In Enemy Hands

been home in the Star Kingdom on the staff of one of the major base hospitals, or else assigned to one of the lavishly equipped hospital ships which accompanied the Fleet Train. Some flag officers might have wondered why he wasn't in one of those other pigeon holes and been leery about accepting his services lest they discover there was a reason no one else had wanted him. But Honor had known Montoya for over twelve T-years... and knew he'd spent the time since they'd last served together systematically avoiding the promotion to captain which would have pulled him out of regular fleet deployments and seen him assigned to one of those base hospitals or hospital ships. She doubted he'd be able to avoid that fourth cuff ring much longer, but in the meantime she'd grabbed him and had no intention of letting him go, whatever BuPers might want. In addition to being (as she could attest from painful personal experience) one of the finest doctors around, he was a friend. And his Medical Branch commission meant he stood outside the normal chain of command, which gave him a certain detached perspective she'd found useful in the past.

The extremely young lieutenant commander who accompanied Montoya onto the bridge was the final Manticoran-born member of Honor's staff. His third cuff ring was so new it still squeaked, but Honor had known Scotty Tremaine since he was an ensign, and despite her ingrained distaste for anything that resembled favoritism, she'd done her best to shepherd his career. It was part of the payback she owed the Navy for the officers like her own first captain and Admiral Courvosier who'd shepherded her career, and she knew all about the skilled professional who hid behind his irrepressible surface persona. She'd been glad to get him as her staff electronics officer, although she knew he'd had a few reservations about the job, not about serving on her staff, but about the position itself. First and foremost, Tremaine was a small craft specialist who felt most at home as a boat bay officer or in charge of flight ops for a LAC squadron. That was where he was most comfortable and where he would really have preferred to remain... which was one reason Honor had picked him for his new job. It would do him good to stretch his mental muscles and push him into something beyond his beloved small craft. The experience would stand him in good stead down the road, just as his quick mental agility would stand him, and Honor, in good stead as they worked together to establish the exact parameters of his position's responsibilities.

They wouldn't be the only RMN officers working on that particular problem, and Honor knew some of the others were going to approach the concept with negative preconceptions. She understood that, but she rejected their reservations... and not simply because she'd become as much a Grayson as a Manticoran. To be sure, the notion of devoting a staff-level slot to an officer specifically responsible for coordinating an entire squadron’s or task force's electronic warfare systems, however logical, had never occurred to the RMN, which had always seen that sort of duty as one of the ops officer's responsibilities.

That was where most other navies assigned the responsibility, as well, but the Graysons, continuing their iconoclastic ways, had chosen to split the function off. They'd created the new staff position less than a T-year before, which meant it was as new in practice to Honor as to any other RMN officer, but both the Office of Personnel and Commodore Reston’s Doctrine and Training Command had put a lot of thought into it before they'd acted. She'd known they were considering it before she'd left Yeltsin to return to Manticoran service, which put her at least a little ahead of her RMN contemporaries, many of whom were still busy grumbling about newfangled notions thought up by inexperienced amateurs without the common sense to leave things alone if they weren't broken. In Honor's experience, that was usually the first response of people who clung to tradition simply because it was tradition. That would have been enough by itself to incline her to give the concept a fair try, and like quite a few of the GSN’s other heretical ideas, the arrangement appeared to be working out well in practice, a conclusion Scotty seemed to be coming to share as he settled into his new responsibilities.

As she watched, Tremaine crossed the bridge to the second youngest member of her staff. Lieutenant (Senior-Grade) Jasper Mayhew, her staff intelligence officer, was a distant relative of some sort of Protector Benjamin and only twenty-eight T-years old, with auburn hair as thick as Andrew LaFollet’s and sky-blue eyes. Despite his extreme youth, Honor was confident of his abilities, and the fact that he'd been trained by Captain Gregory Paxton, who'd held the intelligence slot on her BatRon One staff, only made her more so. Besides, he and Scotty already worked together with the smoothness of long-time cronies, and little though she might choose to admit it (at least where Tremaine could hear her) she had great faith in the electronics officers judgment.

