“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.” Despite her thanks, the citizen ensign’s face was still red, and Heathrow shook his head. He’d been twenty-two once himself, he was sure. He simply didn’t seem to remember when it had been.

But the important thing was that at least some of the traffic he’d just delivered to Hades—whatever it had been—required an immediate response. That was unfortunate. It might mean he and his crew had to hang around for several hours, or even a day or two, waiting while Dirtside got its act together. With no idea of what had been in the encrypted message files, he couldn’t even make an estimate of how long he might be hung up. Not that there would have been anything he could do to shorten the time requirement even if he’d known what it was, he thought with a mental sigh.

“Is anyone down there asking us to receipt anything?” he asked, trying not to sound too hopeful that no one was. After all, it was possible some regular SS courier had just happened to wander by and deal with the problem before he got here. That wouldn’t be asking too much, would it?

“No, Sir,” Howard told him, and he started to smile. But then the citizen ensign went on. “They have transmitted a request to hold while they read the traffic, though.”

“Great,” Bouret muttered under his breath, and Heathrow heartily endorsed the astrogator’s disgusted tone. God only knew how long it would take for Groundside to read its mail and then record a response.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it except wait,” he said as philosophically as possible, and leaned back in his command chair.

· · • · ·

Lieutenant Commander Geraldine Metcalf tried very hard not to swear. She’d felt badly enough out of place as officer of the watch in Command Central without having the responsibility for this dumped on her shoulders! She’d already put in a call for Commodore Simmons, but he was halfway around the planet with Captain Gonsalves, interviewing people over a problem which had arisen at Beta Eleven, one of the camps to which they’d transferred the prisoners who intended to remain behind on Hell. Beta Eleven, unfortunately, was also one of the camps whose inmates had decided that as part of their proof that they’d had nothing to do with events on Styx, they didn’t even want to be part of the “rebels” communications net. Which meant Simmons was out of immediate contact until someone from his shuttle crew got word—and a hand com—to him… and that the hot potato was all Metcalf’s in the meantime.

She paced slowly up and down behind the operators’ consoles, hands clasped behind her, and concentrated on looking calm while Anson Lethridge worked on decoding the message traffic. The homely Erewhonese officer had the com watch, which, up until—she checked the time display—eleven minutes ago, had been one of the more pleasant aspects of her present duty. The two of them had been seeing a good deal of one another lately, although they’d been careful not to go too far too fast in light of the provisions of Article 119. Of course, Article 119 didn’t actually apply to Anson, since it was a purely Manticoran regulation, but that was a gray area they’d preferred not to get into. Not that they weren’t both aware of how that was going to change once they could get out of the same chain of command and out from under 119’s restrictions.