The thoughts flickered through her brain while the door was still opening, but she let no sign of them touch her expression. She intended to ask a few discreet questions to confirm her suspicions first. Of course, if she did find out that he’d been diverting calls, they were going to have to have one of their periodic little talks.

Not that she expected it to do a great deal of good. They never had before, after all.

I may not have Mac or Miranda along, but I’m sure both of them would approve of the way Andrew’s taken over to mother-hen me for all of them, she thought wryly, and held out the tie.

“Help,” was all she said, and then raised her chin so he could loop the ridiculous thing around her neck and knot it for her. I should have insisted that Henri make this thing a clip-on, whatever Andrew and Solomon had to say about it, she thought darkly, and waited patiently while LaFollet worked.

“There, My Lady,” he said after a moment, and folded her collar down and buttoned it for her, as well.

“Thank you,” she said, and returned to the bedroom for her tunic. She supposed there was no real reason she had to be properly uniformed in the middle of the night, but she refused to come running in half-dressed and out of breath. She’d always felt that taking the time to present the proper appearance was an important leadership function, however trivial it might seem to others. It was one way of demonstrating one’s composure, a sort of subliminal statement of an officer’s ability to exert control over the situation around her which her subordinates absorbed through their mental pores without really thinking about it. Or even if they did think about it and recognized it as a bit of subtle psychological warfare on their CO’s part.

Of course, it was also true that she sometimes wondered how much of her belief in the importance of a proper appearance stemmed from personal vanity, she admitted with a small smile.

She collected her gold-braided Grayson cap from the top of her dresser, settled it on her head, and held out her arm to Nimitz. The ’cat still couldn’t leap to it as he once would have, but he managed to walk up it to the crook of her elbow. She knew he felt her desire to pick him up like a kitten to make it easier on him, and she tasted the soft undercurrent of his gratitude when she refrained.

“Ready, Stinker?” she asked, and he nodded again, this time with an ear-flick of agreement.

“Good,” she said, and headed back out the door to her waiting armsman.

“Good morning, Admiral,” Harriet Benson said formally as Honor walked into the Styx command center. Honor glanced at the time and date display and grinned wryly.

“I guess it is,” she agreed, and Benson chuckled.

The blond captain did a lot more of that since they’d taken Styx… and even more since the courts-martial, Honor thought, trying not to feel bitter about it. It was hard, sometimes, and she knew she’d made it harder by establishing from the outset that she personally would review and confirm every sentence handed down by the tribunal. It had never been easy for her to accept responsibility for death, yet confirming those verdicts was her responsibility. She could have avoided it legally, but not if she’d wanted to live with herself afterwards. Which was perverse of her, she thought mordantly. Surely she’d assumed “responsibility” for deaths enough by now! Yet it sometimes seemed to her that she would never escape that crushing weight—that her life had made her the very Angel of Death. Wherever she went, it followed, among her own people as well as the enemy, and there were times the memory of all her dead ambushed her with crushing force in her dreams.