She brooded in silence for a few moments, then shrugged.

“Anyway, Henri was serving in the Marine detachment aboard one of their ships—”

“The Dague,” Dessouix put in.

“Yes, the Dague.” Benson nodded. “And when the system government surrendered, Dague’s skipper refused to obey the cease-fire order. She fought a hit-and-run campaign against the Peeps’ merchant marine for over a T-year before they finally cornered her and pounded Dague to scrap. The Peeps shot her and her senior surviving officers for ‘piracy,’ and the junior officers got shipped to Hell where they couldn’t make any more trouble. I guess it was—what? About ten T-years, Henri?—after that when we met.”

“About ten,” Dessouix agreed. “They transferred me to your camp to separate me from my men.”

“And how did the two of you end up at Inferno?” Honor asked after a moment.

“Oh, I’ve always been a troublemaker, Commodore,” Benson said with a bitter smile, and reached out to lay a hand on Dessouix’s shoulder. “Henri here can tell you that.”

“Stop that,” Dessouix said. His tone was forceful, and he enunciated each word slowly and carefully, as if he were determined to make his weirdly accented Standard English comprehensible. “It wasn’t your fault, bien-aimée. I made my own decision, Harriet. All of us did.”

“And I led all of you right into it,” she said flatly. But then she inhaled sharply and shook her head. “Not but what he isn’t right, Dame Honor. He’s a stubborn man, my Henri.”

“And you aren’t?” Dessouix snorted with slightly less force.

“Not a man, at any rate,” Benson observed with a slow, lurking smile. It was the first Honor had seen from the other woman, and it softened her stern face into something almost gentle.

“I’d noticed,” Dessouix replied dryly, and Benson chuckled. Then she looked back at Honor.

“But you were asking how I wound up here. The answer’s simple enough, I’m afraid—ugly, but simple. You see, neither InSec nor these new Black Leg, StateSec bastards have ever seen any reason to worry about little things like the Deneb Accords. We’re not prisoners to them; we’re property. They can do anything the hell they like to us, and none of their ’superior officers’ are going to so much as slap their wrists. So if you’re good looking and a Black Leg takes a hankering for you—”

She shrugged, and Honor’s face went harder than stone. Benson gazed into her one good eye for a second, then nodded.

“Exactly,” she said harshly. She looked away and drew a deep breath, and Honor could feel the iron discipline it took for the older woman to throttle the rage which threatened to explode within her.

“I was the senior officer in our old camp, which made me the CO,” the woman from Pegasus continued after a moment, her voice level with dearly bought dispassion, “and there were two other prisoners there, friends of mine, who both helped me with camp management. They were twins—a brother and a sister. I never knew exactly what planet they were from. I think it was Haven itself, but they never said. I think they were afraid to, even here on Hell, but I knew they were politicals, not military. They really shouldn’t have been in the same camp as us military types, but they’d been on Hell a long time—almost as long as me—and InSec hadn’t been as careful about segregating us in the early days. But they were both good looking, and unlike me, they were second-generation prolong.”