She knew some people wondered what she could possibly see in the brutish-looking Lethridge, but that was because they’d never bothered to look past the face at the man. Metcalf had, and—

“Oh, shit!” The soft expletive was almost a prayer, and she turned quickly as she heard it. Lethridge sat back in his chair, looking down at the lines of text glowing on his display, and she walked quickly towards him.

“What is it?”

“We’ve got a ’response required’ message,” he replied.

“What about?” she asked.

“They’ve missed Proxmire’s courier boat,” he said grimly, and she felt her face lose all expression.

“And?” Her voice was flat, impersonal, and Lethridge looked up at her quickly. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, discarding whatever he’d been about to say as he recognized the grimness in her dark eyes.

“And it’s just about what the Admiral figured it would be,” he said after a moment instead. “His next duty station’s sent a routine missing ship inquiry up the line.”

“Is this one his replacement?” Metcalf asked. It was unlikely, of course. If the new boat was carrying a shipping inquiry, then obviously someone expected it to report back instead of settling into orbit here.

“No.” Lethridge shook his head. “There’s an attachment to the inquiry, though—something about another message that explains why Proxmire’s replacement has been delayed. It’s listed as… Alpha-Seven-Seven-Ten.” He looked at the petty officer who shared his com watch with him. “Anything on that one, Alwyn?”

“Sorry, Sir. I’m still working through the queue directory. There’s an awful lot of routine stuff in here—requests for reports, new regulations, all kinds of crap. Just looking at all of it is going to take a couple of hours, I’d guess, and I haven’t started any actual decoding of the lower priority messages yet.”

“Find it now,” Metcalf directed, much more curtly than she’d intended to, and resumed her pacing as PO Alwyn called up message A-7710 and he and Lethridge dove into the task of decoding it.

She hadn’t thought about Proxmire and his crew in months now. Part of her had felt almost guilty about that, but the rest of her had recognized it as a healthy sign that she’d finally accepted that she’d truly had no choice but to kill him and that it was time to put it behind her. But they never had located anyone on Hell who’d known exactly how long he was supposed to have the Cerberus courier duty, and Citizen Brigadier Tresca’s sloppy com staff had never bothered to enter that information into their computers.

Once Harkness and his team had broken into the secured data they’d at least been able to check the records for how long courier boats were normally assigned to Camp Charon, but the information hadn’t helped much. The duration of courier assignments tended to be erratic—in some cases, the records suggested, because assignment here was considered punishment duty, which meant that how long a crew had it depended on how seriously they’d pissed off their superiors. The shortest duration they’d found had been five T-months, and the longest had been just over a T-year and a half. They’d also been able to establish that Proxmire had been here for only three months, and they’d hoped that meant he’d had enough time left on his assignment for them to do what they had to do before someone came looking for him.