He bent over her hand, kissing it in proper Grayson fashion, then straightened, still holding it in a light clasp. White Haven was a tall, broad shouldered man, yet he and Honor stood virtually eye to eye, and she felt Nimitz's interested examination of the earl as the 'cat rose a bit higher on her shoulder.

"I see you've found my own preferred hiding place, My Lord," she observed.

"Hiding place?" White Haven replied politely.

"Of course." She glanced at LaFollet, and her armsman read the silent order in her eyes. He still didn't much like the idea of leaving her back unguarded, but even he had to admit she should be safe enough here, so he gave a small half-bow of surrender and withdrew. The library door closed behind him, and Honor walked past White Haven to the main data console in a rustle of skirts. She lifted Nimitz to the perch installed above the console especially for him, and he gave a soft, half-scolding, half-laughing sound and snatched playfully at her hand. But that was an old game, and she evaded him easily and gave him a gentle swat on the muzzle before she turned back to the earl.

"I've never really enjoyed parties, My Lord," she admitted. "I suppose it's because I still feel out of place at them, but Mike Henke and Admiral Courvosier taught me to at least pretend I'm having a good time." She gave him another of her off-center smiles, and he nodded as though he hadn't already known that. Raoul Courvosier had been one of his closest friends, as well as Harrington's professional mentor, and over the years, Raoul had let fall even more about his favorite student than he himself, perhaps, had realized.

"At any rate," she went on, stepping back to prop a hip on the corner of the console behind her, "I decided that since I'm a steadholder now, I have the authority to at least provide myself with a hidey hole. That's why the staff has orders to keep the library clear on party nights to provide a place where I can clear my head between skirmishes."

"I didn't know, Milady," White Haven said, reaching for his dress sword as he prepared to withdraw, but she shook her head quickly.

"I'm not trying to evict you, My Lord," she assured him. "As a matter of fact, Security saw you headed this way and passed the word to Andrew. That's why I'm here myself... and if you hadn't found your way here on your own, Mac would be gently nudging you in this direction about now."

"Ah?" White Haven cocked his head, and her smile turned wry as she shrugged.

"I've just come from a stint on the Weapons Development Board, and Admiral Caparelli felt you might have some, um, concerns over certain of its recommendations. Because of that, he specifically instructed me to brief you on what the Board's been up to. Since neither of us seems particularly addicted to the social life, and since I know you'll be talking to High Admiral Matthews and his staff about them in the next few days, I'd rather hoped I could create an opportunity to answer any of your questions that I can tonight."

"I see." White Haven rubbed his chin as he considered her confident, self-assured manner and found himself impressed yet again by all the ways in which she'd grown into her many roles. He knew he shouldn't be, yet he couldn't help comparing her to the focused military officer, painfully ignorant of and filled with contempt for politics (or at least politicians), whom he'd first met here in Yeltsin.

There was no sign of that officer's political ignorance in this poised stateswoman, and the transformation still astounded him. Partly, he supposed, that stemmed from the fact that he belonged to the first Manticoran prolong generation. Whatever his own life expectancy, he'd grown up in a society where people still died after little more than a T-century, and at the deepest levels, the assumptions of that earlier society remained a part of his mental baggage. At ninety-two, anyone as young as Honor Harrington still seemed a child to him, and the fact that her own third- generation treatments froze the aging process at a far earlier point only made it worse. He at least had streaks of white in his hair and what he preferred to think of as "character lines" around his eyes, whereas she looked like a pre-prolong nineteen or twenty!

But she wasn't a child, he reminded himself. In fact, she was fifty-two, and as smart, and tough, mentally as well as physically, as anyone he was ever likely to meet. She was also a person who had always accepted the responsibilities which came her way, whether she'd sought them or not, and that made it almost inevitable that she should "grow" into her role as Steadholder Harrington. She couldn't have done anything else without being someone else.

None of which made her accomplishments any less admirable. It only meant it was damned well time he stopped thinking of her as a brilliant, talented, gifted junior officer and began thinking of Admiral Lady Harrington, GSN, as his equal.

Those thoughts flickered through his brain almost too quickly to keep track of, and then he smiled at her.

"I see," he repeated, and sat back down in the chair he'd vacated. Honor returned his smile and turned the chair at her own data station to face him, then sat and made a small gesture which invited him to begin.

"Actually," he said after a moment, "I'm at least as concerned over some of ONI's reports as I am about the WDB. The Admiralty's kept me generally abreast of developments, but the analyses you brought out with you are both more detailed and rather more pessimistic than anything else I've seen. They also seem to contain a lot of new data, and I can't help wondering about that data's reliability. Did you have the chance to discuss any of this with someone at ONI before you left the Star Kingdom?"

"As a matter of fact, Admiral Givens and I spoke about it at some length month before last," Honor replied. "We didn't go into any detail on the operational side, ONI's actual information-gathering activities are classified on a need-to-know basis, and I didn't need to, but the WDB needed the most complete background available before it wrote its recommendations. From what she told me then, I'd say she's convinced of her sources' reliability, and given how well she and ONI have read the Peeps since the shooting actually started..."

She shrugged, knowing White Haven understood what she'd left unspoken. The actual outbreak of hostilities had taken the Office of Naval Intelligence by surprise, and Admiral Givens and her analysts had been given no more reason than anyone else to expect (or predict) the Harris Assassination or the creation of the Committee of Public Safety. But those failures aside, ONI's spooks had done a sterling job of dissecting Peep capabilities and probable intentions.

"I gathered the impression," she went on after a moment, choosing her words with care, "that a good deal of the raw data is coming from new human intelligence sources."

She held White Havens eyes until he nodded once more. "Human intelligence" was a more polite term than "spies," but even today, the many and varied technological means for gathering information fell short of what an alert, intelligently used pair of eyes and ears in the right place could deliver. The problem, of course, was assessing your spies' reliability, then getting their reports across interstellar distances. On the other hand, intelligence agencies had been working on the data transmission end of it ever since the Warshawski sail made hyper-travel a truly practical proposition.

"In particular," she continued, "I rather suspect, though Admiral Givens didn't say so directly, that we have at least one source within the Peeps' embassy on Old Earth."

White Havens eyebrows rose at that, but then his lips pursed as thoughtfulness replaced surprise. That actually made sense, he reflected. Ron Bergren, the Havenite foreign secretary under the old Legislaturalist government, had been the only member of Sidney Harris' cabinet to escape the massacre of the PRH's so-called military coup attempt. He'd survived for the simple reason that, at the time, he'd been in transit to Old Earth to explain to the Solarian League that the war with Manticore hadn't really been started by the Peeps, however things might look. Upon learning of the coup, he'd declared his enthusiastic loyalty to the Committee of Public Safety... and found as many reasons as possible why neither he, his wife, nor their three children should return to the People's Republic. That was probably wise of him, given the fact that over ninety percent of the members of the great Legislaturalist families had been executed or exiled to prison planets by the Peoples Courts, and he'd been helped by the fact that Old Earth was over eighteen hundred Light-years from the Haven System.