She was as surprised to hear herself admit that as Clinkscales might have been to admit his liking to her, but he only smiled again.
"You seem to be doing well enough to me, My Lady. You have the habit of command, but I've never seen you act without thinking or give a capricious order to anyone."
"Oh, that." Honor waved a hand, mildly embarrassed and highly pleased by his comment. "I just fall back on my Navy experience. I like to think I'm a pretty fair starship commander, and I guess it shows." Clinkscales nodded, and she shrugged. "But that's the easy part. Learning to be a Grayson is hard, Howard. There's more to it than just putting on a dress" she indicated the gown she wore "and making the right command decisions."
Clinkscales cocked his head and regarded her thoughtfully.
"May I give you a word of advice, My Lady?" Honor nodded, and he tugged at his ear once more. "Then I'd advise you not to try. Just be yourself. No one could fault the job you're doing, and trying to make yourself over into a 'proper' Grayson while we're all busy trying to redefine 'proper' anyway would be pointless. Besides, your holders like you just the way you are."
Both of Honor's eyebrows flew up in surprise, and he laughed.
"Before you took your seat in the Conclave, some of your people were worried about what would happen with 'that foreign woman' holding steading over them. Now that they're getting to know you, they're rather proud of your, um, eccentricities. This steading's been attracting people who were more eager than most for change from the beginning, My Lady; now a lot of them seem to hope some of your attitudes will rub off on them."
"Are you serious?" Honor demanded.
"Quite. In fact"
Honor's chrono beeped, announcing the imminent arrival of her next caller, and Clinkscales cut himself off. He glanced down at his own data screen, then shook his head wryly.
"This should be interesting, My Lady. Your next appointment is with the engineer I mentioned to you."
Honor nodded and straightened her own chair as the quiet knock on the door came-exactly on schedule.
"Enter," she called, and an armsmen in the green-on-green colors she'd chosen for her steading opened the door to admit the engineer in question.
He was a young man, and there was something vaguely untidy about him. Not slovenly, and no one could have been more painfully clean, but he seemed uncomfortable in his formal clothing. He would, she thought, have looked far more natural in coveralls, festooned with micro-comps and the other tools of his trade, and his nervousness was palpable as he hesitated in the doorway.
"Come in, Mr. Gerrick." She put as much reassurance into her voice as she could and stood behind her desk, extending a hand in welcome. Protocol called for her to remain seated throughout, as befitted her high office, but she couldn'tnot when the youthful engineer looked so unsure of himself.
Gerrick blushed scarlet and scurried across the office, covered with all too obvious confusion, and it occurred to her that he'd probably boned up on the way things ought to go. Well, it was too late for that, and she smiled and left her hand out as he came to a halt before her desk.
He paused a moment, then reached out hesitantly, as if unsure whether to shake her hand or kiss it. She solved his quandary by grasping his firmly, and some of his uncertainty seemed to flow away. He smiled backshylyand returned her grip with something like assurance.
"Sit down, Mr. Gerrick." She pointed at the chair before his desk, and he obeyed the gesture quickly, clutching his briefcase in his lap with a residue of his original nervousness. "Lord Clinkscales tells me you're one of my senior engineers," she went on, "and that you have some special project you wish to discuss with me?"
Gerrick blushed again, as if he felt calling him a senior engineer might be a veiled irony, given his obvious youth, but she only waited, hands folded on her blotter. Her attentive expression must have reassured him, because he drew a deep breath and nodded.
"Yes, My Lady, I do." He spoke quickly, but his voice was deeper than his undeniable scrawniness might have suggested.
"Then, tell me about it," Honor invited, leaning back in her chair, and he cleared his throat.
"Well, My Lady, I've been studying applications of the new materials the Alliance has made available to us here." He ended on a slight upward note, as if asking a question, and she nodded in understanding. "Some of them are quite remarkable," Gerrick went on with greater confidence. "In fact, I've been particularly impressed by the possibilities of the new crystoplast."
He paused, and Honor rubbed the tip of her nose. Crystoplast wasn't really all that new, though it might be to a Grayson engineer. The armorplast routinely used in spacecraft was far more advanced; in fact, it had relegated the cheaper crystoplast almost exclusively to civilian industry, where design tolerances could be traded off against cost savings, and it took her a moment to fix the differences between the two of them in her mind.
"All right, Mr. Gerrick," she said. "I'm with you. May I assume this project of yours employs crystoplast?"
"Yes, My Lady." Gerrick leaned forward, the last of his nervousness fading as eagerness took over. "We've never had anything with that much tensile strengthnot on Grayson. It offers a whole new range of possibilities for enviro engineering. Why, we could dome whole towns and cities with it!"
Honor nodded in sudden understanding. Grayson's heavy metal concentrations made simple atmospheric dust an all too real danger. Provision for internal over-pressure and filtration systems were as routine in Grayson building codes as roofs were on other planets, and public structureslike Protector's Palace, or her own steadholder's mansionwere built under climate-controlled domes as a matter of course.
She rubbed her nose again, then glanced at Clinkscales. The regent was watching Gerrick with a slight smile, one that mingled approval with a hint of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she turned back to the engineer.
"I imagine you're right, Mr. Gerrick. And, under the circumstances, I suppose Harrington Steading would be a good place to start doing it. We could incorporate city domes from the ground up, as it were, couldn't we?"
"Yes, My Lady. But that's not all we could do. We could build entire farms under crystoplast!"
"Farms?" Honor asked in some surprise, and Gerrick nodded firmly.
"Yes, My Lady. Farms. I've got the cost projections here-" he started digging into his briefcase, his face alight with eagerness "and once we take long-term operational expenses into consideration, production costs would be much lower than in the orbital habitats. We could cut transportation costs, too, and"
"Just a moment, Adam," Clinkscales interrupted with surprising gentleness. Gerrick looked quickly at the regent, and Clinkscales gave a slight headshake as he turned to Honor.
"I've seen Adam'sMr. Gerrick'sfigures, My Lady, and he's quite right. His domes would provide a marked decrease over the orbital farms in cost-per-yield. Unfortunately, our farmers are a bit... traditional, shall we say?" His eyes twinkled at his own choice of words, and Honor hid a smile. "So far, Adam hasn't been able to interest anyone with the capital for it in funding his project."
"Ah." Honor leaned further back in understanding, and Gerrick watched her anxiously. "Just what sort of costs are we looking at here?"
"I've designed and costed a six-thousand-hectare demonstration project, My Lady." Gerrick swallowed, as if expecting her to protest the size, and went on quickly. "Anything much smaller than that would be too little to prove the concept to the agri-corporations, and"