Страница:
"You will take her into custody for transfer to Tepes, Citizen Major." Ransom spoke to the SS officer, but her cold, triumphant eyes never left Harrington's face. "You will place her in close confinement aboard ship for transport to the State Security prison facility in the Cerberus System, where you will deliver her to the warden of Camp Charon for execution."
It was all a nightmare. It wasn't real, a part of Honors mind insisted. It couldn't be happening. But the rest of her knew it could happen, and that it was. Her eyes flicked to Thomas Theisman's face as Ransom called her a murderer, and the helpless shame she saw there was the final straw. Ransoms cold, cruel delight in pronouncing her fate fed into her through Nimitz, like a knife twisting slowly and gloatingly in a wound, but it was Theisman's despair which made it all real by stripping away any pretense of hope.
She'd all but forgotten that so-called conviction. Everyone had known it was a propaganda ploy, an attempt by the Legislaturalists to convince their own subjects and the Solarian League that they were the innocent victim of Manticoran aggression. What else could they have done? If they hadn't maintained that Sirius was an "unarmed freighter," they would have had to admit they'd sent a seven-and-a-half-million-ton Q-ship on a deliberate violation of Manticoran territory. But the entire thing had been so absurd that she'd never believed anyone could possibly take it seriously, especially at this late date.
But as Ransom’s vindictive triumph flowed into her like venom, Honor realized it didn't really matter. Ransom wanted Honor dead, and not just because of what Honor had done to the Peoples Navy. No, there was something dark and poisonous, something personal, in her hatred, and even through her own despair, Honor realized what it was.
Fear. Ransom was afraid of her, as if she personified every threat to Ransom's own position. In the other woman's mind, Honor was the embodiment of the Alliance’s military threat to the Republic, and hence to Ransom herself. Yet the committeewoman's hatred went even deeper than that should explain, and as Ransom glanced back at Tourville, Honor understood. The citizen rear admiral's efforts to protect her had only turned her into yet another threat: the threat that the Republic’s own military would turn upon the Committee of Public Safety.
There'd been rumors enough of mounting unrest in the Haven System, where lunatic factions in the Nouveau Paris Mob had mounted at least one coup attempt. The Navy had put that down, somewhat to the surprise of ONI, but what if the military didn't put down the next one? What if it began to think for itself, to make its own policies and resist the Committee's? That was the only way a person like Ransom could possibly interpret Tourville’s actions, as the first move in some plot to overthrow the Committee's authority, because it would never occur to her that the citizen rear admiral had acted out of a sense of decency. Cordelia Ransom couldn't conceive of viewing her enemies as honorable opponents who deserved to be honorably treated, and so she assumed that, just as she would have been, Tourville must be playing some Byzantine game in which Honor was only one more marker on the board.
If that was the case, then he must be crushed, in a way which would teach the rest of the military not to cross swords with the Committee of Public Safety or its members, and if Ransom could use the same opportunity to have Honor killed, so much the better.
Those thoughts flickered through her brain in a heartbeat, but she seemed paralyzed, unable to react or move or speak. Ransom turned her triumphant smile back from Tourville to her victim, and Honor didn't even twitch. She couldn't, but a dangerous ripple of movement ran down the line of prisoners. Ransom noted it, and her smile would have frozen helium as the glanced back at the SS major and pointed at Nimitz.
"In the meantime, Citizen Major, take that creature outside and destroy it. Immediately," she said softly.
"Yes, Citizen Committeewoman!"
The citizen major saluted again, then gestured to two of his troopers.
"You heard the Citizen Committeewoman," he growled. "See to it."
"Yes, Citizen Major!"
The two guards started towards Honor, and something snapped inside her. Resistance was worse than futile, for if she resisted, at least some of her people would do the same, and they were surrounded by armed guards. She'd known that would be the case, and she'd told herself she must endure whatever happened to her or Nimitz. She could not, must not, let any useless gesture on her part spark a massacre of the men and women for whom she was responsible, and she'd ordered herself not to make one.
But that was an order she could not obey. In that instant, her link with Nimitz was suddenly deeper and stronger than ever before. They were no longer two beings, and their single identity had no doubts... and only one objective.
The guards had been briefed on Ransom's intentions and warned to expect trouble, but Honors passivity had lulled them. Or perhaps her heavy-grav reflexes were simply too fast for them. Whatever the reason, they were too slow, even forewarned, as she rose on her toes and her up-sweeping arms launched Nimitz like a falconer with a hawk.
The treecat was a cream-and-gray blur, arcing sinuously over the guards' heads, and the ripping canvas snarl of his war cry was the only warning the citizen major had. The SS man shrieked in agony as six sets of scimitar claws reduced his face to ruin, and his shriek died in a hideous gurgle as one last slash severed his jugular. But he was only an intermediate step for Nimitz, a launching pad from which to redirect his trajectory, not his true objective, and he leapt from his first victim to hit another SS guard in the chest. The fresh target screamed, clutching uselessly at the six-limbed demon that hissed and snarled as it swarmed up him, claws savaging his belly and chest, and then sprang from his shoulders in a leap that carried him straight at Cordelia Ransom.
The first flechette gun butt slammed into Honor even before Nimitz hit the citizen major, but she'd sensed it coming and rode the force of the blow. She let it smash her aside, taking her out of the path of a second guards swing, and her feet shot up as her back hit the floor. Both heels thudded into a man's belly, and she rolled frantically to avoid two more. She came up on one knee, and her left fist lashed out in a savage thrust to an unprotected groin. The stricken guard doubled forward as she came upright once more, and the heel of her right hand exploded into his face. It smashed his nose, driving shattered bone and cartilage up into his brain, and her left hand snatched for his flechette gun as he went down.
She never touched it. Another gun butt came down, and this time its owner made no mistake. It struck cleanly at the base of the neck, driving her back to the floor, stunned and unable to move, and two more slammed into her kidneys and ribs while shouts and orders and the sounds erupted around her through the shrieks of Nimitz's second victim.
She couldn't even turn her head, but she caught glimpses of the chaos. She saw McKeon take down one guard with a smashed kneecap, then go down himself under battering gun butts. Andrew LaFollet was a madman. He spun like a cat, catching one SS trooper completely off guard, and his fist crushed the man’s larynx like a hammer. Two more came at him, and he went into them in a blur of fists, elbows, and flying feet. Both of them went down, one with a broken neck, and he hurled himself at the woman who'd just smashed Honor in the ribs and was raising her weapon for yet another stroke.
Another guards flechette gun came at him from the side, crunching into him so hard it lifted his toes into the air. A second gun butt crashed down, and he crumpled across Honors legs just as Andreas Venizelos and Marcia McGinley were tackled and buried under the weight of half a dozen SS troopers.
Most of the other POWs never had time to react before they were beaten to their knees, but Nimitz's war cry still wailed as another SS trooper came between him and Ransom. The new guard wasn't trying to intercept him, in fact, she tried desperately to get out of his way, but she was the last barrier blocking him from his prey, and he snarled as he ripped her throat out. She went down in a gush of blood, but killing her had delayed him an instant too long, and he screamed as a gun slammed into him at last.
Honor screamed with him, her face against the floor, as the agony of his wound ripped through her. It was as if her shoulder, her ribs, had broken under the savage blow, and her body spasmed, trying to curl around the injury someone else had suffered. She sensed the flechette gun rising again, knew it was about to come smashing down, and she bared her teeth as Nimitz snarled up at his killer.
The gun butt started down, but a pair of hands caught it in midstroke, shoving it aside so that it thudded into the floor instead. The SS man spat a curse and turned towards the Manticoran who'd interfered, then froze in confusion.
It hadn't been a Manticoran after all, and he gaped at Shannon Foraker as she thrust him further aside and wheeled to Ransom.
"If you kill the 'cat, she'll die!" The ops officers shout cut through the confusion, and she stretched out a hand to the committeewoman. "They're linked!" she shouted. "Don't you understand? If you kill the 'cat, she'll die, too!"
Honor lay on the floor, still too stunned to move or think coherently, but her body twitched and jerked as Nimitz writhed in agony, and Ransom's eyes narrowed. She'd expected something like this, in fact, she'd planned for it, but she hadn't expected to come so close to death herself, and it had all been over so quickly she hadn't really had time to react. Now she did have time, and after-the-fact panic filled her as she looked at the half dozen bodies Nimitz, Honor, and LaFollet had left in their wake. She bared her teeth at the injured 'cat who'd tried so hard to kill her and so nearly succeeded, and started to order Foraker out of the way.
But then she made herself draw a deep breath. She closed her eyes while she forced herself back under control, and her voice was cold when she opened them once more.
"What do you mean?" she snapped.
