McKeon knew it as well as Honor did, and now she looked up at him sharply, surprised by his comment. He recognized her reaction and smiled crookedly.

“The walls are kind of thin around here, Honor,” he pointed out, “and I was next door waiting to see you. Besides, the way he was bawling and bellowing before you performed that double orchiectomy on him, they must’ve been able to hear him clear over at the landing strip!”

“Oh, dear.” Honor sighed. She leaned back in her chair and massaged her forehead with her fingers. “I didn’t want that to happen.”

“Not your fault it did,” McKeon pointed out.

“Maybe not, but I didn’t exactly do anything to prevent it, either. And it’s not going to help anything for our people to know I’m at dagger-drawing with the second-ranking Allied officer on the planet!”

“First, it wasn’t your job to prevent it from happening,” McKeon told her sternly. “It’s your job to exercise command and keep us alive. If some asshole idiot makes a fool and a laughingstock out of himself, then it’s your job to keep his stupidity from hamstringing your efforts to get us off Hell, not to protect him from the consequences he brings down on his own head. Second, it’s probably a good thing that this is happening, not a bad one.”

“Excuse me?” Honor cocked her head at him in surprise.

“You think maybe our non-Allied personnel aren’t going to hear about this?” McKeon shook his head at her. “You know better than that. Walls have ears when something like this happens, and if I could hear it go down, you can be damned sure someone else heard it, too. Which means that it will be all over Styx by the end of the day. And that, in turn, means that our Infernoites, and the ex-slaves, and everyone else will know that you overrode the senior Royal Navy prisoner in order to do what you promised you’d do back at Inferno. Most of these people are—or were—professional military personnel, Honor. They know how the game is played… and the way you happen to play it is going to do more to hammer them together than you realize.”

“That’s not why I’m moving ahead with this, Alistair!” she said sharply.

“Of course it isn’t,” he said almost sadly. “But they know that, too. And that’s exactly why it will have that effect.”

She frowned at him, uncomfortable with his argument and also with the emotions behind it, but he only looked back calmly.

“Well, in that case—” she began, only to stop short as someone rapped sharply on the frame of the still open door. She looked up, and both eyebrows rose as she saw Solomon Marchant in the doorway. His face was alight with excitement, and she blinked as she felt his mingled surprise, wariness, and confusion all mixed together with the eagerness of someone with startling news.

“Yes, Solomon?” she said.

“I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, My Lady,” he said, “but Senior Chief Harkness and I just cracked another security code, and I thought you’d want to know what we found.”