Alistair McKeon knew where that would end. One of them would have to go, and it wouldn’t be the captain. Nor should it be, he told himself with scathing, inherent honesty.

He looked around the briefing room again and felt something very like panic. He could lose all this. He’d known he couldn’t hope for command of Fearless, but his own actions—and inactions—could take even this away from him. He knew it, yet knowing wasn’t enough. For the first time in his career, recognizing where his duty lay wasn’t enough for him to do it. Try as he might, he couldn’t break through his resentment and the dislike springing from it.

He felt a sudden, terrible temptation to confess his feelings and his failures to the captain. To beg her to find a way through them for him. Somehow, he knew, those dark brown eyes would listen without condemning, that calm soprano would reply without contempt.

And that, of course, was what made it impossible. It would be the final capitulation, the admission that Harrington deserved the command he had known from the start could not be his.

He ground his teeth together and stroked the cover of his memo pad in silence.

The attention signal chimed, and Honor pressed the com button.

“Communications Officer, Ma’am,” the traditional Marine sentry announced crisply, and she felt an eyebrow rise.

“Enter,” she invited, and the hatch hissed open to admit Lieutenant Samuel Houston Webster.

Honor gestured at the chair across her desk from her, and Nimitz sat up on his hindquarters with a welcoming “bleek” as the gangling lieutenant crossed the day cabin to take it. As always, the ’cat was a sure barometer of Honor’s own feelings. She despised captains who played favorites among their officers, but if she’d been the sort to let herself do things like that, Webster would have been her choice.

Of all Fearless’s officers, he was the most cheerful and seemed least wary of his captain. Or, she thought wryly, perhaps he was simply less worried about being splattered by Admiral Hemphill’s evident displeasure with the said captain. He was a young, overly-tall redhead who seemed to have too little meat on his bones, but he was also very, very good at his job—and a third cousin of the Duke of New Texas. Honor often felt ill at ease with subordinates from such rarefied aristocratic heights, but no one could feel that way around Webster, and she gave him a slight smile as he sat.

To her surprise, he failed to return it. In fact, his homely face (dominated by the craggy Webster chin) wore an expression of acute unhappiness as he laid a message board on the blotter.

“We’ve just copied a dispatch from the Admiralty, Ma’am,” he said. “Orders to a new station.”

Something about the way he said it—and the fact that he’d brought it in person instead of sending it by messenger or over the intercom—filled Honor with dread. She schooled her features into calm interest and picked it up, then bit her lip in dismay as she scanned the display and the brief, terse directive.