over the goddamn place with that piece of shit! It's a damn miracle you didn't kill one of us!'
She gave the linked drive units a furious kick to emphasize her point. Unfortunately, she failed to allow for the low grav conditions, and the result was more prat fall than intimidating. She sent herself flailing through the air towards the center of the passage, where she landed flat on her posterior on the decksole, without even budging the drive units, none of which did a thing for her temper. It did, however, have the effect of infuriating the missile tech even further, and he unbuckled from his push-pull and shoved himself off the saddle with obviously homicidal intent. One of the male Engineering ratings moved to intercept him, and things were headed rapidly downhill when Honor reached out for one of the bulkhead handrails and brought herself to a semi-floating stop.
'Belay that!'
Her soprano was very little louder than normal, yet it cracked like a whip, and the disputants' heads snapped around in sheer surprise. Their surprise only grew when they saw the fuzz-haired midshipwoman who had produced the order.
'I don't know who did what to whom,' she told them crisply while they gawked at her in astonishment, 'and I don't really care. What matters is getting this mess sorted out and getting you people to wherever it is you're supposed to be.' She glared at them for a moment, and then jabbed a finger at the senior Engineering rating. 'You,' she told the woman. 'Chase down those loose crates, get them back on the pallet, and this time get them properly secured! You and you -- ' she jabbed an index finger at the other two members of the work party ' -- get over there and give her a hand. And you,' she wheeled on the missile tech who had just begun to gloat at his rivals' stunned expressions, 'get that push-pull back under control, tighten the grav-collars on those missile drives before they fall right out of them, and see to it that you stay in the right heavy tow lane the rest of the way to wherever you're going!'
'Uh, yes, Ma'am!' The missile tech recognized command voice when he heard it, even if it did come from a mid–shipwoman who looked like someone's preteen kid sister, and he knew better than to irritate the person who had produced it. He actually braced to attention before he scurried back over to the bundle of drive units and began adjusting the offending counter-grav collars, and the Engineering working party, which had already come to the same conclusion, spread out, quickly corralling their scattered crates and stacking them oh-so-neatly on their pallet. Honor stood waiting, one toe tapping gently on the decksole while Nimitz watched with interest from her shoulder and the errant ratings -- the youngest of them at least six standard years older than she -- gave an excellent imitation of small children under the eye of an irritated governess.
It took a remarkably short time for the confusion to be reduced to order, and all four ratings turned carefully expressionless faces back to Honor.
'That's better,' she told them in more approving tones. 'Now I suggest that all of you get back to doing what you're supposed to be doing just a little more carefully than you were.'
'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' they chorused, and she nodded. They moved off -- far more sedately than before, she suspected -- and she resumed her own interrupted trip.
That went fairly well, she told herself, and continued her progress along Axial One, unaware of the grinning senior chief who had arrived behind her just in time to witness the entire episode.
'So, Shellhead,' Senior Master Chief Flanagan said comfortably, 'what d'you think of this helpless bunch of Momma's dirtside darlings now?'
'Who, me?' Senior Chief Shelton leaned back in his own chair, heels propped on the table in the senior petty officers' mess, and grinned as he nursed a beer stein. Not many were permitted to use that nickname to his face, but Flanagan had known him for over twenty standard years. More importantly than that, perhaps, Flanagan was also War Maid's Bosun, the senior noncommissioned member of her company.
'Yeah, you,' Flanagan told him. 'You ever see such a hapless bunch in your entire life? I swear, I think one or two of them aren't real clear on which hatch to open first on the air lock!'
'Oh, they're not as bad as all that,' Shelton said. 'They've got a few rough edges -- hell, let's be honest, they've got a lot of rough edges -- but we're getting them filed down. By the time we hit Silesia, they'll be ready. And some of them aren't half bad already.'
'You think so?' Flanagan's eyebrows rose ever so slightly at Shelton's tone, and the senior chief nodded. 'And just who, if you don't mind my asking, brought that particular bit of praise to the surface?'
