get away without inflicting some sort of party on you!'
'I could hope,' he mock-growled, and she laughed, then held out her hand to him. The background noise faded as he gripped it, and she glanced at the others, then looked back at him.
'Happy birthday, Captain, and best wishes from all of us,' she said simply. Someone started to clap again, but she raised her left hand in a silence-restoring gesture and went on. 'I'm certain your ship's company has its own gift for you, it better have one if it knows what's good for it!, but I brought along a little something of my own.'
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
