"Now, Honor," Dr. Harrington looked up at her with a deadly gleam in those almond eyes so much like Honor's own, "all I said was—"

"I know what you said, but that `young man' is my executive officer!"

"Well, of course he is," her mother said comfortably. "That's what makes it so convenient. And he certainly is a handsome fellow, isn't he? I'll bet he has to beat them off with a stick." She sighed. "Assuming he wants to," she added thoughtfully. "Just look at those eyes! He looks just like Nimitz in mating season, doesn't he?"

Honor hovered on the brink of apoplexy, and Nimitz cocked his head reprovingly at Dr. Harrington. It wasn't that he objected to her comments on his sexual prowess, but the empathic 'cat was only too well aware of how much his person's mother enjoyed teasing her.

"Commander Venizelos is not a treecat, and I do not have the least intention of chasing him with a club," Honor said firmly.

"No, dear, I know. You never have had very good judgment where men are concerned."

"Mother—!"

"Now, Honor, you know I'd never dream of criticizing," the twinkle in Allison Harrington's eyes was devilish, yet there was a trace of seriousness under the loving malice, "but a Navy captain—a senior-grade captain, at that—ought to get over those silly inhibitions of yours."

"I'm not `inhibited,' " Honor said with all the dignity she could muster.

"Whatever you say, darling. But in that case, you're letting that delicious young man go sadly to waste, executive officer or not."

"Mother, just because you were born on an uncivilized and licentious planet like Beowulf is no reason for you to make eyes at my exec! Besides, what would Daddy think?"

"What would I think about what?" Surgeon Commander Alfred Harrington (retired) demanded.

"Oh, there you are." Honor and her father stood eye to eye, towering over her diminutive mother, and she jerked a thumb downward. "Mother's casting hungry looks at my exec again," she complained.

"Not to worry," her father replied. "She looks a lot, but she's never had any reason to roam."

"You're as bad as she is!"

"Meow," Allison said, and Honor fought back a grin.

For as long as she could remember, her mother had delighted in scandalizing the more conservative members of Manticoran society. She considered the entire kingdom hopelessly prudish, and her pungent observations to that effect drove certain society dames absolutely berserk. And her beauty, and the fact that she doted on her husband and never actually did the least thing for which they could ostracize her, only made it worse.

Of course, if she had been inclined to follow the mores of her birth world, she could have assembled a drooling male harem any time she cared to. She was a tiny thing, little more than two-thirds Honor's own height and of almost pure Old Earth Oriental extraction. The strong, sharply carved bone structure which had always made Honor feel plain and unfinished was muted into exotic beauty in her mother's face, and the prolong process had frozen her biological age at no more than thirty T-years. She really was like a treecat herself, Honor thought—delicate but strong, graceful and fascinating, with just a hint of the predator, and the fact that she was one of the most brilliant genetic surgeons in the Kingdom didn't hurt.

She was also, Honor knew, genuinely concerned about her only child's lack of a sex life. Well, sometimes Honor was a bit worried about it, but it wasn't as if she had all that many opportunities. A starship's captain simply could not dally with a member of her crew, even if she had the desire to, and Honor was none too sure she did. Her sexual experience was virtually nil—aside from a single extremely unpleasant Academy episode and one adolescent infatuation that had trickled off in dreary unhappiness—because she'd simply never met a man she cared to become involved with.

Not that she was interested in women; she just didn't seem particularly interested in anyone — which might be just as well. It avoided all sorts of potential professional difficulties ... and she rather doubted an overgrown horse like her would provoke much reciprocal interest, anyway. That reflection bothered her a bit. No, she thought, be honest; it bothered her a lot, and there were times her mother's version of a sense of humor was less than amusing. But this wasn't one of them, and she surprised them both by putting an arm around her and squeezing in a rare public display of affection.

"Trying to bribe me into being good, huh?" Dr. Harrington teased, and Honor shook her head.

"I never try to do the impossible, Mother."

"That's one for your side," her father observed, then held out his hand to his wife. "Come along, Alley. Honor ought to be circulating—you can go make someone else's life miserable for a while."

"You Navy types can be a real pain in the ... posterior," Allison replied with a wickedly demure glance at her daughter, and Honor watched fondly as her parents vanished into the crowd. She didn't get to see them as often as she would have liked, which was one reason she'd been so happy when Fearless was sent to Vulcan for refit, instead of Hephaestus.Vulcan orbited Honor's own homeworld of Sphinx, ten light-minutes further out than the capital planet of Manticore, and she'd taken shameless advantage of the fact to spend time at home, wallowing in her father's cooking.

But Alfred Harrington was quite right about her responsibilities as a hostess, and Honor squared her shoulders for the plunge back into the festivities.

A rather proprietary smile touched Admiral of the Green Raoul Courvosier's mouth as he watched Captain Harrington mix confidently with her guests and remembered the gangling midshipman, all knees and elbows and sharp, angular face, he'd first met sixteen Manticoran years—over twenty-seven T-years—ago. She really had been a piece of work, he reflected affectionately. Absolutely dedicated, shy to the point of speechlessness and determined not to show it, terrified of math courses, and one of the most brilliant intuitive shiphandlers and tacticians he'd ever met. She'd also been one of the most frustrating. All that promise and potential, and she'd near as nothing flunked out on him before he could convince her to use that same intuition on her math tests! But once she'd gotten her feet under her, nothing could stop her.

Courvosier was a childless bachelor. He knew he'd invested so much of his life in his students at the Academy as compensation, yet few of them had made him as proud as Honor. Too many officers simply wore the uniform; Honor lived it. And it became her well, he thought.

He watched her chatting with the husband of Vulcan's commanding officer and wondered where that awkward midshipman had gone. He knew she still disliked parties, still thought of herself as the ugly duckling, but she never let it show. And one of these days, he thought fondly, she would wake up to the fact that the duckling had become a swan. One of the drawbacks of the prolong treatment, especially in its later, more effective versions, was that it stretched out the "awkward periods" in physical development, and Honor, he admitted, really had been on the homely side as a girl—at first glance, at least. She'd always had the cat-quick reflexes of her 1.35-gravity homeworld, but the grace of her carriage had been something else, something that went beyond her high-gee birth environment. Even as a first-form middy, she'd had that elegance in motion which drew second glances from eyes which had dismissed her unprepossessing surface too quickly, and hers was a face that improved with age. Yet she truly didn't realize, even now, how the too-sharp edges had smoothed into character, how her mother's huge eyes lent her triangular face an intriguing, exotic air. He supposed it wasn't all that surprising, given how long the prolong-slowed smoothing process had taken, and it was true she would never be "pretty"—only beautiful ... once she realized it.