Honor heard a retching sound and looked up to see Rear Admiral Styles dashing from the office, one hand clamped over his mouth. Nausea rippled in her own belly, but she fought it down. In a strange way, her access to Parnell’s emotions actually helped, for she felt the terrible, bottomless hatred and the anguish hiding behind his calm demeanor. He and his chief of staff had been close, she realized, perhaps as close as she and McKeon, and she felt her hand clench in an ivory-knuckled fist at the thought of watching anyone do something like that to Alistair.

“Confessions, Admiral?” she heard her own voice ask, and his nod thanked her for her own conversational tone, as if it were a shield against something he chose not to face too closely.

“Yes. He wanted us to confess our participation in the Harris Assassination plot. We’d been sentenced to death for it already, of course, but he wanted chips of our confession for the records. For propaganda, I assume. I could be wrong, though. It may simply have been for his own pleasure.” He cocked his head, then sighed. “I suppose there’s a certain poetic justice in it. Internal Security did create him, after all. And if we’re going to be honest, we brought Pierre and his damned Committee down on our own heads out of sheer incompetence. Didn’t we, Citizen Commander?”

This time there was a cold, bleak hatred in his voice, and Caslet winced. Parnell’s question and the bottomless contempt of his tone—contempt for a traitor who served traitors—cut him like a knife, and he opened his mouth to defend himself. But no words came out. He could only sit there, staring at the fierce, crippled man who had been his uniformed commander-in-chief only eight T-years earlier. The man who had administered his own officer’s oath at the Naval Academy so many years before that, though there was no reason to expect Parnell to remember one single midshipman among hundreds.

“I understand your feelings, Admiral,” Honor said quietly. The Legislaturalist looked at her, his mouth taut, as if prepared to reject her statement, and she shifted the stump of her left arm ever so slightly. It was a tiny gesture, more imagined than seen, but Parnell’s lips relaxed. “I understand your feelings,” she repeated, “but you should know that Cit— That Commander Caslet is here on Hell because he did his best to see to it that captured Allied personnel were treated properly and humanely by State Security. I assure you, Sir, that to my own personal knowledge, he has always demonstrated all the virtues of the old Havenite officer corps… and none of its vices.”

She held the ex-CNO’s gaze with her own, and it was Parnell who finally looked away.

“I had that coming, Admiral Harrington,” he said after a moment, and glanced at Caslet. “I apologize, Commander. I’ve been stuck here on Hell, but I’ve talked to other politicals sent here since my own arrival. I know at least a little something about the pressures you and people like you have faced, and in your position I might—” He paused and cocked his head, as if reconsidering something, then shrugged. “No, let’s be honest. In your position I would have kept my head down and tried to do my duty as best I could and somehow stay alive.” He chuckled softly, almost naturally. “I forget sometimes that knowing they’re going to kill you in the end anyway tends to make it just a little easier to choose ‘death before dishonor.’ ”