Lieutenant Commander Michael Vorland, her staff chaplain, was the only one of her staffers who would be absent from this mornings meeting. A small, neat, balding man with gentle brown eyes and a fringe of sandy hair, Vorland actually wore antique wire-rimmed spectacles and steadfastly refused to avail himself of the corrective services available since Grayson joined the Manticoran Alliance. On the other hand, his lense prescription was modest, and Honor suspected that his refusal to discard them had less to do with old-fashioned prejudice than with preserving something which had become a part of his 'uniform' over the years. No one could have presented a milder appearance, yet his slight frame hid a surprising physical strength and he could radiate an astounding degree of sheer moral presence at need.

It was obvious that he was also aware that the Manticoran members of her staff felt a bit uncomfortable where he was concerned. The RMN had no official chaplains, and it would have been surprising if there hadn't been a certain period of... adjustment. At the same time, the Grayson Navy had never been without its chaplains, and even the most skeptical of Manticorans had to admit that a mixed squadron required a clerical presence. Honor would really have preferred to call once more on the services of Abraham Jackson, who'd served as BatRon One's chaplain, but Jackson had been detached from active duty and assigned to Reverend Sullivan's personal staff, and although Vorland was a very different man, she sensed from him the same sort of open-minded, flexible strength she'd found in Jackson. At the moment, he was somewhere in Mackenzie Steading instead of aboard Alvarez, but Honor could hardly begrudge his absence. His only son was marrying his third wife today, and Vorland would be there to perform the wedding himself.

Honor rubbed the tip of her nose slowly, contemplating the strengths, and occasional weaknesses, already emerging from her new staffers. Even the ones with whom she had served before would be performing in new roles, assuming new responsibilities and relationships with her, but so far most of the surprises had been pleasant ones, and...

She heard a sudden sound behind her, a soft, almost slithery noise, followed by the flat, slapping sound of something flexible hitting the deck, and turned her head just in time to see a husky young man grab frantically for the armload of hardcopy binders he'd just spilled. He managed to snag one of them, but the others evaded his desperately reaching hands like missiles on preprogrammed evasion courses. The noise level as they hit the deck was remarkable, and Honor pressed her lips together to keep from smiling as the youngsters face went beet- red.

The color showed very clearly, for Ensign Carson Clinkscales, her flag lieutenant, was cursed with the fair, freckled complexion that went with his dark red hair and green eyes. He was enormously tall for a Grayson, at a hundred and ninety centimeters, he was taller than Honor herself, which was a claim very few Graysons could make, but he was also only twenty-one T-years old. He never seemed entirely certain what to do with his hands and feet, and he was agonizingly aware of Honors reputation and rank... which only made his lingering, puppylike awkwardness worse. In many ways, he reminded her of young Aubrey Wanderman, a grav tech from her last ship who'd suffered from both inexperience and a massive case of hero worship. Except, of course, that Wanderman had always seemed to get things right where his job was concerned, and Clinkscales, well...

She'd never met a youngster who tried harder or applied himself more conscientiously to his duties, but if there was any way, any way at all, that something could go wrong for him it did so with an inevitability that was almost awesome. She devoutly hoped that he would outgrow his penchant for disasters, because she liked him a great deal, rather more, in fact, than she was prepared to let him guess. She'd bent one of her own rules by accepting him for her flag lieutenant, and she was determined to avoid even the suggestion that his status as Howard Clinkscales' nephew was going to buy him any favoritism. And in fairness to the youngster, he seemed to have all the right ingredients, if he could only get on top of his private jinx. Although he was the physical antithesis of Jared Sutton, her last flag lieutenant, his lingering shyness and determination to get things right, eventually, reminded her almost too strongly of Jared. She couldn't forget the way young Sutton had died, and his face wanted to superimpose itself on Clinkscales' whenever she let her guard down.

But there were no ghosts on the flag bridge just now, and she heard Venizelos chuckle, not softly, but not unkindly, either, as the ensign squatted to fumble after the binders. The chief of staff walked over to him and knelt to reach under a console for a folder which had slithered away from the main heap, then held it out with a