But despite all the Navy efforts to accommodate her needs, Samantha had proven persistently unconventional. Perhaps that was to have been expected. Virtually all of the very few female 'cats who'd ever adopted had bonded to Forestry Commission rangers and never left Sphinx. Honor had run a check. No law or regulation required the registry of treecat adoptions, so the records she'd been able to consult had to have been incomplete, but as nearly as she could determine, in well over five T-centuries, only eight female 'cats had ever adopted anyone except a ranger... and that number included Samantha. That probably should have warned her that Samantha was unlikely to feel bound by whatever parenting conventions were "normal" for 'cats, but she'd still been surprised when Nimitz made it clear that Samantha wanted and intended to return to Grayson, with her kittens, when he and Honor did.

That had seemed like a very bad idea to Honor. She and Nimitz were scheduled to resume shipboard duty soon after her return, which would leave Samantha all alone with four rambunctious young on an alien planet whose environment included invisible and insidious risk factors which could kill even an adult 'cat, much less a kitten. Worse, she and her children would be the only treecats on the planet, leaving her as a first-time mother with no older and more experienced mothers of her own land to whom to turn for advice or assistance.

Honor had tried to make those points to Nimitz and Samantha, and she'd been confident Nimitz grasped them. But she hadn't been certain Samantha understood even with Nimitz to explain them to her. Telepathy was all very well, but Samantha had seemed so blithely unconcerned by Honor's arguments that she'd doubted the message was getting through.

Until the week before their departure for Grayson, that was. It had never occurred to Honor to wonder about just how much seniority Samantha had among her own kind.

She was quite a bit younger than Nimitz, and Honor had simply assumed that the wishes of a 'cat of her relative youth couldn't carry a great deal of weight with a clan to which she belonged only "by marriage." But she'd been forced to reconsider that assumption rather radically when no less than eight members of Nimitz's clan, three of them female, all older than Samantha, arrived on her doorstep. She'd been staying in her parents rambling, five-hundred-year-old house on the flanks of the Copperwall Mountains when they turned up, and she'd hardly been able to believe her own eyes.

She'd been certain at first that there was some mistake when MacGuiness answered the front doorbell and the newcomers had walked calmly inside, but Nimitz and Samantha had greeted them with purrs of pleasure and the unmistakable air of hosts welcoming expected guests. The thought of trying to chase them back outside had never even occurred to Honor, one simply didn't do things like that with treecats, and the eight of them had hopped up onto her parents' dining room table and regarded her expectantly. Her sense of shock had made her a bit slow, but a sharp nudge over her link to Nimitz had reminded her of her manners, and she'd introduced herself to her surprise guests while MacGuiness disappeared into the kitchen in search of the celery all 'cats loved.

Each 'cat had acknowledged her self-introduction gravely, and though it was considered bad form to assign names to 'cats unless the 'cat in question had adopted the namer, there were so many of them that Honor had to call them something just to keep them all straight. Given her taste for naval history, the five males had ended up dubbed Nelson, Togo, Hood, Farragut, and Hipper, but naming the females had been harder. Since so few of them adopted, it had seemed particularly important to come up with names which reflected their personalities, and Honor had needed several days to get to know them well enough to feel comfortable naming them.

In the end, the apparent social dynamics of the group had done it for her. The eldest of the three had become Hera, for it was obvious that every one of the males, except, perhaps, Nimitz, deferred utterly to her authority. If she was the head of this small slice of a clan, however, the 'cat Honor had dubbed Athena was obviously her exec and general advisor. The third female, Artemis, was barely older than Samantha, but she was also the feistiest of the ladies and the one who'd taken on the task of teaching the kittens the rudiments of hunting and stalking.

Honor still felt uncomfortable over having assigned names at all, but the newcomers had accepted their new appellations with cheerful approval. They'd also proceeded to settle down as if they'd always been members of her household... and given every sign that they intended to remain as such.

Yet if they'd been calm about it, the humans of Sphinx had not.

Despite the fact that Honor knew more about treecats than ninety-nine percent of her fellow Sphinxians, she'd had no more idea of how to proceed than anyone else did. It was clear Samantha and Nimitz had invited the others to join them, but she'd taken a while to grasp that it wasn't just for an extended visit or to take the kittens back to Nimitz's clan. And when she finally did realize Samantha actually intended for the newcomers to accompany her and Nimitz back to Grayson, it really hit the fan.

Treecats were a protected species. More than that, the Ninth Amendment to the Star Kingdom's Constitution expressly granted them special status as the indigenous intelligent species of Sphinx. The laws which protected their corporate claim to just over a third of Sphinx's surface in perpetuity and guarded them from exploitation were, to say the least, firm, but the people who'd drafted those laws had never anticipated a situation such as this. Adoption bonds had much the same legal status as marriages, which helped explain the Admiralty regulations sending pregnant 'cats and their humans home, but the fact that Samantha hadn't adopted Honor had already put their relationship on the fringes of established precedence. It was unheard of for a single human to have two 'cats, although no one had been prepared to comment when it was obvious Samantha and Nimitz were mated. But eight more of them? No one had ever even contemplated a situation in which one human found herself the focus of no less than ten treecats (not to mention the kittens)... all of whom seemed intent on following said human off-planet!

The Forestry Commission had pitched a fit, and a dozen rangers had descended on the Harrington Homestead, grimly determined to rescue the eight "wild" 'cats from any chance of exploitation. But once there, they'd been faced by their rescuees' determination not to be rescued. Two of the rangers had been accompanied by their own 'cats, whose reactions had made it plain that they felt Samantha and Nimitz's friends had the right to go wherever they wanted to go with whomever they chose to go there with... however hot and bothered it might make humans.

But once the Forestry Commission had retreated in confusion, the Admiralty's minions had moved in. They'd wanted Honor to leave Samantha on Sphinx with Nimitz's clan, which, in fact, had been her original intention. Honor couldn't blame BuPers for being just a bit put out with her for changing her mind (although, to be fair, she wasn't precisely the one whose mind had changed), but she did think they'd overreacted when they all but commanded her to leave Samantha, the kittens, and, especially!, the eight "wild" adults on Sphinx. They hadn't quite made it a nondiscretionary order, but they had specifically denied her the right to take any 'cat other than Nimitz with her aboard the military transport whose use her orders to Grayson authorized.

Unfortunately for Their Lordships, the Articles of War didn't require naval personnel to use naval shipping to reach their assigned duty stations, and once she'd accepted that her six-limbed friends were serious, Honor had given in and provided alternate transportation. At first, she'd intended to buy passage aboard a passenger liner. Then she'd considered chartering a small private vessel. What she hadn't considered, until Willard Neufsteiler, her chief financial manager, suggested it, was buying a ship of her own.