In Enemy Hands

It'd be nice, sometimes, she reflected, if Mac could just figure out that I'm not a child he has to keep an eye on all the time. I got along without him for forty years, after all, and I really can take care of myself! She felt a stir, small but stubborn, of guilt at the thought and grimaced at her mirrored image. All right, so I wouldn't want to take care of myself, but honestly! There are times I could cheerfully strangle him.

'Look,' she said finally, turning to face him. 'There are two reasons you're not coming. First, seating's too limited on the flight over to fit you in. Second, and more to the point, we'll be going aboard Prince Adrian as Captain McKeon’s guests, and if I tried to bring you in to supervise, his steward would be just as ticked off as you'd be in his place. And I might point out that I'm only going to be gone for about eighteen hours. Whether you believe it or not, Mac, I am capable of looking after myself for that long!'

Her dark brown eyes held his, touched with a twinkle but stern, until his gaze dropped. He looked down at his toes for a moment, then cleared his throat.

'Yes, Ma'am. I, um, didn't mean to suggest you weren't.'

'Oh yes you did,' Honor retorted, the twinkle in her eyes more pronounced, and he grinned sheepishly. 'That's better!' She punched him lightly on the shoulder, then scooped up Nimitz. 'Now, having just informed you that I can manage on my own, am I presentable enough to avoid embarrassing you in public?'

'You look just fine, Ma'am,' MacGuiness assured her, but he also reached out to twitch her tunic collar a bit more perfectly into position and brushed an imaginary speck of lint from her 'catless shoulder. It was Honors turn to grin, and she shook her head as he stepped back. Then she led the way into her day cabin and ran a critical eye over the trio of armsmen who would accompany her aboard Prince Adrian.

As expected, they were perfectly turned out. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless had been with Honor ever since her formal investiture as Steadholder Harrington, and although Robert Whitman had become the third man of her regular security detail little more than a year and a half ago, following Eddy Howard's death in HMS Wayfarer's final battle, LaFollet had hand-picked him for the slot. Whitman was well aware of that fact, and, if possible, he was even more brightly shined and sharply creased than either of his seniors, but all three of them would sooner be gnawed to death by Grayson neorats than let their appearance embarrass their Steadholder, and she nodded in satisfaction.

'Very nice, gentlemen,' she complimented them. 'Even you, Jamie. I don't think I'd be ashamed to be seen in public with any of you.'

'Thank you, My Lady. We did try,' LaFollet replied with straight-faced, exquisite politeness, and she chuckled.

'I'm sure you did. Got the package, Bob?'

'Yes, My Lady.' Whitman held up a small, brightly wrapped box, and she nodded once more.

'In that case, gentlemen, let's be about it,' she said.

The other pinnace passengers were waiting in Boat Bay Two when she arrived. At Honor's request, Alvarez was skipping formal honors, so there was no official side party, but Captain Greentree had come down to see them off.

'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