“Maybe not stylish, but as close to comfortable as anyone’s going to find on this damned planet,” Caslet replied wryly. He was a native of Danville, in the Paroa System of the PRH, and his Standard English carried a sharp but oddly pleasant accent.

“Now let’s not be unfair,” Honor chided. “We’re right in the middle of the equatorial zone here, and I understand from Chief Harkness that the higher temperate zones can be quite pleasant.”

“Sure they can.” McKeon snorted, and flipped a spatter of sweat off his forehead. “I understand the temperature gets all the way down to thirty-five degrees—at night at least—up in the high arctic.”

“A gross exaggeration,” Honor said. She spoke as primly as the dead nerves in the left side of her face allowed, and a twinkle danced in her remaining eye, but McKeon felt his own smile become just the slightest bit forced and fought an urge to glance accusingly at Caslet. Her captors had burned out her artificial facial nerves at the same time they wrecked her eye, and the slurring imposed by the crippled side of her mouth always got worse when she forgot to speak slowly and concentrate on what she was saying. He felt a fresh, lava-like boil of anger as he heard it, and he reminded himself—again—that Warner Caslet hadn’t had a thing to do with it. That, in fact, the Peep naval officer had been headed for something at least as bad as Hell himself because of his efforts to help McKeon and all the other Allied prisoners aboard PNS Tepes.

That was all true, and McKeon knew it, but he wanted so badly to have someone—anyone—to take his hate out on whenever he thought about what the State Security goons had done to Honor. Ostensibly, deactivating all cybernetic implants of any prisoner had been billed as a “security measure,” just as shaving her head had been solely for “sanitary purposes.” But despite Honor’s refusal to go into details, he knew damned well that neither “security” nor “sanitation” had had a thing to do with either. They’d been done out of sick, premeditated cruelty, pure and simple, and whenever he thought about it he felt almost sorry that the people responsible were already dead.

“All right, thirty degrees,” he said, trying to sound as light as she did. “But only in the fall and winter.”

“You’re hopeless, Alistair.” Honor shook her head with another of those crooked half-smiles. McKeon was too self-disciplined to let his emotions show, but she and Nimitz had felt his sudden spike of fury, and she knew exactly what had caused it. But talking about it wouldn’t change anything, and so she only looked at Caslet.

“And how has your day been, Warner?”

“Hot and humid,” Caslet replied with a smile. He glanced at McKeon, then held out a hand. “Let me have your canteen, Alistair. Dame Honor obviously wants to talk to you, so I’ll take myself off and refill yours and mine both before we head back out.”