“Current range from Hades?” Honor asked after a moment.

“They’re fourteen-point-six light-minutes from a zero/zero intercept with the planet, Ma’am,” Phillips replied promptly. “They made a low-speed translation—about eight hundred KPS—and their current velocity is up to just over nineteen hundred. That puts them right at a hundred and twenty-nine minutes from turnover with a decel period of a hundred and thirty-eight minutes. Call it four and a half hours from now.”

“Thank you.” Honor sat for a moment, considering the numbers, then nodded to herself in the darkened bedroom. “Very well, Commander. Tell Captain Benson I’ll be there presently. In the meantime, she’s to use her own judgment in responding to any additional com traffic. Is Commander Tremaine there?”

“He is, Admiral. And Senior Chief Harkness is on his way. I expect his arrival momentarily.”

The undamaged corner of Honor’s mouth quirked as the slight, prim note of disapproval in the other woman’s voice brought her memory of the officer at the other end of her com suddenly into sharper focus. Commander Susan Phillips had been a computer specialist in the Sarawak System Navy. But she had also been on Hell for over forty T-years, and her training had been sadly out of date, even for Peep equipment, when her camp was liberated and she reached Styx. She’d done extremely well in the quickie refresher courses Honor had organized, but she was still rusty compared to Honor’s people from Prince Adrian and Jason Alvarez—or, for that matter, most of the other Allied POWs from the current war.

Phillips knew that, and for the most part, she accepted it with a good grace. But a part of her couldn’t help resenting the fact that Tremaine, who was both junior to her and young enough to be her son, had been assigned to her watch specifically to handle any creative communication or electronic warfare requirements which might arise. Honor suspected she would have minded it less if Scotty had been even a little older, although the fact that he was third-generation prolong while Phillips was only second-generation must make it seem even worse to her. The Commander might have found it easier to have Anson Lethridge ride herd on her—he was only two T-years older than Scotty, but he, too, was second-generation prolong and looked considerably older. Unfortunately, Honor needed Anson on first watch.

But the same part of Phillips that resented Tremaine really resented the fact that Harkness, a mere senior chief, had become the chief cyberneticist of Hell.

Well, Honor sympathized in many ways, although she considered the commander’s belief that officers could always do things better than senior noncoms foolish. Of course, Phillips came from a very different naval tradition—that of the Sarawak Republic, one of the liberal-thinking targets the Peeps had gobbled up in the early days of the DuQuesne Plan. The SSN had relied upon a professional officer corps, but Sarawak’s advanced, egalitarian social theories had inspired it (unlike the dangerous, elitist plutocracy of Manticore) to use short-service conscripts to fill its enlisted and noncommissioned ranks. The result had produced something very like the present-day People’s Navy, in which the service simply hadn’t had its enlisted draftees long enough to train them up to Manticoran standards. Which meant that Phillips’ ingrained belief that officers ought to be better at their jobs than petty officers represented her own experience, not blind prejudice. And to be fair, she was less resentful of Harkness’ status than many of Honor’s other non-Manticoran officers. Not to mention the fact that she was working diligently at getting rid of the resentment she still harbored. It just seemed to come a bit hard for her.