David Weber - In Enemy Hands

"I'll try to have him home before he turns into a pumpkin," she promised Greentree now, and released his hand. Then she turned to the personnel tube and reached for the grab bar. LaFollet and her other armsmen followed immediately behind her, and were trailed in turn by Andreas Venizelos and the other members of her party, in descending order of seniority.

She swam down the tube, then swung herself gracefully into the pinnace's internal gravity and nodded to the burly, battered-looking flight engineer.

"Good morning, Senior Chief," she greeted him.

"Morning, Ma'am," Senior Chief Harkness rumbled back. "Welcome aboard."

"Thank you," she said, and twitched the hem of her tunic straight as she headed down the aisle to her seat. Horace Harkness was more than a little senior for his present duty, but she'd known he'd be here, given who was on the flight deck.

She set Nimitz in the seat beside her and strapped herself in, then looked back over her shoulder at the rest of her party. There were quite a few of them, and Honor allowed herself a rare, lazy smile which not even Nimitz could have bettered. Poor Alistair , she gloated. If I've managed even half as well as I think I have, he doesn't have a clue what's really coming! But then her smile faded a bit. There was a downside to her arrangements, after all, for the news she had for McKeon was going to make things harder for her down the road. She knew it, yet that inconvenience paled beside her anticipation of his expression when she told him. Besides, he had it coming .

She chuckled at the thought while she watched the others settle into the truncated passenger compartment. As she'd told MacGuiness, seating was limited, for the pinnace was heavily loaded with cargo—in this case, consigned to Prince Adrian 's engineer. One of the cruiser's air scrubbers had failed, reducing her life-support capacity by ten percent, and although McKeon's ship had enough spares to rebuild the scrubber from scratch, if necessary, the job would take over a week without yard support. No one looked forward to the amount of sheer grunt work involved, but that was a relatively minor concern beside the lost capacity the scrubber represented. Taking it off-line had reduced Prince Adrian 's environmental safety margin by thirty-three percent, and no starship skipper wanted to operate with that little reserve for an entire week if it could be helped.

And as it happened, this time it could be helped. Prince Adrian carried sufficient spare parts to repair the scrubber, but the newer, bigger Alvarez turned out to have three complete backup scrubbers tucked away in her capacious Engineering spaces. Exactly where Alvarez 's chief engineer had acquired the third one (which put her above establishment) was something of a mystery, and Lieutenant Commander Sinkowitz had been a bit vague when discussing the subject, but Honor was used to the way odds and ends of extra equipment had a habit of turning up aboard ship. Alvarez 's higher-volume scrubbers weren't exact matches for Prince Adrian 's, but they were close enough that one of them could be adapted to replace the failed unit. Swapping them out would save at least eight days and a lot of sweat, and Greentree had offered to trade McKeon the complete scrubber for the spare parts the Manticoran ship would have used for repairs.

McKeon had been grateful for Greentree's offer, and local hyper-space conditions had made the transfer practical, although the transport window would be brief. They were just over five days out from Clairmont, and they happened to be under impeller drive at the moment, transiting between two grav waves, which made small craft traffic practical. But the transition to the grav wave which would carry the convoy the rest of the way to its current destination would take only another two hours, after which the ships would be required to reconfigure their drives from impeller mode to Warshawski sails. Since nothing smaller than a starship mounted Warshawski sails, no small craft would be able to move between ships again after that until the convoy reentered n-space.

The Grayson and Manticoran navies shared Edward Saganami's dictum that time, as the single absolutely irreplaceable commodity any fleet possessed, was never to be wasted. Greentree and McKeon had set briskly to work to transship their engineering stores within the window they'd been offered, and when Honor had heard about it, she'd taken the opportunity to transship herself and several members of her staff, as well. Discussions with her staffers over the past two days had led her to approve a few small but significant alterations to the squadron's tactical planning, and she wanted to sit down with her second-in-command to discuss them in person. Even if she hadn't been a firm believer in face-to-face discussion, the com lag imposed by Prince Adrian 's lead position would have made any sort of electronic conference impractical. And while she supposed she could have waited until they reached Adler, she had her own ulterior motive for paying a visit to Prince Adrian right now, instead. Besides, as much as she and Greentree had grown to like one another, she suspected her flag captain would feel a certain relief to have her out from underfoot for a few hours.

She was impressed by how swiftly and smoothly Alvarez 's boat bay officer had coordinated the transfer, but the scrubber was big enough (and awkwardly enough shaped) that he'd been forced to close off the after two-thirds of the pinnace's modular interior to free up the cargo space to accommodate it. That had also required him to remove the seating which usually occupied that space, of course, and accounted for the cramped personnel area which had been Honor's excuse to leave MacGuiness behind.

Even without the steward, seats were at a premium. In addition to the precious scrubber unit, Sinkowitz was sending along a half dozen of his own people to assist Lieutenant Commander Palliser, Prince Adrian 's chief engineer, in the job of installing it. That used up a third of the available places, and Honor had quickly filled the rest. Besides her armsmen, Commander Marchant, and Venizelos, she was bringing along Fritz Montoya, Marcia McGinley, Jasper Mayhew, Anson Lethridge, and Scotty Tremaine, and she'd added Carson Clinkscales almost as an afterthought. Her flag lieutenant's performance had improved markedly over the past three weeks. He remained an accident looking for a place to happen, but he was learning to anticipate and minimize disasters... and to cope with the embarrassment when they happened anyway. Yet that was when he was among superiors he'd come to know, and she'd decided it would do him good to spend a few hours with strangers. His confidence had grown steadily aboard Alvarez , and if his improved efficiency survived the visit to a new environment, it would do his overall self-image a world of good.

Besides, when it came to the ostensible purpose of her visit, Carson's inclusion was at least as logical as Montoya's. After all, there was no practical reason for the squadron's senior medical officer to sit in on a discussion of tactics... even if he did happen to be an old personal friend of Prince Adrian 's CO.

The last of the passengers found a seat, and Harkness sealed the hatch. He consulted the telltales carefully, then spoke into the boom mike of his headset.

"All secure aft," he announced to the cockpit.

"Thank you, Chief," Scotty Tremaine's voice replied. "Disengaging tube and umbilicals now."

The pinnace's hull transmitted indistinct thuds and bangs to its passengers as Tremaine unhooked from Alvarez 's systems, and Harkness watched his readouts.