Her nostrils flared, but the commodore didn’t even notice. He just went on and on, patting himself on the back so hard she expected him to sprain his shoulder, and the corner of her mouth began to twitch.

Talk to his board members? He wanted her to talk to his board members and tell them what a stroke of genius Fearless’s refit had been?! She glared at him, sucking in breath to tell him exactly where he could put his invitation, but then a new thought struck her. She reared back to consider it, and the tick died. Her eyes began to twinkle instead of glare, and she fought back a sudden urge to giggle in his face as he slithered to a halt at last.

“Excuse me, Commodore,” she heard herself say, “but let me be sure I’ve got this straight. You want me to address an official panel of the Weapons Development Board and give them my combat evaluation of Fearless’s weapon systems?”

“Precisely, Captain!” Yerensky enthused. “Our more progressive members—the whole Navy, in fact—would be eternally in your debt. The personal testimony of an officer who’s proven their efficacy in actual combat would have tremendous weight with the more reactionary, stick-in-the-mud board members, I’m sure, and God knows we need all the help we can get. Why, some of those die-hards actually refuse to admit it was your weapons—and skill, of course—which made your victory possible!”

“Shocking,” Honor murmured. She cocked her head, and her glowing brown eyes danced while her firm lips blossomed into an immense smile. “Well, Commodore Yerensky, I don’t see how I could possibly turn your request down. It happens that I do have very strong feelings about the new armament—” her smile grew even broader “—and I’d be delighted to share them with Admiral Hemphill and her colleagues.”

Appendix

A NOTE ON TIME

Like all extra-Solar colonies, the Manticore Colony, Ltd.’s original investors found it necessary to create a new calendar to reflect the axial and orbital rotations of their new home. In their case, however, the situation was complicated by the fact that whereas most star systems are fortunate to have a single habitable world, Manticore, a GO/G5 distant binary system, possessed three of them, each with its own day and year.

As the rest of humanity, Manticorans use standard seconds, minutes, and hours, and Old Earth’s 365.26-day year serves as the “Standard Reckoning Year,” or “T-year,” the common base to which local dates throughout known space are converted for convenience in interstellar trade and communication. Like most extra-Solar polities, the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s history texts follow the convention of counting years “Post Diaspora” (i.e., in T-years from the year in which the first interstellar colony ship departed Old Earth) as well as in terms of the local calendar.

The Kingdom’s official reckoning of dates is based on the rotational and orbital periods of Manticore-A III, the planet Manticore. This calendar is used for all official records, the calculation of individuals’ ages, etc., but doesn’t really work very well for the seasons of any planet other than Manticore itself. Accordingly, both Sphinx (Manticore-A IV) and Gryphon (Manticore-B IV) have their own, purely local calendars, which means that a single star system routinely uses no less than four calendars (including standard reckoning). Needless to say, dateconversion software is incorporated into virtually every Manticoran computer.