That question is really what this chapter answers, but it's not the answer to this question that interests me nearly so much as how Weber chooses to answer it. He could have put Protector Benjamin and High Admiral Matthews in one of their offices, or a war room, or even the bridge of a recently-completed Grayson superdreadnought.
Instead he sets it in a greenhouse.
This allows him to establish several things.
-Protector Benjamin Mayhew IX has an unusual hobby (cross-planetary horticulture)
-High Admiral Wesley Matthews isn't good at sticking to his guns on some things (i.e., staying in uniform while inside an absurdly hot greenhouse) but is good on other things (i.e., persuading the Protector to put Honor back in the saddle).
-Matthews is still rather new to his role and, unlike his predecessor, who was related to Benjamin (and died in Book 2 during a Masadan/Haven sneak attack), he has a hard time coping with Benjamin's eccentricities.
-Benjamin sometimes arranges to meet Matthews in the greenhouse just to mess with him, but this time it was an accident.
These are great little character touches that actually don't really matter (spoiler: Matthews and Benjamin have a perfectly fine working relationship right up until Matthews is killed much later on down the line during Pearl Harbor In Space), but do make the universe feel lived-in, as if these are actual people and not just ciphers who exist to dump the book's problems in Honor's lap.
This established, they leave the greenhouse so that Matthews doesn't have to sweat his way through the entire argument. Benjamin is hesitant to heap any new responsibility on Honor's shoulders given the crap she's recently been through (murdered boyfriend, loss of her career) and the crap she's now getting from the reactionaries on Grayson (#OccupyHarrington). Matthews points out that Benjamin would not be making these excuses for her if she was a man. (Because, you know, Grayson society expects men to put aside their problems and move forward with the task at hand, whereas women are there to have and raise children.) By the way, none of this is screaming "FEMINISM" at me the way Fake Ghostbusters probably would if I bothered to see it. Benjamin is a liberal* but although his horizons have been broadened by his offworld education, he is still constrained by the mindset of his home planet. He's trapped by the following two propositions: 1) Women can do anything men can do. 2) Women are precious and need to be protected. Matthews calls him out on it.
*A note on politics: neither the labels of the Manticore political parties nor the labels I'll be using in these blog posts correspond to the American political spectrum. I mean, obviously, the Liberal Party being led by a countess who's insanely corrupt and yet suffers occasional pangs of conscience? Please. We all know Hillary has no conscience. (Although the Conservative Association being effectively in the thrall of a guy who has the dirt on everyone could very easily explain why Trump is their nominee, so...)
But as I was saying. There are "conservatives," or "reactionaries" or even "traditionalists" who can't stand the sight of a woman out of the kitchen - we'll meet them in good time and some of them just exist for Honor to beat up on. But Benjamin frickin' Mayhew, who's the driving force for these reforms, is at times incredibly patronizing simply because he can't get over his own ingrained prejudices. I mean look at this paragraph and ask yourself if any third-wave feminist would ever have written such a thing:
Unlike most Graysons, he'd been educated off-world, on Old Terra herself. The traditional Grayson view held that asking women to bear the same responsibilities as men was a perversion of nature, but he'd been exposed to a society in which the notion that men and women might possibly be considered unequal would have been regarded as equally grotesque, and he'd accepted that view. Yet at the bottom of his genuine commitment to it, he was a Grayson, and one who owed his entire family's lives to Honor Harrington; how much had his auto-reflex instinct to protect her affected his judgment?It's honest and sincere and not a cardboard cutout of either a misogynist or an "ally." (A movie/TV adaptation could pretty easily fall flat on its face, really.)
So then Matthews pulls some Grand Admiral Thrawn-style analysis (by the way: there's a new Honorverse novel out late this year and then a new Thrawn novel out next year! So. Much. Brilliance!) and determines that even though Manticore might not have made up its mind to do so yet, it's going to have to pull its capital units out of Yeltsin (the Grayson system) within two months.
He's figured this out based on the fact that, as the prologue hinted, the momentum is shifting away from Manticore. In the war's first six months, Manticore lost 7 capital ships taking 19 systems away from Haven and killing 40 of their capital ships. But in the most recent three months, Manticore lost 19 capital ships taking only 2 systems away from Haven. With their momentum drastically slowing down, Manticore is going to pull out all the stops it can to drive as far as possible into Haven territory before the Havenites can start thinking about counterattacks. And that means that, with the Grayson navy technically ready to stand on its own, Manticore is sure to pull out of the system.
But Grayson is woefully understaffed. Matthews himself was a mere commodore before the woefully misnamed First Battle of Yeltsin and the deaths of basically everybody superior to him. They badly need people with any combat experience. People, like, say, Honor Harrington, who kicked ass at Second Yeltsin and then went on to win the Battle of Hancock during the opening stages of the Manticore-Haven War. And it just so happens that Manticore doesn't currently have a use for her. As Matthews points out: "I think their Admiralty would be happy to [loan her to Grayson]. It wasn't their idea to put her on half-pay, and, historically, the Star Kingdom often 'loans' half-pay officers to allies." (The Admiralty, remember, is totally separate from, but beholden to, the politicians; the Cromarty government had to bench her to try to placate the Conservatives after she killed Pavel Young, and even then, Duke Cromarty himself did it only as a necessity.)
Benjamin says he'll consider it, but really he's got about as much choice as Cromarty did when he benched her; Grayson needs every experienced officer it can get its hands on, and right now that means Honor Harrington.
Next: is she up for the job? (The next few chapters deal with Honor's current mental state and a domestic plot brewing against her; Matthews doesn't actually offer her a job until Chapter 6. In particular, Chapters 3 and 4 are both really short and I'll probably cover them in one post.)
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