Yang saw the flicker of awareness in his eyes, but she had no intention of indicating that she had, for she’d long since decided Thornegrave needed regular stroking to keep him off her back. It wasn’t even really because he was StateSec, either. She’d had regular Navy superiors who were just as compulsive about controlling everything and everyone around them, and she sometimes wondered if that sort of personality was what had propelled them to senior rank in the first place.

Of course, she didn’t dare forget his SS connections for a moment, either, and he’d seen to it that she hadn’t. The one good thing about her current assignment was that there was no people’s commissioner attached to her staff. The downside of that was that the reason for it was that she was, in effect, simply attached to Thornegrave’s staff, which left him filling the role of watchdog himself. Worse, the Longstops couldn’t climb above the delta bands (which was why no Navy officer would have even considered using them to deliver so many troops so close to the front line of a serious war), so the piddling little 33.75 light-year-voyage from Shilo to Cerberus had required over two hundred and ninety-five hours, base-time. Relativity had reduced that to just under ten days subjective at the transports’ best speed, but that had still given him entirely too much time to make himself totally unbearable. Of course, she thought moodily, a man with his immense native talent could have done that in just a few hours. Nine days had simply given him the time he needed to achieve complete artistry.

But they were coming up on Cerberus at last, thank God. She could at least hope that the chance to boss around more of his red-coated SS minions would distract him from badgering her for the next couple of days. On the other hand, we’re scheduled to ship everyone on board and be out of here within seventy-two hours, and it’s going to take us over five and a third T-weeks subjective to reach Seabring. She shuddered at the very thought, but shuddering wouldn’t change anything.

“The actual translation from hyper to n-space is quite visually spectacular, Sir,” she went on in her most pleasant voice. “Have you ever had the opportunity to observe it?”

“No. No, I haven’t,” Thornegrave replied after a moment.

“If you’d like a ringside seat for it, Sir, you can watch the main plot here on Flag Bridge. CIC will be keeping an eye out for Tactical, and I’m sure Citizen Captain Ferris will be watching his maneuvering plot carefully. But I rather enjoy watching the translation bleed myself, so I normally have the main plot configured to take a visual feed from the forward optical heads. Or you can also watch it directly with the naked eye from the observatory blister.”

Thornegrave regarded her thoughtfully. He more than half suspected she was looking for any excuse to tempt him off “her” flag bridge, but if she was she’d certainly found a bait that piqued his interest. And she had covered his ass for him with that smoothly slipped in little explanation, so he supposed he could argue that he owed her some small triumph in return. He weighed silent pros and cons for several seconds, then shrugged mentally. He had no intention of spending the next six hours standing around on Flag Bridge. Yang was going to, but it was her job to play chauffeur. In his own case, however, he could use the observation blister as an excuse to leave now, then come back several hours later to fulfill his role as the expeditionary CO without losing face.