Ackenheil’s firm lips seemed to quiver, as if a smile threatened to take them over for just a moment, and she felt herself blush. She hated it when she blushed. It made her feel even more like a schoolgirl pretending to be a naval officer.

Jason Ackenheil managed—with difficulty—not to smile as Lieutenant Commander Zahn’s cheekbones turned a delicate pink, and he scolded himself for wanting to. Well, not really wanting to, perhaps. It was just that the young Sidemore officer was so determined to get it right and so convinced that the Royal Manticoran Navy had made special allowances to put her into her present slot. The fact that she was an extraordinarily talented young woman, with one of the best sets of tactical instincts he’d ever seen, seemed to escape her somehow.

But perhaps he shouldn’t blame her for that. The truth was that despite her ability, the Navy had indeed gone out of its way to assign SN officers to responsible slots aboard the RMN ships deployed to Sidemore Station, and some of them—no, be honest, all of them—were extremely short on experience, by Manticoran standards, for the positions they held. There was no way to avoid that. Unless they wanted the Sidemorians to have an entire navy which contained no officer above the rank of lieutenant, then the locals had no choice but to promote at a ridiculously rapid rate. Like the prewar Grayson Navy, the Sidemorians had acquired a skeletal core of Manticoran “loaners,” but the bulk of their officer corps was being built from within, and assigning as many as possible of their more promising home-grown officers to Royal Navy ships was one way to transfer some of the much greater Manticoran experience to them.

Everyone knew that, and he’d been prepared to discover that Zahn was… less than totally qualified when he was first informed that she would be assigned to LaFroye. As it turned out, his worries had been unnecessary, as he’d realized within the first week after her arrival. That had been over six T-months ago, and his initial favorable impression of her had been amply confirmed over that period. Still, he had to admit that there were times when he felt rather more like her uncle than her CO. It was just that she was so damned young. He was more accustomed to junior-grade lieutenants her age than he was to lieutenant commanders, and it was difficult, sometimes, to keep that from showing, however competent the lieutenant commander in question might be. Which, he reminded himself a bit sternly, probably didn’t do a thing to bolster her belief that she’d earned her position. Besides, he genuinely wanted to hear what she had to say. Young she might be, but he’d learned to respect her analytical abilities almost as much as her tactical skills, and he walked over to stand beside her station chair.

“No one really knows what they’re planning, Commander,” he said as he leaned over her shoulder to study the incidents displayed on her plot. “Certainly no one from ONI seems to have a clue! Nor, to be devastatingly honest about it, do I. Which is why I’d be interested in any hypotheses you might care to offer. You certainly couldn’t do any worse job of reading their minds than the rest of us have been doing.”