told Citizen Captain Turner we'd take the rest for him."

Luchner frowned so darkly that Allworth had to fight an urge to quail. Not that the citizen exec doubted the explanation. Katana and Nuada had worked together to nab a pair of Manty destroyers and a single fast, independently routed freighter since the task group had taken Adler, and Turner's ship had lost two-thirds of her primary sensor suite during the pursuit of the second destroyer. Such equipment failures were less uncommon in the People's Navy than they ought to have been, especially when undertrained maintenance staffs were handed new systems to look after when they still hadn't fully mastered the old ones. Turners engineers had promised then to fix whatever had gone wrong, but now it appeared Nuada had been even unluckier and lost her secondaries, as well. Luchner had no doubt that Turners engineers would solve their problems, eventually, but he also knew it was going to take them longer than it should have.

Their shortcomings weren't really their fault, of course. Every line officer knew that rushing replacements, especially replacements drawn from the Dolists' ill-educated ranks, through the training schools in half of what prewar standards had established as the minimum time meant the newbies had to pick up their real training on the job.

Unfortunately, the political establishment didn't want to hear about that. Given the Navy's heavy losses in combat, the people's commissioners assigned to supervise the Admiralty's manpower programs had no choice but to find recruits anywhere they could and then push them through training as rapidly as possible. But they had their own heads to worry about, and admitting they were sending out insufficiently trained personnel might bring StateSec sniffing around them. Which meant that trying to defend Nuada's lack of progress to higher authority would probably be pointless. It probably also meant that Turner had asked Allworth, very indirectly and discreetly, of course, not to mention the breakdown to anyone else. And the reason Nuada had asked for help rather than trying to rely solely on her own recon drones to make up the difference was equally easy to understand. The Mars-class cruisers had given up almost a third of the telemetry capacity of the older Swords in part exchange for their superior electronic warfare capabilities, and Nuada simply couldn't operate sufficient drones to cover her entire zone of responsibility without the backup of her shipboard systems.

Luchner understood that, and he had no objection to helping to cover a colleagues ass. After all, it might be his posterior next time. No, his frown arose from another consideration, and he raised one eyebrow as he glowered down at the citizen lieutenant.

"I see. And did you, perhaps, inform myself or Citizen Captain Zachary that Katana was assuming this additional responsibility?"

"Uh... no, Citizen Exec." Allworth blushed. "I guess I forgot."

"You 'forgot,' Luchner repeated, and Allworth's blush darkened. "It failed to occur to you that we might like to know about it? Or, for that matter, that the Citizen Captain and I are legally responsible for your actions?"

"Yes, Citizen Exec," Allworth admitted miserably. He obviously wanted to lower his eyes to his display to avoid his superiors stern expression, but he made himself meet Luchner’s gaze. The citizen commander regarded him coldly for several more seconds, but beneath his baleful exterior, Luchner was pleased by the youngster's refusal to flinch, and, after a moment, he reached out and rested a hand on Allworth's shoulder.

"Citizen Commander Foraker is an outstanding tac officer," he said, and allowed himself a small smile. "You could do a lot worse for a model. But do try to stay in touch with the rest of the universe better than she does, Citizen Lieutenant. Do you read me?"

"Yes, Citizen Exec!"

"Good." Luchner gave the younger man's shoulder a squeeze. "Now tell me about this possible contact."

"It translated into n-space just outside the hyper limit eight minutes ago, Citizen Exec... assuming it is a contact. It's hard to be sure that far from the drone."

The citizen lieutenant paused, and Luchner nodded his comprehension. The PN's drones weren't as good as the Manties', with a maximum passive detection range of no more than twelve to fourteen light-minutes, depending on the strength of a target's emissions, and a maximum telemetry range of ten light-minutes. Because of that, they were normally deployed at ranges of no more than seven or eight light-minutes, which limited their mother ships' sensor reach to twenty light-minutes or so, but got the data on FTL sources (like the gravitic energy of an impeller wedge or a hyper translation) to the combat information center quickly. In this case, Allworth had deployed the drone at the very limit of the telemetry links to take up the slack for Nuada, but even so, the possible contact was near the edge of the drones envelope.

"If it's headed for Samovar," Allworth went on, "the geometry of its vector is going to take it out of the drone’s reach without its ever coming close enough for us to get any sort of a mass estimate from its impeller signature."

"Hm." Luchner rubbed his chin for a moment. "Assume that it is a contact and that it's headed in-system. Who'd be in the best position to intercept?"

