"And what, Master Steward, might that be?" she asked.
"I beg the Admiral's pardon?" Billingsley said innocently. "What 'that' would the Admiral be referring to?"
"The Admiral would be referring to that 'that,' " Michelle replied, one forefinger indicating the broad, prick-eared head which had just poked itself exploringly around the corner of a door.
"Oh, that 'that'!"
"Precisely," Michelle said, folding her arms and regarding him ominously.
"That's a cat, Ma'am," Billingsley told her. "Not a treecat, a cat—an Old Earth cat. It's called a 'Maine Coon.' "
"I'm well aware of what an Old Earth cat looks like, Chris," Michelle said repressively, never unfolding her arms. "I don't believe I've ever seen one quite that large, but I do know what they are. What I don't know is what it's doing in my mother's townhouse."
Actually, the townhouse and its landscaped grounds belonged to Michelle now, not to her mother, but it was Caitrin Winton-Henke's home, even if Michelle did have most of a wing reserved for her private use whenever she was on Manticore.
"Well, actually, Ma'am, he's mine," Billingsley said with the air of someone making a clean breast of it.
"And just when did this monumental change in your status as a parent take place?" Michelle inquired just a bit acidly as the rest of the impressively large feline ambled into the foyer.
"Day before yesterday," Billingsley said. "I . . . found him wandering around over near the Master Chiefs' Club. He looked like he needed a home, and he walked right up to me, and I couldn't just leave him there, Ma'am!"
"I see," Michelle said, looking into his guilelessly wide and innocent eyes. "And would it happen that this hulking menace to all mice, hamsters, chipmunks, and unwary small children has a name?"
"Yes, Ma'am. I call him 'Dicey.' "
" 'Dicey,' " Michelle replied with long-suffering resignation. "Of course."
Billingsley continued to look as if butter would not melt in his mouth, but the name was a dead giveaway of how his new pet had really come into his possession, Michelle thought, looking at the enormous cat. It was the first terrestrial cat she'd ever seen who looked like he probably came close to matching Nimitz's mass. Not only that, but 'Dicey' was a good twenty centimeters shorter overall than Nimitz, and although he was definitely a long hair, he was nowhere near as fluffy as a treecat, which made him substantially bulkier. One ear had a notch that looked like someone else had taken a bite out of it, and a scar across the back of his burly neck left a visible furrow in his fur. There were a couple of more of those on the left side of his face, as well, she noticed. Obviously, he'd been to the wars, yet there was something about him that reminded her irresistibly of Billingsley himself, now that she thought about it. A certain endearing disreputability, perhaps.
She glanced at her new flag lieutenant, who was observing the entire scene with a laudably professional and serene expression. There was, however, a certain almost subliminal twinkle in Lieutenant Archer's green eyes. One that boded ill, she decided. Clearly "Gwen" was already succumbing to Billingsley's incorrigible charm.
Much like a certain admiral you know, perhaps? she reflected.
"You do realize how many regulations there are against having a pet on board one of her Majesty's starships?" she inquired out loud after a moment.
"Regulations, Ma'am?" Billingsley repeated blankly, as if he'd never heard the word before.
Michelle started to open her mouth again, then gave up. A wise woman knew when to cut her losses, and she didn't begin to have the time it would take to make a dent in Billingsley's bland innocence. Besides, she didn't have the heart for it.
"As long as you understand that I'm not going to put any pressure on anyone to allow you to bring that beast along on our next deployment," she said, trying womanfully to sound firm.
"Oh, yes, Ma'am. I understand that," Billingsley assured her without a trace of triumph.
They'd managed to arrive almost twenty minutes early.
Not exactly the best way to look like I'm not champing at the bit for another assignment, I suppose, Michelle had mused as she and Archer were ushered into the waiting room. On the other hand, it's probably a little late to try to convince anyone I'm not doing exactly that. Besides, she looked around the spacious waiting room, it gives me more time to appreciate the "new air car smell," doesn't it?
