Heathrow made himself sit back and ease his death grip on the chair arms. It wasn’t easy, and he tried to distract himself by studying his plot. Camp Charon had warned him in brusque, no-nonsense tones that Navy ships were not encouraged to use active sensors this close to StateSec’s private little planet, but even passive sensors and old-fashioned visuals were enough to show Heathrow that he wanted nothing to do with this place. Seeing all that orbital firepower made his skin crawl. This was supposed to be a prison, not some kind of fortress against the universe, for God’s sake! What did they expect? That the prisoners were somehow going to signal an enemy fleet to come charging in and attack the system? It had to be something like that—or else sheer, paranoid distrust of the Republic’s own Navy—because there was no way in hell StateSec needed remote missile platforms, graser and laser platforms, and minefields against anyone on the surface of Hades.

I just hope that the fact that they had to tell me the system’s coordinates so I could get here in the first place doesn’t come back to haunt me, Heathrow thought mordantly. I can see it now: “We can tell you how to get there, but then we’ll have to kill you. Here, take Citizen Warden Tresca this message, then report back for… um, debriefing. Thank you very much, and remember—StateSec is your friend!”

“We’re coming up on our designated orbit, Skipper,” Bouret reported.

“Good. We’re a lot more likely to attract some loose mine when we’re moving under power,” Heathrow muttered. “Time to thruster shutdown?”

“Eight minutes,” Bouret replied.

“Very well.”

Heathrow watched the plot as the courier boat’s icon drifted ever so slowly towards precisely the proper spot. They’d been on reaction thrusters with their wedge down for the last hour, as per instructions from Camp Charon. His mission brief had warned him that would be SOP once he arrived; apparently StateSec imposed it on everyone who came to Cerberus, though for the life of him Heathrow couldn’t understand the reasoning behind that particular bit of idiocy. But as with all the other foolishness which had come his way, he’d known better than to argue. Nonetheless, he would have felt much more comfortable with the wedge up. At least it would have offered his ship some protection if one of those hordes of mines took it into its idiot-savant brain that she was a hostile unit.

And after associating with StateSec for so long, the poor things probably think everybody is “the enemy,” the citizen lieutenant commander thought moodily.

“Done with thrusters, Skipper,” Bouret reported finally.

“Very good.” Heathrow looked over his shoulder at the com section. “Are you ready to transmit, Irene?”

“Yes, Sir,” Citizen Ensign Howard replied promptly.

Heathrow glanced over at Bouret with a grin, but he didn’t correct her. One of the few things that made the cramped confines of a courier boat endurable was that such vessels were considered too small and unimportant to require their own people’s commissioners. Which meant there was still one place in the Navy where officers could be naval officers.