“If it’s all the same to you, Alistair,” she said mildly, squeezing his hand back, “I’d prefer to spend at least—oh, an hour or two, perhaps—getting my bags unpacked before I go over to do battle with Admiral Draskovic and the First Space Lord.”

“Sorry.” He grimaced, then grinned lopsidedly. “It’s just that I’ve never been at my best dealing with bureaucrats. And to be completely honest, it seems to me that some of them are deliberately dragging their feet this time around.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Alistair’s suspicions are justified,” Dame Alice Truman put in, reaching out to shake Honor’s hand in turn. Her own smile was genuine but carried a decidedly sour edge. “I don’t know exactly what you did to Draskovic to make her sign off on your staff and command selections, but I suspect we’d be getting considerably more—and prompter—cooperation out of the Admiralty if you’d picked a slate that was in somewhat better odor with the Powers That Be. Starting with your choice for your second in command.”

“Starting with the station commander herself, you mean, Ma’am,” Jaruwalski put in. The dark, hawk-faced captain had come a long way from the defensive, half-defeated woman who’d once been branded with responsibility for the Seaford Nine disaster, and she met Honor’s sharp look with a sardonic smile.

“That might not be exactly the most diplomatic possible thing to say, Andrea,” Honor observed, and her new ops officer shrugged.

“One thing I’ve already learned about trying to work with the new management at the Admiralty, Your Grace—we’re never going to get anything done if we count on Admiralty House to do it for us. And with all due respect, Ma’am, you know that as well as we do. So we might as well be open about it here ‘in the family,’ don’t you think?”

“You’re probably right,” Honor conceded after a moment, then shrugged and turned back to McKeon. “We’ll have to sit down and discuss exactly where we are now that Mercedes and I are back from Grayson,” she told him. “And if it looks like there’s something we need that I can get the Admiralty to move on, then I’ll certainly use whatever size stick it requires. But if it’s something we can take care of ourselves, even if we have to go through back channels to do it, then I’d prefer to avoid any more… Admiralty interviews that I can.”

“I can understand that,” he agreed. “And I suppose it wouldn’t hurt any for the rest of us to carry as much of the weight as we can instead of consigning you to Admiralty House’s tender mercies.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite that way myself—even ‘here in the family,’ ” Honor replied. “But in general, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep me in reserve whenever we can rather than squandering whatever clout I have. Speaking of which,” she continued her interrupted trip to the chair at the head of the briefing room table and sat down, moving Nimitz from her shoulder to her lap, “where, exactly, are we?”