But he wouldn’t—or not yet, anyway—and that meant he’d be staying at the controls with the turbines spooling over and Gearing would be staying on the dorsal gun, just in case. And that meant it was going to be completely up to Rodgers and Citizen Corporal Fierenzi to unload all the stinking food for the useless bastards here in Inferno.

Of course, there are some pluses, Rodgers reminded himself as he hit the button and the big rear cargo hatch whined open. I may be stuck humping this stuff out, but it’ll give me a fresh chance to look over the local talent. If that cute little brunette’s still out here, maybe I’ll just cut her out of the herd and take her back to Styx with me.

And maybe he wouldn’t, too, he thought. None of the prison bait in Inferno had been sent here for good behavior, after all. Cute as that sweet little number looked, ordering her into his bed might not be the very smartest thing he could possibly do.

He chuckled at the thought and stepped out into the brilliant sunlight with Fierenzi on his heels.

That’s funny, he thought. They had to hear us coming, so why the hell aren’t any of ’em already out here to unload their damned food?

· · • · ·

“They’re following the rules,” Honor said, and McKeon heard the sadness in her voice. “Just two of them, and they’re already starting to look around,” she went on. “I’m afraid we don’t have any choice, Alistair.” She paused for a heartbeat, then sighed.

“Do it,” she said softly.

Commodore Alistair McKeon pressed a button, and a strand of old-fashioned fiberoptic cable flashed the signal to the detonators on five hundred kilos of the very best chemical explosives State Security had once owned. Those five hundred kilos were buried directly under the center of the shuttle pad—beneath, in fact, the exact point on which Citizen Lieutenant Jardine’s precise piloting had deposited his shuttle.

The thunderous explosion smashed at Honor’s face and eardrums even at a full kilometer’s range, and the local equivalent of birds erupted from the trees in a shrill, yodeling chorus of protest as the dreadful sound reverberated. The shuttle vanished in a flaming fountain of dirt and debris, taking its entire crew with it, and Honor felt a stab of terrible guilt. She hadn’t had a choice… but that made her feel no less like an assassin.

“Cub, this is Wolf. Go,” she said into her com, and her calm voice showed no hint of her sense of regret.

“All right, Chief. Let’s roll!” Scotty Tremaine snapped.

“Aye, Sir. Everything looks good back here,” Horace Harkness replied crisply, and Tremaine glanced out the side window of his cockpit. Geraldine Metcalf and Sarah DuChene had Shuttle Two, with Master Chief Ascher as their flight engineer, but there’d never been any doubt in Tremaine’s mind who would draw Shuttle One for Operation Lunch Basket. Now he watched as Solomon Marchant and Anson Lethridge shouted orders to the “ground crew.” Muscles strained as the carefully prepared cammo nettings were yanked off, and then the ground crews were streaming aboard Shuttle One.