Honor placed the message board carefully on her desk and tried not to giggle. She hated the way she sounded when she giggled, but this time she couldn’t help it. She rose, still snickering like a naughty schoolgirl with a secret, and reached out to scoop Nimitz off his perch. She held him at arm’s length, and the treecat chittered with his own equivalent of a giggle as she whirled him in circles about the cabin.

“Well, that’s that, Sir.” PO Harkness scrubbed sweat from his forehead with a grubby handkerchief, then returned it to his coveralls’ forearm pocket.

“It is, indeed,” Ensign Tremaine agreed. He kneaded his stiff back muscles with one hand and wondered if it would be beneath an officer’s dignity to do a little brow-mopping of his own.

“Thanks, Mr. Tremaine.” Gunny Jenkins—for some reason known only to Marines, the senior Marine noncom on any ship was always called “Gunny,” even when, like Jenkins himself, he was a company sergeant-major—wasn’t even sweating, Tremaine noticed with some resentment. Jenkins made one last eyeball check of the empty suits of battle armor webbed into the pinnace’s cargo bay, made a notation on his memo board, and closed the bay hatch.

“You’re welcome, Gunny,” Tremaine replied. Harkness was silent, eyeing the Marine with an air of infinite superiority, and Jenkins replied by ignoring the burly petty officer entirely.

“That just leaves the ammo pallets for Pinnace Two,” Jenkins went on cheerfully as the three of them headed down the access tube from the pinnace airlock, and Tremaine swallowed a moan. He’d been hoping to leave that till next watch, and the look on Harkness’s face said he’d hoped the same thing. The ensign started to object, then bit his lip. No one could have called Jenkins’s expression a smirk, exactly, but it certainly came close. Perhaps, Tremaine thought, PO Harkness had a point where Marines were concerned… not that he intended to give Jenkins the satisfaction of hearing him say so. Instead—

“Of course, Gunny,” he said even more cheerfully. “If you’ll step right this way? PO?”

“My pleasure, Mr. Tremaine,” Harkness said sourly, and Jenkins waved for his work party to fall in astern as they headed across the boat bay towards the stacked pallets.

· · • · ·

“—so the pinnaces are combat-loaded if we have to drop them.”

McKeon finished his report and switched off his memo pad, and Honor nodded. It was late, by Fearless’s clock. The remains of supper lay on the snowy tablecloth between them, and Nimitz was still busy with his own plate at the table’s far end. She crossed her legs and watched his needle-sharp teeth remove the flesh from a Sphinxian tree-hopper drumstick with surgical precision as she toyed with a fork. It was remarkable, she thought for the thousandth time, how neat his table manners were where anything but celery was concerned.

“I think we’re about as ready as we’re going to get, then,” she said finally.

“I only wish we knew what we’re ready for,” McKeon agreed a bit sourly, and she gave a faint smile.