McKeon was as glad she had. He liked Alice Truman, but however much Honor's other skippers might respect her, he knew damned well none of them would push her on any subject she didn't open herself. He also knew, from personal experience, that she would never dream of sharing her own pain with any of her own ship's company—and that she was less impervious to strain and self-doubt than she believed she ought to be.

He finished his peach cobbler and leaned back with a sigh of content as MacGuiness poured fresh coffee into his cup.

"Thank you, Mac," he said, then grimaced as the chief steward filled Honor's mug with cocoa.

"I don't see how you can drink that stuff," he complained as MacGuiness retired. "Especially not after something as sweet and sticky as dessert!"

"Fair enough," Honor replied, sipping with a grin. "I've never understood how any of you can swill up coffee. Yecch!" She shuddered. "It smells nice, but I wouldn't use it for a lubricant."

"It's not as bad as all that," McKeon protested.

"All I can say is that it must be an acquired taste I, for one, have no interest in acquiring."

"At least it's not gooey and sticky."

"Which, aside from its smell, is probably its only virtue." Honor's dark eyes danced. "It certainly wouldn't keep you alive through a Sphinx winter. That takes a real hot drink!"

"I'm not too sure I'd be interested in surviving a Sphinx winter."

"That's because you're an effete Manticoran. You call what you get there weather?" She sniffed. "You're all so spoiled you think a measly meter or so of snow is a blizzard!"

"Oh? I don't see you moving to Gryphon."

"The fact that I like weather doesn't make me a masochist."

"I don't imagine Commander DuMorne would appreciate that implied aspersion on his home world's climate," McKeon grinned.

"I doubt Steve's been back to visit Gryphon more than twice since the Academy, and if you think what I have to say about Gryphon weather is bad, you should hear him. Saganami Island made a true believer out of him, and he resettled his entire family around Jason Bay years ago."

"I see." McKeon toyed with his coffee cup a moment, then looked up with an expression that was half smile and half frown. "Speaking of true believers, what do you think of Grayson?"

Some of the humor vanished from Honor's eyes. She took another sip of cocoa, as if to buy time, but McKeon waited patiently. He'd been trying to work the conversation around to Grayson all evening, and he wasn't going to let her off the hook now. He might be her junior officer, but he was also her friend.

"I try not to think about them," she said finally, her tone a tacit acceptance of his persistence. "They're provincial, narrow, and bigoted, and if the Admiral hadn't let me get away from them, I would've started breaking heads."

"Not the most diplomatic method of communication, Ma'am," McKeon murmured, and her lips twitched in an unwilling smile.

"I wasn't feeling particularly diplomatic. And, frankly, I wasn't all that concerned with communicating with them, either."

"Then you were wrong," McKeon said very quietly. Her mouth tightened with a stubbornness he knew well, but he continued in that same quiet voice. "Once upon a time, you had a real jerk of an exec who let his feelings get in the way of his duty." He watched her eyes flicker as his words struck home. "Don't let anything push you into doing the same thing, Honor."

Silence hovered between them, and Nimitz thumped down from his chair to hop up into Honor's lap. He stood on his rearmost limbs, planting the other four firmly on the table, and looked back and forth between them.

"You've been headed for this all evening, haven't you?" she asked finally.

"More or less. You could have flushed my career down the toilet—Lord knows you had reason to—and I don't want to see you making mistakes for the same reason I did."

"Mistakes?" There was an edge to her voice, but he nodded.

"Mistakes." He waved a hand over the table. "I know you'd never let Admiral Courvosier down like I let you down, but some day you're going to have to learn to handle people in a diplomatic context. This isn't Basilisk Station, and we're not talking about enforcing the commerce regulations or running down smugglers. We're talking about interacting with the officers of a sovereign star system with a radically different culture, and the rules are different."

"I seem to recall that you also objected to my decision to enforce the com regs," Honor half-snapped, and McKeon winced. He started to reply, but her hand rose before he opened his mouth. "I shouldn't have said that—and I know you're trying to help. But I'm just not cut out to be a diplomat, Alistair. Not if that means putting up with people like the Graysons!"

"You don't have a lot of choice," McKeon said as gently as he could. "You're Admiral Courvosier's ranking military officer. Whether you like the Graysons or detest them—and whether they like you or not—you can't change that, and this treaty is as important to the Kingdom as any naval engagement. You're not just Honor Harrington to these people. You're a Queen's officer, the senior Queen's officer in their system, and—"

"And you think I was wrong to leave," Honor interrupted.

"Yes, I do." McKeon met her eyes unflinchingly. "I realize that, as a man, my contacts with their officers must have been a lot less stressful than yours, and some of them are genuine bastards, potential allies or no. But some of the ones who aren't let their guard down with me a time or two. They were curious—more than curious—and what they really wanted to know was how I could stomach having a woman as my commanding officer." He shrugged. "They knew better than to come right out and ask, but the question was there."

"How did you answer it?"

"I didn't, in so many words, but I expect I said what Jason Alvarez or any of our other male personnel would've said—that we don't worry about people's plumbing, only how well they do their jobs, and that you do yours better than anyone else I know."

Honor blushed, but McKeon continued without a trace of sycophancy.

"That shook them up, but some of them went away to think about it. So what concerns me now is that the ones who did have to know there was no real need for Fearless to convoy these freighters to Casca—not when you could've sent Apollo and Troubadour, For the real idiots, that may not make any difference, but what about the ones who aren't total assholes? They're going to figure the real reason was to get you and Commander Truman `out of sight, out of mind,' and it doesn't matter whether it was your idea or the Admiral's. Except ... if it was your idea, they're going to wonder why you wanted out. Because you felt your presence was hampering the negotiations? Or because you're a woman and, whatever we said, you couldn't take the pressure?"

"You mean they'll think I cut and ran," Honor said flatly.

"I mean they may."

"No, you mean they will." She leaned back and studied his face. "Do you think that, Alistair?"

"No. Or maybe I do, a little. Not because you were scared of a fight, but because you didn't want to face this one. Because this time you didn't know how to fight back, maybe."

"Maybe I did cut and run." She turned her cocoa mug on its saucer, and Nimitz nuzzled her elbow. "But it seemed to me—still seems to me—that I was only getting in the Admiral's way, and—" She paused, then sighed. "Damn it, Alistair, I don't know how to fight it!"

McKeon grimaced at the oath, mild as it was, for he'd never before heard her swear, not even when their ship was being blown apart around them.

"Then you'll just have to figure out how." She looked back up at him, and he shrugged. "I know—easy for me to say. After all, I've got gonads. But they're still going to be there when we get back from Casca, and you're going to have to deal with them then. You're going to have to, whatever the Admiral may have achieved in our absence, and not just for yourself. You're our senior officer. What you do and say—what you let them do or say to you—reflects on the Queen's honor, not just yours, and there are other women serving under your command. Even if there weren't, more women are going to follow you in Yeltsin sooner or later, and the pattern you establish is the one they'll have to deal with, too. You know that."