But that had still left her with eight heavy units, each in need of the best captain she could find. She’d done the best she could by assigning Alistair McKeon to command Wallenstein, Benson to command in Kutuzov, Solomon Marchant to command MacArthur, and Geraldine Metcalf to command Barbarosa. That had taken care of the undamaged battlecruisers, and she’d picked Sarah DuChene to command Ishtar, Anson Lethridge to command Huan-Ti, and Scotty Tremaine to take over Krashnark from McKeon. She’d really wanted to give one of the heavy cruisers to Warner Caslet. By any conceivable measure, he would have been the most experienced CO she could have picked for a Peep-built ship, but too many of the liberated POWs still nursed reservations about serving under an ex-Peep, no matter who vouched for him. So she’d made him her XO aboard Farnese instead, on the theory that her lamed flagship would need the best command team it could get, and then played mix-and-match in an effort to build something like solid teams for all of her other ships. Jesus Ramirez would be her liberated squadron’s second-in-command from aboard Wallenstein, but he simply hadn’t been able to bring his tactical and shiphandling skills up to the point of handling a warship in a close engagement, and he knew it. In the meantime, Commander Phillips would run Charon Control, and Gaston Simmons would have overall command of Hell.

It was, by any imaginable standard, a ramshackle and jury-rigged command structure from the perspective of current skills levels. But most of the people in it had been given almost a full T-year to get to know one another, and Honor expected their trust and cohesion to overcome a lot of their rough edges.

It had better, anyway, she thought, and turned away from the display at last. Any more Peeps who just happened to drop by Cerberus would almost certainly come in fat, dumb, and happy, just as Thornegrave had. She expected that condition to last for perhaps another two to three months—long enough for Thornegrave and his intervention battalions to be reported as overdue at Seabring—and she intended to use those months to drill her new crews mercilessly.

Unfortunately, if the last T-year had been any indication, there wouldn’t be many casual visitors in a period that short. Which meant she wouldn’t be able to grab off any more handy transports like the Longstops. Which meant that in all probability there would still be better than a hundred thousand liberated prisoners trapped on Hell when the Peeps noticed Thornegrave’s nonarrival and sent someone to find out where he was.

She didn’t know who or what that someone would be. The logical thing for the Peeps to do would be to send a courier boat to check in with Camp Charon to determine that Thornegrave had arrived and departed. If that happened, she would still have a chance to bluff her way through and convince them he had—that whatever had happened to him and his ships had happened somewhere between Cerberus and Seabring. But even if she managed it, she would be on a short time count from that moment on, because even StateSec was bound to notice eventually that Cerberus had turned into a black hole for anything larger than a courier.