“Oh, no, TJ! Not this time,” Kare said with a seraphic smile. “You found it, so this time you’re the one who’s going to be doing well to get a single word in edgewise.”

· · • · ·

“That was delicious, Your Grace,” Mercedes Brigham sighed, sitting back from the breakfast table with a comfortable sense of repletion. The plate before her bore the sticky remains of her eggs Benedict’s hollandaise sauce and a few bacon crumbs, while the rind of a musk melon stood up like the keel of a stripped ark on a smaller plate, accompanied by two purple grapes which had somehow escaped the massacre of their fellows.

Honor’s breakfast, as always, had been considerably more substantial, as a concession to her enhanced metabolism, and she smiled at Brigham’s comment as she reached for the cocoa carafe and poured herself another mug.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” she said, her smile broadening as James MacGuiness stepped in from his pantry with a fresh cup of the hot tea her chief of staff preferred. “Of course, I’m not the person you ought to be complimenting about it.”

“No, and I wasn’t complimenting you,” Brigham told her. “I was simply commenting. The person I intended to compliment about it wasn’t here at the moment. Now he is.” She sniffed and looked up at MacGuiness. “That was delicious, Mac,” she said with dignity.

“Thank you, Commodore,” MacGuiness said gravely. “Would you like another egg?”

“Some of us, unfortunately, have to be a bit more careful than others about what we eat,” Brigham said in regretful tones.

“Cheer up, Mercedes,” Honor told her while Nimitz bleeked a laugh of his own around a stalk of celery. “There’s always lunch.”

“And I’ll look forward to it,” Brigham assured her with a chuckle while she smiled at the steward.

“I’ll do my best not to disappoint,” MacGuiness assured her. He was just about to say something more when the com attention signal chimed softly. He made a small face—the grimace of irritation he saved for moments when the outside universe intruded itself into his admiral’s mealtimes—and then stepped over to the bulkhead-mounted terminal and pressed the accept key.

“Admiral’s day cabin, MacGuiness speaking,” he told the pickup in decidedly repressive accents.

“Bridge, Officer of the Watch, speaking,” Lieutenant Ernest Talbot, Werewolf’s communications officer, replied in a respectful voice. “Sorry to interrupt Her Grace’s breakfast, Mr. MacGuiness. But the Captain asked me to inform her that Perimeter Security has just picked up an unidentified incoming hyper footprint. A big one, twenty-two light-minutes from the primary. According to CIC, there are over twenty major drive sources.”

MacGuiness’s eyebrows rose, and he started to turn towards Honor, but she was by his side before the movement was more than half completed. She laid one hand on his shoulder and leaned a bit closer to the pickup herself.

“This is the Admiral, Lieutenant Talbot,” she said. “I assume that the grav-pulse challenge has already been sent?”