“I see,” Honor said quietly.

“I think you do, Commodore,” Benson replied, gazing back at her. Their eyes held for several seconds, and then Honor stepped back a bit from the intensity of the moment.

“Obviously, I still have a great many more questions,” she said, making her tone come out sounding as natural as her own crippled mouth permitted. And aren’t we all a battered and bedamned lot? she thought with a flash of true humor. Benson and Dessouix from their “false-potatoes”and me from nerve damage. Lord, it’s a wonder we can understand ourselves, much less anyone else! Nimitz followed her thought and bleeked a quiet laugh from her lap, and she shook herself.

“As I say, I still have questions,” she said more easily, “but there’s one I hope you can answer for me right now.”

“Such as?” Benson asked.

“Such as just what you and Lieutenant Dessouix were doing when my people, um, invited you to come talk to me.”

“Doing?” Benson repeated blankly.

“Yes. We could figure out some of what was going on out there,” Honor told her, waving her hand in the direction of the camp clearing, “but you and the Lieutenant had us stumped.”

“Oh, that!” Benson’s expression cleared, and then she laughed with an edge of embarrassment. “We were… well, call it bird-watching, Dame Honor.”

“Bird-watching?” Honor blinked, and Benson shrugged.

“Well, they’re not really birds, of course. Hell doesn’t have birds. But they’re close enough analogues, and they’re pretty.” She shrugged again. “It’s an interest we share—a hobby, I suppose—and yesterday and today were our free days, so we decided to see if we couldn’t spot a mated group we’ve been seeing foraging in the sword grass for the last couple of weeks. You do realize, don’t you, that all native life here on Hell is trisexual?” Her expression brightened with genuine interest. “Actually, there are four sexes, but we think only three of them are immediately involved in procreation,” she explained. “The fourth is a neuter, but it’s actually the one that does the nursing in the mammal equivalents, and it seems to do most of the foraging or hunting for the others. And the birth rates for all four sexes seem to be set by some sort of biomechanism that—”

She stopped abruptly, and blushed. The effect looked fascinating on her stern, captain’s face, and Dessouix laughed delightedly.

“You see, Dame Honor?” he said after a moment, “even here in Hell, some people have hobbies.”

“Yes, I do see,” Honor replied with one of her half-smiles. Then she leaned back against the tree, studying them both for several silent seconds while her mind worked.

Nimitz pressed his chin against her knee, chest rumbling with the merest whisper of his normal buzzing purr. Benson’s and Dessouix’s emotions had lashed him like a whip during their explanation of how they’d come to Camp Inferno, but he’d weathered that storm, and now he lay calmly in Honor’s lap, relaxed in its aftermath.