"Just what I said... Ma'am." Foraker went to her knees beside Nimitz, taking a risk even most Sphinxians would never have dared, for even a crippled 'cat could inflict terrible wounds. "Treecats are empaths, and probably telepathic," she went on, making herself speak urgently but clearly. "They bond to their partners, and when they die, their partners either die or go catatonic."
"That's nonsense!" Ransom snarled.
"No it isn't," another voice said, and the committeewoman turned towards the source. Like every other Manticoran in the room, Fritz Montoya was on his knees now, with the muzzle of a flechette gun pressed against the back of his head, but his Medical Branch caduceus glittered on his collar.
"What do you mean?" Ransom repeated suspiciously.
"Its in the medical literature," Montoya lied in support of Foraker's preposterous claim. "Treecats' bonds with humans are uncommon, and we don't know as much about them as we'd like, but the consequences of a 'cat's death are well established. Catatonia is more common than death, but the mortality rate is well above forty percent."
Ransom's mouth twisted as if to spit, but once again she made herself stop and draw a deep breath. She was on the downslope of the adrenaline rush now, her belated terror turning into a sense of elation at her survival, and it was hard to think as she ran her mind back over the SS dossier on Harrington. She'd studied it carefully before she planned this afternoons events, and her estimate of Harrington’s reaction to the order to kill the 'cat had been right on the money. The problem was that there were too many blank spots in the file for her to know whether or not Foraker was right.
She growled a mental curse as she admitted that. The clips from Grayson news broadcasts were their best source of information on treecats, for Harrington was a planetary heroine. She was always good copy on her adopted planet, and her bond to the beast was endlessly fascinating to her public. Unfortunately, the Graysons actually knew very little about how it all worked. Their coverage had warned Ransom that the animal was both dangerous and more intelligent than most people would have guessed, just as it had told her the best way to hurt Harrington would be to take it away from her and kill it, but she had no information at all on the actual nature of the bond between them.
Her eyes moved to Harrington, still twitching on the floor, and narrowed. The way she lay, half-turned on one side and curled around, mimicked the posture of the 'cat. Indeed, allowing for the fact that the animal had six limbs and Harrington had only four, it was virtually identical. But she wasn't even conscious. She couldn't have adopted that posture deliberately, and that argued for at least the possibility that Foraker had it right.
On the other hand, Foraker felt she owed Harrington something. Was she gutsy enough, and stupid enough, to risk spinning such a lie to protect the Manticoran?
"Just how did you happen to come by this knowledge, Citizen Commander?" the committeewoman asked after a long, fulminating moment.
"Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville assigned me as liaison to the prisoners aboard Count Tilly" Foraker replied without hesitation. "In the course of those duties, I asked Doctor Montoya about any possible specialized health needs they might have. Under the circumstances, he felt it best to alert me to the nature of Commo... of the prisoner's bond with the 'cat."
"I see," Ransom said very slowly. A part of her was certain Foraker was lying, but only a part, and the Manty surgeon had supported the ops officer quickly and smoothly enough. She wanted that disgusting beast dead, but what if Foraker and Montoya were telling the truth? Her plans for recording the details of Harrington’s execution would go into the crapper if she had the 'cat killed and Harrington actually did die or go catatonic.
She thought furiously for several more seconds, and then she smiled. It was a chill smile, and an ugly one, and Thomas Theisman shivered as he saw it.
"Very well, Doctor Montoya," she said coldly, "you're now in charge of keeping the animal alive." She nodded for the doctors guard to withdraw the flechette muzzle from the back of his head, and Montoya hurried over to kneel beside Foraker. "Do your best," Ransom told him. "I want it healthy when the prisoner goes to the scaffold."
Her smile turned even colder as she pictured Harrington’s reaction to seeing the animal in a cage, knowing that the instant she was dead, her precious "Nimitz" would follow, and she turned to the massively muscled female SS captain who had been the majors second-in-command.
"As far as the rest of these... people are concerned, Citizen Captain... de Sangro," she said, reading the nameplate on her chest, "their actions here were clearly unprovoked." A wave of her hand took in the groaning SS wounded, and the bodies of those who would never groan again. "Even under the Deneb Accords, a prisoner of war who attacks our personnel except in the course of an escape attempt or in direct self-defense forfeits the standard protections accorded to captured military personnel."
She turned to smile at Theisman, who clenched his jaw as yet again she cited the letter of the Accords correctly in order to pervert their intent.
"The Accords don't give us the right to execute them for their actions, which, of course, we would never choose to do, anyway," she told the StateSec officer piously for the benefit of the watching cameras. "In light of their murderous, unprovoked assault on our personnel, however, a more secure disposition is clearly in order in their case. Under my authority as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, I instruct you to take charge of them in the name of the Office of State Security for transport to and imprisonment at Camp Charon. They can be shipped out on the same transport as their ex-commander."
"Of course, Citizen Committeewoman!" the citizen captain barked, snapping one hand to her cap brim in salute, and Theisman felt physically ill with impotent rage.
He shouldn't have been surprised, he told himself, but he was. Even now he was. It was amazing how a lifetime of expecting at least semicivilized behavior out of one's superiors could prevent one from seeing something like this coming, he thought almost calmly, but in retrospect, it should have been manifest from the first. Of course Ransom had played out her cruel game. The committeewoman hadn't had to be a genius to figure out how Harrington was likely to react to the death sentence of her treecat. Even a casual perusal of her dossier would have made that obvious. The reaction of her officers when the SS clubbed her to the floor had been equally predictable, and Ransom had relied on it to provide the pretext to send every one of them off to Cerberus with Harrington.
Of course she had, and malice and triumph mingled in her smile as she turned back to Tourville.
"As for you, Citizen Rear Admiral," she said, "I believe you ought to return to Haven with me. What's happened here raises serious questions as to the quality of your judgment where these prisoners are concerned. I think you should drop by the Admiralty for a discussion of proper procedure for dealing with captured enemy personnel."
Tourville said nothing. He met her gaze levelly refusing to flinch, but that was all right with Ransom. She was willing to allow him his bravado. In fact, it would make the final outcome even more satisfactory.
"In fact," she went on, "I believe you should bring along your entire staff, and Citizen Commissioner Honeker." She glanced at Theisman. "Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville and his flagship will escort Tepes to the Cerberus System, Citizen Admiral," she told him. "Please have orders to that effect cut immediately."
"Yes, Citizen Committeewoman." Theisman managed to keep his voice more nearly normal than Tourville had been able to, but it was hard. And the fact that he'd succeeded made him feel contaminated.
"Then I think we're done," Ransom said brightly, and nodded to de Sangro. "See to having these..." she waved disdainfully at the battered, kneeling prisoners "...taken aboard ship, Citizen Captain. I'm sure we can find proper accommodations for them."
"At once, Citizen Committeewoman!"
The citizen captain saluted again, then jerked her head at her detail, and gun butts urged the prisoners back to their feet and out of the lounge. Those who couldn't walk were dragged, and as Thomas Theisman watched them go, he knew he would never feel clean again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was all a nightmare. It wasn't real, a part of Honors mind insisted. It couldn't be happening. But the rest of her knew it could happen, and that it was. Her eyes flicked to Thomas Theisman's face as Ransom called her a murderer, and the helpless shame she saw there was the final straw. Ransoms cold, cruel delight in pronouncing her fate fed into her through Nimitz, like a knife twisting slowly and gloatingly in a wound, but it was Theisman's despair which made it all real by stripping away any pretense of hope.
She'd all but forgotten that so-called conviction. Everyone had known it was a propaganda ploy, an attempt by the Legislaturalists to convince their own subjects and the Solarian League that they were the innocent victim of Manticoran aggression. What else could they have done? If they hadn't maintained that Sirius was an "unarmed freighter," they would have had to admit they'd sent a seven-and-a-half-million-ton Q-ship on a deliberate violation of Manticoran territory. But the entire thing had been so absurd that she'd never believed anyone could possibly take it seriously, especially at this late date.
But as Ransom’s vindictive triumph flowed into her like venom, Honor realized it didn't really matter. Ransom wanted Honor dead, and not just because of what Honor had done to the Peoples Navy. No, there was something dark and poisonous, something personal, in her hatred, and even through her own despair, Honor realized what it was.
Fear. Ransom was afraid of her, as if she personified every threat to Ransom's own position. In the other woman's mind, Honor was the embodiment of the Alliance’s military threat to the Republic, and hence to Ransom herself. Yet the committeewoman's hatred went even deeper than that should explain, and as Ransom glanced back at Tourville, Honor understood. The citizen rear admiral's efforts to protect her had only turned her into yet another threat: the threat that the Republic’s own military would turn upon the Committee of Public Safety.
