Commodore Read Free Page A

cutters because, being fast, nimble and manned by fully-trained and qualified crews, they'd be essential to any Hashimoto opposition. Scattered all over the system as the ships were, for example, if fighting broke out they'd be the ones who carried the word to other systems and there'd be nothing we loyalists could do to prevent it. So I was more than a little relieved to see that they were behaving themselves… for the moment at least.
    Since no one could've known for certain that such a lull would develop after my little presentation, I hadn't scheduled anything for many hours after our Jump. As more and more time passed on the bridge, however, it soon became evident that nothing much was going to happen anytime soon. So I turned things over to Josiah and headed down to my cabin to strip off my uncomfortable full-dress uniform and maybe get some paperwork done. A battlecruiser, I'd already learned, carried strictly limited quantities of fuel, stores, and men. Yet, somewhere aboard the vessel a magical storage locker containing an infinite amount of red tape clearly had to exist. Someday, I promised myself, I'd make time to investigate the mystery more thoroughly. Once I was caught up on my paperwork, that was…
    "You shouldn't fret so much, sir," Nestor advised me over the top of his reader as I sat and signed the daily fuel consumption report, the daily weapons-availability report, the daily maintenance report… "Everything's going to be all right. Hashimoto will capitulate. They're in too poor a position not to. It's Wilkes we have to worry about."
    I nodded in agreement. Before leaving on this mission I'd been briefed by dozens of experts on various aspects of the situation, and virtually all of them were of the same opinion. Which Nestor well knew, as I'd insisted on bringing him along with me. "Leave them a graceful way out," Uncle Robert had declared, "and they'll trip all over each other to bow down to the new sovereign. I've been dealing with them for decades—the big mystery is how they got involved in such a high-stakes game in the first place. It's grossly out of character for them."
    "They'll test you," Nestor predicted. "Once and only once, if you respond assertively enough. Then they'll come fawning to eat out of your hand and swear the whole affair was a huge misunderstanding. It's how humans do things. They're obsessed by power and status games, but they also know how to back down when they've lost. Or at least the sane ones do. Relatively sane, that is."
    I smiled as I ring-stamped a form blessing the advancement of a certain Jacob Arlens to Able Spacer due to especially meritorious performance. Promoting people was a much more pleasant than dealing with Javelin 's disciplinary cases, which fortunately were so few as to be almost non-existent. Everyone wanted to serve aboard the most famous and romantic active vessel in the navy, so for the most part my department heads were free to pick and choose from an ocean of volunteers. The results spoke for themselves. "You don't seem to think much of humans," I observed eventually.
    Nestor shrugged. "They're all different, of course. So some are a lot better than others. His Majesty, for example…" He smiled. "James would've made a fine Rabbit indeed, sir."
    "Heh!" I replied. "Don't say that in public, even though of course I understand that you mean well by it. Some might take is as lese majeste ."
    I expected my aide to grin ever wider at that, but instead his smile faded. "That's just what I mean, sir," he explained. "Can you even imagine any Rabbit declaring it a crime merely to insult his dignity?"
    "Well…" I temporized, thinking back over my relationships with my fellow bunnies. They seemed to think pretty highly of me, and yet… Back at the Academy, one night while I was eating dinner with the maintenance Rabbits someone had exchanged a filthy old tar-covered work-cap for my uniform hat. It'd been a good joke, and we'd all had fun together as I