Commander Ansten FitzGerald stepped through the briefing room hatch with his memo board tucked under his arm.

"Sorry I'm late, Sir," he said to the tall, blond man in the white beret sitting at the head of the briefing room table. "I had to... straighten out Commander Bennington."

"Ah. The yard dogs are still arguing about the Engineering spares?" Captain Aivars Aleksovitch Terekhov leaned back in his chair, arctic blue eyes faintly amused.

"Yes, Sir." FitzGerald shrugged. "According to Bennington, we're twenty percent over establishment in almost every category."

"Shocking," Terekhov murmured. He quirked an eyebrow at his Chief Engineer. "Do you have any idea how this sad state of affairs could have come about, Commander Lewis?"

"Why, no, Sir," Ginger Lewis said. She shook her head, guileless green eyes wide.

"Lieutenant Duncan?" Terekhov looked at the short, attractive officer at the foot of the table. Lieutenant Andrea Duncan was the most junior officer present, and she looked more than a bit uneasy. Although she was Hexapuma 's logistics officer, she wasn't a natural scrounger. She took her responsibilities seriously, but unlike Lewis, she appeared to be... uncomfortable whenever it came to going outside officially approved channels. And the fact that Terekhov had been aboard as Hexapuma 's CO for less than three weeks didn't exactly make her feel any more at ease with him.

It didn't make FitzGerald feel a lot more at ease, for that matter. Not that a good executive officer was about to let that show.

"Uh, no, Sir," Duncan said after a moment, glancing at Lewis' serene expression. "None at all."

"I thought not," Terekhov said, and pointed at FitzGerald's waiting chair. The executive officer settled into it, and the bearded captain let his own chair come back forward. "And how did your conversation with Commander Bennington go, XO? Is the Station Patrol likely to turn up to place us under arrest?"

"No, Sir," FitzGerald replied. "I pointed out that whatever the exact numbers of spares we might have on board, all of our materials requests had been properly submitted and approved. I informed him that if he wishes to submit the required paperwork to have our original requests disallowed, all of our onboard spares off-loaded, new requests drawn up, considered, and approved, and the new spares loaded, that's certainly his privilege. I also pointed out that I estimated it would take him a minimum of three weeks, and that we're under orders to depart Hephaestus in less than two."

The executive officer shrugged, and one or two of the officers seated around the table chuckled. Given the current situation at the front, no yard dog was going to risk Their Lordships' displeasure by delaying the departure of one of Her Majesty's starships.

"I take it the Commander didn't indicate he intended to accept your generous invitation."

"No, Sir." FitzGerald smiled slightly. "As a matter of fact, Sir, Bennington isn't all that bad a sort. Oh, he's a bean-counter, but I think that when it comes right down to it, he'd prefer for us to have the spares we may need in an emergency, whether we're excess to establishment or not. He just thinks we were a little too successful in our midnight requisitions. All I really needed was to give him an excuse he can use if any of his superiors fault him for what we got away with."

"I can live with that, as long as we don't really end up with our departure delayed," Terekhov said, then moved his right hand in a little throwing away gesture. FitzGerald hadn't known Terekhov long, but he'd already learned to recognize the mannerism. That hand-flick was the captain's way of shifting from one mental focus to another, and the XO wondered if he'd always had it, or if it was one he'd developed since the hand was regenerated.

"How does our schedule look from your end, Commander Lewis?" Terekhov asked. "Is the yard going to be done with us on time?"

"It'll be close, Sir," Lewis replied, meeting his eyes squarely. "To be honest, I don't think the yard dogs have time to get everything done, so I've had them concentrating on Beta Thirty. That much, they should have done with at least a couple of days to spare. Most of the rest of our problems are relatively minor, actually. My people can take care of them underway out of our onboard resources. That was one reason I, ah, acquired so many spares." She shrugged. "Bottom line, Sir, this is a new ship. We passed our trials, and aside from that one beta node, everything on our list is really nothing more than squeaky hinges and parts that need wearing in."

Terekhov gazed at her for a moment, and she looked back steadily. More than one engineer would have sounded far less confident than Lewis. They would have insisted it was Hephaestus' job to repair every problem their own departments' surveys had identified instead of cheerfully accepting responsibility for them themselves. Especially given the way their commanding officers were liable to react if it turned out they couldn't deal with them themselves, after all.