Admiralty House's latest expansion project had been authorized less than a month after the High Ridge Government took office. The previous one had been completed—on time and under budget—just over a T-year before that by a subsidiary of the Hauptman Cartel. Obviously, an administration which had based its domestic policies so firmly on the time-honored, well-tested device of the support-buying boondoggle couldn't have such a potentially lucrative avenue for . . . creative capital flow sitting around unutilized, however. So another expansion had promptly been authorized . . . despite the fact that the Janacek Admiralty had been so busily downsizing the Navy. This one was going to add another forty floors when it was finished sometime in the next few months, and Michelle didn't like to think about how much it had contributed to the bottom line of Apex Industrial Group.
I probably wouldn't mind as much if Apex didn't belong to a bottom-feeder like dear, dear Cousin Freddy, she thought.
There'd never been any real likelihood that someone as strongly and openly opposed to High Ridge as Klaus Hauptman was going to get the contract for this expansion. Aside from his political views, Hauptman was known for a certain ruthless concentration on holding down little things like creative cost overruns, and his accountants were sudden death on anything that even looked like kickbacks or "comfortable" little relationships with corrupt politicians.
The Honorable Frederick James Winton-Travis, CEO and majority stockholder of the Apex Industrial Group, was a far smaller fish than Hauptman, but he'd been much more to the High Ridge crowd's taste. First, he was a card-carrying member of the Conservative Association who'd contributed in excess of three million Manticoran dollars to the political coffers of one Michael Janvier, also known as the Baron of High Ridge. There was no law against his doing that, of course, as long as the contributions were a matter of public record, and there was no doubt—unfortunately—that the contributions had reflected Winton-Travis' actual political convictions. Such as they were and what there was of them. Michelle would have found the political convictions in question distasteful enough on their own merits, however. The fact that the most recent Admiralty House "renovation project" had obviously been a way for High Ridge to pay back the contribution—with hefty interest—had simply added a particularly repulsive taste to the entire transaction, as far as she was concerned.
Being related to the scummy bastard doesn't help, either, she admitted to herself. Still, I don't think I'd mind quite as much if it wasn't something everyone knows about but no one can prove. If there was at least a chance of sending dear Freddy to prison for a decade or two, I'd be able to think about this much more philosophically. It's not even as if we didn't really need the extra space, because we do. But that doesn't make it any less of a boondoggle, because no one involved in deciding to build it could possibly have believed we actually ever would. And every time I think about the way the contracts were handled my blood pressure goes—
"Excuse me, Admiral."
Michelle turned from her study of the streets and green belts of the City of Landing, two hundred floors below her crystoplast window viewpoint, as the Admiralty yeoman spoke.
"Yes, Chief?"
"Sir Lucian is ready for you now, Ma'am."
"Thank you, Chief."
She managed to restrain the almost overpowering impulse to let nervous fingers check her appearance one last time, nor did she lick her lips anxiously or whistle a merry tune to disguise her nervousness. Despite which, unusually large butterflies seemed to be waltzing about in her midsection as the yeoman pressed the button which opened the door to Sir Lucian Cortez's palatial Admiralty House office.
/>
She nodded her thanks and stepped through the waiting portal, with Archer on her heels.
"Admiral Gold Peak!"
Cortez was a smallish man who wore the uniform of an admiral of the green. In many ways, he looked more like a successful schoolteacher, or perhaps a bank bureaucrat, than a naval officer, despite the uniform. And in many ways, Michelle supposed, he was a bureaucrat. But he was a very important bureaucrat—the Royal Manticoran Navy's Fifth Space Lord and the commanding officer of the Bureau of Personnel. It was his job to meet the unending appetite of the frantically expanding, brutally overworked Navy, and no one—including Michelle—quite knew how he had done that so well, for so long. Under the prewar system of rotating senior officers regularly through fleet commands and then back to desk jobs in order to see to it that they stayed operationally current, Cortez would have been replaced in his present position long since. No one in her right mind was going to suggest replacing him under wartime conditions, however.
Now he came to his feet, smiling in welcome, and extended his hand to her across the desk as the other man, a commander wearing the insignia of the Judge Advocate's Corps, who'd been sitting beside the office's coffee table also stood respectfully.
"Good morning, My Lord," Michelle responded to Cortez's greeting, and clasped his hand firmly. Then she quirked one eyebrow politely at the waiting commander, and Cortez smiled.
