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This, she realized suddenly, was probably the best squadron command she would ever have, unless, perhaps, she was ever fortunate enough to command her own battlecruiser squadron. Heavy cruisers were powerful units, too valuable to waste on secondary duties, yet small enough and numerous enough that they could be worked hard... or risked. There would always be something for squadrons like this to do, and those who commanded them would always enjoy a degree of freedom and independence from higher authority no ship of the wall would ever know. Capital ships must remain concentrated at crucial strategic points, but cruisers were not just the eyes and ears of the Fleet but its fingertips, as well. They were far more likely to be detached for independent operations, and she felt herself looking forward to forging her ships into the single, cohesive force she would wield as easily and naturally as she did the Harrington Sword.
She smiled at the simile and turned her chair around, putting her back to her displays to survey her staff. She was over a half-hour early for the regular morning conference, and most of her officers were busy with routine duties or collating one last bit of data for their upcoming briefings.
Like her squadron’s ships, her staff reflected the composite nature of the fleet it would be joining. Unlike her BatRon One staff, however, she'd personally selected each member of her current team, either on the basis of personal experience with them or on the advice of Commodore Justin Ackroyd, current head of the GSN's Office of Perso
Venizelos, of course, she knew very well indeed, and her eyes rested on him with carefully hidden fondness as he bent over Lieutenant Commander McGinley’s shoulder to discuss something on the ops officers display. Honor could just hear the crisp, quiet murmur of his voice, and she smiled as she recalled the poker-faced, noncommittal, almost desperately detached officer she'd taken to Basilisk Station with her so many years ago. He'd changed a lot since then, yet he remained just as poised, and handsome, as ever, and his small stature was no handicap among Grayson's generally undersized population. In fact, he probably wished it was a problem. Given the fact that female births outnumbered male by three-to-one on Grayson, women were far more aggressive, in their own fashion, here than back in the Star Kingdom, and according to Honors reports from MacGuiness, Venizelos was finding it necessary to beat off Grayson beauties with a stick.
She smothered a highly inappropriate giggle at the thought and turned her attention to the ops officer herself. Like Venizelos, Marcia McGinley was Manticoran, but unlike him, or, for that matter, Honor, McGinley wore Grayson uniform. The trim, brown-haired, gray-eyed lieutenant commander was barely thirty-seven, extremely young for her rank in the RMN, but like many of the Manticoran "loaners" in GSN service (including one Honor Harrington), she'd found rapid promotion in her adopted navy. She was also, according to Commodore Ackroyd, who'd hand-picked McGinley as one of his three final nominees for Honors operations officer, extremely good at her job. From what Honor had seen so far, he'd been right about McGinley's competence, and it looked like the ops officer was going to be one of the off-duty spark plugs of the staff, as well.
Commander Howard Latham, her staff com officer, was the senior Grayson-born member of the staff, and he was as old for his rank (as a Grayson) as McGinley was young (for a Manticoran). Not that his service record had ever been less than exemplary, for his relative lack of seniority was entirely due to the serious injuries he'd suffered in a shuttle accident six years before Grayson joined the Alliance. Grayson's pre-Alliance medical science had done its best, yet its best hadn't been good enough to keep the damage from cutting short what had been a very promising career. But once Grayson had signed the treaty of alliance, modern medicine had been able to intervene retroactively and do a great deal to restore his "hopelessly crippled" legs.
Complete repair, unfortunately, had evaded even the Manticoran doctors, mainly because the healing process had been so far along. To really fix all that was wrong, the doctors would have been forced basically to destroy his legs all over again in order to start from scratch, and Latham had been entirely too good an officer to put back into the hospital for another two years. His mouth was bracketed by deep-etched pain lines, and he moved stiffly, but even when he had been invalided out of the Navy, he'd continued to work from a wheelchair as one of the GSN’s civilian consultants. On his return to active duty, he'd spent two years working with the RMN to more fully integrate the Allies' FTL communications capability into squadron-level tactical and operational capabilities, and his present assignment was almost certainly the last stop on his career track before he received his own first starship command. Honor didn't know if he realized that, but she knew how glad she was to have him.
At fifty-five, Lieutenant (Senior-Grade) George LeMoyne, her Logistics and Supply Officer, was the oldest member of the staff, but anyone who thought his relatively low rank reflected lack of ability or performance would have been sadly mistaken. LeMoyne had joined the Royal Manticoran Navy straight out of high school (as the forfeit for a lost bet, according to him). Despite initial training as a small craft coxswain, he'd soon been moved over to the Bureau of Ships and assigned to BuShips Logistics Command, and despite his lack of formal education, he'd risen steadily in grade on the basis of sheer competence. Two T-years before the present war broke out, LeMoyne had attained the rank of master chief and the equivalent of at least three postgraduate degrees, and Admiral Cortez's BuPers had offered him a commission, then assigned him to Logistics Commands Grayson liaison group. His performance there had more than justified BuPers' faith in him, and Honor knew she'd be able to keep him for no more than a T-year or so before he was promoted to lieutenant commander and reassigned to one of the Manticore Binary System’s three major Navy shipyards.
Lieutenant Commander Anson Lethridge, Honors astrogator, was the only member of her staff who was neither Manticoran nor Grayson. Lethridge was from the Erewhon Republic and an officer of the Erewhon Navy. Dark-haired and eyed, he was heavyset and powerfully built. He was also one of the ugliest men Honor had ever seen, with rough features and a heavy brow that, coupled with his broad shoulders and long arms, lent him a hulking, almost brutish appearance at complete odds with his quick mind and endless energy, and she wondered why he'd never resorted to biosculpt. It was obvious that he was sensitive about the way he looked, for he went out of his way to deliberately cast himself as the butt of his own humor by making jokes about his appearance. Many of them were genuinely fu
She watched now as he gazed at his display, watching vectors shift and change while he played with the input values and variables. It was odd, she reflected, how often outward appearances were so completely misleading. Of every officer on her staff, her brutish astrogator was almost certainly the most gentle... despite the lengths to which he went to hide it.
The lift doors hissed open once more, drawing her eyes from Lethridge, and a small, fond smile curved her lips as her squadrons senior medical officer arrived on the bridge. Surgeon Commander Fritz Montoya was Alvarez's surgeon and technically not a member of her staff at all, but she'd specifically requested him for Alvarez, and she made a point of including him in staff meetings.