FitzGerald waited to see how Terekhov would respond. Captain Sarcula had been assigned to command Hexapuma while she was still only a gleam in BuShips' eye. He'd supervised her construction from the keel plate out, and begun the assembly of a handpicked command team, starting with one Ansten FitzGerald and Commander Lewis. But Sarcula's assignment had been overtaken by events. His orders to assume command of the battlecruiser Braveheart, following her skipper's death in action, had been totally unexpected, and Terekhov's abrupt assignment to Hexapuma , for all intents and purposes straight out of Bassingford Medical Center, must have come as just as much of a surprise to him as Sarcula's sudden transfer had come to FitzGerald.

That sudden reshuffling of command assignments had, unfortunately, become less uncommon than it ought to have been. BuShips and BuPers were still fighting to regain their balance after the shocking losses inflicted by the Havenites' opening offensives. But even so, it couldn't have been easy for Terekhov. He'd missed Hexapuma 's builders' and acceptance trials and inherited another man's command team, composed of officers he'd never even met before. They didn't know him, and he hadn't been given very long to form an opinion of their competence, either. Which meant he had precious little upon which to base any evaluation of Ginger Lewis' judgment.

If that worried him at the moment, however, it didn't show.

"Very well," was all he said, and the right hand flicked again. His head moved, as well, as he turned his attention to Lieutenant Commander Tobias Wright, Hexapuma 's Astrogator. Wright was the youngest of Terekhov's senior officers, and the most reserved.

"Have you received all of the downloads you requested, Commander?" he asked.

"Yes, Sir," the sandy-haired lieutenant commander replied. Terekhov gazed at him a moment longer, as if waiting to see if he cared to add anything to that bald reply, but Wright only looked back at him.

"Good," the captain said after a few seconds, and turned his attention to Lieutenant Commander Amal Nagchaudhuri. "Have we received our communications downloads, Commander?"

"Not yet, Sir." Nagchaudhuri was very tall-over a hundred and ninety-three centimeters-with dark black hair and brown eyes that stood out in sharp contrast to a complexion that approached albinism. That complexion was a legacy of the planet Sandor, from which his parents had immigrated before he'd learned to walk.

"We've received some of them, Captain," he continued, "but we won't be receiving the full crypto download until forty-four hours before we depart. I'm also still waiting for the Trade Union's secure merchant codes, but I've been assured that we should have them within the next day or two. Other than that, we're ready to go."

There was something about his last sentence. Not anything anyone could have put a finger on, but there, and FitzGerald looked at him with an edge of warning. Nagchaudhuri was a cheerful, extroverted sort. Some people tended to underestimate the sharp brain hidden behind the pun-cracking jokester he preferred to present to the rest of the universe. But there was a very serious and dedicated naval officer behind that facade, as well, and one with all of the fervent patriotism of a naturalized citizen. Amal hadn't taken it very well when he was informed of the change in Hexapuma 's assigned station.

Neither had FitzGerald, for that matter. But orders were orders, and there was no point in making his disappointment too evident to their new captain. Especially not if they'd received their orders for the reasons FitzGerald suspected they had.

If Terekhov had noted the same slight edge FitzGerald had, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he simply nodded.

"I'm sure you'll have everything we need before we depart, Commander," he said. The right hand moved, and he turned to the petite, fine-boned officer seated to FitzGerald's left.

"Commander Kaplan."

"Yes, Sir." Lieutenant Commander Naomi Kaplan was the physical opposite of Amal Nagchaudhuri. She was forty centimeters shorter, and where he was so pale-skinned he'd had a permanent nanotech sun blocker installed, her complexion was almost as dark as Queen Elizabeth's own. Which only made her blond hair, so light it was almost-but not quite-platinum, stand out even more vividly. Her eyes were as dark as Nagchaudhuri's, but they were also far more intense. She reminded FitzGerald forcibly of their ship's hexapuma namesake-territorial, naturally aggressive, perpetually poised for mayhem, and very, very sharp-clawed.

"I'm afraid I have some potentially bad news for your department, Commander. Lieutenant Grigsby won't be reporting aboard, after all. It seems there was an air car accident." He shrugged. "And there's also the matter of your request for an assistant for Lieutenant Bagwell."

"Sir?" Kaplan glanced at the lieutenant seated to her left.

Guthrie Bagwell was a solidly built man, thirty centimeters taller than the tactical officer, but almost painfully nondescript. His features were eminently forgettable, his hair was an unremarkable brown, and his brain was quite possibly the sharpest of any of Hexapuma 's officers. As the heavy cruiser's electronics warfare officer, he was one of Kaplan's subordinates, but ever since the new hardware developed as part of Project Ghost Rider had reached the deployment stage, EW had become a specialist's job once again. Bagwell, for all of his undisputed brilliance in his own esoteric area, completely lacked the broad-based tactical background which Lieutenant Grigsby had been supposed to bring to Hexapuma as her junior tactical officer.