The Andermani admiral, who just happened to also be Emperor Gustav’s first cousin, was a smallish man, not much larger than Honor’s Uncle Jacques. And like Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou and Honor herself, he had dark, almond-shaped eyes. At the moment, as they stood in the admiral’s day cabin aboard HMS Imperator, those eyes were as warm with genuine pleasure as his tone, and he smiled broadly. Not that he and Honor had always been on such excellent terms.

“I’m glad—and surprised, actually—they managed to get you back here so quickly,” she went on, and he shrugged. It was six days by courier vessel from the Manticore Binary System to the Andermani capital in the New Potsdam System by way of the Junction’s Gregor Terminus. To get here this quickly—less than one full day after Benjamin Mayhew’s arrival—Rabenstrange must have departed within no more than twenty-four standard hours after the arrival of Elizabeth’s courier to Emperor Gustav.

“I won’t pretend travel aboard something as crowded and plebeian as a dispatch boat is truly suited to one of my towering aristocratic birth, but it does have the advantage of getting you where you’re going in a hurry. Although”—Rabenstrange’s smile faded slightly—“perhaps not as much of a hurry as certain other people can achieve, if this business about the ‘streak drive’ has any validity.”

His voice rose very slightly with the final sentence, almost (but not quite) turning it into a question, and it was Honor’s turn to shrug.

“All I can tell you about that is that as far as Nimitz and the other treecats are concerned, Simões is telling the truth to the best of his own knowledge. And as far as Admiral Hemphill and the rest of her tech people are concerned, what he’s told them so far seems to be holding together. The general feeling among our intelligence types is that all the technical information he’s provided so far appears to be both genuine and theoretically valid.”

Rabenstrange gazed into her eyes very steadily, then nodded, and Honor tasted his satisfaction. She couldn’t be positive, of course, but it seemed to her that he was satisfied on several levels. At least with her.

“That’s what I expected to hear,” he said after a moment.

“You expected to hear that I thought he was telling the truth, or you expected me to tell you he was telling the truth anyway, like a good, loyal Queen’s officer?” she asked with a smile that was a bit more crooked than usual.

“That you’d tell me what you personally believe to be the truth…and that you’d distinguish between what can be realistically evaluated and what can’t be,” he said.

Honor’s eyebrows rose a millimeter or so at the unusual candor—or un-diplomat-like directness, at least—of his response, and he snorted in amusement.