HMS Fearless made her final heading change and settled into the groove, decelerating for a smooth orbital insertion. Honor was back on the bridge, watching Medusa swell in the visual display and feeling the change in the atmosphere about her. The apathy of their arrival here had faded, and if it hadn’t been replaced by the esprit de corps she might have wished for, her crew’s current attitude was at least a vast improvement.

The last six days had been rough for everyone… and a close approximation to Hell for some. Lieutenant Commander Santos had good justification for her exhaustion. She’d practically driven her people with a whip when it became obvious Honor had no intention of slowing her drone deployment, but she’d driven herself even harder, and to her own amazement, she’d met every deadline. That last-minute design improvisation of hers had been little short of brilliant, and the drones were in place now. Dangerous holes remained, but at least Honor had a warning net covering seventy degrees either side of the ecliptic, and Santos seemed to be having some difficulty deciding whether she was more proud of her department’s achievements or infuriated by her captain’s demands.

Nor was she the only one caught between pride and resentment. Lieutenant Cardones, probably more to his own surprise than anyone else’s, had actually managed to correct his mistakes with the drone programming. He’d been forced to go to McKeon for help with the remote reprogramming, just as Honor had hoped, and spent endless hours on the project, but he’d dealt with it. And, truth to tell, she was pleased by how well McKeon had responded. As nearly as she could tell, he hadn’t raked Cardones over at all, despite what must have been a bitter recognition that he should have kept a closer eye on him in the first place, and from what she’d overheard, he’d subtly directed the youngster into finding the CIC links on his own.

By the time Webster had gotten the drone data collection net set up to her demanding satisfaction and Stromboli had computed two separate on-the-fly course corrections to double back for misdropped drones, every one of Honor’s senior officers had been worn out, intensely irritated… and working as a team again at last. It wasn’t the way she would have chosen, but if self-defense was the only way she could goad them off their posteriors, she could stand their resultant unhappiness.

She turned her head as McKeon stepped out of the bridge lift and settled down in the executive officer’s chair. He was as stiff and formal as ever, but she’d gotten past his defenses a time or two in the last week—especially with Cardones. Something was eating at him, that was clear, yet she suspected he, at least, understood exactly what she was doing. And, wonder of wonders, he wasn’t fighting her on it. She more than suspected that he resented the way she’d gone about goading her crew back to life, and he wasn’t exactly bending over backwards to help, nor had she been able to decide why he’d disliked her so from the beginning, but his professionalism seemed to be getting the better of whatever it was. There was no spontaneity in their relationship, no interplay of ideas, and the situation remained far from ideal, but at least they both seemed willing to admit, if only to themselves, that there was a problem. That was a major advance, and she hoped they were both professional enough to rise above their apparent incompatibility.