Honor chuckled again and Nimitz bleeked a laugh as they stepped through the exit. Spencer Hawke, Clifford McGraw, and Joshua Atkins fell in behind them, and Waldemar Tümmel, who’d been promoted to lieutenant commander following their return from Nouveau Paris, had been waiting with her personal armsmen. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, although the dark memory of the parents, brother, and sister he’d lost with Hephaestus was still there, behind the smile.

“How far ahead of schedule are we, Waldemar?” she asked.

“Almost an hour, Your Grace,” the flag lieutenant who was no longer a lieutenant replied, and his smile got a bit broader. “I don’t think the umpires expected you to polish them off quite that quickly.”

“Well, let’s not get too carried away patting ourselves on the back,” she said. She was speaking to Tümmel, but she met Theisman’s eyes as she spoke. “All something like this can really tell us is how well we’re likely to perform against the threats we think we know about, and Filareta seems to be several cuts above the Sollies we’ve seen in Talbott. If it turns out someone with a working brain has something we didn’t know about…”

The Havenite nodded soberly. They’d both had enough unpleasant experience with that sort of discovery.

Honor nodded back. She’d always liked Theisman, and the better she got to know him, the more strongly he reminded her of Alistair McKeon. Although—her lips twitched in a faint, fond smile of memory—he was definitely less inclined than Alistair had been to simply head for the nearest enemy and start slugging.

Ever since Beowulf’s initial warning, however, Honor had studied everything Pat Givens’ ONI had on Massimo Filareta, and Theisman had joined the effort from the moment Pritchart and her delegation arrived. Admittedly, Haven hadn’t had a lot to add to ONI’s meager bio on Filareta, but there’d been enough for her to be cautiously confident that she and Theisman had a feel for his basic personality. He was clearly very different from the late Sandra Crandall, and he had her horrible example to make him even less like her. Whatever the rest of the Solarian League Navy might think, Filareta was unlikely to reject reports of Manticoran technological superiority out of hand. Perhaps he might have, once, but despite some hints in ONI’s dossier about objectionable personal habits, he was obviously too smart to do that after the Battle of Spindle.

“I take your point,” Theisman said out loud now. “That’s one reason I’m so happy—now, at any rate—to see you people base your training on the assumption that the other side’s better than it really is.”