His facilities were nonexistent, and his medical supplies were limited to the emergency supplies aboard the shuttles, but he was very good at his job. Although he’d been reduced almost to the primitive capabilities of a late prespace physician on Old Earth, he’d handled everything that came his way with aplomb. But he’d also almost had a fit over some of Camp Inferno’s routine procedures. He’d completely overhauled their garbage disposal practices, for example, and he’d instigated an inflexible schedule of regular checkups. He’d even rooted out the most sedentary of the camp’s inhabitants and badgered Benson into reworking the work assignments to see to it that they got sufficient exercise. For the most part, the camp’s inhabitants were still at the bemused stage where he was concerned, as if they hadn’t quite decided what to make of this alien bundle of energy, but they were far too glad to see him to resent him.

Honor hid a fresh mental grimace at the thought. That was another thing the Peeps couldn’t have cared less about. The way StateSec saw it, it was cheaper for them to lose an entire camp of two or three thousand prisoners than to bother to provide proper medical care. If someone got sick or injured, he or she lived or died on his or her own, with only the crude facilities and resources fellow prisoners might be able to cobble up to keep them alive.

I suppose I should be grateful they even bother to lace the inmates’ rations with contraceptives, she thought grimly. Not that they do it to be nice. Kids would just be more mouths for them to feed, after all. And God only knows what the infant mortality rate would look like in a place like this without proper medical support!

“I’m sure Fritz would be touched by your faith in his medical prowess,” she told McKeon dryly, shaking off her gloomy thoughts. “Unfortunately, I doubt even his superb bedside manner would impress molycircs very much.”

“I don’t know about that,” McKeon argued with a grin. “Every time he starts in on me about exercise and diet, I get instantly healthy in self-defense!”

“But you’re easily led and highly suggestible, Alistair,” Honor said sweetly, and he laughed.

“You are feeling sleepy, very sleepy,” she intoned sonorously, wiggling the fingers of her hand in front of his eyes. “Your eyelids are growing heavier and heavier.”

“They are not,” he replied—then blinked suddenly and stretched in a prodigious yawn. Honor laughed delightedly, echoed by Nimitz’s bleek of amusement, and McKeon gave both of them an injured look as he finished stretching.

“I, Dame Honor, am neither suggestible nor easily led,” he told her severely. “Claims to that effect are base lies, I’ll have you and your friend know! However—” he yawned again “—I’ve been up all day and so, purely coincidentally, I do find myself just a bit sleepy at the moment. The which being so, I think I should take myself off to bed. I’ll see you all in the morning.”