“Thank you, Exec.” She inhaled deeply, and he saw her face change. The Captain was back, settling over her bony features like a shield, and she squared her shoulders.

“In the meantime,” she said more briskly, “I’ll ask Dame Estelle if she can get Barney Isvarian up here. I want him to sit down with Papadapolous and myself to discuss these new Medusan weapons.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” McKeon stepped back, braced to attention for just an instant, and turned away. The hatch hissed closed behind him.

“There it is, Mr. Tremaine. See?”

The NPA private stepped back from the electronic glasses swivel-mounted atop the power relay on the ridge above the crater which had once housed a drug laboratory. It had taken hours to track the buried cable from the transmitter below to this point, and their real problem had started then, for the receptor wasn’t a direct space up-link, and it was omnidirectional. They hadn’t had a clue where its relay was, but now Tremaine peered through the glasses, and his face tightened as he saw the telltale roundness of a parabolic receiving dish. It was on a much higher ridge almost twenty kilometers away, but that smooth arc couldn’t possibly be a natural formation, even if it had been painted to look like the rock around it.

“I think you’re right, Chris.” He looked down at the bearing ring on the glasses’ mount, then raised his wrist com to his mouth. “Hiro?”

“Here, Skipper,” Yammata’s voice came down from the pinnace hovering overhead.

“I think Rodgers has spotted it. Take a look at that ridge to the north, bearing—” he looked back at the ring “—zero-one-eight true from this relay.”

“Just a sec, Skipper.” The pinnace shifted slightly, and Yammata came back up on the com almost instantly. “Tell Chris he’s got good eyes, Skip. That’s it, all right.”

“Good.” Tremaine gave the NPA man a tight nod of approval, then looked back up at the pinnace. “Have Ruth pick us up, and let’s get over there.”

“Aye, aye, Sir. We’re on it.”

“Major Papadapolous, Ma’am,” McKeon said, and stood aside as Captain Nikos Papadapolous, Royal Manticoran Marines, marched into Honor’s briefing room.

There could be only one “captain” aboard a ship of war, where any uncertainty over who someone was referring to in the midst of a critical situation could be fatal, so Papadapolous received the courtesy promotion to avoid that confusion. And he looked every centimeter a major, despite his captain’s insignia, like someone who’d just stepped out of a recruiting poster, as he paused inside the hatch. Barney Isvarian was a real major, but far less spruce-looking. In point of fact, he looked like hell. He’d had exactly no sleep in the twenty-nine hours since sixty-one of his best friends were killed or wounded, and Honor was fairly positive he hadn’t even changed his clothes.

Papadapolous glanced at the NPA major and clicked to attention, but there was a dubious look in his eyes. The Marine was dark, despite his auburn hair, with quick, alert eyes, and he moved with an assurance just short of cockiness and the limber power of the RMMC’s strenuous physical training program. He was probably all spring steel and leather and dangerous as a kodiak max, just like the poster said, Honor thought sardonically, but he looked like an untested recruit beside Isvarian’s stained and weary experience.