She reached the main troop compartment and picked her way around people strapping into clamshell breast-and-back plates and activating test circuits on their helmet coms and HUDs. She already wore a holstered pulser, but she made no move to collect any additional weapons. A one-armed woman and a crippled treecat had no business in the kind of fight this was likely to be… and Andrew LaFollet would have knocked her out and sat on her if she’d even tried to participate in it.

She grinned at the thought despite her tension—or perhaps because of it—and glanced over her shoulder. LaFollet had snagged armor and a helmet of his own and stopped in the tac section to climb into it while she pushed on into the cockpit and settled into the copilot’s couch. She actually had no business here, either, since the loss of her arm would hardly make her the ideal pilot to take over if something happened to Tremaine. On the other hand, if anything happens to Scotty, it’ll probably be… extreme enough that it won’t matter how many arms I have, she reflected, and grinned as the lieutenant commander looked up at her.

“So far, so good, Ma’am,” he reported. “Shuttle Two is light on the skids when we need her.”

“Good, Scotty. Good. Give me a hand?” She unhooked the chest strap for Nimitz’s carrier and turned sideways for Tremaine to help her shift it around in front of her. Then she strapped in—awkwardly with one hand, and careful to keep from crushing the ’cat—and adjusted the powered flight couch to the proper angle.

Someone loomed in the hatch between the cockpit and the tac section, and she turned her head to peer over her shoulder.

“Only me,” Alistair McKeon told her. “Jesus and Harriet say another fifteen minutes to get everyone on board.”

“Um.” Honor checked her chrono. The good news about the late Citizen Lieutenant Jardine’s attention to The Book was that no one in Camp Charon was going to expect “his” shuttle to do anything at all untoward upon its arrival. The bad news was that he had told Base Ops exactly when he landed, and given that Camp Charon knew how long it should take him to unload his counter-grav pallets of food, that meant they also knew how soon he ought to be lifting off again. And they should be lifting off right now.

“Tell them to expedite, Alistair,” she said calmly, and he nodded and withdrew from the cockpit. Honor returned her attention to the panel in front of her, and the living side of her mouth curled up in a hexapuma’s snarl as she keyed the weapons station alive. That was something she could do with one arm… and she was looking forward to it.

“Checking external ordnance circuits,” she told Tremaine calmly, and her good eye gleamed.

Payback time, she thought.

· · • · ·

“Come on, come on! Move—move!” Captain Harriet Benson chanted, reaching out and physically pushing people up the ramp. It was taking longer than they’d expected. Should have figured it would, she thought almost absently. We thought we’d allowed plenty of time, but Murphy always knows better. Yet the thought barely touched the surface of her mind. It was an aside, an inconsequential. What mattered was that they were actually doing it. That after the better part of seventy years on Hell, she was about to have her chance at kicking the Black Legs’ asses. Personally, she gave Commodore Harrington’s plan to actually get anyone off Hell no more than a thirty percent chance of success, but that hardly mattered. Whether they managed to escape the prison or not, they were going to make one hell of a hole in the StateSec garrison, and that was good enough for Harriet Benson.