Cardones looked, then swallowed and blushed pink.

“Right into the front of my wedge, Ma’am,” he admitted.

“Agreed. You should have skew-turned and changed planes to bring your belly bands up to cover yourself, shouldn’t you?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, feeling some of his elation fade. But the Captain touched his shoulder and smiled.

“Don’t feel too bad. Instead, tell me why the computer didn’t nail you?”

“Ma’am?” Cardones looked back at the display and frowned. “I don’t know, Ma’am. The beam window was wide enough.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” The Captain tapped the readouts again. “The human factor, Lieutenant. Always remember the human factor. The tac computer’s programmed to assign a response time to your supposedly flesh-and-blood opponent, and this time—this time, Guns—you were lucky. The range was long enough your opponent had less than three seconds to see the opening, recognize it, and take it, and the computer decided he hadn’t reacted quickly enough to get the shot off. I expect it was right, too, but don’t count on that when it’s for real. Right?”

“Right, Skipper!” Cardones replied, grinning once more, and Honor patted his shoulder gently before she returned to her command chair.

She didn’t mention that she’d been running the same problem from the other side through her command chair displays, using Cardones’s maneuvers in real time, and that she had gotten her shot off. The youngster had made tremendous strides in the last few weeks, and he deserved his enjoyment. Besides, she wasn’t at all sure she would have seen it and responded so quickly had it been a genuine action, and she had no intention of raining on his parade over a might-have-been.

She seated herself and let Nimitz slither down into his favorite spot in her lap while she scanned her bridge. Lieutenant Panowski was running his own exercise at Astrogation, and from the looks being exchanged between Lieutenant Brigham and Panowski’s senior yeoman, it wasn’t going very well. She hid a smile. McKeon had been right about the assistant astrogator’s tendency to coast, and he’d looked almost betrayed when Honor announced that, shorthanded or not, in parking orbit or no, Fearless would continue her regularly scheduled drills without break. It was difficult for her to be as hard on Panowski as he probably deserved because of her awareness of her own weaknesses as a mathematician. She was a lousy astrogator and she knew it, but McKeon, ably assisted by Brigham, was taking up the slack for her nicely.

She let her eyes drift back to the main maneuvering display, pondering the ships in orbit around Medusa. Fearless had been on station for almost a full Manticoran month now, and there were far fewer than there had been when she arrived five weeks before; a direct result, she suspected, of Ensign Tremaine’s campaign against illegal traffic. Medusa was no longer a good place to transship prohibited goods, and the word was getting around. She hadn’t realized what a holy terror Tremaine was going to be—he seemed to be developing some sort of ESP where smugglers were concerned—and Stromboli’s eagle eye on ship-to-ship traffic had guided the ensign to three mid-space pounces that had netted close to half a billion more dollars of contraband. She’d seen to it they both got “well dones” for their success, and Lieutenant Venizelos had come in for quite a few of his own for his efforts at the terminus. Judging by the violence and volume of the protests they were generating, they and their people were putting an extremely painful crimp into someone’s profits, and she’d made sure they knew she knew it.