“Ah?” Bukato cocked his head. “You sound as if you have a way to use it in mind,” he observed slowly.

“I do… maybe,” McQueen admitted. “One of the things I’ve just been reading over was the availability numbers on our battleships.” Bukato grimaced before he could stop himself, and she chuckled. “I know—I know! Every single time someone’s come up with a brilliant idea about how to use them, we’ve ended up with less battleships when the wreckage cooled. And, frankly, we lost an awful lot of them in the run up to Trevor’s Star simply because we had no choice but to commit them to defensive actions against dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts. But I was surprised to see how many we have left. If we strip the eastern sectors down to bedrock, we could assemble quite a fleet of them to support a core of real ships of the wall.”

“You’re thinking in terms of a counterattack,” Bukato said quietly.

“I am,” McQueen agreed. It was the first time she’d said a word about it to anyone, and intense interest flickered in Bukato’s dark, deepset eyes. “I’m going to keep the exact point where I want to launch it my own little secret for a while longer,” she told him, “but one of the jobs Citizen Chairman Pierre gave me was to improve the Fleet’s morale. Well, if we can knock the damn Manties back on their heels at a place of our own choosing, even if it’s only briefly, we should make a running start on that particular chore. It wouldn’t hurt civilian morale, either, and that doesn’t even count what it would do to Manty morale… or their future deployment considerations.”

“I’d certainly have to agree with that, Citizen Secretary,” Bukato said. “The tech transfers from the Solarian League have helped shake some of our people loose from their sense of inferiority, but most of them are still too defensive minded for my taste. We need more admirals like Tourville and Theisman, and we need to give them the support they require, then turn them loose.”

“Um.” McQueen nodded, but she couldn’t hide a frown of displeasure as mention of Lester Tourville and Thomas Theisman reminded her of the whole Honor Harrington episode. She saw a flicker of concern flash across Bukato’s face as her expression altered and quickly banished the grimace before he could decide it was directed at him for some reason.

And it’s not as if the affair was a total disaster, she reminded herself. You know damned well Ransom was going to purge Tourville and his entire staff—if not Theisman as well—for trying to protect Harrington from StateSec. At least the paranoid bitch managed to get her worthless ass killed before she did any more damage to the Fleet! And it also means I don’t have to fight her tooth and nail over every tiny move I make, either. On the other hand, StateSec is treating Tourville and his people as if they were the ones who killed her! Count Tilly’s been back from Cerberus for almost four months now, and her entire crew’s still sequestered while Saint-Just’s security goons “investigate” the episode. Idiots!