CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Lieutenant Samuel Houston Webster hummed to himself as he worked his steady way through the mountain of routine signal traffic. Venerable and sacrosanct tradition required every communications officer to resent the paperwork his position entailed, but Webster was guiltily aware that he failed to measure up in that respect. There were days he resented the time it used up, yet the fact that he, alone of his ship's other officers, knew as much about Fearless's information flow as the captain tickled his ego. More than that, it was surprisingly difficult to resent anything he "had" to do for Captain Harrington.

His fingers danced over his console with practiced ease, and a small corner of his mind occupied itself with other matters even as he kept an eagle eye on the secure traffic he was breaking down into clear. The Captain was good people, he told himself. That was about the strongest accolade in his vocabulary, and very few of his superiors ever earned it. Webster wasn't vain or arrogant, but he was entirely aware that the fortunate accident of his birth meant he was almost bound to become a senior officer himself someday. As such, he'd discovered that he had a tendency to look at his superiors of the moment through two sets of eyes. One belonged to the very junior officer he was, eager to learn from their greater experience and example, but the other belonged to the future flag officer he intended someday to be, and that second set of eyes was more critical than his cheerful exterior might suggest.

He'd been very disappointed in Lieutenant Commander McKeon, for example. If anyone on board should have seen what the Captain was up to and helped her achieve it, it was her exec. But McKeon seemed to have come around, and Webster had made a very careful note of the way the Captain had avoided climbing all over him before he did. There'd been times he'd been a little upset with her for not jerking McKeon up short, but the final result she'd achieved with him had been an eye-opener.

It was funny, in a way. Captain Harrington was so quiet. The RMN had its share of characters, and Webster had known captains who could blister battle steel when they were ticked. Captain Harrington never even raised her voice, and he'd never once heard her swear. Not that her calm manner meant anyone but an idiot would ever take liberties with her. In fact, he'd been surprised to realize that her very quietness was even more effective precisely because it was so different from the fire and thunder another captain might have shown.

He admired that, just as he admired the way she maintained her distance from her subordinates, always there, always approachable, but never letting anyone forget that she was in charge. Yet at the same time, she could rattle someone's cage any time she chose—like the way she'd forced Rafe Cardones into finding the answer to that problem with the drones—and she seemed to know everything there was to know about all of them. She even knew that while Cardones liked being called "Rafe," Webster passionately hated it when people called him "Sam." He rather doubted that information was listed anywhere in their personnel jackets, and he was at a loss to figure out how she'd acquired it.

Another message flickered on his display, the jumbled symbol groups flowing magically into clear text, and he paused. His eyebrows rose in surprise, and then he began to smile as he read it through. He sat for a moment, tapping on the edge of his console in thought, then nodded to himself. This one would go into the hopper last, he decided. It was only a routine "information" message, but Webster had a keener sense than most of the infinitely polite infighting between the Navy's first families. He rather thought it would make the Captain's day—if not her week—and it would be a nice surprise to finish out the traffic.

He tapped a priority number into the terminal and brought up the next message with a grin.

Honor sat working at her own terminal in the quiet of her cabin. She'd been spending too much time in her bridge briefing room. Knowing the Captain was just on the other side of that hatch, hovering over them, could have an inhibiting effect on junior officers, and with McKeon coming around it was no longer necessary to hover. They'd made great strides over the past week and a half. Not enough to completely compensate for the time they'd lost building their professional relationship, but certainly enough to leave the day-to-day affairs of the ship completely in his hands. So she'd brought her workload "home" to deal with.

She finished Dominica Santos's weekly maintenance report, approved the suggestions the engineer and McKeon had made for dealing with several minor problems, and paused to rub her eyes. The dining cabin hatch slid open, and MacGuiness padded through it with a fresh cup of hot cocoa as if her thoughts had summoned him.

"Thank you, James." She sipped with a smile, and he smiled back.

"You're welcome, Ma'am," he said, and vanished as quietly as he'd appeared. She took another sip and set the mug aside, preparing to jump back into the minutiae of her reports, when the admittance buzzer sounded. She hit the intercom key.

"Yes?"

"Communications Officer, Ma'am," her Marine sentry announced, and she made a face. Not because it was Webster, but because it meant he was bringing her the day's routine message traffic.

"Come in, Samuel," she said, and opened the hatch.

Webster walked in with the message board tucked under his arm, came briefly to attention, and extended it.

"The—"

"—daily traffic," Honor finished for him wryly, and he smiled.

"Yes, Ma'am. No special priorities."

"Well that's a relief."

She took the board and pressed her thumb to the security panel, receipting the traffic, and wondered yet again why the Navy insisted on using up an officer's time hand-delivering a ship's routine mail. Webster could have dumped the whole thing to her terminal direct from the bridge with the press of a key, but that wasn't the way the Navy did things. Perhaps, she thought, hand delivery was supposed to insure captains actually read the stuff.

"Yes, Ma'am." Webster came back to attention, gave her another smile, and disappeared back through the hatch.

Honor sat for a moment, gazing back and forth between the message board and her terminal while she pondered which boring bit of paperwork to turn her attention to next. The message traffic won out—at least it had come from a source outside Fearless —and she drew the board towards her and keyed it alive.

The first message appeared on the built-in display, and she scanned it idly, then punched for the next. And the next.

It was remarkable what gems of information the Lords of Admiralty in their wisdom deemed it necessary for their captains to know. She couldn't quite see, for example, why the Acting Senior Officer on Basilisk Station needed to know that BuShips had decreed that henceforth all RMN dreadnoughts should trade in two of their cutters for a sixth pinnace. Perhaps it was simply easier for them to send it to all captains than go to the trouble of looking up the ones who really needed it?

Her lips quirked at the thought, and she worked her way more briskly through the traffic. Some of it was both pertinent and germane to her duties, like the specific addition of force knives to the contraband list for Medusa, and other bits and pieces were moderately amusing, yet most of it was boring in the extreme.

But then she came to the last message, and her eyes opened very wide indeed. She sat bolt upright in her chair, a corner of her eye noting the way Nimitz had risen on his padded perch to mirror her reaction, and read it a second time.

It wasn't even addressed to her, but her face blossomed into a smile and her eyes began to dance as she read it yet again. It had been copied to her for her "information," not for any required action, and she began to chuckle aloud as she recalled her earlier suspicions that someone approved of her actions. Whoever that someone was had apparently decided to give her a very broad hint of his or her approval, for there was no other conceivable reason for this to have been sent to Fearless.