“To be completely honest,” she told her guests, “I probably would have taken the long way around even if I hadn’t been concerned about the Andies’ sensibilities. God knows we needed the time to get the rust blown off.” She shook her head. “I hate to admit it, but the whole time Earl White Haven and I have been fighting with Janacek and High Ridge over procurement policies, we managed to take our eyes off an even more important ball. We were so worried about the hardware that we forgot to worry about how well our people were trained to use the hardware they actually had.”

“Even if you hadn’t, how much could you realistically have expected to accomplish, Ma’am?” Mercedes Brigham’s tone was respectful, but it was also firm, almost brisk. “There were only so many battles you could fight,” she pointed out. “And if you’ll forgive me for pointing it out again, there’s no point for blaming yourself for the consequences of policies you opposed. And you did oppose the entire mindset that made this sort of mistake possible.”

“Well, yes. But not because I saw this one coming. I think that’s what actually bothers me most about it, to be honest. I like to think I’m smart enough to notice things like this sneaking up on me, and I hate finding out I wasn’t.”

“Everyone gets an egg in the face every so often,” McKeon observed philosophically, then grinned. “Some of us get to savor the sensation more often than others, of course. Like your humble wall of battle commander.”

“Or,” Goodrick said in a darker voice, “the people who get into bed with people like Manpower.”

The captain smiled thinly and very, very coldly. Of all the people in the dining compartment, Wraith Goodrick had the most intensely personal bone to pick with the Mesan slavers, because his mother had been genetically designed and sold like so much animate property. She’d been consigned to one of the notorious “pleasure resorts” whose whispered existence was an open secret, however well hidden they might be, and she’d escaped that fate only because she’d been loaded as cargo aboard a freighter which had enjoyed the unhappy experience of straying into the arms of an RMN light cruiser. Which was how she’d come to be emancipated in the Star Kingdom and why Goodrick had imbibed his searing hatred of all things Mesan literally at his mother’s breast.

Which, in turn, explained his almost religious experience when Honor and Andrea Jaruwalski explained Operation Wilberforce to Task Force Thirty-Four’s senior officers once they were en route to Marsh.

“We can certainly hope that will prove the case for some of them, at least,” Honor told him, with no more doubt than anyone else in the compartment what he was referring to. “Not that we can absolutely count on it, of course,” she added on a note of caution. “We are going to be operating in Silesia, not Manticoran space.”

“Judging from the way the Manpower scandal worked out in the Star Kingdom, that may actually be an advantage where bigger fish are concerned, Your Grace,” Orndorff pointed out.