There'd been rumors enough of mounting unrest in the Haven System, where lunatic factions in the Nouveau Paris Mob had mounted at least one coup attempt. The Navy had put that down, somewhat to the surprise of ONI, but what if the military didn't put down the next one? What if it began to think for itself, to make its own policies and resist the Committee's? That was the only way a person like Ransom could possibly interpret Tourville’s actions, as the first move in some plot to overthrow the Committee's authority, because it would never occur to her that the citizen rear admiral had acted out of a sense of decency. Cordelia Ransom couldn't conceive of viewing her enemies as honorable opponents who deserved to be honorably treated, and so she assumed that, just as she would have been, Tourville must be playing some Byzantine game in which Honor was only one more marker on the board.
If that was the case, then he must be crushed, in a way which would teach the rest of the military not to cross swords with the Committee of Public Safety or its members, and if Ransom could use the same opportunity to have Honor killed, so much the better.
Those thoughts flickered through her brain in a heartbeat, but she seemed paralyzed, unable to react or move or speak. Ransom turned her triumphant smile back from Tourville to her victim, and Honor didn't even twitch. She couldn't, but a dangerous ripple of movement ran down the line of prisoners. Ransom noted it, and her smile would have frozen helium as the glanced back at the SS major and pointed at Nimitz.
"In the meantime, Citizen Major, take that creature outside and destroy it. Immediately," she said softly.
"Yes, Citizen Committeewoman!"
The citizen major saluted again, then gestured to two of his troopers.
"You heard the Citizen Committeewoman," he growled. "See to it."
"Yes, Citizen Major!"
The two guards started towards Honor, and something snapped inside her. Resistance was worse than futile, for if she resisted, at least some of her people would do the same, and they were surrounded by armed guards. She'd known that would be the case, and she'd told herself she must endure whatever happened to her or Nimitz. She could not, must not, let any useless gesture on her part spark a massacre of the men and women for whom she was responsible, and she'd ordered herself not to make one.
But that was an order she could not obey. In that instant, her link with Nimitz was suddenly deeper and stronger than ever before. They were no longer two beings, and their single identity had no doubts... and only one objective.
The guards had been briefed on Ransom's intentions and warned to expect trouble, but Honors passivity had lulled them. Or perhaps her heavy-grav reflexes were simply too fast for them. Whatever the reason, they were too slow, even forewarned, as she rose on her toes and her up-sweeping arms launched Nimitz like a falconer with a hawk.
The treecat was a cream-and-gray blur, arcing sinuously over the guards' heads, and the ripping canvas snarl of his war cry was the only warning the citizen major had. The SS man shrieked in agony as six sets of scimitar claws reduced his face to ruin, and his shriek died in a hideous gurgle as one last slash severed his jugular. But he was only an intermediate step for Nimitz, a launching pad from which to redirect his trajectory, not his true objective, and he leapt from his first victim to hit another SS guard in the chest. The fresh target screamed, clutching uselessly at the six-limbed demon that hissed and snarled as it swarmed up him, claws savaging his belly and chest, and then sprang from his shoulders in a leap that carried him straight at Cordelia Ransom.
The first flechette gun butt slammed into Honor even before Nimitz hit the citizen major, but she'd sensed it coming and rode the force of the blow. She let it smash her aside, taking her out of the path of a second guards swing, and her feet shot up as her back hit the floor. Both heels thudded into a man's belly, and she rolled frantically to avoid two more. She came up on one knee, and her left fist lashed out in a savage thrust to an unprotected groin. The stricken guard doubled forward as she came upright once more, and the heel of her right hand exploded into his face. It smashed his nose, driving shattered bone and cartilage up into his brain, and her left hand snatched for his flechette gun as he went down.
She never touched it. Another gun butt came down, and this time its owner made no mistake. It struck cleanly at the base of the neck, driving her back to the floor, stunned and unable to move, and two more slammed into her kidneys and ribs while shouts and orders and the sounds erupted around her through the shrieks of Nimitz's second victim.
She couldn't even turn her head, but she caught glimpses of the chaos. She saw McKeon take down one guard with a smashed kneecap, then go down himself under battering gun butts. Andrew LaFollet was a madman. He spun like a cat, catching one SS trooper completely off guard, and his fist crushed the man’s larynx like a hammer. Two more came at him, and he went into them in a blur of fists, elbows, and flying feet. Both of them went down, one with a broken neck, and he hurled himself at the woman who'd just smashed Honor in the ribs and was raising her weapon for yet another stroke.
Another guards flechette gun came at him from the side, crunching into him so hard it lifted his toes into the air. A second gun butt crashed down, and he crumpled across Honors legs just as Andreas Venizelos and Marcia McGinley were tackled and buried under the weight of half a dozen SS troopers.
Most of the other POWs never had time to react before they were beaten to their knees, but Nimitz's war cry still wailed as another SS trooper came between him and Ransom. The new guard wasn't trying to intercept him, in fact, she tried desperately to get out of his way, but she was the last barrier blocking him from his prey, and he snarled as he ripped her throat out. She went down in a gush of blood, but killing her had delayed him an instant too long, and he screamed as a gun slammed into him at last.
Honor screamed with him, her face against the floor, as the agony of his wound ripped through her. It was as if her shoulder, her ribs, had broken under the savage blow, and her body spasmed, trying to curl around the injury someone else had suffered. She sensed the flechette gun rising again, knew it was about to come smashing down, and she bared her teeth as Nimitz snarled up at his killer.
The gun butt started down, but a pair of hands caught it in midstroke, shoving it aside so that it thudded into the floor instead. The SS man spat a curse and turned towards the Manticoran who'd interfered, then froze in confusion.
It hadn't been a Manticoran after all, and he gaped at Shannon Foraker as she thrust him further aside and wheeled to Ransom.
"If you kill the 'cat, she'll die!" The ops officers shout cut through the confusion, and she stretched out a hand to the committeewoman. "They're linked!" she shouted. "Don't you understand? If you kill the 'cat, she'll die, too!"
Honor lay on the floor, still too stunned to move or think coherently, but her body twitched and jerked as Nimitz writhed in agony, and Ransom's eyes narrowed. She'd expected something like this, in fact, she'd planned for it, but she hadn't expected to come so close to death herself, and it had all been over so quickly she hadn't really had time to react. Now she did have time, and after-the-fact panic filled her as she looked at the half dozen bodies Nimitz, Honor, and LaFollet had left in their wake. She bared her teeth at the injured 'cat who'd tried so hard to kill her and so nearly succeeded, and started to order Foraker out of the way.
But then she made herself draw a deep breath. She closed her eyes while she forced herself back under control, and her voice was cold when she opened them once more.
"What do you mean?" she snapped.
"Just what I said... Ma'am." Foraker went to her knees beside Nimitz, taking a risk even most Sphinxians would never have dared, for even a crippled 'cat could inflict terrible wounds. "Treecats are empaths, and probably telepathic," she went on, making herself speak urgently but clearly. "They bond to their partners, and when they die, their partners either die or go catatonic."
"That's nonsense!" Ransom snarled.
"No it isn't," another voice said, and the committeewoman turned towards the source. Like every other Manticoran in the room, Fritz Montoya was on his knees now, with the muzzle of a flechette gun pressed against the back of his head, but his Medical Branch caduceus glittered on his collar.
"What do you mean?" Ransom repeated suspiciously.
"Its in the medical literature," Montoya lied in support of Foraker's preposterous claim. "Treecats' bonds with humans are uncommon, and we don't know as much about them as we'd like, but the consequences of a 'cat's death are well established. Catatonia is more common than death, but the mortality rate is well above forty percent."
Ransom's mouth twisted as if to spit, but once again she made herself stop and draw a deep breath. She was on the downslope of the adrenaline rush now, her belated terror turning into a sense of elation at her survival, and it was hard to think as she ran her mind back over the SS dossier on Harrington. She'd studied it carefully before she planned this afternoons events, and her estimate of Harrington’s reaction to the order to kill the 'cat had been right on the money. The problem was that there were too many blank spots in the file for her to know whether or not Foraker was right.
She growled a mental curse as she admitted that. The clips from Grayson news broadcasts were their best source of information on treecats, for Harrington was a planetary heroine. She was always good copy on her adopted planet, and her bond to the beast was endlessly fascinating to her public. Unfortunately, the Graysons actually knew very little about how it all worked. Their coverage had warned Ransom that the animal was both dangerous and more intelligent than most people would have guessed, just as it had told her the best way to hurt Harrington would be to take it away from her and kill it, but she had no information at all on the actual nature of the bond between them.
Her eyes moved to Harrington, still twitching on the floor, and narrowed. The way she lay, half-turned on one side and curled around, mimicked the posture of the 'cat. Indeed, allowing for the fact that the animal had six limbs and Harrington had only four, it was virtually identical. But she wasn't even conscious. She couldn't have adopted that posture deliberately, and that argued for at least the possibility that Foraker had it right.
On the other hand, Foraker felt she owed Harrington something. Was she gutsy enough, and stupid enough, to risk spinning such a lie to protect the Manticoran?
