“I’ll try to bear that in mind,” she said dryly, and smiled at him. Yet even as she smiled, that hidden part of her brain wondered where his personal loyalties lay. It was damnably hard to tell these days… and critically important. On the surface, he was as hardworking, loyal, and reliable a subordinate as a woman could ask for, but surface impressions were dangerous. In fact, his apparent loyalty actually made her uneasy, for she was perfectly well aware that most of the officer corps regarded her as dangerously ambitious. She didn’t blame them for that—since she was ambitious—and she normally managed to win over her direct subordinates despite her reputation. But it usually took longer than this, and she couldn’t help wondering how much of his seeming ease with her was genuine.

“In the meantime, however,” she went on, letting her chair snap forward and reaching out to rest one hand on the heap of data chips on her desk, “I still have to get the overall situation and its parameters fixed in my mind. You know, I’m still more than a little amazed to discover how true it really is that the people at the sharp end of the stick are too close to the shooting to see the big picture.”

“I know.” Bukato nodded. “Of course, it’s also true that the COs at the front usually do have a much better grasp of their own separate parts of the ‘big picture.’ ”

“You’re right there,” she agreed feelingly, remembering her own mammoth frustration—and fury—with her superiors when she’d been the one fighting desperately to hang onto Trevor’s Star. “But the thing that surprised me most was that the Manties aren’t pushing any harder than they are. Until I got a chance to review these—” she tapped the data chips again “—and realized just how thinly stretched they are.”

“I tried to make that same point to Citizen Secretary Kline before his, um, departure,” Bukato said. “But he never seemed to grasp what I was trying to tell him.”

He slid his own chip folio into her In basket, walked over to the chair facing her desk, and cocked an eyebrow in question, and McQueen nodded for him to be seated.

“Thank you, Citizen Secretary,” he said, folding his long, lanky body into the chair, then leaned back and crossed his legs. “I have to admit,” he went on in a much more serious tone, “that was one reason I was glad to see you replace him. Obviously, the civilian government has to retain the ultimate authority over the People’s military forces, but Citizen Secretary Kline didn’t have any military background at all, and sometimes that made it a bit difficult to explain things to him.”

McQueen nodded. Privately, she was more than a little surprised by Bukato’s willingness to say anything that could be taken as a criticism of the former citizen secretary. To be sure, Kline’s removal from office was a sign he’d fallen out of favor, but Bukato had to be as aware as she was that StateSec must have bugged her office, and anything that even hinted that a senior officer harbored doubts about or contempt for a political superior could have dire consequences. Of course, he had covered himself with his pious observation about civilian authority, she reminded herself.