“Moving carefully is no problem,” McKeon replied. “Time, though. That could be a bit of a complication, depending on how much of it we’ll need.”

“I think we’ll be all right,” Honor said thoughtfully. “The real bottleneck is food, of course.”

“Of course,” McKeon agreed. Like most small craft aboard a warship, the shuttles had been supplied for use as life boats in an emergency. Normally, that meant a week or so worth of food for a reasonable load of survivors, but the escapees rattled around inside their two stolen shuttles like a handful of peas. What would have carried a “reasonable” number of survivors for a week would feed all of them for months, and his own initial estimate of how long their food would last had been overly pessimistic by a factor of at least forty percent. Yet there was still a limit to how long they could last without some alternate source of food, and he and Honor both felt it creeping up upon them.

“Has Fritz turned up anything at all?” he asked after a moment.

“I’m afraid not.” Honor sighed. “He’s run everything we could get our hands on through the analyzer, and unless the stuff you and Warner brought back is radically different from anything else he’s checked, there’s not much hope there. Our digestive systems can isolate most of the inorganics we need from the local plant life, and most of it won’t kill us out of hand if we eat it, but that’s about it. We don’t even have the right enzymes to break down the local equivalent of cellulose, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want a big lump of undigestible plant fiber moving through my gizzards. At any rate, we’re certainly not going to be able to stretch our e-rats by browsing on the local flora or fauna.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised,” McKeon observed, then snorted a chuckle. “But what the hell, Skipper! If it was going to be easy, they wouldn’t have needed us to deal with it, now would they?”

“True. Too true,” Honor agreed. She wrapped her arm around Nimitz, hugging him for several moments, then looked back at McKeon.

“At the same time, I think it’s time we were about it,” she told him quietly. “I know you and Fritz are still watching over me like a pair of anxious hens, but I really am recovered enough to get started.” He opened his mouth, as if to object, then closed it again, and she reached across to pat him on the knee with her remaining hand. “Don’t worry so much, Alistair. Nimitz and I are tough.”

“I know you are,” he muttered, “it’s just that it’s so damned un—” He cut himself off and twitched a shrug. “I guess I should have figured out by now that the universe really is unfair, but sometimes I get awful tired of watching it do its level damned best to chew you up and spit you back out. So humor me and take it easy, okay?”