"No, you're not going to need legal representation, Milady," he assured her. "This is Commander Hal Roach, and he is here because of you, but not because of anything you've done. Unless, of course, you have a guilty conscience I didn't know anything about?"
"My Lord, my conscience is as pure as the driven snow," she replied, holding out her hand to Roach, and the commander smiled in appreciation as he took it. He was a solidly built fellow, with dark hair, and probably somewhere in his mid-forties, Michelle estimated.
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Milady," he assured her.
"A lawyer, and tactful, too," Michelle observed, and nodded her head at Lieutenant Archer. "My Lord, Commander, this is Gervais Archer, my flag lieutenant."
"Lieutenant," Cortez said, acknowledging him with another nod, and then gestured at the comfortable chairs which faced his desk.
"Please," he said. "Have a seat. Both of you."
"Thank you, My Lord," Michelle murmured, and settled herself in the indicated chair. Archer, with a junior aide's unfailing instincts, took another one, set slightly behind and to the left of Michelle's, and Roach resumed his own chair after Cortez seated himself behind his desk once more. Then the admiral tipped back slightly and cocked his head to one side as he regarded Michelle with deep-set dark eyes gleaming with intelligence.
"I understand you've been pestering Captain Shaw, Milady," he said.
"I'd hardly call it 'pestering,' My Lord," she replied. "I may have contacted the captain a time or two."
Captain Terrence Shaw was Cortez's chief of staff, which made him the ultimate keeper of the keys where BuPers was concerned.
"Captain Shaw didn't call it that, either," Cortez said with a twinkle. "On the other hand, Milady, seven com calls in eight days does seem just a tad . . . energetic."
"Did I really screen him that many times?" Michelle blinked, honestly surprised by the total, and Cortez snorted.
"Yes, Milady. You did. One would almost think that you were eager to get off-world again. Surely there's something you could think of to do with your convalescent leave?"
"Probably, My Lord," Michelle conceded. "On the other hand, I really wasn't gone all that long, and it wasn't particularly difficult to get things sorted back out after I got home. And," a smile softened her expression, "I made it in time for the one thing I really wanted to do."
"The birth of Lady Alexander-Harrington's son, Milady?" Cortez asked in a considerably gentler tone.
"Yes." Michelle's nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply, remembering that moment, once again seeing Honor's transcendent happiness and reliving her own joy as she shared that joyous experience with her best friend.
"Yes, My Lord," she repeated. "Mind you, I missed the wedding, along with all the rest of the Star Kingdom, but at least I did make it home for Raoul's birth."
"And then promptly began hounding BuMed again," Cortez observed. "So, tell me, Milady—how's the leg?"
"Fine, My Lord," she replied just a bit warily.
"BuMed agrees with you," he said, swinging his chair gently from side to side. "In fact, they've endorsed your fitness report in very positive terms." Michelle began to exhale a surreptitious sigh of relief, but amusement flickered in Cortez's eyes as he continued, "Although Captain Montoya did point out that you've been persistently . . . less than completely candid, shall we say, about the amount of physical discomfort you're continuing to experience."
"My Lord," she began, but Cortez shook his head.
"Believe me, Milady," he told her, his eyes now deadly serious, "Montoya would have to be reporting something a lot more serious than a case of someone who's too stubborn to take the convalescent leave to which she's entitled before we worried about it at this point."
"I'm . . . relieved to hear that, Sir," Michelle said frankly, and Cortez snorted.
"I'm going to assume that what you mean is that you're relieved we have a command for you, rather than that we're so desperately pressed for personnel we're cutting corners where medical considerations are concerned, Milady."
Well, there's something there's no good response to, Michelle thought, and Cortez chuckled.
"Forgive me, Milady. I'm afraid my sense of humor has gotten itself a bit skewed over the last T-year or so."
He gave himself a shake and let his chair come fully back upright once again.
"In fact," he told her, "the real reason I've been ducking your calls—and I have been, if I'm going to be honest—is that we've had quite a problem deciding exactly what to do about that parole of yours. No one here at Admiralty House has any qualms about your having given President Pritchart your parole, especially under the circumstances that obtained," he said quickly, as she started to open her mouth. "It's more a matter of our needing to figure out which precedents apply. Which is what Commander Roach is here to explain to you."
