Which was why Honor had opted to travel the Triangle Route in reverse. Rather than making transit to Gregor, and from there to Silesia and home again by way of Basilisk, as most merchant skippers would have, she and the reinforcing units of Task Force Thirty-Four had moved “north” to Basilisk, and then “west” to Silesia. It wasn’t the fastest possible way to get there, since it required her to effectively cross the entire breadth of the Confederacy to reach Marsh, but it was one way to avoid any possible… unpleasantness with the Andies before she even reached her new command area. She didn’t really like tacking on the additional thirty-four light-years, but even in the zeta hyper-space band, that amounted to less than five days of travel time, and the additional delay was acceptable under the circumstances which actually applied.

Not that every one of her officers agreed with her about that.

“I still say that all of this pussyfooting around is ridiculous,” Alistair McKeon grumbled.

He, Alice Truman, and their chiefs of staff had come aboard Werewolf by pinnace in response to one of Honor’s dinner invitations. Her dinners were something of a legend in the Fleet, and everyone knew her guests were expected to bring their opinions and any problems they might be wrestling with along with them when they came. McKeon knew that even better than most, and she’d more than half-expected to hear from him—again—on this topic once the wine had been poured.

“It’s not ‘pussyfooting,’ Alistair,” she replied mildly, sipping her own cocoa while her guests nursed a particularly good Sphinxian burgundy. She knew it was a good one, although she personally didn’t care for it particularly, because her father had selected it for her.

“I call it as I see it,” he told her with a lopsided grin. “And pussyfooting is exactly what it feels like to me. No offense, Nimitz,” he added with a nod to the treecat in the highchair beside Honor, who showed him bone-white fangs in a yawn of amusement.

“In a lot of ways, I have to agree with Alistair,” Truman put in. “Not that Wraith and I can’t find a lot of useful things to do with the additional time, of course.”

She cocked her head at Captain (senior-grade) Craig Goodrick, her chief of staff. Goodrick, who’d earned the nickname “Wraith” for his work with the electronic warfare capabilities of the first Shrike-class LACs, was an unremarkable-looking officer. The brain hiding behind his unassuming façade, however, was one of the better ones in the RMN, at least when it could be pried away from contemplating a hand of spades. Now he shrugged.

“Actually, Ma’am, I don’t mind the longer transit time at all. I’m not especially crazy about anything that looks like tiptoeing around the Andies’ sensibilities when they’re being such pains in the posterior, but given the realities where our LAC groups are concerned, I’ll take all the exercise time I can get and be glad of it.”