“Hmmmm.” Tremaine rubbed his chin. “That’s true enough. We could lay off flight paths to cover this entire hemisphere, couldn’t we? And that would free us up to cover the other side of the planet.” He nodded slowly, eyes narrowing in thought, and Harkness nodded back.

“This, PO,” the ensign said judiciously, “bears thinking on. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Sir,” Harkness said, and Tremaine headed back to the cockpit and the pinnace’s com.

Lieutenant Commander Santos stepped into the briefing room and paused behind the captain’s chair. Honor was busy perusing the latest data on planetary power usage and didn’t hear her come in, but she looked up at the sound of a sudden, juicy crunch.

Nimitz’s buzzing purr confirmed her suspicions, and she shot a humorous glare at Santos as she saw the celery stalk clutched in the treecat’s right true-hand. Nimitz’s carnivore fangs weren’t designed for vegetable matter, despite his tree-dweller origins. Treecats were the top of Sphinx’s arboreal food chain, preying on the smaller vegetarians and omnivores who inhabited their domain, and his needle-sharp teeth shredded the celery into stringy green strands—wet, stringy green strands—as he chewed.

Santos gave her a half-apologetic glance as she watched the ’cat make a blissful mess, and Honor shook her head.

“You know that stuff’s bad for him, Dominica,” she chided.

“But he likes it so much, Skipper,” Santos excused herself.

“I know he does, but he can’t metabolize it—not fully, anyway. He’s got the wrong enzymes. It just fills him up, and then he picks at his supper.”

Nimitz paused in his chewing. His vocal apparatus might be utterly unsuited to anything resembling human speech, but he understood a surprisingly large vocabulary, and he’d heard this particular speech from his person too often over the years. Now he gave her a disdainful glance, flirted his tail, and rose on his rear feet to rub his head against Santos’s arm, making his views on the subject abundantly clear. The engineer was his favorite among Fearless’s officers—probably, Honor reflected darkly, because she always had a stash of celery somewhere about her person these days—and Santos grinned down at him.

“Well,” Honor sighed finally, “I guess I should be used to it. The little devil always finds someone to pander to his vices.”

“He is kind of cute, isn’t he?” Santos agreed. She gave the ’cat an affectionate chin rub, then sank into an empty chair at the table, and Honor smiled. She was, she reflected, a terrible sucker where people with a kindness for treecats were concerned.

“You wanted to see me about something?” Santos asked after a moment.

“Yes.” Honor tapped her data display with a stylus. “I’ve been looking at Barney’s figures on probable power usage. They seem awfully vague to me.”

“Well, it’s not an easy thing to quantify, Skipper.” Santos ran her fingers through her hair and frowned thoughtfully. “He doesn’t have very solid data on what they’ve got to use their power on, so his people have had to make a lot of WAGs.” Honor raised an eyebrow, and Santos grinned. “That’s a technical term we engineers use. It means ‘Wild-Assed Guess,’ ” she explained. “They can feed in some hard figures from outside observation—things like exterior lighting, com traffic, and heat exchangers—but without complete specs on an enclave’s interior hardware, they’re shooting in the dark. Just knowing whether or not a given set of people remember to turn the lights off when they leave the room could throw any estimate off by a pretty wide margin.”