Which was too bad, Honor thought with a crooked grin, because Harkness wasn’t going away. The senior chief might not have a commission, but he’d been doing his job considerably longer than Honor had been doing hers. Besides, after the better part of seven months crawling around inside Camp Charon’s computers, Harkness knew them better than anyone else on Hell—including the SS personnel Honor and her people had taken them away from. If any emergencies came up, she wanted the best person for the job—which meant Harkness—there to handle it.

“I understand, Commander,” she said now, silently scolding herself for judging Phillips overly harshly. After all, they were from different navies, and it was as unrealistic for Honor to blame Phillips for having different traditions and expectations as it would have been for the commander to hold the same thing against Harkness. “I’ll be there shortly. Harrington, clear.”

She killed the com and reached for the bedroom light switch, and excitement burned within her.

Honor missed James MacGuiness even more than usual as she dressed. The fact that she had only one hand made things awkward at the best of times; when she tried to hurry herself, it only got worse. And what made her particularly irritated with herself was that she knew it did… and tried to rush herself anyway.

Nimitz chittered in amusement at the taste of her emotions, and she paused to shake a fist at him, then resumed her efforts more deliberately. She knew LaFollet, for one, thought she was foolish not to have selected another steward from among the prisoners her people had liberated, and she more than suspected that several of her senior officers agreed with him. McKeon certainly did, although Honor regarded Alistair’s judgment as just a little suspect where the concept of her “pushing herself too hard” was involved. More than that, however, she knew most—not all certainly, but most—of the enlisted or noncommissioned personnel she might have chosen would have been delighted to fill the role for her.

Yet despite her frustration with things like fastening the waist of her trousers one-handed, or sealing the old-fashioned buttons the GSN had insisted on using for its uniform blouses—and which Henri Dessouix, after discussions with LaFollet, had insisted with equal stubbornness upon using in the name of “authenticity”—she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was foolish, and she knew it, which only made her even more stubborn about refusing. But she simply couldn’t.

Rear Admiral Styles was one reason, and she grimaced even now as the thought of him flickered across her brain. He continued to feel she had improperly usurped the authority which was rightfully his. And however inept he might be as a tactician or strategist (and she was coming to suspect that her original caustic estimate of his probable capabilities in those areas had been entirely too generous), he was obviously a genius at bureaucratic infighting. He reminded her irresistibly of a plant Grayson’s original colonists had, for reasons none of their descendants could imagine, brought with them from old Earth. The vine, called kudzu, made an excellent ground cover, but it was almost impossible to get rid of, grew with ferocious energy, and choked out all competing flora with ruthless arrogance. Which was a pretty fair metaphor for Styles.