"Just how did you happen to come by this knowledge, Citizen Commander?" the committeewoman asked after a long, fulminating moment.
"Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville assigned me as liaison to the prisoners aboard Count Tilly" Foraker replied without hesitation. "In the course of those duties, I asked Doctor Montoya about any possible specialized health needs they might have. Under the circumstances, he felt it best to alert me to the nature of Commo... of the prisoner's bond with the 'cat."
"I see," Ransom said very slowly. A part of her was certain Foraker was lying, but only a part, and the Manty surgeon had supported the ops officer quickly and smoothly enough. She wanted that disgusting beast dead, but what if Foraker and Montoya were telling the truth? Her plans for recording the details of Harrington’s execution would go into the crapper if she had the 'cat killed and Harrington actually did die or go catatonic.
She thought furiously for several more seconds, and then she smiled. It was a chill smile, and an ugly one, and Thomas Theisman shivered as he saw it.
"Very well, Doctor Montoya," she said coldly, "you're now in charge of keeping the animal alive." She nodded for the doctors guard to withdraw the flechette muzzle from the back of his head, and Montoya hurried over to kneel beside Foraker. "Do your best," Ransom told him. "I want it healthy when the prisoner goes to the scaffold."
Her smile turned even colder as she pictured Harrington’s reaction to seeing the animal in a cage, knowing that the instant she was dead, her precious "Nimitz" would follow, and she turned to the massively muscled female SS captain who had been the majors second-in-command.
"As far as the rest of these... people are concerned, Citizen Captain... de Sangro," she said, reading the nameplate on her chest, "their actions here were clearly unprovoked." A wave of her hand took in the groaning SS wounded, and the bodies of those who would never groan again. "Even under the Deneb Accords, a prisoner of war who attacks our personnel except in the course of an escape attempt or in direct self-defense forfeits the standard protections accorded to captured military personnel."
She turned to smile at Theisman, who clenched his jaw as yet again she cited the letter of the Accords correctly in order to pervert their intent.
"The Accords don't give us the right to execute them for their actions, which, of course, we would never choose to do, anyway," she told the StateSec officer piously for the benefit of the watching cameras. "In light of their murderous, unprovoked assault on our personnel, however, a more secure disposition is clearly in order in their case. Under my authority as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, I instruct you to take charge of them in the name of the Office of State Security for transport to and imprisonment at Camp Charon. They can be shipped out on the same transport as their ex-commander."
"Of course, Citizen Committeewoman!" the citizen captain barked, snapping one hand to her cap brim in salute, and Theisman felt physically ill with impotent rage.
He shouldn't have been surprised, he told himself, but he was. Even now he was. It was amazing how a lifetime of expecting at least semicivilized behavior out of one's superiors could prevent one from seeing something like this coming, he thought almost calmly, but in retrospect, it should have been manifest from the first. Of course Ransom had played out her cruel game. The committeewoman hadn't had to be a genius to figure out how Harrington was likely to react to the death sentence of her treecat. Even a casual perusal of her dossier would have made that obvious. The reaction of her officers when the SS clubbed her to the floor had been equally predictable, and Ransom had relied on it to provide the pretext to send every one of them off to Cerberus with Harrington.
Of course she had, and malice and triumph mingled in her smile as she turned back to Tourville.
"As for you, Citizen Rear Admiral," she said, "I believe you ought to return to Haven with me. What's happened here raises serious questions as to the quality of your judgment where these prisoners are concerned. I think you should drop by the Admiralty for a discussion of proper procedure for dealing with captured enemy personnel."
Tourville said nothing. He met her gaze levelly refusing to flinch, but that was all right with Ransom. She was willing to allow him his bravado. In fact, it would make the final outcome even more satisfactory.
"In fact," she went on, "I believe you should bring along your entire staff, and Citizen Commissioner Honeker." She glanced at Theisman. "Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville and his flagship will escort Tepes to the Cerberus System, Citizen Admiral," she told him. "Please have orders to that effect cut immediately."
"Yes, Citizen Committeewoman." Theisman managed to keep his voice more nearly normal than Tourville had been able to, but it was hard. And the fact that he'd succeeded made him feel contaminated.
"Then I think we're done," Ransom said brightly, and nodded to de Sangro. "See to having these..." she waved disdainfully at the battered, kneeling prisoners "...taken aboard ship, Citizen Captain. I'm sure we can find proper accommodations for them."
"At once, Citizen Committeewoman!"
The citizen captain saluted again, then jerked her head at her detail, and gun butts urged the prisoners back to their feet and out of the lounge. Those who couldn't walk were dragged, and as Thomas Theisman watched them go, he knew he would never feel clean again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Pain.
A roaring sea of pain sent fiery combers flaring through her brain to shatter her thoughts like explosions of foam, and she locked her teeth against a moan of anguish. Her mind refused to function, yet even so she knew only a tiny portion of the crippling pain was truly her own. She felt bruised and cruelly battered where the gun butts had smashed into her, but the agony of broken bones and torn muscle tissue was someone else’s, and her soul cried out as the waves of hurt crashed over her from Nimitz.
She opened her eyes and blinked foggily, trying to resolve what she saw into a coherent image. It took her several long, dragging seconds to realize that she was slumped forward and sideways against the safety straps of a shuttle seat, staring down at the deck, and still more seconds oozed away before she could decide what to do about it.
She struggled upright in her seat, the effort made awkward by the handcuffs locking her wrists behind her, and her vision blurred once more as the surges of Nimitz’s pain filled her eyes with tears. The strange, deeper fusion which had possessed them both in the moment of their despair still gripped her, and her vision was oddly doubled. It wasn't just the effects of the blows she'd taken after all, she realized, for while part of her saw the deck and the shuttle's forward bulkhead, less than a meter in front of her, another part looked up through Nimitz’s eyes at Fritz Montoya as the doctor bent urgently over him. The touch of Montoya’s hands was gentle, yet each contact sent fresh agony ripping through them both, and the part of them which was still Honor hoped desperately that Fritz knew what he was doing. But he was trained in human physiology, not Sphinxian, and she tried to strangle at birth her dread of his potential ignorance, before the half of them which was Nimitz detected it.
She blinked again, gritted her teeth, and fought the duality of her senses. It was hard, hard, for every fiber of her being cried out to be with Nimitz. To share his pain in hopes of somehow easing it, and to prove to him he was not alone. Yet the maelstrom of pain and fear and need, not just hers and Nimitz's, but beating in from all the other prisoners in the shuttle, as well, sucked at her too strongly, crippling her ability to think, and she knew Nimitz was too lost in his own pain even to realize she was there. And so she battled to separate herself from him, to become herself once more.
She succeeded, and her success sent a flash of shame through her, as if she had somehow abandoned the 'cat. The need to go to him physically sent her wrists turning against their manacles, muscles straining to break free of them as if she thought she could somehow reach him if only she were unchained, but it was useless. She merely bruised herself, and even if she'd been unfettered, the SS guards would simply have clubbed her down once more if she tried to get to him. Her memory of events in the terminal lounge was chaotic, but she knew that much, and she set her teeth and fought for self-mastery.
At least the pain stabbing into her proved Nimitz was alive. She wanted to sob in relief at the knowledge, yet she couldn't understand why he was. She and the 'cat had recognized the gloating pleasure dancing behind Ransom's order to kill him. It was that pleasure, the certainty that Ransom truly meant it, which had spurred them to action, for they'd known they had nothing to lose. But somehow, for some reason, Nimitz was still alive, and she slowly exerted control over the pain and the confusing mental echoes of that closer union with the 'cat and made herself now that could be true.
Vague memories flickered, just beyond her grasp. She remembered launching Nimitz at Ransom clearly enough, and her own brief fight before the guards battered her to the floor, but everything else was foggy and unclear. She recalled a brief image of LaFollet, fighting to reach her side, and one of McKeon being beaten to his knees, and she bit her lip as she realized how dearly her defiance might have cost the others. But nothing suggested a reason for Nimitz to still be alive, unless...
She frowned as the faint echo of a voice threaded itself through her memories. She couldn't quite summon the words back to her, but she recognized the voice. It belonged to Shannon Foraker, and if she couldn't recall the words, their urgency came back to her clearly. Somehow Shannon must have convinced Ransom not to kill Nimitz on the spot, but how? And at what cost to herself?
Honor had no answers to those questions, and she turned her head, looking for someone else to ask them of. But there was no one beside her. She was alone in the front row of seats in which her body had been dumped, and she started to turn to look behind her, only to gasp in pain as a hand twisted cruelly in her hair. It kept her from turning, forced her to stare directly in front of her, and she locked her teeth still harder, cutting off any other sign of how much it hurt, as her tormentor spoke.
