“There’s still too much crap to be hosed out of the stables,” she told him wryly, and he shrugged.

“That’s as may be, but I tend to doubt that you cut yourself this short on sleep at the front.”

She grunted like a moderately irate boor in acknowledgment of a direct hit. But there were major differences between running the Republic’s entire war office and commanding a front-line fleet. A fleet commander could never be positive when an enemy task force might suddenly appear out of hyper and come slashing in to attack her command area. She always had to be alert, ready for the possibility and with enough reserve energy in hand to deal with it. But a secretary of war was weeks behind the front line. By the time a decision was bucked all the way back to her, there was seldom any point in shaving a few minutes, or hours—or even days—off her response time. If the problem was that time-critical, then either the people at the front had already solved it, or else they were dead, and either way, there was damn-all she could do to reassemble Humpty-Dumpty from here. No, McQueen’s job was to provide general direction, select officers she thought had the best shot at carrying out the missions assigned to them, pick the targets to aim them at, and then figure out how to keep those homicidal idiots at StateSec off their backs and get them the material support they needed while they got on with said missions. If she could figure out, in her copious free time, how to rebuild the Navy’s morale, offset the technological inferiority of its weapon systems, magically replace the dozens of battle squadrons it had lost since the war began, and find a way to divert Manty attention from taking the rest of the Republic away from the Committee of Public Safety, that was simply an added benefit.

She smiled wryly at the thought, tipped her chair back, and folded her arms behind her head as she regarded Bukato with bright green eyes. She was still getting to know him—Rob Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just hadn’t been so foolish as to let her shake up the existing chain of command by handpicking her senior subordinates herself—but they worked well enough together. And as his teasing tone had just indicated, he appeared to have begun feeling reasonably comfortable with her as his boss. Not that anyone would be stupid enough to let any discomfort with a superior show in the current People’s Republic. Especially when that boss was also a junior member of the Committee of Public Safety.

“I probably should try to keep more regular hours,” she agreed, unfolding one arm long enough to run a hand over her dark hair. “But somehow or other, I’ve got to get a handle on all the problems my predecessor let grow like weeds.”

“With all due respect, Citizen Secretary, you’ve already cut through more of the undergrowth than I would have believed possible a few months ago. That being the case, I’d just as soon not see you collapse from overwork and leave me with the job of breaking in still another Secretary of War.”