“He is that,” Honor agreed, watching Benson pet Nimitz.

The ’cat had set about captivating Camp Inferno’s inmates with all his customary skill, and he had every one of them wrapped around his thumb by now. Not that he hadn’t had more reasons than usual for being his charming self. The seduction process had given him—and Honor—the opportunity to sample the emotions of every human being in the camp. A few of them were hanging on the ragged edge, with a dangerous degree of instability after their endless, hopeless years on Hell, and she had quietly discussed her concerns about those people with Ramirez and Benson, but only one of Inferno’s six hundred and twelve inhabitants had been a genuine security risk.

Honor had been dumbfounded to discover that the Peeps really had planted an agent in Inferno, and the other inmates had been even more shocked than she. The man in question had been their resident expert on how to spin and weave the local equivalent of flax to provide the fabric Dessouix and his two assistants used to clothe the inmates. That had made him a vital cog in the camp’s small, survival-oriented economy, and almost all of the other prisoners had regarded him as a personal friend, as well. The thought that he was actually a StateSec agent planted to betray their trust had been more than enough to produce a murderous fury in his fellow prisoners.

Only he hadn’t actually been an “agent” at all; he was simply an informer. It was a subtle difference, but it had kept Ramirez from ordering (or allowing) his execution when, acting on Honor’s suggestion, Benson and Dessouix found the short-range com set hidden in his mattress. Had they failed to find it before the next food drop brought a shuttle into his com range, a single short report from him would have killed them all, and they knew it. But they’d also discovered why he’d become a StateSec agent, and it was hard to fault a man for agreeing to do anything which might save his lover from execution.

So instead of killing him, they’d simply taken away his com set and detailed half a dozen others to keep an eye on him. All things taken together, Honor was just as glad it had worked out that way. Whatever else he might have been, too many of the camp inmates had considered him a friend for too many years, and things were going to be ugly enough without having to begin killing their own.

“—on Basilisk Station?”

She blinked and looked up as she realized McKeon had been speaking to her.

“Sorry, Alistair. I was thinking about something else,” she apologized. “What did you say?”

“I asked if you remembered what a puppy Scotty was at Basilisk,” McKeon said, then grinned at Ramirez and Benson. “He meant well, but lord was he green!”

“And he was also—what? A couple of hundred thousand richer by the end of the deployment?” Honor shot back with a half-grin of her own.