"You just stay where the hell you are, chica." It was the SS captain who'd taken over the detail, and her accent was tantalizingly familiar. It took Honor a few seconds to realize that she'd heard it before, from Tomas Ramirez and other refugees from the Peeps' conquest of San Martin, the inhabited planet of Trevor’s Star, and she wondered how the woman behind her felt now that her home world had been conquered in turn by the Alliance. At the moment, however, the origin of her accent meant far less to Honor than the sneering pleasure in her voice. "You don't talk, you don't turn your head, you don't do anything unless someone tells you to. You got that?"
Honor said nothing, and the hand in her hair turned its wrist, actually lifting her a few millimeters out of the seat by her scalp. San Martin’s gravity was much heavier even than Sphinx's, and Honor bit her lip hard as the guard demonstrated the strength her birth world had given her. Honor had never imagined that simply pulling someone's hair could hurt that much, and the SS thug's voice went colder and harsher.
"I asked if you got that, chica!" she snapped.
"Yes." Honor made herself say the one word in the flattest voice she could, and managed, somehow, not to gasp in relief as the other woman snickered and released her hair with a contemptuous flicking motion. The pulsing of Nimitz’s pain fogged Honor's ability to read the emotions of others, but she didn't need it to recognize the other's vicious satisfaction... and anticipation. This wasn't one of the cold, emotionless ones, Honor realized. This was one of the ones who enjoyed her work.
"Good. You're gonna have enough fun on the trip to Hell anyway, chica. Believe me, you don't want to borrow any more," the woman said.
Honor heard the soft brush of uniform fabric on upholstery as her tormentor leaned back in the seat behind her. Even without looking, Honor knew there was no one else in that row, either. Her captors had used it like some sort of moat, cutting her off from the support of her officers by physically separating her from them, and she knew it was only the first step.
Ransoms intentions were clear enough. Over the years, the PRH’s security forces had discovered that it was much more effective to "disappear" troublemakers. It was a tactic InSec had used often enough against opponents of the Legislaturalist regime, and StateSec had brought it to a new, all-pervasive height. And it worked, she thought grimly, for there was an infinitely greater terror in knowing people you cared for could simply vanish. Death was terrible, yet it was an end, a conclusion. Disappearance was simply the doorway to ignorance and the cruelest emotion of all: hope that the one you loved still lived... somewhere. Which was what made it so effective, the ripple effect of a single "disappeared" individual could keep a dozen others in line in hopes that their submission would buy the life and eventual return of the person they loved.
But her case was different, for Ransom had orchestrated that entire confrontation before the cameras to officially justify Honors execution. No doubt she could change her mind about going public later, the Secretary of Public Information could kill any story she wanted to, after all, but Honor didn't believe she would. She wanted her enemies, foreign and domestic, real or imagined, to know what had happened to Honor, and that meant Honors death would be a special feature on the evening news. She could picture the solemn warnings about "violent content" and "viewer discretion," for they always preceded the broadcast imagery of "enemies of the People" paying for their crimes. Indeed, she was almost surprised, in a distant way, that she hadn't already been shot. There had to be countless convenient spots here in the Barnett System where a minor detail like that could be dealt with, so why send her all the way out to Camp Charon?
It was pointless to wonder about such details, but she couldn't stop herself. There was a sort of dreadful fascination to contemplating her own cold-blooded murder, and she wondered if perhaps Ransom had chosen Camp Charon for her execution in order to confirm the facility's existence. If so, the event would mark a major change in a policy InSec had established decades earlier and StateSec had maintained since, and one of those detached corners of her brain wondered if she should be flattered to be the catalyst for it.
For seventy-odd years, the Legislaturalists and then the Committee of Public Safety had steadfastly denied that there was any such planet as Hades or place as Camp Charon. Their existence was no more than a vicious rumor circulated by opponents of the regime, with no foundation in fact. Indeed, the Legislaturalists' denials had been so consistent that the Star Kingdom’s intelligence agencies had almost been prepared to believe them. After all, as more than one analyst had pointed out, rumors of such a prison planet would be almost as effective as the reality for controlling the Peep population, and feeding the rumor mill would also be far cheaper than actually creating a Camp Charon.
But the consensus had been that the camp was real, and over the years a few dozen once-"disappeared" enemies had been "rehabilitated" amid rumors they'd been held there. And their fragmentary descriptions fitted together to paint a picture of the planet officially named Hades but called "Hell" by anyone who had ever been sent there. No one outside the PRH’s security forces knew where it was, but all reports agreed escape was impossible, and stories abounded that the most recalcitrant military and political prisoners the Republic had taken in seventy T-years had been dispatched to its surface.
And now Ransom intended to use the occasion of Honors execution to confirm the places existence. For a moment, the thought that Ransom felt so threatened, that she believed the Committee of Public Safety's control was so fragile, that she wanted to be certain her enemies knew the iron fist really existed, that all the rumors of the suppressive power of StateSec were founded on fact, woke a distant stir of hope within Honor. It was like proof that there was a chink in the enemy's armor.
But any elation died even more quickly than it had come. Whatever all of this might imply about the ultimate fate of the People’s Republic and the outcome of the war, Honor Harrington would not be around to see it happen, and she felt the hopelessness of her future crash in on her once more while she stared at the bulkhead. She knew she was supposed to feel hopeless, that the female thug behind her had deliberately driven that feeling home as the first step in crushing her spirit, but knowing that and being able to resist it were two different things. Her memory replayed the exact words of Cordelia Ransoms sentence of death again and again, like a defective recording, as if, she thought, something inside her were determined to grind home the lesson that she and Nimitz had no future. It was a stupid thought, yet she couldn't shake it off, and she wasn't certain she even wanted to, for somehow the act of admitting what awaited her left her feeling washed out and clear. Perhaps it was the confirmation, she thought. Perhaps actually hearing herself condemned had resolved the uncertainty and extinguished the last tormenting embers some stubborn scrap of hope had kept alive.
In its own way, there was a mercy in that. If there was no longer any hope, then neither was there any reason to act as if there were, and she felt the comfort of apathy reaching out to her. She could let go of her dignity, she thought almost dreamily. She could abandon the pretense of pride and courage, for clinging to those qualities would only challenge her captors to crush them, and surely they had no real significance to a dead woman. Why try to maintain the mask, play the role of the Queen's officer facing adversity with fortitude?
Just let go, an inner voice urged. They're going to do their best to break you, you've already seen that much, so why not let them? Why put yourself through what trying to stop them will cost you? Go along with them, play whatever part they insist you play. It won't mean anything. It would only mean something if you had a choice. If there were any option that would let it make a difference, and there isn't one.
It was insidious, that voice, and tempting, and a coldly rational core of her knew it was even right. There was no logical reason to subject herself to what her captors would do if she defied them, not when she was going to die in the end, anyway. But there were reasons, she realized, thoughts still wandering with that odd, crystal clarity. Not logical ones, no, but reasons which were no less important because they were illogical.
In the end, no one except the Peeps would know what she did and how she did it, nor would the way she conducted herself mean a thing to anyone... except her. That was the crux of it. How she faced her captors and her death mattered to her, and if she was going to die, and if Nimitz was going to die with her, they must do so on their feet. Not because she was a Queen's officer. Not even because she owed her people an example. She was, and she did, and that was important, but that identity and that debt were simply part and parcel of who she was. In the ultimate analysis, they mattered only because they mattered to her, not because of what anyone else might think. No. The real reason for refusing to surrender was that she and Nimitz owed themselves that final dignity, that last defiance of the people like the woman behind her who would do anything in their power to take it from them. Resisting their enemies would invite those enemies to fill whatever time she and her beloved friend had left with brutality and humiliation, yet even as she faced that, she also felt a subtle strength flowing back into her.
It wasn't like the strength she'd summoned when she took a ship into combat, or like the courage she donned like armor when she led her people to what she expected to be their deaths. As she faced herself in that moment of odd clarity, she realized that the strength she'd summoned on those other occasions had always held an edge of... not bravado, but something like it. Something that was real enough, but intended for others, not for her. In a way, it was a gift, a power which came to her from outside to permit her to carry her people with her when there was nothing else. A confluence of duty and responsibility, of the determination to do her job because others depended upon her, because she'd sworn an oath to do it and would die before she broke that promise, and because the rules required her to play the game out to the final throw. And behind that intersection of duty, determination, and the needs of others was tradition, the example of the Star Kingdom’s great captains, who served as model, inspiration, and challenge in one. How many times had she reached out to share the mantle of Edward Saganami or Travis Webster or Ellen D'Orville without even realizing that was what she was doing?
But the strength she felt now had nothing to do with those external sources or the need to do her duty for the sake of others. For the first time in her memory, she stood in a place where none of those things mattered. No, that wasn't right. They mattered, but they'd become secondary, subordinate to her duty to herself and to Nimitz, and their support had become secondary as well. What she felt now was her strength, hers and Nimitz’s, and the desperation faded from her eyes as that awareness flowed into her.
