Nimitz's buzzing purr confirmed her suspicions, and she shot a humorous glare at Santos as she saw the celery stalk clutched in the treecat's right hand-paw. Nimitz's carnivore fangs weren't designed for vegetable matter, despite his tree-dweller origins. Treecats were the top of Sphinx's arboreal food chain, preying on the smaller vegetarians and omnivores who inhabited their domain, and his needle-sharp teeth shredded the celery into stringy green strands—wet, stringy green strands—as he chewed.
Santos gave her a half-apologetic glance as she watched the 'cat make a blissful mess, and Honor shook her head.
"You know that stuff's bad for him, Dominica," she chided.
"But he likes it so much, Skipper," Santos excused herself.
"I know he does, but he can't metabolize it—not fully, anyway. He's got the wrong enzymes for terrestrial cellulose. It just fills him up, and then he picks at his supper."
Nimitz paused in his chewing. His vocal apparatus might be utterly unsuited to anything resembling human speech, but he understood a surprisingly large vocabulary, and he'd heard this particular speech from his person too often over the years. Now he gave her a disdainful glance, flirted his tail, and rose on his rear feet to rub his head against Santos's arm, making his views on the subject abundantly clear. The engineer was his favorite among Fearless's officers—probably, Honor reflected darkly, because she always had a stash of celery somewhere about her person these days—and Santos grinned down at him.
"Well," Honor sighed finally, "I guess I should be used to it. The little devil always finds someone to pander to his vices."
"He is kind of cute, isn't he?" Santos agreed. She gave the 'cat an affectionate chin rub, then sank into an empty chair at the table, and Honor smiled. She was, she reflected, a terrible sucker where people with a kindness for treecats were concerned.
"You wanted to see me about something?" Santos asked after a moment.
"Yes." Honor tapped her data display with a stylus. "I've been looking at Barney's figures on probable power usage. They seem awfully vague to me."
"Well, it's not an easy thing to quantify, Skipper." Santos ran her fingers through her hair and frowned thoughtfully. "He doesn't have very solid data on what they've got to use their power on, so his people have had to make a lot of WAGs." Honor raised an eyebrow, and Santos grinned. "That's a technical term we engineers use. It means `Wild-Assed Guess,'" she explained. "They can feed in some hard figures from outside observation—things like exterior lighting, com traffic, and heat exchangers—but without complete specs on an enclave's interior hardware, they're shooting in the dark. Just knowing whether or not a given set of people remember to turn the lights off when they leave the room could throw any estimate off by a pretty wide margin."
"Um." Honor rubbed the tip of her nose and leaned back in her chair, listening to Nimitz crunch and slurp away at his celery. "How are we coming on the collector taps?" she asked suddenly.
"We've got three—no, four—to go," Santos replied. "Sorry it's taking so long, but with just the cutters—"
Honor waved a hand, cutting her off, and smiled.
"Don't apologize. You're doing well, especially since we're trying to keep anyone from noticing what we're up to." She rocked her chair slightly, still gazing at the data on her terminal, then shrugged.
"All right, let's see if we can come at this a different way, Dominica," she murmured, and pressed her intercom key.
"Officer of the watch," Lieutenant Webster's voice replied.
"Com, this is the Captain. Is the exec on the bridge?"
"No, Ma'am. I think he's down in Missile Two. Tactical's been having some problems with the magazine feed."
"I see. Well, buzz him, would you? If he's free, I'd like to see him in my briefing room. And ask Lieutenant Cardones to come in, too, please."
"Yes, Ma'am." The intercom was silent for a few moments, then spoke again. "They're on their way, Ma'am."
"Thank you, Samuel." Honor keyed off and looked at Santos. "If Barney can't give us hard numbers, maybe we can make his WAGs work for us, instead."
"How?"
"Well, it occurs to me that—"
Honor broke off as the briefing room hatch opened to admit Cardones. The lieutenant nodded just a bit shyly to Santos, then looked at Honor.
"You wanted me, Ma'am?"
"Yes. Have a seat, Guns. I've got a problem I need you and the exec to help me solve."
"Problem, Ma'am?" Cardones sounded a trifle wary, and Honor smiled.
"Nothing to do with your department. It's just—"
She paused again as the hatch opened once more. McKeon wore coveralls over his uniform, and there was grease on them. That was one thing Honor unreservedly approved of in her prickly executive officer; he was never above getting his own hands dirty.
"You sent for me, Captain?" he asked, far more formally than Cardones. Honor nodded, feeling her own face stiffen with a chill of answering formality, and pointed at the chair opposite Santos.
"I did," she said. McKeon sat. "How's the missile feed problem?" she asked, trying—again—to draw him out.
"Nothing major, Captain. I think it's pretty much solved," he replied crisply, and she hid a sigh. Behind her, Nimitz stopped crunching his celery for a moment, then resumed with more restrained gusto.
"Well," she said, "as I was telling Rafe, we have a problem. We're trying to spot unusual power flows, and we don't have a reliable base usage to pick them out of." McKeon nodded, gray eyes thoughtful but cool in his expressionless face.
"What I want you and Rafe to do," Honor went on, "is take all the input from the solar collector taps and compare it to Major Isvarian's rough estimates. What I'm looking for is a total usage figure over several days' time for each enclave, one we can relate to his estimate on a proportional basis."
She paused, and Cardones glanced at the first officer, as if waiting for him to ask a question. When McKeon only nodded, he cleared his own throat.
"Excuse me, Ma'am, but what good will that do us?"
"Maybe not a lot, Rafe, but I want to see how close Barney came in his original estimate. If he's close, or if he's off by the same proportion in each case, then we'll have both an indication of his numbers' reliability and some idea of what a given enclave's power needs should look like. If he's close in most cases but off by a large factor in one or two instances, we'll have an indication that the ones outside his estimate bear closer examination."
Cardones nodded. McKeon simply sat silently, waiting.
"In addition," Honor went on, "I want the changes in power demand tracked on an hourly basis. Get a feel for the pattern. In particular, I want to know if any of them use large amounts of power during local down periods—especially late at night, for instance. Compare the fluctuations in power usage between all the enclaves on a time basis. If demand drops by a lower percentage in one or two of them, I want to know about it. From what Major Isvarian and his NPA types tell me, a mekoha lab wouldn't be able to shut down in mid-process, so if someone's power levels remain high when all their neighbors' drop, we may have an indication that we're closing in on the lab."
Cardones nodded again, eyes bright with interest. Unlike, Honor noted, McKeon's.
"I'll get right on it, Ma'am," the exec said after a moment. "Will there be anything else, Captain?"
"No," Honor said quietly, and McKeon rose with a quick nod. He beckoned to Cardones, and the two of them filed out. Honor watched the hatch close behind them and sighed.