She chuckled at the thought while she watched the others settle into the truncated passenger compartment. As she'd told MacGuiness, seating was limited, for the pinnace was heavily loaded with cargo, in this case, consigned to Prince Adrian's engineer. One of the cruisers air scrubbers had failed, reducing her life-support capacity by ten percent, and although McKeon's ship had enough spares to rebuild the scrubber from scratch, if necessary, the job would take over a week without yard support. No one looked forward to the amount of sheer grunt work involved, but that was a relatively minor concern beside the lost capacity the scrubber represented. Taking it off-line had reduced Prince Adrian's environmental safety margin by thirty-three percent, and no starship skipper wanted to operate with that little reserve for an entire week if it could be helped.
And as it happened, this time it could be helped. Prince Adrian carried sufficient spare parts to repair the scrubber, but the newer, bigger Alvarez turned out to have three complete backup scrubbers tucked away in her capacious Engineering spaces. Exactly where Alvarez's chief engineer had acquired the third one (which put her above establishment) was something of a mystery, and Lieutenant Commander Sinkowitz had been a bit vague when discussing the subject, but Honor was used to the way odds and ends of extra equipment had a habit of turning up aboard ship. Alvarez's higher-volume scrubbers weren't exact matches for Prince Adrian's, but they were close enough that one of them could be adapted to replace the failed unit. Swapping them out would save at least eight days and a lot of sweat, and Greentree had offered to trade McKeon the complete scrubber for the spare parts the Manticoran ship would have used for repairs.
McKeon had been grateful for Greentree’s offer, and local hyper-space conditions had made the transfer practical, although the transport window would be brief. They were just over five days out from Clairmont, and they happened to be under impeller drive at the moment, transiting between two grav waves, which made small craft traffic practical. But the transition to the grav wave which would carry the convoy the rest of the way to its current destination would take only another two hours, after which the ships would be required to reconfigure their drives from impeller mode to Warshawski sails. Since nothing smaller than a starship mounted Warshawski sails, no small craft would be able to move between ships again after that until the convoy reentered n-space.
The Grayson and Manticoran navies shared Edward Saganami's dictum that time, as the single absolutely irreplaceable commodity any fleet possessed, was never to be wasted. Greentree and McKeon had set briskly to work to transship their engineering stores within the window they'd been offered, and when Honor had heard about it, she'd taken the opportunity to transship herself and several members of her staff, as well. Discussions with her staffers over the past two days had led her to approve a few small but significant alterations to the squadrons tactical planning, and she wanted to sit down with her second-in-command to discuss them in person. Even if she hadn't been a firm believer in face-to-face discussion, the com lag imposed by Prince Adrian's lead position would have made any sort of electronic conference impractical. And while she supposed she could have waited until they reached Adler, she had her own ulterior motive for paying a visit to Prince Adrian right now, instead. Besides, as much as she and Greentree had grown to like one another, she suspected her flag captain would feel a certain relief to have her out from underfoot for a few hours.
She was impressed by how swiftly and smoothly Alvarez's boat bay officer had coordinated the transfer, but the scrubber was big enough (and awkwardly enough shaped) that he'd been forced to close off the after two-thirds of the pinnace's modular interior to free up the cargo space to accommodate it. That had also required him to remove the seating which usually occupied that space, of course, and accounted for the cramped personnel area which had been Honors excuse to leave MacGuiness behind.
Even without the steward, seats were at a premium. In addition to the precious scrubber unit, Sinkowitz was sending along a half dozen of his own people to assist Lieutenant Commander Palliser, Prince Adrian's chief engineer, in the job of installing it. That used up a third of the available places, and Honor had quickly filled the rest. Besides her armsmen, Commander Marchant, and Venizelos, she was bringing along Fritz Montoya, Marcia McGinley, Jasper Mayhew, Anson Lethridge, and Scotty Tremaine, and she'd added Carson Clinkscales almost as an afterthought. Her flag lieutenants performance had improved markedly over the past three weeks. He remained an accident looking for a place to happen, but he was learning to anticipate and minimize disasters... and to cope with the embarrassment when they happened anyway. Yet that was when he was among superiors he'd come to know, and she'd decided it would do him good to spend a few hours with strangers. His confidence had grown steadily aboard Alvarez, and if his improved efficiency survived the visit to a new environment, it would do his overall self-image a world of good.
Besides, when it came to the ostensible purpose of her visit, Carson's inclusion was at least as logical as Montoya's. After all, there was no practical reason for the squadron's senior medical officer to sit in on a discussion of tactics... even if he did happen to be an old personal friend of Prince Adrian's CO.
The last of the passengers found a seat, and Harkness sealed the hatch. He consulted the telltales carefully, then spoke into the boom mike of his headset.
"All secure aft," he announced to the cockpit.
"Thank you, Chief," Scotty Tremaine’s voice replied. "Disengaging tube and umbilicals now."
The pinnace's hull transmitted indistinct thuds and bangs to its passengers as Tremaine unhooked from Alvarez's systems, and Harkness watched his readouts.
"Green board," he informed Tremaine after a moment. "Clear to undock."
"Undocking," Tremaine said crisply, and the mechanical docking arms retracted as Honors electronics officer drifted the pinnace free of the bay on reaction thrusters.
Honor watched through the view port, smiling at her reflection in the armorplast as the brilliantly illuminated boat bay slid away from her. At least fitting Scotty aboard hadn't been a problem. He'd made it respectfully but firmly clear at a very early date that staff officer or no, he would permit no one else to serve as Honor's small craft pilot. Given protocol's dictate that Honors seniority meant she couldn't fly herself, she was more than willing to let Tremaine have his way, since he happened to be one of the five or six best natural pilots she'd ever seen. But he and Harkness came as a matched set, so letting him onto the flight deck had also made it inevitable that the senior chief would be aboard as her flight engineer. Precisely how Harkness managed to manipulate BuPers in order to turn up wherever Tremaine went remained one of the unexplained mysteries of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Honor wasn't about to attempt to get to the bottom of it, either. They were far too useful a pair for her to risk jinxing the magic.
The pinnace cleared the bay, and Alvarez dropped her impeller wedge long enough for a stronger kick from the pinnace's thrusters to carry it beyond its own wedge's safety perimeter. Tremaine brought his drive up quickly and smoothly, transitioning from thrusters to impellers, and the pinnace accelerated away from the flagship at well over four hundred gravities. Alvarez's wedge snapped back up behind her, and Honor leaned back in her seat as Tremaine steadied down to overtake Prince Adrian.
The flight would require the better part of the available two hours, for a pinnace's particle shielding limited its top speed to little more than 22,500 KPS more than a merchantman could pull here, and McKeon’s ship was almost nine full light-minutes ahead of Alvarez. Deep down inside, a part of Honor still resented the fact that she'd had to put someone else in that exposed position, but she'd had plenty of time to learn to accept it. Besides, she knew her resentment was silly. It was her job to command the squadron, just as it was Alistair's job to take the point position, and that was that.