Battalion-Captain Hymair chan Yahndar said, standing behind the desk in his cramped—extremely cramped—shipboard office. There was too little room, as his Karmalian grandmother would have said, to swing a sheep. Of course, chan Yahndar had never understood who’d want to swing a sheep, but the phrase certainly offered all of the earthy color anyone could have desired. And however tiny his office was, he was lucky to have it. TTE’s mass-produced steamships were scarcely noted for their palatial accommodations, and Voyager Osprey was no exception to that rule, although—thank all the gods!—she’d at least been intended as a transport from the beginning. That meant he and his men hadn’t ended up stacked in six-high pipe-frame bunks in a converted cargo hold whose last contents had reeked to the gods themselves. “Well,” the dark-skinned Shurkhali said with an expression halfway between a grimace and a smile, “given all we’ve got to do, it seemed like a good idea to get started early.
