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“Well it certainly looked like they got the point, Skipper,” Lieutenant Gearman remarked with a grin as the last of the squadron and section commanders departed. “Think any of them have figured out you slipped Commander Ashford a ringer?”

“Now when did I ever say I’d done anything of the sort, Mike?” Harmon asked her personal engineer innocently.

“You didn’t have to say a word, Skipper. Not when Ernest was grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat!”

“There’s nothing feline in my ancestry, Sir,” Takahashi objected.

“Of course not,” Commander McGyver agreed. McGyver was from Sphinx, a startlingly handsome man with platinum blond hair and a powerful physique who walked with a pronounced limp courtesy of a skiing injury which had stubbornly persisted in refusing to mend properly despite all quick heal could do. Now he smiled, even white teeth flashing in his tanned HD-star face. “Personally, I’ve always thought of you as having a bit more weasel than feline, Ernest,” he announced. “Or possibly a little snake. You know—” he raised an arm and swayed it sinuously back and forth in mid-air “—the sneaky, squirm-through-the-grass-and-bite-you-on-the-butt-when-you’re-not-looking variety.”

“I wouldn’t know about snakes, Sir,” Takahashi replied. “We don’t have them on Manticore, you know.”

“They do on Sphinx,” Stackowitz informed him. “Of course, they’ve got legs on Sphinx, and I don’t think Old Earth snakes do. Then again, Sphinx always has been noted for the… um, peculiarities of its flora and fauna.”

“And people?” McGyver suggested genially, eyes glinting at the ops officer.

“Oh, heavens, Sir! Who would ever suggest such a thing as that?” Like Takahashi, Stackowitz was from Manticore, and her expression could scarcely have been more innocent.

“Personally,” Harmon observed, dropping untidily back into her chair and sprawling out comfortably, “I’ve always figured Carroll must have met a treecat in an opium dream or something when he invented the Cheshire Cat.”

“And the lot of you are changing the subject,” Gearman pointed out. “You did have Ernest cook his software, didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” Harmon allowed with a lazy smile. Which, Gearman knew, was as close as she would ever come to admitting it.

He shook his head and leaned back in his own chair. Captain Harmon wasn’t quite like any other four-striper he’d ever met. She was at least as cocky and confident as any one of the carefully selected hotshots under her command, and she had a wicked and devious sense of humor. She also possessed a downright infectious enthusiasm for her new duties and actively encouraged informality among all her officers—not just her staff—outside “office hours.”

She should have been born two thousand years ago, he often thought, in an era when deranged individuals in flying scarves strapped on so-called “aircraft” more fragile than a modern hang glider, but armed with machine guns, and went out hunting one another. Her training techniques were, to say the least, unconventional, as her latest ploy amply demonstrated, yet she got remarkable results, and she was very consciously and deliberately infusing her personnel with what the ancients had called the “fighter jock” mentality.