The chief of staffs vicious voice carried an outright hatred he would never have allowed to show a month before. It cut like a lash, but Honeker didn't even bat an eyelid. He'd had plenty of time during the voyage here to realize he was just as doomed as Tourville and his officers. He supposed he should blame Tourville for that, but he couldn't. He'd gone into it with open eyes, and he was still convinced the Navy officer had been right. Cordelia Ransom's determination to have Honor Harrington judicially murdered was going to be a disaster for everyone, not just for the people who'd tried to prevent it. The Solarian League would be almost as infuriated as the Manties and their allies, which could have devastating consequences for the movement of technology from the League to the PRH, and altogether too many members of the Republic’s own military would be just as sickened and shamed by it as Tourville had predicted. And quite aside from all the pragmatic considerations that made executing her an act of lunacy, trying to keep Harrington alive had been the right thing to do morally, as well.

No, much as he regretted, and feared, the consequences, Honeker couldn't fault Tourville for making the effort or enlisting his own tacit support. And that had produced an odd effect on Everard Honeker. He'd come aboard Count Tilly, and before that aboard Tourville’s old flagship, Rash al-Din, to spy on him for StateSec and the Committee of Public Safety, and though he'd learned to like the aggressive, hard-fighting rear admiral, he'd never forgotten he was Tourville's keeper. That there must always be that sense of separation, of standing apart and watching warily for signs of unreliability.

But the separation had vanished now. Perhaps it was only because Honeker knew they were both doomed, yet it was a vast relief nonetheless. And partly, he knew, it was because he no longer had to lie, to others or to himself, to justify actions he'd always known deep inside couldn't be justified. By betraying and condemning him for trying to do his duty despite its own idiocy, the system had finally freed him from his bondage to it, and he realized, now, that "unreliables" like Lester Tourville and his staff were far better champions of the cause he'd once thought the Committee served than people like Cordelia Ransom could ever be.

Unaware of the thoughts behind his people's commissioner's silence, Tourville simply nodded to Bogdanovich, for the citizen captain was obviously correct. The entire Cerberus System was a monumental tribute to the institutional paranoia of the PRH’s security services, old and new alike. Its coordinates weren't even in Count Tilly's astrogation database, for the very existence of the system, much less its location, had been classified by the Office of Internal Security when the old regime first authorized Camp Charon's construction. Even today, or perhaps especially today, that information was a fanatically guarded secret known only to StateSec, and the fact that no one else had the slightest idea of where to find it was but the first layer of a defense in depth.

In all his years of naval service, Tourville had seldom seen orbital defenses as massive as those which surrounded Hades, otherwise known as Cerberus-B-2, and its three largish moons. The data on it available to Count Tilly was severely limited, but Citizen Captain Vladovich had given her a fragmentary download when it was assumed she would accompany Tepes all the way in. He'd had to, for the planet-moon system was literally smothered with firepower which would have made short work of any ship which made a single wrong move. Yet even a cursory glance at Vladovich's information had been enough to show that StateSec's chronic distrust had produced a bizarre defensive arrangement whose like neither Tourville nor any member of his staff had ever imagined.

There wasn't a single manned fortress in the entire star system. Shoals of mines, old-fashioned "contact" nukes designed to kill small craft as well as the laser buoys designed to shoot LAC’s and starships, and both seemingly thick enough to walk across, surrounded the planet and its moons, seeded with more sophisticated and modern energy platforms for good measure, and he suspected there were ground-based missiles on the planet, at least, if not on the moons. Taken all together, Hades must have had the raw combat power of a full squadron of super-dreadnoughts... but all of those weapons were remote-controlled from Camp Charon. There wasn't even an orbital cargo station. Everything within a good light-minute of the planet was covered by massive amounts of firepower, but no permanent manned orbital presence of any sort had been tolerated, and Tourville wondered why that was.

To be sure, minefields and energy platforms were cheaper than manned systems would have been, and because they weren't manned, there was no need to come up with personnel to crew them. Of course, "cheap" was a purely relative term where defenses on this scale were concerned, but even purely relative savings mounted up. He could understand that, just as he understood that StateSec's decision, like that of InSec, before it, to conceal this place’s location from its own military had meant they couldn't call in Navy personnel to man its defenses. But surely they could have come up with sufficient personnel of their own to man at least a cargo station! That would have tremendously simplified the transshipment of freight (and prisoners) from orbit to surface, so why not do it? Were they so paranoid they didn't trust anyone, even their own, in orbit above them?

He didn't know the answer to that, and he doubted he ever would. Nor did he understand why they'd bothered with orbital defenses at all. If they weren't going to let the Navy know where the system was and put a picket force into it, then all the mines and remote energy platforms in the galaxy were ultimately useless, for a planet suffered from one enormous tactical disadvantage: it couldn't dodge. An attacker always knew exactly where it was, and that meant a single battlecruiser, probably even a heavy cruiser, could take out every weapon orbiting Hades with old-fashioned nuclear warheads launched on purely ballistic courses from beyond the defenses' own range. A few dozen fifty or sixty-megaton detonations would blow gaping holes in the massive, interlocking shells of mines, and not even modern hardening could have prevented the EMP from at least temporarily crippling the electronics of any spaceborne platform that survived outright destruction. He supposed ground-based missiles on the planet or its moons (if, in fact, there were some) would survive, but any competent defensive planner knew purely orbital systems, even proper fortresses with bubble sidewalls, were ultimately useless against mobile attackers.

The only explanation he could come up with was that whoever had ordered the immense (and wasted) expenditure to put this abortion together hadn't bothered to consult a competent defensive planner. Well, that actually made a sort of sense, didn't it? If you distrusted your own military personnel so much that you refused even to tell them a prison existed, far less where it was, lest they decide to attack it for some unimaginable reason, then you were hardly likely to ask those same people for advice on how to fortify it against themselves, now were you?

But whatever the rationale behind the emplacements, Yuri was right; the paranoiacs who'd put them up would never allow a warship manned by anyone except their own people any closer to Hades than they had to. And parking Count Tilly clear out around Cerberus-B-3 would put her a full seventeen light-minutes from the prison planet, and condemn Tourville, Honeker, Bogdanovich, and Foraker to an almost three-hour pinnace flight to reach it. Well, at least Tilly would be well outside the range of the defensive shell, too. In his present mood, Lester Tourville had to consider that a major plus.