“Of course, Captain.”

“Thank you. I’ll see you then.” She nodded and left the bridge without a backward glance.

Chapter Two

HONOR Harrington sighed, leaned back from the terminal, and pinched the bridge of her nose. No wonder Admiral Courvosier had been so vague about the refit. Her old mentor knew her entirely too well. He’d known exactly how she would have reacted if he’d told her the truth, and he wasn’t about to let her blow her first cruiser command in a fit of temper.

She shook herself and rose to stretch, and Nimitz roused to look her way. He started to slither down from the padded rest her new steward had rigged at her request, but she waved him back with the soft sound which told him she had to think. He cocked his head a moment, then “bleeked” quietly at her and settled back down.

She took a quick turn about her cabin. That was one nice thing about Fearless; at less than ninety thousand tons, she might be small by modern standards, but the captain’s quarters were downright spacious compared to Hawkwing’s. Still small and cramped in planet-side eyes, perhaps, but Honor hadn’t applied planetary standards to her living space in years. She even had her own dining compartment, large enough to seat all of her officers for formal occasions, and that was luxury, indeed, aboard a warship.

Not that spaciousness made her feel any better about the ghastly mutilation Hephaestus was wreaking upon her lovely ship.

She paused to adjust the golden plaque on the bulkhead by her desk. There was a fingerprint on the polished alloy, and she felt a familiar, wry self-amusement as she leaned closer to burnish it away with her sleeve. That plaque had accompanied her from ship to ship and planet-side and back for twelve and a half years, and she would have felt lost without it. It was her good luck piece. Her totem. She rubbed a fingertip gently across the long, tapering wing of the sailplane etched into the gold, remembering the day she’d landed to discover she’d set a new Academy record—one that still stood—for combined altitude, duration, and aerobatics, and she smiled.

But the smile faded as she glanced through the open internal hatch into the dining compartment and returned to the depressing present. She sighed again. She wasn’t looking forward to that dinner. For that matter, she wasn’t looking forward to her tour of the ship, after what she’d found locked away in her computer. The happiness she’d felt such a short time ago had soured, and what should have been two of the more pleasurable rituals of a change of command looked far less inviting now.

She’d told McKeon she meant to study the ship’s books, and so she had, but her main attention had been focused on the refit specs and the detailed instructions she’d found in the captain’s secure data base. McKeon’s description of the alterations was only too accurate, though he hadn’t mentioned that in addition to ripping out two-thirds of Fearless’s missile tubes, the yard was gutting her magazine space, as well. Missile stowage was always a problem, particularly for smaller starships like light cruisers and destroyers, because an impeller-drive missile simply had to be big. There were limits to how many you could cram aboard, and since they’d decided to reduce Fearless’s tubes, they’d seen no reason not to reduce her magazines, as well. After all, it had let them cram in four additional energy torpedo launchers.