She was also, Honor knew, genuinely concerned about her only child's lack of a sex life. Well, sometimes Honor was a bit worried about it, but it wasn't as if she had all that many opportunities. A starship's captain simply could not dally with a member of her crew, even if she had the desire to, and Honor was none too sure she did. Her sexual experience was virtually nil—aside from a single extremely unpleasant Academy episode and one adolescent infatuation that had trickled off in dreary unhappiness—because she'd simply never met a man she cared to become involved with.

Not that she was interested in women; she just didn't seem particularly interested in anyone — which might be just as well. It avoided all sorts of potential professional difficulties ... and she rather doubted an overgrown horse like her would provoke much reciprocal interest, anyway. That reflection bothered her a bit. No, she thought, be honest; it bothered her a lot, and there were times her mother's version of a sense of humor was less than amusing. But this wasn't one of them, and she surprised them both by putting an arm around her and squeezing in a rare public display of affection.

"Trying to bribe me into being good, huh?" Dr. Harrington teased, and Honor shook her head.

"I never try to do the impossible, Mother."

"That's one for your side," her father observed, then held out his hand to his wife. "Come along, Alley. Honor ought to be circulating—you can go make someone else's life miserable for a while."

"You Navy types can be a real pain in the ... posterior," Allison replied with a wickedly demure glance at her daughter, and Honor watched fondly as her parents vanished into the crowd. She didn't get to see them as often as she would have liked, which was one reason she'd been so happy when Fearless was sent to Vulcan for refit, instead of Hephaestus.Vulcan orbited Honor's own homeworld of Sphinx, ten light-minutes further out than the capital planet of Manticore, and she'd taken shameless advantage of the fact to spend time at home, wallowing in her father's cooking.