“It can consider me anything it likes,” McKeon told her, “but if it gets close enough to me to be rude, I’m gonna feed it an appetizer of pulser darts.”

“Not very friendly, but probably prudent,” she conceded. “At least the things are smaller than hexapumas or peak bears.”

“True.” McKeon turned on the log and glanced over his shoulder at their encampment. Each of their two hijacked Peep assault shuttles was sixty-three meters in length, with a maximum wingspan of forty-three meters and a minimum span of over nineteen even with the wings in full oversweep for parking efficiency. Fervently as every member of their group might curse the hot, wet, rot-ridden, voracious jungle, hiding something the size of those two craft would have been an impossible challenge in most other kinds of terrain. As it was, the individual trees which supported the uppermost layer of the overhead canopy were just far enough apart that the pilots had been able to nudge their way between the thick trunks without actually knocking them over. And once the shuttles were down, the cammo netting which had been part of their standard supplies, coupled with the jungle’s vines, lianas, fronds, leaves, branches, and tree trunks had made concealing them a straightforward task. The sheer grunt labor involved in spreading the nets with only seventeen sets of hands and just four portable grav lifters available for the job had been daunting, but the alternative had been a great motivator. They’d all had more than enough of the Office of State Security’s hospitality.

“How are the converters holding up?” he asked after a moment.

“Still cranking out the current,” Honor replied. She’d gotten the knot of fur out of the comb and went back to work on Nimitz. “The more I see of Peep survival equipment, the more impressed I am,” she admitted, not looking up from her task. “I’d expected that most of it would be pretty shoddy compared to our own gear, but somebody in the PRH put some serious thought into equipping those two birds.”

“State Security,” McKeon grunted sourly. “The SS gets the best of everything else, so why not survival gear, too?”

“I don’t think that’s what happened here,” Honor disagreed. “Harkness, Scotty, and Warner have gone through the operator’s manuals, and they’re all standard Navy publications. A little more simpleminded than any of ours would have been, but still Navy, not SS.”

McKeon made a noncommittal sound, and she smiled down at Nimitz as she tasted the other human’s urge to disagree with her. Alistair hated the very thought that anything the Peeps did or had could match the Manticoran equivalent.

“Actually,” she went on, “I think their power converters may even be a bit better than ours are. They’re a little bulkier and a lot more massive, but I suspect their output’s higher on a weight-for-weight basis.”

“Oh, yeah? Well at least their weapons still stink compared to ours!” McKeon told her, turning on her with a grin that acknowledged her teasing.