He wrote the short story "A Grand Tour" for the first Honorverse anthology More Than Honor, creating, among others, the characters of Hakon Nessler and Edith Mincio, as well as the alien race known as the Alphanes. His story has few links to any other in the Honorverse setting; indeed Drake once confirmed that A Grand Tour is in fact the conceptual antecendant of his own work With the Lightnings, the first novel of the RCN series.