“I’m sure you do, Commodore. But so did I, and look where I wound up!”

“Fair enough,” Honor conceded. “But if I may, Commodore, I’d suggest you think of Hell not as the place you ‘wound up,’ but as the temporary stopping place you’re going to leave with us.”

“An optimist, I see.” Ramirez was silent again, thinking, and then he smacked his hands together with the sudden, shocking sound of an explosion. “All right, Commodore Harrington! If you’re crazy enough to try it, I suppose I’m crazy enough to help you.”

“Good,” Honor said, but then she went on in a careful tone. “There is just one other thing, Commodore.”

“Yes?” His voice was uninflected, but Honor could taste the emotions behind it, and the one thing she hadn’t expected was suppressed, devilish amusement.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “We have to settle the question of command.”

“I see.” He leaned back, a solider piece of the darkness beside her as he crossed his ankles and folded his arms across his massive chest. “Well, I suppose we should consider relative seniority, then,” he said courteously. “My own date of rank as a commodore is 1870 p.d. And yours is?”

“I was only eleven T-years old in 1870!” Honor protested.

“Really?” Laughter lurked in his voice. “Then I suppose I’ve been a commodore a little longer than you have.”

“Well, yes, but—I mean, with all due respect, you’ve been stuck here on Hell for the last forty years, Commodore! There’ve been changes, developments in—”

She broke off and clenched her jaw. Should I tell him I’m a full admiral in the Grayson Navy? she wondered. But if I do that now, it’ll sound like—

“Oh, don’t worry so much, Commodore Harrington!” Ramirez laughed out loud, breaking into her thoughts. “You’re right, of course. My last operational experience was so long ago I’d have trouble just finding the flag bridge. Not only that, you and your people are the ones who managed to get down here with the shuttles and the weapons that might just make this entire thing work.”

He shook his head in the darkness, and his voice—and the emotions Honor felt through Nimitz—were dead serious when he went on.

“If you truly manage to pull this off, you’ll certainly have earned the right of command,” he told her. “And the one thing we absolutely can’t afford is any division within our ranks or competition for authority between you and me. I may technically be senior to you, but I will cheerfully accept your authority.”

“And you’ll support me after the initial operation?” she pressed. “What happens then is going to be even more important than the preliminary op—if we’re going to get off-planet, at any rate—and no one can command this kind of campaign by committee.” She paused a moment, then went on deliberately. “And there’s another consideration, as well. I fully realize that you and thousands of other people on this planet will have your own ideas about what to do with the Peeps, and how. But if we’re going to carry through to a conclusion that actually gives us a chance to get off Hell, our command structure will have to hold all the way through… including the ‘domestic’ side.”