How odd, she thought. She'd had to come to this point, to realize everything she was and all she might yet have become were going to end, to be blotted out, to find the true strength hidden at her core. But she'd found it now, and as she looked at it with clear mental eyes, she realized this strength had no end. It might fade, might be driven out of her for a time. Indeed, it could be suppressed and overborne again and again, but it would always return, for it was her and she was it. She was too self-honest and too much the realist to lie to herself. Given enough time and determination, experts like the creatures who worked for State Security could destroy anyone, yet in its own way, that was the point. They could destroy her. With the right drugs, the right abuse and pressures, they could smash her, even reprogram her into someone else entirely. But that was simply another form of execution, and so long as she lived, so long as a trace of the person she was and had always been remained, so would the strength which filled her now. In that sense, no one could take it from her; she could only surrender it herself.
Commodore Lady Dame Honor Harrington sat in the shuttle seat, face and body bruised and aching, hands chained behind her while Nimitz’s anguish pulsed through her and her calm expression was no longer merely a mask to deceive her enemies.
"You can go in now, Citizen Commander."
"Thank you." Warner Caslet's curtness wasn't directed at the yeoman outside Citizen Admiral Theisman's office. In fact, he rather regretted speaking so sharply to Citizen Chief Maynard, and he knew it was dangerous, as well, but he couldn't help it. He was too angry to give such thoughts the weight they should have held... and that, of course, was what made his sharpness dangerous.
He stepped into Theisman's office and paused as he saw Dennis LePic standing at one end of the citizen admiral's desk. It was only a brief pause, and then his feet carried him across the carpet to face his superiors. The sight of the people’s commissioner sent a splash of cold water through him, as if reiterating all the reasons he already knew he must conceal his anger, yet it also made that anger still worse. Not because he blamed LePic, personally, for what had happened, but because LePic, for all his efforts to be a decent human being, had voluntarily associated himself with the people he did blame.
And so did you, in a way, didn't you, Warner? his brain sneered. You could have been heroic and defied the new regime. You could have refused to sully your hands or compromise your principles and honor, couldn't you? They would have shot you for it, but you could have done it... and you didn't. So don't be so damned holier-than-thou about a man like LePic.
"You sent for me, Citizen Admiral?" he asked, trying to bury the echoes of anger in crispness, and Theisman nodded.
Something had changed in the citizen admiral's face. There were no new lines on it, yet it seemed as if Theisman had aged years in the space of hours. And as he saw the change in his commander, Caslet realized that what had happened to the prisoners must have been worse even than had been reported to him. Or perhaps it hadn't been. Perhaps Theisman had simply been too close, seen the events, and their implications, too clearly.
"I'm afraid I did, Warner," Theisman said after a moment.
"No doubt you've heard about the... disgraceful events of this morning."
He asked the question of Caslet, but he glanced at LePic as he spoke. The people's commissioner said nothing, yet something flickered in his eyes. His lips tightened and his nostrils flared, but then he gave a brief, unwilling nod, as if to endorse Theisman's adjective. It was a small thing, yet its significance struck Caslet like a shout, for it ranged the people's commissioner, for the moment at least, alongside the military officers upon whom he was supposed to spy.
"Yes, Citizen Admiral. I did." The citizen commander spoke quietly, and not just because he, too, agreed with Theisman's choice of adjectives. There'd been no discussion of the citizen admiral's reasons for sending him on the inspection trip from which he'd just returned, but he'd guessed what they were, and he was torn between gratitude and a sense that he'd somehow been absent from his post. That he'd evaded his responsibility to be present when Honor Harrington faced Cordelia Ransom.
"Well, I'm afraid there are going to be some repercussions from them," Theisman told him, and glanced at LePic again, as if he was considering just how open he could be. Well, Caslet could understand that. Temporary ally or no, there was a limit to the frankness Theisman dared risk in front of the commissioner. He saw the same thoughts flicker across his CO's face, but then the citizen admiral tossed his head like a horse shaking off flies, or a bull preparing to charge.
"In particular," he said, "Citizen Committeewoman Ransom feels the military has failed to properly embrace the realities of total war against our class enemies. She believes too many of our officers continue to cling to outmoded, elitist concepts of so-called 'honor.' While such a carryover may be understandable in the abstract, she feels the time has come to break such habits of thought, which create a dangerous sense of sympathy for the enemies of the People who are currently attempting to undermine our will to fight as part and parcel of their efforts to defeat and destroy the Republic."
Despite his own anger, Caslet's eyes widened at the sheer vitriol of Theisman's tone, and his gaze darted to LePic. No one could have faulted the citizen admirals words, but the voice which had delivered them shouted a contempt and disgust which cut at least as deep as Caslet's own. The people's commissioner shifted unhappily, yet he said nothing. And that, Caslet realized, was because he was less unhappy with Theisman's tone than with the fact that he knew it was justified.
"In light of her conclusions," the citizen admiral went on in that same voice of supercooled acid, "the Citizen Committeewoman considers that her duty as a member of the Committee of Public Safety requires her to begin addressing the officer corps' failings. Accordingly, she's decided that although the prisoners are now in the custody of the Office of State Security, a delegation of military officers should be temporarily attached to State Security to observe the manner in which such enemies of the People are properly treated. For this purpose, she has instructed me to detach the Count Tilly to escort Tepes to Cerberus so that Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville and his staff can form the core of that delegation. In addition..." Theisman's eyes narrowed and bored into Caslet's like twin laser mounts "...she has specifically requested your presence."
"My presence, Citizen Admiral?" Caslet's surprise was genuine, and he blinked as Theisman nodded in confirmation. "Did the Citizen Committeewoman explain why she wishes me to accompany her?"
"No," Theisman replied, but his flat voice said he suspected the reason. And after a few seconds' thought, Caslet realized he did, as well.
Of course. The reports he'd already heard had warned him that Shannon's lack of caution had finally landed her in the disaster he'd tried so hard to protect her from, and it was unlikely someone like Ransom would have failed to check Shannon’s record. After all, how could she have risen to her present rank without StateSec's detecting her unreliability unless her naval superiors had covered for her? And if Ransom had checked, she knew Caslet had not only been Shannon’s CO but also recommended her promotion, twice. Another check would have revealed his own absence on his "inspection trip," and while there was no official reason for her to question his orders from Theisman, she wouldn't have hesitated to add two plus two. In light of the connection between him and Shannon, that was all she would have required, and she wasn't the sort to commit excesses by halves. If Caslet could have tolerated an officer like Shannon under his command, then no doubt he, too, harbored dangerous elitist sympathies. And it was entirely possible that Ransom also saw this as a way to slap Theisman’s hand for sending Caslet away in the first place. She could hardly have Navy officers sticking together to protect one another from their so-called government, now could she?
A roaring sea of pain sent fiery combers flaring through her brain to shatter her thoughts like explosions of foam, and she locked her teeth against a moan of anguish. Her mind refused to function, yet even so she knew only a tiny portion of the crippling pain was truly her own. She felt bruised and cruelly battered where the gun butts had smashed into her, but the agony of broken bones and torn muscle tissue was someone else’s, and her soul cried out as the waves of hurt crashed over her from Nimitz.
She opened her eyes and blinked foggily, trying to resolve what she saw into a coherent image. It took her several long, dragging seconds to realize that she was slumped forward and sideways against the safety straps of a shuttle seat, staring down at the deck, and still more seconds oozed away before she could decide what to do about it.
She struggled upright in her seat, the effort made awkward by the handcuffs locking her wrists behind her, and her vision blurred once more as the surges of Nimitz’s pain filled her eyes with tears. The strange, deeper fusion which had possessed them both in the moment of their despair still gripped her, and her vision was oddly doubled. It wasn't just the effects of the blows she'd taken after all, she realized, for while part of her saw the deck and the shuttle's forward bulkhead, less than a meter in front of her, another part looked up through Nimitz’s eyes at Fritz Montoya as the doctor bent urgently over him. The touch of Montoya’s hands was gentle, yet each contact sent fresh agony ripping through them both, and the part of them which was still Honor hoped desperately that Fritz knew what he was doing. But he was trained in human physiology, not Sphinxian, and she tried to strangle at birth her dread of his potential ignorance, before the half of them which was Nimitz detected it.
She blinked again, gritted her teeth, and fought the duality of her senses. It was hard, hard, for every fiber of her being cried out to be with Nimitz. To share his pain in hopes of somehow easing it, and to prove to him he was not alone. Yet the maelstrom of pain and fear and need, not just hers and Nimitz's, but beating in from all the other prisoners in the shuttle, as well, sucked at her too strongly, crippling her ability to think, and she knew Nimitz was too lost in his own pain even to realize she was there. And so she battled to separate herself from him, to become herself once more.
