The normally unflappable MacGuiness stared back at her, and his jaw dropped. HMS Nike wasn't just a battlecruiser. She was the battlecruiser, the fiercely sought after, most prestigious prize any captain could covet. There was always a Nike, with a list of battle honors reaching clear back to Edward Saganami, the founder of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and the current Nike was the newest, most powerful battlecruiser in the Fleet.

Honor laughed out loud and tapped the second sheet of parchment.

"According to this, we go aboard Wednesday," she said, "Ready for a little space duty again, Mac?"

MacGuiness' eyes met hers, and then he shook himself, and a huge, matching smile lit his own face.

"Yes, Ma'am. I think I can stand that—and this certainly is a night for the Delacourt!"

The intra-system shuttle settled into the docking buffers of Her Majesty's Space Station Hephaestus, and Honor tapped the save key on her memo pad and rose from her seat just inside the hatch.

Her face gave no hint of her inner excitement as she drew the white beret of a starship's commander from under her left epaulet. She grimaced mentally as she adjusted it, for she hadn't worn it in over a T-year, and she hadn't allowed for the way her hair had grown. It was considered bad luck for an RMN officer to replace her first white beret, which meant she either had to get her hair clipped or the beret re-sized, she thought, and held out her arms to Nimitz.

The 'cat swarmed up onto her padded shoulder and settled his weight with a soft bleek, then patted the soft, white beret with a proprietary air. Honor hid a grin that would never have suited the probity of a senior grade captain, and Nimitz snorted in amused tolerance. He knew how much that symbol meant to her, and he saw absolutely no reason she shouldn't show it.

For that matter, Honor had to admit there was no real need to assume her "captain's face" so soon, since, aside from MacGuiness, no one on the shuttle knew who she was or why she was here. But she needed the practice. Even the shuttle felt strange after so long off a command deck, and few things were more important than starting a new command off on the right foot. Besides—

She brought her mental babbling to a stern halt and admitted the truth. She didn't feel just "strange"; she felt worried, and under her joy at getting back into space, butterflies mated in her midsection. She'd put in all the simulation hours she'd been allowed between bouts of surgery and therapy, but that wasn't as many as she would have liked. Unfortunately, it was hard to argue with your physician when he was also your father, and even if Doctor Harrington had allowed all the sim time she wanted, simulators weren't the same as reality. Besides, Nike would be her biggest, most powerful ship yet—eight hundred and eighty thousand tons, with a crew of over two thousand—which was enough to make anyone nervous after so long dirt-side, simulators or no.

Yet she knew her long medical leave wasn't the only reason for her anxiety. Being picked for Nike was an enormous professional compliment, especially for a captain who'd never before held battlecruiser command. Among other things, it was an implicit approval of her performance in her last command, whatever her own mixed feelings, and a clear indication the Admiralty was grooming her for flag rank. But there was another side to the coin, as well. With opportunity came responsibility... and the chance to fail.

She inhaled deeply, squaring her shoulders, then touched the three gold stars embroidered on her tunic, and deep down inside something laughed at her own reactions. Each of those stars represented a previous hyper-capable command, and she'd been through almost exactly the same internal cycle with each of them. Oh, there were differences this time, but there were always differences, and the underlying truth never changed. There was nothing in the universe she wanted more than command... and nothing that scared her worse than the thought of failing once she had it.

Nimitz bleeked again, softly, in her ear. The sound was comforting yet scolding, and she glanced over at him. A delicate yawn showed needle-sharp white fangs in the lazy, confident grin of a predator, and humor narrowed her eyes as she nibbled his ears and started for the hatch with MacGuiness at her heels.

The personnel tube deposited them at a slip on the extreme rim of Hephaestus' hull. The space station seemed larger every time Honor saw it... probably because it was. Hephaestus was the Royal Manticoran Navy's premiere shipyard, and the Navy's steadily accelerating building programs were mirrored by an equally steady growth in the station's size. It was over forty kilometers long, now—a lumpy, ungainly, immensely productive amalgamation of building and repair slips, fabrication shops, deep-space foundries, and living quarters for thousands of workers that never stopped growing.

She glanced through the armorplast wall of the space-dock gallery as she and MacGuiness headed for the docking tube, and it took all her will power not to gawk like a middy on her first deployment, for the sleek, powerful shape floating in the building slip's mooring tractors cried out for her to stop dead and stare hungrily through the armorplast

HMS Nike was all but completed. Yard dogs and their remotes floated about her and crawled over her like tiny, furiously laboring ants, and the double-ended, flattened spindle of her battle steel hull looked mottled as it awaited its final coating of skin-fused pigment. But the hollow throats of missile tubes and the ominous snouts of lasers and grasers crouched in her opened weapon bays, and mechs were already closing up the plating around her last drive nodes. Another two weeks, Honor thought, three at the most, till the acceptance trials. Only twenty T-years ago, the process would have been far more extended, with builder's tests followed by pre-acceptance trials before she was turned over for the Navy's own evaluation, but there was no time for that now. The tempo of construction was almost scary, and the reason for the endless hurry was enough to frighten anyone.

She turned a bend in the gallery and the Marines manning the outboard end of Nike's docking tube stiffened and snapped to attention as she crossed to door with a measured stride. She returned their salutes and handed her ID to the sergeant in charge, who scrutinized it briefly but closely before he returned it with another salute.

"Thank you, Milady," he said crisply, and Honor's upper lip quivered. She was still getting used to being a peer of the realm—although, in truth, that wasn't exactly what she was—but she suppressed the temptation to smile and accepted her ID folio with a grave nod.

"Thank you, Sergeant," she said and started to step into the tube, then paused as she saw one hand twitch towards his communicator. He stiffened into immobility, and this time she did let herself smile. "It's all right, Sergeant. Go ahead."

"Uh, yes, Milady." The sergeant blushed, then relaxed and responded with a slight smile of his own. Some captains preferred to catch their new crews by surprise, but Honor had always thought it was rather pointless—and foolish. Unless an executive officer had managed to completely alienate her crew, they were going to flash a warning to her as soon as the new captains back was out of sight anyway. And there was no way a crew would leave Nike's exec in the dark.

She grinned at that thought as she crossed the scarlet zero-gee warning stripe and launched herself into a graceful free-fall glide.

A full side party waited in the entry port. The side boys came to attention, electronic bosun's pipes twittered in archaic ritual, and the spotlessly uniformed commander at the head of Nike's assembled senior officers snapped a salute that would have done Saganami Island proud.