'Young Harrington, as a matter of fact,' Shelton said. 'I came across her in Axial One this afternoon tearing a strip off a couple of work parties who'd managed to run smack into each other. 'Tronics crates all over the deck, counter-grav pallet cocked up on its side, push-pull all twisted against the bulkhead, and half a dozen missile drives ready to slip right out of their collars, not to mention a couple of ratings ready to start thumping hell out of each other over whose fault it was. And there she stood, reading them the riot act. Got their sorry asses sorted out in record time, too.'
Flanagan found it a little difficult to hide his surprise at the obvious approval in Shelton's voice.
'I wouldn't've thought she had the decibels for reading riot acts,' he observed, watching his friend's expression carefully. 'Sweet-voiced thing like that, I'd think she'd sound sort of silly shouting at a hairy bunch of spacers.'
'Nah,' Shelton said with a grin. 'That was the beauty of it -- never cussed or even raised her voice once. Didn't have to. She may only be a snotty, but that young lady could burn the finish off a battle steel bulkhead with just her tone alone. Haven't seen anything like it in years.'
'Sounds like that shithead Santino could learn a little something from his snotties, then,' Flanagan observed sourly, and it was Shelton's turn to feel surprise. In all the years he'd known Flanagan, he could count the number of times he'd heard his friend use that tone of voice about a commissioned officer on the fingers of one hand. Well, maybe one and half. Not that the senior chief disagreed with the bosun.
'Actually, I think he could learn a hell of a lot from Harrington,' he said after a moment. 'For that matter, he could probably learn a lot from all of them. If he could keep his own mouth shut long enough to listen to them, anyway.'
'And how likely is that to happen?' Flanagan snorted.
'Not very,' Shelton conceded. 'The man does like to hear himself talk.'
'I wouldn't mind that so much, if he weren't such a bastard,' Flanagan said, still with such an edge of bitter condemnation that Shelton looked across at him with the first beginnings of true alarm.
'Is there something going on that I should be hearing about, Ian?'
'Probably not anything you don't already know about,' Flanagan told him moodily. 'It's just that he's such a total asshole. Hell, you're in a better spot to see the way he treats the snotties like dirt than I am, and he's not a lot better with his own tac people. Even he knows better than to piss off a senior noncom, but he came down like a five-grav field on his yeoman yesterday, for a screw-up that was entirely his own fault. You know I've got no use for any officer who beats up on his people when he's the one who screwed the pooch. Man's the most worthless piece of crap I've seen in an officer's uniform in years, Shellhead.'
'I don't know that I'd go quite that far myself,' Shelton said in a considering tone. 'I've seen some pretty piss- poor officers, you know. Some of them could at least give him a run for his money. On the other hand, I don't think any of them were worse than he is.' He paused for a moment, and looked quizzically at his friend. 'You know, I think it's probably against Regs for two senior petty officers to sit around and badmouth a commissioned officer over their beer this way.'
'And you don't see me doing it with anyone else, do you?' Flanagan returned, then grimaced. 'Ah, hell, Shellhead, you know as well as I do that Santino is the worst frigging officer in this ship. Come on, be honest. You're worried about the way he treats the snotties, aren't you?'
'Well, yeah,' Shelton admitted. 'I see a kid like Harrington -- any of them, really, but especially Harrington -- with all that promise, and there's Santino, doing his level best to crush it all out of them. I mean, it's one thing to be tough on them. It's something else entirely to ride them twenty-two hours a day out of sheer poison meanness because you know there's nothing in the world they can do to fight back.'
'You can say that again,' Flanagan said. 'Not bad enough he's got the chain of command on his side, but they know he can flush their careers any time he damned well pleases if they don't kiss ass enough to make him happy.'
'Maybe. But I've got to tell you, Ian, I don't know how much longer Harrington's going to put up with it.' Shelton shook his head soberly. 'I had my doubts when she turned up with that treecat of hers. First time I'd ever seen one onboard ship. I figured it was bound to make trouble in Snotty Row if nowhere else, and that Harrington
