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on the arms.
    Sten felt mildly sorry for the being.
    "You not penguin."
    "An' how d'ye know, lad? Y' dinnae hae th' look ae a passionate penguin pervert aboot y'."
    "You man."
    "Look, son. Y're tired. Y'hae a bit t'… snuff, snort, swill, or suck. Hae y'self ae sitdown, an' Ah'll buy y' a wee new balloon."
    "Don't like men! I hurt men! First I hurt you, then hurt him."
    "Ah well," Kilgour said. "Sten, y' bear witness t' m' wee mum Ah'm noo goin't out an' gettin' in th' bloody frae like Ah wae a cub again."
    "I'll tell her."
    "Ah knew Ah c'd rely on you."
    The being was reaching for Kilgour's neck—what little neck the tubby man had.
    Kilgour's hands circled the being's arms, just where a wrist would be on a humanoid. And he levered down. The being scrawked in pain and collapsed down on what were maybe knees, just as gracelessly as an Earth camel. Kilgour, still holding the being's "wrists," stepped forward—and the quadruped collapsed back into a sprawled, seated position.
    "Noo," Alex said. "Y' see how easy pacifism is, when y' put y'r mind t' it?"
    "If you're through playing, Mr. Kilgour?"
    "Ah'm through, Admiral. But Ah hae t' buy m' friend his round. As Ah promis't."
    Kilgour, an upright and honorable man from the high-gee world of Edinburgh, Sten's long-time aide and accomplice and one of the Empire's most highly trained elite commandos, did keep his word—and bought the now quiescent monster a balloon before they left for their inspection tour of the Imperial battle cruiser Victory .
    " 'Tis  all i' th' the leverage," was his only explanation to Sten. "Like tearin' a phone book apart."
    "What's a phone book?"

    " 'Tis quite a ship," Alex said, three hours later.
    "Aye," Sten agreed. He took off the sensor hood he had been wearing and stopped his run through of the Victory's tertiary and redundant TA systems.
    Alex's eyes swept the room before he spoke. There weren't any crewmen within earshot, and the com box wasn't picking up. "Perhaps Ah'm gettin' old," he went on, still tentatively, "but the way this scow's set up's noo like it would have been back in the—the old days."
    "You mean before the Emperor's assassination."
    "Aye," Kilgour said. "Thae's a bit too much flash ae filigree fr this to suit th' old Emp. Or am I rememberin't th' past ae better'n it wae?"
    "I've been thinking the same thing," Sten said. He touched keys, and the computer obediently threw a three-meter hologram of the Victory into the air over the mess table they were sitting at. Another key combination, and the computer began peeling the hologram, displaying the new battle cruiser from all angles and deck by deck.
    "Ah'd heard this wae t' be a 'maphrodite," Alex said. "But it looks more like a three-way or four-way arrangement t'me."
    Sten nodded agreement. He wasn't happy, on a number of levels. First was the entirely pragmatic consideration of the Victory as a warship. Sten had experience with tools, vehicles, and ships that were ostensibly dual- or multiple-purpose. Almost without exception that meant that the tool did quite a number of things badly, and nothing well.
    Battle cruisers, for instance, were based on aeons-old designs of ships that had enough muscle to beat up almost anything—except battleships or monitors—and enough power to run away from the biggies. Quite frequently, though, it worked out that the class was too slow to be able to catch and destroy smaller ships, and played hell getting away from the monsters. Plus, once the ship was caught, its armament, quite capable of bashing a stray destroyer or such, was too light to damage a battleship, and its defensive systems, active or passive, were too weak.
    Sten had gone through the builder-promised specs on the Victory , cross-correlating them with the actual performance the battle cruiser produced during its trials. Unless the Imperial procurement people were on the take—not an impossibility, but not very likely—it looked as if the Victory might be an effective