Stackowitz had been the first to apply the term to her. Gearman had never heard of it before. He’d been forced to look the term up to figure out what it meant, but once he had, he’d had to admit it fitted Captain Harmon perfectly. And given the unconventionality of her assignment, he mused, her command style was probably entirely appropriate. Certainly none of the by-the-book types he’d served under could have accomplished as much as she had in so short a period.

He leaned back and massaged his closed eyes while he reflected on just how much all of them had accomplished in the last five months. Captain Truman and Captain Harmon could probably have given lessons to the slave-drivers who’d built Old Earth’s pyramids, but they did get the job done. And they’d managed to build a solid esprit de corps in the process.

It was a bit confusing to have two Navy captains aboard the same ship, both in command slots, even if one of them was a junior-grade and the other a senior-grade. And it could have led to dangerous confusion as to exactly whom one was speaking to or of in an emergency, which explained why Harmon was almost always referred to as the “COLAC,” the brand-new acronym someone had coined for “Commanding Officer, LACs.” Harmon had resisted it at first, on the grounds that it sounded too much like “colic,” but it had stuck. It still sounded odd, but it was beginning to seem less so, and it certainly made it perfectly clear who you were talking about. (Ernest Takahashi’s innocent suggestion that if the Captain objected to “Commanding Officer, LACs,” they might try “Commanding Officer, Wing” instead had been rejected with astonishing speed. Even more astonishingly, the lieutenant had survived making it.)

The new title was also only a tiny part of all the adjustments and new departures Minotaur and her company had been forced to deal with. For the first time in modern naval history—the first time in almost two thousand years, in fact—the “main battery” of a unit which had to be considered a capital ship did not operate directly from that ship in action… and the ship’s captain didn’t control it. Gearman couldn’t imagine a better choice for Minotaur’s CO than Alice Truman. She had the flexibility and the confidence, not to mention the experience, to grasp the changes in the RMN’s traditional command arrangements which the introduction of the LAC-carrier implied, and he wasn’t sure how many other captains could have said the same thing. But the fact was that once Minotaur’s LACs were launched, Jackie Harmon—a mere captain (JG)—had under her command twice as many energy weapons and six and a half times as many missile tubes as the skipper of a Reliant-class battlecruiser. Not only that, but Minotaur’s only real function after launching her brood was to get the hell out of the way while Harmon and her squadron COs got on with business.

That required a genuine partnership between Truman and Harmon. There was no question as to who was in command, but Truman had to be smart enough to know when a call properly belonged to Harmon, and the two of them had worked out the CO’s and COLAC’s spheres of authority and responsibility with remarkably little friction. More than that, they were the ones who got to make up The Book on carrier ops as they went, and they’d written those spheres into it. By the time the next LAC-carrier commissioned, its skipper would already know how the areas of authority were supposed to break down.