"Normally, I'd say Nuada, Citizen Exec, but the sensor snafu would make things tough for her. The contacts barely sixty-six million klicks from her, but its also smack in the middle of the area we're watching for her. Without her gravitic array, she probably hasn't picked up a thing, and if it's headed for Samovar, it's accelerating almost straight away from her. She could probably run down a merchant ship, but even if she cuts her pods loose, just about any kind of warship should have the accel to stay away from her with the kind of head start this one will have."

"Which means we probably can't intercept in the outer zone," Luchner observed. "Which leaves Dirk."

"Yes, Citizen Exec," Allworth confirmed, and Luchner frowned again as he digested the information.

Technically, what happened in Nuada's zone was her responsibility. Katana had her own sector to look after, and if she horned into someone else's interception problem and things went wrong, Luchner, or, rather, Citizen Captain Zachary, would make a convenient scapegoat. But Luchner possessed information Citizen Captain Turner didn't have, and that imposed a responsibility that cut across technical lines of authority. Or it did in Citizen Admiral Tourville’s command, anyway, and Luchner rubbed his chin gently as he made himself look at the situation through Tourville’s eyes.

The task group had too few ships to set up complete coverage, so Shannon Foraker had created a layered ambush to cover most likely arrival vectors. Anything that came in somewhere else would probably escape, but anything that translated back into n-space on a logical course would find evasion a much tougher proposition. So far the task group had managed to run down everyone who'd arrived in Adler since the system's change in management, though Nuada's hardware glitches threatened to throw a spanner into the works now. Luchner hoped that wouldn't come home to haunt Turner and his crew, but he made himself set that thought aside while he considered how the intercept effort was most likely to develop.

Like Katana, PNS Dirk, the ship responsible for the middle interception zone in Turner’s sector, was one of the older Sword-class ships. That was why the ops plan relegated her to the inner, less risky station and assigned the bigger Nuada to play the role of beater, closing in from three and a half light-minutes beyond the hyper limit to cut any target's retreat. The Mars class were expected to come as a nasty surprise to the Manties: almost as large as some of the PN's prewar battlecruisers, they took full advantage of the improved EW systems the Navy had acquired from its contacts in the Solarian League... and by reducing magazine space they'd also managed to pack in nearly twice the broadside of a Sword-class ship but gave up less than twenty gravities in maximum acceleration to do it.

But however powerful Nuada was, her hardware faults meant she didn't know what Katana had just discovered. Without that knowledge, she wouldn't leave her station to pursue the possible contact, which would leave Dirk to cope with whatever it was on her own, and that could be bad. Not only could she find herself outclassed in a single-ship action, if in fact the contact was a Manty warship, but unlike Katana, the ships in the inner zone relied on the outer pickets to pick up incoming traffic. That meant Dirk would have deployed neither RDs nor missile pods.

"What's the current com delay to Nuada?" he asked after a moment.

"Twenty-two minutes, Citizen Exec."

"And the range from the target to Dirk?"

"Approximately eighteen-point-three light-minutes." Luchner nodded again, then walked back to the command chair at the center of the bridge. He leaned over without seating himself, punched a com key, and waited until the small screen flicked alight with the image of Citizen Captain Helen Zachary. A moment later, the screen divided neatly in half down the center as Citizen Commissioner Kuttner dropped into the circuit. "Yes, Fred?" Zachary said.

"We've got a possible contact in Nuada's sector, Citizen Captain," the exec replied. He summarized Allworth's report, then went on, "With your permission, Citizen Captain, I'd like to alert Nuada and Dirk for an Alpha Intercept. We're only fifteen light-minutes from Dirk, so our transmission should reach her long before a ship accelerating after translation enters her sensor range, and if Nuada cuts her pods loose and goes to max accel as soon as she gets the word, she should have a pretty fair chance of intercepting the bogey if it tries to break back out across the limit. But since she will have to leave her pods behind to have a shot, I'd also like to alert Raiden and Claymore to support her and Dirk in case this is a battlecruiser or something even heavier."

"Hm." Zachary scratched the tip of her nose. "How much delay would we build in if we simply alerted Turner and let him handle it?' she asked. She and Luchner both already knew the answer to that; she was asking it only to be sure the answer was officially on record before they stuck their necks out.

"Nuada's about twenty-two light-minutes from us and eighteen from Dirk," Luchner replied. "It would take Turner at least forty minutes from the moment we send him the alert to pass it on to Dirk, and another two minutes to hit Raiden and Claymore. If we pass the word to the others at the same time we inform Nuada, we'll cut a minimum of thirteen minutes off the time for every one of the other ships, but our current geometry will let us take a full nineteen minutes off the time for Dirk."