She succeeded, and her success sent a flash of shame through her, as if she had somehow abandoned the 'cat. The need to go to him physically sent her wrists turning against their manacles, muscles straining to break free of them as if she thought she could somehow reach him if only she were unchained, but it was useless. She merely bruised herself, and even if she'd been unfettered, the SS guards would simply have clubbed her down once more if she tried to get to him. Her memory of events in the terminal lounge was chaotic, but she knew that much, and she set her teeth and fought for self-mastery.
At least the pain stabbing into her proved Nimitz was alive. She wanted to sob in relief at the knowledge, yet she couldn't understand why he was. She and the 'cat had recognized the gloating pleasure dancing behind Ransom's order to kill him. It was that pleasure, the certainty that Ransom truly meant it, which had spurred them to action, for they'd known they had nothing to lose. But somehow, for some reason, Nimitz was still alive, and she slowly exerted control over the pain and the confusing mental echoes of that closer union with the 'cat and made herself now that could be true.
Vague memories flickered, just beyond her grasp. She remembered launching Nimitz at Ransom clearly enough, and her own brief fight before the guards battered her to the floor, but everything else was foggy and unclear. She recalled a brief image of LaFollet, fighting to reach her side, and one of McKeon being beaten to his knees, and she bit her lip as she realized how dearly her defiance might have cost the others. But nothing suggested a reason for Nimitz to still be alive, unless...
She frowned as the faint echo of a voice threaded itself through her memories. She couldn't quite summon the words back to her, but she recognized the voice. It belonged to Shannon Foraker, and if she couldn't recall the words, their urgency came back to her clearly. Somehow Shannon must have convinced Ransom not to kill Nimitz on the spot, but how? And at what cost to herself?
Honor had no answers to those questions, and she turned her head, looking for someone else to ask them of. But there was no one beside her. She was alone in the front row of seats in which her body had been dumped, and she started to turn to look behind her, only to gasp in pain as a hand twisted cruelly in her hair. It kept her from turning, forced her to stare directly in front of her, and she locked her teeth still harder, cutting off any other sign of how much it hurt, as her tormentor spoke.
"You just stay where the hell you are, chica." It was the SS captain who'd taken over the detail, and her accent was tantalizingly familiar. It took Honor a few seconds to realize that she'd heard it before, from Tomas Ramirez and other refugees from the Peeps' conquest of San Martin, the inhabited planet of Trevor’s Star, and she wondered how the woman behind her felt now that her home world had been conquered in turn by the Alliance. At the moment, however, the origin of her accent meant far less to Honor than the sneering pleasure in her voice. "You don't talk, you don't turn your head, you don't do anything unless someone tells you to. You got that?"
Honor said nothing, and the hand in her hair turned its wrist, actually lifting her a few millimeters out of the seat by her scalp. San Martin’s gravity was much heavier even than Sphinx's, and Honor bit her lip hard as the guard demonstrated the strength her birth world had given her. Honor had never imagined that simply pulling someone's hair could hurt that much, and the SS thug's voice went colder and harsher.
"I asked if you got that, chica!" she snapped.
"Yes." Honor made herself say the one word in the flattest voice she could, and managed, somehow, not to gasp in relief as the other woman snickered and released her hair with a contemptuous flicking motion. The pulsing of Nimitz’s pain fogged Honor's ability to read the emotions of others, but she didn't need it to recognize the other's vicious satisfaction... and anticipation. This wasn't one of the cold, emotionless ones, Honor realized. This was one of the ones who enjoyed her work.
"Good. You're gonna have enough fun on the trip to Hell anyway, chica. Believe me, you don't want to borrow any more," the woman said.
Honor heard the soft brush of uniform fabric on upholstery as her tormentor leaned back in the seat behind her. Even without looking, Honor knew there was no one else in that row, either. Her captors had used it like some sort of moat, cutting her off from the support of her officers by physically separating her from them, and she knew it was only the first step.
Ransoms intentions were clear enough. Over the years, the PRH’s security forces had discovered that it was much more effective to "disappear" troublemakers. It was a tactic InSec had used often enough against opponents of the Legislaturalist regime, and StateSec had brought it to a new, all-pervasive height. And it worked, she thought grimly, for there was an infinitely greater terror in knowing people you cared for could simply vanish. Death was terrible, yet it was an end, a conclusion. Disappearance was simply the doorway to ignorance and the cruelest emotion of all: hope that the one you loved still lived... somewhere. Which was what made it so effective, the ripple effect of a single "disappeared" individual could keep a dozen others in line in hopes that their submission would buy the life and eventual return of the person they loved.
But her case was different, for Ransom had orchestrated that entire confrontation before the cameras to officially justify Honors execution. No doubt she could change her mind about going public later, the Secretary of Public Information could kill any story she wanted to, after all, but Honor didn't believe she would. She wanted her enemies, foreign and domestic, real or imagined, to know what had happened to Honor, and that meant Honors death would be a special feature on the evening news. She could picture the solemn warnings about "violent content" and "viewer discretion," for they always preceded the broadcast imagery of "enemies of the People" paying for their crimes. Indeed, she was almost surprised, in a distant way, that she hadn't already been shot. There had to be countless convenient spots here in the Barnett System where a minor detail like that could be dealt with, so why send her all the way out to Camp Charon?
It was pointless to wonder about such details, but she couldn't stop herself. There was a sort of dreadful fascination to contemplating her own cold-blooded murder, and she wondered if perhaps Ransom had chosen Camp Charon for her execution in order to confirm the facility's existence. If so, the event would mark a major change in a policy InSec had established decades earlier and StateSec had maintained since, and one of those detached corners of her brain wondered if she should be flattered to be the catalyst for it.
For seventy-odd years, the Legislaturalists and then the Committee of Public Safety had steadfastly denied that there was any such planet as Hades or place as Camp Charon. Their existence was no more than a vicious rumor circulated by opponents of the regime, with no foundation in fact. Indeed, the Legislaturalists' denials had been so consistent that the Star Kingdom’s intelligence agencies had almost been prepared to believe them. After all, as more than one analyst had pointed out, rumors of such a prison planet would be almost as effective as the reality for controlling the Peep population, and feeding the rumor mill would also be far cheaper than actually creating a Camp Charon.
But the consensus had been that the camp was real, and over the years a few dozen once-"disappeared" enemies had been "rehabilitated" amid rumors they'd been held there. And their fragmentary descriptions fitted together to paint a picture of the planet officially named Hades but called "Hell" by anyone who had ever been sent there. No one outside the PRH’s security forces knew where it was, but all reports agreed escape was impossible, and stories abounded that the most recalcitrant military and political prisoners the Republic had taken in seventy T-years had been dispatched to its surface.
And now Ransom intended to use the occasion of Honors execution to confirm the places existence. For a moment, the thought that Ransom felt so threatened, that she believed the Committee of Public Safety's control was so fragile, that she wanted to be certain her enemies knew the iron fist really existed, that all the rumors of the suppressive power of StateSec were founded on fact, woke a distant stir of hope within Honor. It was like proof that there was a chink in the enemy's armor.
But any elation died even more quickly than it had come. Whatever all of this might imply about the ultimate fate of the People’s Republic and the outcome of the war, Honor Harrington would not be around to see it happen, and she felt the hopelessness of her future crash in on her once more while she stared at the bulkhead. She knew she was supposed to feel hopeless, that the female thug behind her had deliberately driven that feeling home as the first step in crushing her spirit, but knowing that and being able to resist it were two different things. Her memory replayed the exact words of Cordelia Ransoms sentence of death again and again, like a defective recording, as if, she thought, something inside her were determined to grind home the lesson that she and Nimitz had no future. It was a stupid thought, yet she couldn't shake it off, and she wasn't certain she even wanted to, for somehow the act of admitting what awaited her left her feeling washed out and clear. Perhaps it was the confirmation, she thought. Perhaps actually hearing herself condemned had resolved the uncertainty and extinguished the last tormenting embers some stubborn scrap of hope had kept alive.
In its own way, there was a mercy in that. If there was no longer any hope, then neither was there any reason to act as if there were, and she felt the comfort of apathy reaching out to her. She could let go of her dignity, she thought almost dreamily. She could abandon the pretense of pride and courage, for clinging to those qualities would only challenge her captors to crush them, and surely they had no real significance to a dead woman. Why try to maintain the mask, play the role of the Queen's officer facing adversity with fortitude?
Just let go, an inner voice urged. They're going to do their best to break you, you've already seen that much, so why not let them? Why put yourself through what trying to stop them will cost you? Go along with them, play whatever part they insist you play. It won't mean anything. It would only mean something if you had a choice. If there were any option that would let it make a difference, and there isn't one.
It was insidious, that voice, and tempting, and a coldly rational core of her knew it was even right. There was no logical reason to subject herself to what her captors would do if she defied them, not when she was going to die in the end, anyway. But there were reasons, she realized, thoughts still wandering with that odd, crystal clarity. Not logical ones, no, but reasons which were no less important because they were illogical.
