It’s good to see you again.” “And you, Honor,” Chien-lu Anderman, Herzog von Rabenstrange, said warmly as he shook the offered hand. The Andermani admiral, who just happened to also be Emperor Gustav’s first cousin, was a smallish man, not much larger than Honor’s Uncle Jacques. And like Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou and Honor herself, he had dark, almond-shaped eyes. At the moment, as they stood in the admiral’s day cabin aboard HMS Imperator, those eyes were as warm with genuine pleasure as his tone, and he smiled broadly. Not that he and Honor had always been on such excellent terms. “I’m glad—and surprised, actually—they managed to get you back here so quickly,” she went on, and he shrugged. It was six days by courier vessel from the Manticore Binary System to the Andermani capital in the New Potsdam System by way of the Junction’s Gregor Terminus. To get here this quickly—less than one full day after Benjamin Mayhew’s arrival—Rabenstrange must have departed within no more than twenty-four standard hours after the arrival of Elizabeth’s courier to Emperor Gustav.
