David Weber - In Enemy Hands

"He never told me not to, and I'll be very surprised if you don't start hearing from him yourself, now that you're off the Board. From what he said to me before Adrian pulled out of Manticore for Yeltsin, you really impressed him. In fact—" McKeon grinned "—he sounded a mite perplexed over how you landed on the Board in the first place. He's fond of mangling an old cliché: 'Those who can, fight; those who can't, get assigned to the WDB to figure out ways to handicap those who can.' "

"Am I to understand," Honor said, once she was certain she could keep her voice steady, "that he regards the WDB as somewhat less than effective?"

"Oh, no! Not the Board ," McKeon assured her. "Only the officers who keep getting assigned to it. But you, of course, are the exception that proves the rule."

"Of course." Honor regarded him sternly for several seconds, then shook her head. "He should never have encouraged you," she observed. "You were quite bad enough before you had friends in high places."

"Like you, Your Ladyship?" McKeon's obsequious tone would have fooled anyone who didn't know him. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless, who'd been with Honor long enough to realize that McKeon was one of her two or three closest friends, were sufficiently accustomed to his sense of humor to take it in stride. Whitman, however, had never met the captain before, and Honor felt her newest armsman's immediate, instinctive flash of anger at McKeon's familiarity. But she also felt him get that anger under control almost instantly as he took his cue from his fellow armsmen and Honor herself, and she smiled at him before she glanced back at McKeon and grimaced.

"Maybe in Yeltsin," she told him, only half humorously, "but it might not be very smart to let too many people back in the Star Kingdom know we're friends. I haven't been entirely rehabilitated yet, you know."

"Close enough," McKeon said, and his voice was suddenly serious. " Some idiots will always listen to assholes like Houseman or the Youngs, but the people whose brains still work are starting to figure out that your personal enemies are a batch of—"

He bit off whatever he'd been about to say, but his expression was so disgusted—and angry—that Honor reached out and rested a hand on his shoulder.

"You're probably not the most unprejudiced judge of them," she replied in a tone whose lightness fooled neither of them, "but I like your evaluation. And Nimitz certainly agrees with you."

"An excellent judge of men—and women—is Nimitz," McKeon observed. "I always said so."

"He just likes you because you slip him celery."

"Why not? How could anyone who doesn't recognize a deeply sincere bribery attempt when he sees one possibly be a good judge of character?" McKeon grinned at her, and she shook her head sadly.

"And to think," she sighed, "that the Lords of the Admiralty saw fit to make someone of your dubious moral character a Queen's officer."

"But of course, Milady!" McKeon said, grinning even more broadly as the lift came to a halt. "Surely you didn't think Nimitz was where I started bribing people, did you?"

The lift doors slid open, and Honor and McKeon headed down the passage, walking side by side and laughing while her armsmen brought up the rear.

Citizen Admiral Theisman walked silently into the War Room and stood watching the incoming green dot decelerate towards Enki. It was late arriving—System Control had expected it over a week ago—but delayed arrivals weren't all that unusual. Of course, an entire week was a bit excessive. In fact, a regular Navy captain who turned up that late could expect his superiors to devote several unpleasant minutes to discussing exactly why he'd been so casual about his movement orders. But no one was likely to raise any such question with the captain of this ship.

Warner Caslet had the acutely developed antennae of any staff officer, and he turned his head as he sensed Theisman's arrival. He stood quickly and crossed to the citizen admiral, and Theisman nodded to him.

"Warner."

"Citizen Admiral." Caslet didn't ask what brought Theisman here. He simply turned back to the huge display, standing at his admiral's side with his own hands folded behind him, to watch the green bead. It barely seemed to move across the twenty-five meter holo sphere, but its velocity was almost twelve thousand kilometers per second, and it drew steadily closer to the larger blue icon that indicated Enki's position.

"ETA?" Theisman asked after a moment, his tone conversational.

"Approximately fifty minutes, Citizen Admiral. She'll reach Enki in about forty minutes, but it'll take a little longer to settle her into the designated orbit."

Theisman nodded without comment. Normally, Traffic Control for a system as busy as Barnett assigned parking orbits to ships on a "first available" basis. Far though the system had fallen from its glory days as the Republic's launch pad to conquest, there was more than enough traffic to make its management a full-time job, and controllers hated VIP ships which required special treatment. But no one was going to complain, even if Traffic Control was required to clear all other ships from the newcomer's assigned orbit and a security bubble five thousand kilometers across.

Of course, Theisman thought mordantly, only an idiot would think five k-klicks actually provided any advantage. Oh, it might help against a boarding action or keep some demented crew of kamikazes from physically ramming you, but five thousand kilometers wouldn't mean diddly against a graser or an impeller-drive missile. Hell, for that matter, at five k-klicks a laser head would start out inside its attack range!

Not that I harbor any such designs, of course.

He added the last thought quickly, and then smiled with wry bitterness. He was getting even jumpier than he'd realized. Not even StateSec had yet figured out a way to bug a man's thoughts.

Someone's heels clicked on the floor behind him, and he turned to nod to Dennis LePic. The people's commissioner nodded back and glanced at the display. Over the course of his lengthy assignment to Theisman, LePic had acquired a certain familiarity with Navy hardware. He still didn't know a thing about how the vast majority of it worked, and he continued to require expert explanations of many of the data codes attached to the various icons, but he knew enough to pick out the newly arrived dot and the ship's name displayed beside it.

"I see Citizen Committeewoman Ransom has arrived," he remarked.

"Or, to be more precise, that she will arrive in the next, ah, thirty-six minutes," Theisman replied with a glance at his chrono. "Not counting however long it takes Tepes to maneuver into her final orbit, of course."

"Of course," LePic agreed, and turned his head to give Theisman a smile that held genuine warmth. The citizen admiral's comment could have been a thinly disguised sneer—an implication that LePic was so ignorant that he needed extra explanations—but both he and Theisman knew it wasn't. That, in fact, the precision of Theisman's correction had been a sort of shared joke... and evidence that they were comfortable enough with one another for the citizen admiral to risk what might have been misconstrued as insult by another commissioner.

Of course, it helped that LePic understood not only that most of the Navy's officers resented the Committee of Public Safety's spies but the reasons they were resented. If he'd been a regular officer, he would have resented the people's commissioners' interference, and especially the fact that political appointees with little or no military training were empowered to overrule him. That was the reason he made it a point not to interfere in Theisman's professional decisions any more than he absolutely had to.