“Heresy!” McKeon proclaimed, but there was a twinkle in his eye, and Commander Roslee Orndorff, his own chief of staff, chuckled out loud. It was a very substantial chuckle from a very substantial woman, and the ’cat in the chair beside her bleeked a laugh of his own. Honor didn’t know Orndorff very well, but the ash-blond commander was another of the handful of naval officers who had been adopted. Her Banshee didn’t seem to mind that his human-style name was derived from a mythological female harbinger of death. He was a good bit younger than Nimitz, around Samantha’s age, in fact, but it was obvious to Honor that he shared Nimitz’s low sense of humor.

“You’re outnumbered, Sir,” Orndorff told McKeon now. “And it’s not just the LAC jocks who need time to work up to full efficiency, is it?”

“We could take any batch of Andies I ever saw exactly like we are this minute,” McKeon proclaimed.

“In your dreams, Alistair,” Truman said dryly. McKeon looked at her, and she shook her head at him. “I make all due allowance for patriotism and esprit de corps, even parochialism, but you know better than that.”

“Well, maybe,” he conceded. “But the Andies aren’t exactly four meters tall and covered with long, curly hair, either. And while I’m prepared to admit we have more than our fair share of rough edges, we also have a bunch of combat-experienced veterans, which is more than the Andies can say.”

“That’s fair enough,” Honor acknowledged. “But you might want to think about the fact that before we and the Peeps started shooting at one another, they were the ones with all of the in-depth backlog of combat experience. We’d done our share of chasing down pirates and dealing with the occasional squadron of ‘privateers,’ but we didn’t have any real, recent war-fighting experience to go with it. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty decent description of where the Andermani probably are right now.”

“Maybe it is,” McKeon agreed with a more serious expression, “but we’re not exactly the Peeps. They might have had a lot of experience at knocking off single-star system opponents, but most of their ‘wars’ hadn’t really amounted to all that much more than polishing off privateer squadrons of their own.”

“Somehow I rather doubt President Ramirez would agree with your analysis where the San Martin navy was concerned,” Truman pointed out in an even drier tone.

“Your ganging up on me,” he complained plaintively.

“That’s what happens when someone rushes in where angels fear to tread,” Honor told him. “Besides, it’s dangerous to draw too close an analogy between the prewar Peep navy and the one we actually wound up fighting. The officers who’d amassed all the experience tended to be Legislaturalists, and they disappeared in Pierre’s purges without our having to face most of them in combat. The ones we did go up against, like Parnell—or Alfredo Yu, when he was still in Havenite service—certainly gave us a run for our money, even with our hardware edge.”