“Very well, Citizen Admiral,” she’d said simply, and so it had been decided.

Now McKeon gave himself a mental shake, returning himself to the present and letting his chair come back upright. He could readily understand why Longmont had disqualified herself as president of the court, despite her rank, but he knew most of the liberated prisoners on the planet must have been as surprised as Commodore Simmons when she kept her promise to Honor. She was tough minded, skeptical, and hard to convince, but she also voted to confirm the death sentence when the prosecutor convinced her it was justified.

“All right,” he said into the silence. “Who’d like to start the ball rolling this time?” No one answered, and he cocked his head and looked at Captain Gonsalves. “Cynthia?”

“I’m not sure,” the dusky-skinned Alto Verdan said after a moment. She glanced sideways at Longmont, and McKeon suppressed a wry smile. In an odd way, they had all come to use the board’s single Peep member as a sort of ethical sounding board. That was largely due to the ample proof she’d given of her integrity, but there was another dimension to it, as well. All of them had come to recognize the agonizing position in which Longmont had put herself. If she could accept that sort of responsibility out of a sense of moral obligation, then none of the others were willing to come up short against her measure.

Longmont and Honor have a great deal in common, he mused, not for the first time. Especially the way they get the rest of us to live up to their standards simply by assuming that we will… and daring us to disappoint them.

“The evidence of what actually happened at Alpha Eleven is pretty clear,” Gonsalves went on in a troubled tone, “but there are too many holes in the documentation for what happened here on Styx for me to feel comfortable, Sir.”

“We have eyewitness testimony from Jerome, Lister, and Veracruz, Captain,” Hurston pointed out. “They all saw Mangrum order Lieutenant Weiller aboard the shuttle, and Mangrum has admitted forcing her to have sex with him. That’s rape, at the very least. And two of the other slaves both testify that he’s the one who killed her.”

“They did testify to that effect,” Commodore Simmons observed, “but Mangrum’s counsel did a pretty fair job of demonstrating the probability of bias against him on their part. Mind you, I don’t think I can blame them for that—I’d sure as hell be prejudiced against him in their place, and I’d do my dead-level best to get him hanged, too—but the fact that we sympathize with them doesn’t absolve us from the responsibility of considering whether or not their prejudice is affecting their testimony’s reliability.”

“Agreed.” Gonsalves nodded, her expression troubled, and then looked back at Hurston. “I agree that the rape charge has been clearly demonstrated, Commander. But rape isn’t a capital crime under the Havenite Uniform Code of Conduct unless accompanied by actual violence, not simply the threat of it. Murder is a capital crime, but we have no physical or documentary evidence to support that charge. For that matter, not even the slaves who claim he killed her agree on whether or not he committed forcible rape as defined under the UCC. The woman—Hedges—says Weiller had bruises on her face and that—” the captain tapped a command into her memo pad to refresh her memory, then read aloud “— ‘She limped pretty bad the next day.’ But even Hedges goes on to say that ‘She wouldn’t talk about what the bastard did to her.’ ”