Mark Sarnow met those standards. He was one of the finest tacticians she'd ever met, but she'd known other good tacticians and many of them never learned what was perhaps the hardest lesson of all: when to stand back out of the way.

Honor had seen graphic proof of what could happen when an admiral didn't learn that lesson. HMS Manticore had been Home Fleets flagship when she served aboard her, and Manticore's captain, one of the best Honor had ever served under, had been driven into requesting a transfer from his prestigious post by an admiral who'd insisted on controlling every detail to an extent which had made him little more than a passenger in his own ship. But once Mark Sarnow had given an order, he left it up to Honor to execute it. They'd only worked together in the sims so far, but his style was already becoming clear, and he relied upon her in a partnership that freed him to consider future tactics while she and his other captains executed the ones he'd already formulated.

He was also an able administrator, always fully informed yet capable of delegating with an ease and confidence Honor could only envy. She'd learned more about squadron command from him in five weeks than in her entire previous career, and she knew it.

Of course, there was another side to him, as well. Honor smiled wryly and stretched in the water. The admiral radiated charisma, but she wouldn't want to be the person who failed his standards. He didn't rant or rave; he simply looked at the sinner with disappointed eyes and spoke softly, almost gently, as if to some raw middy he shouldn't have expected to get it right. He wasn't even sarcastic, but she'd never seen anyone make the same mistake twice.

Something plopped into the water near her, and she frowned. There was another, closer plop, and she opened her eyes... just as the third tennis ball hit her squarely in the midriff.

Honor oofed, and her toe lost its anchorage. Her head went under with a splutter before she could spin upright and tread water, and a chitter of delight echoed in the gym. She turned indignantly to face it, and Nimitz hopped back and forth on his hand-paws and true-feet on the end of the diving board and launched a fourth fuzzy sphere at her.

The ball splatted into the water in front of her nose, and she shook a fist at the furry bombardier as he picked up yet another.

"Throw it and you're bedroom shoes!" she told him. He only chittered and bounced a ball off the crown of her head, and she went under again with a fresh splutter as she snatched at the rebounding missile. She managed to catch it and kicked her way back to the surface, and it was Nimitz's turn to oof as she pegged a quick, straight shot back at him. The ball caught him dead center, and his oof became a squeal as he went over the edge of the board and hit the water in a sprawling splash.

He bobbed to the surface like an Old Earth otter, but treecats were arboreals. They disliked swimming, however good at it they were, and Nimitz's disgusted expression wrung a peal of laughter from his person. He ignored her unseemly delight and swam quickly to the edge of the pool, then climbed out of the water with a bedraggled, splattering flip of his normally fluffy tail. It was rat-tailed and dripping, and he sat with a sniff of disdain for her unbecoming snickers, gathered it in true-hands and hand-paws, and began to wring it dry.

"Serves you right," she chuckled, swimming to the side with a few brisk strokes, and he gave her a baleful look as she heaved herself easily over the edge. "Oh, don't worry! You won't shrink. Here."

She sat on the pool's raised lip and picked up her towel. He took the cue and hopped up into her lap, and his disgust quickly gave way to purrs as she dried him.

"There, Stinker. All better now?"

He looked up at her consideringly, then flipped his ears in agreement and patted her thigh with a true-hand, and she laughed again, more softly, as she gathered up a double armful of still-damp 'cat and hugged him.

"Am I interrupting?" a voice asked, and she looked up quickly. Paul Tankersley stood just inside the gym hatch, smiling faintly.

"No, not really." She gave Nimitz one last swipe with the towel and shooed him out of her lap so she could stand.

"Fell in, did he?"

"Not exactly." Honor gave another chuckle as the 'cat flirted his tail in fresh disdain and headed for his perch on the parallel bars. "He decided to play ground attack with tennis balls, and the dastardly enemy's return fire shot him down." She pointed at the balls still floating in the pool, and Tankersley followed her finger in brief puzzlement, then laughed out loud.

"I never realized treecats could be such devils."

"There's no limit to the deviltry he can get up to." Honor grabbed a fresh towel to dry her own short hair. "You ought to see him with a frisbee," she went on through its enshrouding folds. "There's not enough room for him to show his true mastery in here, but join us in the main gym some day when he's at the top of his form. Only don't forget a helmet."

"I'd like to. Mike tells me she still doesn't believe the things he can do with one of them."

"Neither do I," Honor said darkly. She finished drying her hair, draped the towel around her neck, and changed the subject. "How are we coming on Fusion Three? I just got back from the Admiral's latest exercise, and I haven't really checked in with Nike yet."

"We're doing better than I thought we would, actually," he told her with a satisfied air. "Commander Ravicz's suggestion that we come up from below is going to chop at least a couple of weeks off my estimate. We have to cut through more decks, and repairing all the circuit and service runs we're breaking is going to be a nightmare, but avoiding the armor's really speeding things up." He shook his head. "I know The Book insists on coming in from the side to avoid the control runs, but that part was written before the new alloys came in. I imagine we'll see some quiet procedure changes once BuShips digests our reports, because this is not only faster, but it's going to let us put things back together more quickly, even with the need to rewire."

Honor nodded in agreement. The R&D types' latest armor—a complex ceramic and metal alloy unbelievably light for its volume and toughness—was formed in place as part of the basic hull matrix, not added on later. That gave it vastly improved integrity against damage but meant there were no convenient sections to pull in the event of repairs. On the other hand, armor, however light, still used mass. No warship had that to waste, and since a warship's impeller wedge protected it against fire from above or below, BuShips' designers armored the inner areas of its top and bottom lightly or not at all in order to maximize protection elsewhere.

Nike was no wall of battle ship, but leaving her top and bottom unarmored let her flanks carry twelve centimeters of side armor over more critical areas and as much as a meter over her vitals—like her fusion rooms.

That much battle steel could stand up to a near-miss from a megaton-range nuke... and sneered at the best efforts of a standard laser cutter. Indeed, getting through it was a nightmare job even with chem-catalyst gear.

All of which explained why she'd been delighted by Ravicz's suggestion, and she was equally, if quietly, pleased by Tankersley's reaction to it. Yard dogs weren't noted for responsiveness to recommendations from shipboard officers. As a rule, they were too concerned with keeping interfering busybodies out from underfoot while they got on with their jobs to consider whether or not a suggestion had merit, but Tankersley had embraced the idea enthusiastically. He'd praised Ravicz generously in his reports, too, and that couldn't hurt the engineer's chance for promotion down the line.