“We’ve had the better part of two whole weeks since Hauptman’s visit with no alarms and excursions at all,” she pointed out.

“Which only makes me think something extra nasty is sneaking up on us.” McKeon sighed, then produced a wry smile of his own and stood. “Well, whatever happens will happen, I suppose, Ma’am. Good night.”

“Good night, Mr. McKeon.”

He gave her a small nod, and she watched him leave. Quite a change there, she told herself with undeniable satisfaction. Quite a change.

She stood herself and reached for the sadly depleted bowl of salad. Nimitz’s head came up instantly, his green eyes bright, and she smiled.

“Here, Greedy Guts,” she told him. She handed over the celery stalk and turned towards her private head. She could already feel the luxury of a long, hot shower.

The raucous sound of a buzzer woke her.

Honor’s eyes popped open as the buzzer snarled a second time. She was a heavy sleeper by nature, but her first tenure in command of a Queen’s ship had changed that, and Nimitz complained sleepily as she sat up quickly. The ’cat half-slid and half-rolled down into her lap from his favorite sleeping perch on her chest, and she set him gently aside with one hand as she turned and punched the com key with the other.

The buzzer stopped snarling at her acknowledgment, and she ran her hands quickly through her short hair. That was one advantage of wearing it like a man. There was no point pretending she was a beauty, anyway, and at least this way she didn’t have to waste time making it look pretty when someone woke her in the middle of the night. She snatched the kimono her mother had given her for her last birthday from the bedside chair and slipped into it, then hit the com key a second time, accepting the call with full vision.

The screen was painfully bright in the dark cabin. It was also a split-image conference call, and Dame Estelle looked out of one side of it. Fearless had adjusted her shipboard day to match that of the Government Compound, and like Honor, Matsuko wore a robe over her nightclothes, but Barney Isvarian was in uniform in the other half of the image. Honor saw Surgeon Lieutenant Montoya, her own assistant physician, behind him and recognized the antiseptic cleanliness of one of the NPA’s native clinics in the background.

“Sorry to wake you, Honor, but it’s important.” The commissioner sounded almost frightened, and Honor sat straighter as she finished belting her kimono.

“What is it, Dame Estelle?”

“Two pieces of information. One came in two days ago, but it was so vague I decided to sit on it a while before I passed it on to you. Barney just screened me with the second, and it changes the one I already had.”

Honor nodded and cocked her head, inviting the commissioner to continue.

“I had a visit from Gheerinatu, one of the Medusan nomad clan chiefs, Wednesday,” Matsuko said. “He doesn’t like the Delta city-states any better than any other nomad, but we helped his clan out two years back. Given the weather here, the nomads tend to migrate from hemisphere to hemisphere—or at least to the equatorial zone and back—with the seasons, but Gheerinatu’s clan got caught in an early storm while it was crossing the Delta. We pulled most of his clansmen and about half their herds out of a flash flood with NPA counter-grav just before they all drowned, and that makes us friends of his.”