And that’s the only way we are ever going to turn the Confederacy into something besides an ongoing, low-level bloodbath, Honor thought with a touch of grimness. God knows we’ve tried to exterminate the pirates long enough! The only way to get rid of them in the end, though, is going to be by giving the people who live here the prosperity that’ll create the capacity to squash the vermin themselves.

It’s a pity the Confederacy’s government is too corrupt to let that happen.

And that, she knew, as much as Manticore’s interest in the system and the industriousness of its people, was why Marsh was succeeding in turning itself into a modern, prosperous star system. There were no Silesian governors to batten on the opportunities for graft and corruption and strangle any sustained industrial expansion at birth.

None of which, she reminded herself briskly, had any particular bearing on the task which had brought her back to Marsh after all these years.

She turned her back on the viewport and headed for her desk. She had entirely too many reports waiting for her. Mercedes had flagged the most important dozen or so for her attention, but Honor was still behind in her reading, and Mercedes was altogether too capable of making her feel intolerably guilty just by looking reproachfully at her. Honor suspected she’d been taking “Reproachful 101 lessons from James MacGuiness”. And since she’d scheduled a meeting of the entire task force’s staffs for this afternoon, it would probably be a good idea to give her chief of staff one less reason to employ The Look.

She chuckled again and punched up the first report in the queue.

· · • · ·

“Excuse me, Ma’am.”

Honor looked up from the letter to Howard Clinkscales she’d been recording as James MacGuiness appeared in the open hatch of her day cabin.

“Yes, Mac? What can I do for you?”

“Lieutenant Meares asked me to inform you that a merchant captain just screened the com center with a request to make a courtesy call on you.”

“Really?” Honor frowned thoughtfully. Timothy Meares, her flag lieutenant, was a bit on the youthful side, but he’d very early shown the good sense of accepting MacGuiness’s assistance in managing his Admiral. Among other things, Meares had quickly grasped that MacGuiness usually had a better idea than anyone else aboard Werewolf of how busy Honor actually was at any given moment, and the flag lieutenant had come to trust the steward’s judgment about when and whether or not to interrupt her with some routine matter.

He’d also recognized the fact that Honor expected him to use his own discretion about those same routine matters, and he had a somewhat more exalted opinion of her importance than she herself did. Which made the fact that he’d passed the request along to MacGuiness at all informative. Obviously, there was some reason he hadn’t seen fit to reject this particular captain’s attempt to invite himself to dinner—figuratively speaking, of course—out of hand. At the same time, he’d passed it along through the filter of MacGuiness, which suggested that perhaps he’d wondered if an older and wiser head who’d been with Honor much longer than he had might decide to quash it.