In the end, no one except the Peeps would know what she did and how she did it, nor would the way she conducted herself mean a thing to anyone... except her. That was the crux of it. How she faced her captors and her death mattered to her, and if she was going to die, and if Nimitz was going to die with her, they must do so on their feet. Not because she was a Queen's officer. Not even because she owed her people an example. She was, and she did, and that was important, but that identity and that debt were simply part and parcel of who she was. In the ultimate analysis, they mattered only because they mattered to her, not because of what anyone else might think. No. The real reason for refusing to surrender was that she and Nimitz owed themselves that final dignity, that last defiance of the people like the woman behind her who would do anything in their power to take it from them. Resisting their enemies would invite those enemies to fill whatever time she and her beloved friend had left with brutality and humiliation, yet even as she faced that, she also felt a subtle strength flowing back into her.
It wasn't like the strength she'd summoned when she took a ship into combat, or like the courage she donned like armor when she led her people to what she expected to be their deaths. As she faced herself in that moment of odd clarity, she realized that the strength she'd summoned on those other occasions had always held an edge of... not bravado, but something like it. Something that was real enough, but intended for others, not for her. In a way, it was a gift, a power which came to her from outside to permit her to carry her people with her when there was nothing else. A confluence of duty and responsibility, of the determination to do her job because others depended upon her, because she'd sworn an oath to do it and would die before she broke that promise, and because the rules required her to play the game out to the final throw. And behind that intersection of duty, determination, and the needs of others was tradition, the example of the Star Kingdom’s great captains, who served as model, inspiration, and challenge in one. How many times had she reached out to share the mantle of Edward Saganami or Travis Webster or Ellen D'Orville without even realizing that was what she was doing?
But the strength she felt now had nothing to do with those external sources or the need to do her duty for the sake of others. For the first time in her memory, she stood in a place where none of those things mattered. No, that wasn't right. They mattered, but they'd become secondary, subordinate to her duty to herself and to Nimitz, and their support had become secondary as well. What she felt now was her strength, hers and Nimitz’s, and the desperation faded from her eyes as that awareness flowed into her.
How odd, she thought. She'd had to come to this point, to realize everything she was and all she might yet have become were going to end, to be blotted out, to find the true strength hidden at her core. But she'd found it now, and as she looked at it with clear mental eyes, she realized this strength had no end. It might fade, might be driven out of her for a time. Indeed, it could be suppressed and overborne again and again, but it would always return, for it was her and she was it. She was too self-honest and too much the realist to lie to herself. Given enough time and determination, experts like the creatures who worked for State Security could destroy anyone, yet in its own way, that was the point. They could destroy her. With the right drugs, the right abuse and pressures, they could smash her, even reprogram her into someone else entirely. But that was simply another form of execution, and so long as she lived, so long as a trace of the person she was and had always been remained, so would the strength which filled her now. In that sense, no one could take it from her; she could only surrender it herself.
Commodore Lady Dame Honor Harrington sat in the shuttle seat, face and body bruised and aching, hands chained behind her while Nimitz’s anguish pulsed through her and her calm expression was no longer merely a mask to deceive her enemies.
"You can go in now, Citizen Commander."
"Thank you." Warner Caslet's curtness wasn't directed at the yeoman outside Citizen Admiral Theisman's office. In fact, he rather regretted speaking so sharply to Citizen Chief Maynard, and he knew it was dangerous, as well, but he couldn't help it. He was too angry to give such thoughts the weight they should have held... and that, of course, was what made his sharpness dangerous.
He stepped into Theisman's office and paused as he saw Dennis LePic standing at one end of the citizen admiral's desk. It was only a brief pause, and then his feet carried him across the carpet to face his superiors. The sight of the people’s commissioner sent a splash of cold water through him, as if reiterating all the reasons he already knew he must conceal his anger, yet it also made that anger still worse. Not because he blamed LePic, personally, for what had happened, but because LePic, for all his efforts to be a decent human being, had voluntarily associated himself with the people he did blame.
And so did you, in a way, didn't you, Warner? his brain sneered. You could have been heroic and defied the new regime. You could have refused to sully your hands or compromise your principles and honor, couldn't you? They would have shot you for it, but you could have done it... and you didn't. So don't be so damned holier-than-thou about a man like LePic.
"You sent for me, Citizen Admiral?" he asked, trying to bury the echoes of anger in crispness, and Theisman nodded.
Something had changed in the citizen admiral's face. There were no new lines on it, yet it seemed as if Theisman had aged years in the space of hours. And as he saw the change in his commander, Caslet realized that what had happened to the prisoners must have been worse even than had been reported to him. Or perhaps it hadn't been. Perhaps Theisman had simply been too close, seen the events, and their implications, too clearly.
"I'm afraid I did, Warner," Theisman said after a moment.
"No doubt you've heard about the... disgraceful events of this morning."
He asked the question of Caslet, but he glanced at LePic as he spoke. The people's commissioner said nothing, yet something flickered in his eyes. His lips tightened and his nostrils flared, but then he gave a brief, unwilling nod, as if to endorse Theisman's adjective. It was a small thing, yet its significance struck Caslet like a shout, for it ranged the people's commissioner, for the moment at least, alongside the military officers upon whom he was supposed to spy.
"Yes, Citizen Admiral. I did." The citizen commander spoke quietly, and not just because he, too, agreed with Theisman's choice of adjectives. There'd been no discussion of the citizen admiral's reasons for sending him on the inspection trip from which he'd just returned, but he'd guessed what they were, and he was torn between gratitude and a sense that he'd somehow been absent from his post. That he'd evaded his responsibility to be present when Honor Harrington faced Cordelia Ransom.
"Well, I'm afraid there are going to be some repercussions from them," Theisman told him, and glanced at LePic again, as if he was considering just how open he could be. Well, Caslet could understand that. Temporary ally or no, there was a limit to the frankness Theisman dared risk in front of the commissioner. He saw the same thoughts flicker across his CO's face, but then the citizen admiral tossed his head like a horse shaking off flies, or a bull preparing to charge.
"In particular," he said, "Citizen Committeewoman Ransom feels the military has failed to properly embrace the realities of total war against our class enemies. She believes too many of our officers continue to cling to outmoded, elitist concepts of so-called 'honor.' While such a carryover may be understandable in the abstract, she feels the time has come to break such habits of thought, which create a dangerous sense of sympathy for the enemies of the People who are currently attempting to undermine our will to fight as part and parcel of their efforts to defeat and destroy the Republic."
Despite his own anger, Caslet's eyes widened at the sheer vitriol of Theisman's tone, and his gaze darted to LePic. No one could have faulted the citizen admirals words, but the voice which had delivered them shouted a contempt and disgust which cut at least as deep as Caslet's own. The people's commissioner shifted unhappily, yet he said nothing. And that, Caslet realized, was because he was less unhappy with Theisman's tone than with the fact that he knew it was justified.
"In light of her conclusions," the citizen admiral went on in that same voice of supercooled acid, "the Citizen Committeewoman considers that her duty as a member of the Committee of Public Safety requires her to begin addressing the officer corps' failings. Accordingly, she's decided that although the prisoners are now in the custody of the Office of State Security, a delegation of military officers should be temporarily attached to State Security to observe the manner in which such enemies of the People are properly treated. For this purpose, she has instructed me to detach the Count Tilly to escort Tepes to Cerberus so that Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville and his staff can form the core of that delegation. In addition..." Theisman's eyes narrowed and bored into Caslet's like twin laser mounts "...she has specifically requested your presence."
"My presence, Citizen Admiral?" Caslet's surprise was genuine, and he blinked as Theisman nodded in confirmation. "Did the Citizen Committeewoman explain why she wishes me to accompany her?"
"No," Theisman replied, but his flat voice said he suspected the reason. And after a few seconds' thought, Caslet realized he did, as well.
Of course. The reports he'd already heard had warned him that Shannon's lack of caution had finally landed her in the disaster he'd tried so hard to protect her from, and it was unlikely someone like Ransom would have failed to check Shannon’s record. After all, how could she have risen to her present rank without StateSec's detecting her unreliability unless her naval superiors had covered for her? And if Ransom had checked, she knew Caslet had not only been Shannon’s CO but also recommended her promotion, twice. Another check would have revealed his own absence on his "inspection trip," and while there was no official reason for her to question his orders from Theisman, she wouldn't have hesitated to add two plus two. In light of the connection between him and Shannon, that was all she would have required, and she wasn't the sort to commit excesses by halves. If Caslet could have tolerated an officer like Shannon under his command, then no doubt he, too, harbored dangerous elitist sympathies. And it was entirely possible that Ransom also saw this as a way to slap Theisman’s hand for sending Caslet away in the first place. She could hardly have Navy officers sticking together to protect one another from their so-called government, now could she?