He looked at Roach and raised one hand. "Commander?"
"Of course, My Lord," Roach replied, then turned his attention to Michelle.
"For fairly obvious reasons, Milady, there weren't any paroles during the last war, and I'm afraid we've never set up the proper channels between us and the Repulic since the fall of the Committee of Public Safety, either. An oversight we ought to have rectified long since, once we were rid of StateSec. Unfortunately, it would appear the previous government had other things on its mind, such as it was and what there was of it, and we've been just a bit busy ourselves since Baron High Ridge's . . . departure. So, frankly, we've been going around in circles over in the JAG's office, trying to decide how to handle your case."
"Not just over at the JAG's office, either," Cortez added. "Public Affairs has been dithering about it, too, I'm afraid, because of all of the interstellar news coverage this whole summit meeting proposal has spawned. Given your close relationship to Her Majesty and the glare of publicity which has accompanied your return, it's particularly important that we get it right, as I trust you understand."
"Yes, Sir. Of course," Michelle agreed.
"There was a minority opinion," Roach told her when Cortez nodded for him to resume, "that the exact wording of your parole technically disqualifies you from active service anywhere until you've been properly exchanged, on the basis that allowing you to serve somewhere besides directly against Haven would still free up another officer for that service. That's a very strict interpretation of the Deneb Accords, however, and it's one the Star Kingdom has never formally accepted. It was also, frankly, an interpretation that Admiral Cortez didn't much care for, so I was asked to do some additional research, probably because I'm currently the executive officer over
at the Charleston Center for Admiralty Law."
Michelle nodded. The Charleston Center was recognized as one of the galaxy's premier authorities on interstellar admiralty law. Its original reason for being when it was initially established a hundred and sixty T-years ago had been to deal specifically with the military implications of the customary legal practices which had grown up over the centuries of the Diaspora. But despite the fact that it remained a Navy command, the sheer size of the Star Kingdom's merchant marine gave its decisions enormous impact where civilian interstellar traffic was concerned, as well.
"Like any good lawyer, I went looking for the precedents most favorable to my client's case—the stronger and more specific the better—and I found what I was looking for in a decision from the old Greenbriar-Chanticleer War. In 1843, they agreed to submit a dispute over officers' paroles for Solarian League binding arbitration. The decision of the arbitrator was that any legally paroled officer could be utilized for any duty in which he or she was not personally and directly engaged against the enemy who had paroled him or her. Staff, logistic, and medical services assignments for any unit directly committed against the enemy who had paroled him or her were held to be unlawful, but service in another astrographic area, or against another opponent, was specifically held to be a lawful employment of paroled officers. In other words, Milady, as long as you aren't actively shooting at the Peeps or helping someone else do the same thing, the Admiralty can send you anywhere it wants."
"Which is exactly what he told us, in considerably more detail, when he wrote the final decision that we can legally and honorably employ you in either Silesia or the Talbott Cluster, even if that does let us send some other rear admiral to go beat on Haven in your place," Cortez said. "And, frankly, it's a damned good thing we can, too, under the circumstances."
"I understand, My Lord," Michelle said when he paused, and she did.
It didn't seem possible that she'd been back in the Star Kingdom for the better part of two T-months. News of Captain Aivars Terekhov's stunning—and costly—victory at the Battle of Monica had arrived only nine days after she had, and the entire Star Kingdom had experienced a spasm of almost unendurable relief. The price his scratch-built squadron had paid might have been agonizing, but no one had any illusions about what would have happened if he'd failed to demolish the battlecruisers which had been supplied to the Union of Monica. Nor did anyone doubt that those ships had been supplied by someone who clearly did not have the Star Kingdom's best interests at heart, although just what the full ramifications of that "someone's" plans might have been was still being unraveled. Frankly, Michelle was one of those who doubted that even Patricia Givens would ever manage to dig all the bits and pieces of the plot out from under their concealing rocks. But the intelligence people reporting to Rear Admiral Khumalo, Vice Admiral O'Malley, and Special Minister Amandine Corvisart had already dug out enough to validate all of Terekhov's suspicions . . . and actions.