Weber David. In Enemy Hands

   Honor understood their confusion. All their experience told them their abuse and systematic denial of her humanity should have broken her. It should have brought her defiance crashing down, for it always had before, and on the surface of things, she knew, it should have done so this time, as well.
   Her grim, featureless cell had no mirror, but she didn't need one to know what she looked like. Their precious regulations proscribed any sort of cybernetic prostheses or bioenhancement for prisoners, and one of their techs had disabled her artificial eye... and the synthetic nerves in the left side of her face. It had been a gratuitous insult, a gloating deprivation which served no useful purpose. Certainly there had been no possible way in which her eye or facial nerves could be considered a "security risk"! But that hadn't prevented them from doing it, and the relative crudity of their tech base had prevented them from simply shutting her implants down. With neither the access codes nor the technology to derive them, they'd taken a brute force approach and simply burned them out, blinding her left eye and reducing half her face to dead, numb immobility. Honor suspected the damage was irreparable and that complete replacement would be required... or would have been, if she'd been going to live long enough to receive it.
   Nor had their petty cruelties stopped there. They'd shaved her head under the guise of "hygiene," cutting away the braids she'd spent so many years growing. But there, at least, their efforts to dehumanize her had hit a pothole that actually amused her, for they seemed unaware that she'd cut her own hair almost that short for the better part of thirty years for the sake of convenience. Whatever they might have hoped, the loss of her braids was scarcely likely to cause her resistance to crumble.
   Yet for all that her spirit remained unbroken, she also knew, mirror or no, that her confinement was gradually grinding her away. Timmons seemed unaware of her enhanced metabolism or its need for fuel. She didn't know if that was true or if he simply wanted her to beg for the additional food she required, and it didn't really matter. She'd long since decided she would die before asking him for anything.
   The living side of her face had grown gaunt, and her muscle tone was slowly rotting under the impact of poor diet and lack of exercise. She knew Cordelia Ransom had wanted her in good shape for the cameras when they hanged her, and she took a certain grim, perverse satisfaction in knowing what Ransom would actually get. Yet inside, where she guarded the walls of her spirits fortress, she knew she was growing dangerously detached. She had no clear idea how long she'd been in this cell where the light and the temperature never changed, where there was nothing to read or do, where no distraction was ever offered except for her meals and the mocking humiliation of the guards. No doubt they were drawing close to their destination and her execution, yet somehow that hardly seemed to matter. She hadn't spoken a word to her captors in the entire time she'd been here, however long that had been, and she sometimes thought, in the drifting stillness of her thoughts when she was alone, that perhaps she had forgotten how to speak. In an odd sort of way, she'd become a mute, withdrawing from the parts of her brain which engaged others in conversation in order to buttress the vital areas of her core. There was a sense of diminution in that loss of speech, a sense of yet another anchor to the world about her fraying its cable, and she knew it was only one facet of her own deliberate internal disconnection from the sadists who controlled her physical existence.
   But there was one other anchor, one her guards knew nothing about, which she knew would never fail her. It was faint, reduced by distance to a shadow of what it once had been, yet it was there, and because it was, she knew that Nimitz was still alive.
   She clung to that anchor, not as a drowning woman to a spar, but as a lover to her beloved, for she felt his pain, physical, continuing still, and spiritual as he sensed her pain and could not heal it, and she knew that now, as never before, they needed one another. And that one blessing, at least, they had, for none of the sadistic, hating creatures aboard PNS Tepes ever guessed their link still existed, that they fed one another over it. Not with hope, for there was no hope, but with something more important. With love. With the absolute assurance that they would always be there for one another, that neither of them would be allowed to go down into the dark alone, whatever the Peeps intended.
   And that was the final leg of her strength, the one Lieutenant Timmons and Sergeant Bergren and Corporal Hayman could never take from her.
   She stepped into the bottom of the jumpsuit and started to work her arms into the top's sleeves, but a hand gripped her shoulder. She stopped dressing, standing motionless, and despite her hard-won detachment, her heart beat harder, for it was Bergren's hand.
   "Getting close to arrival day, cell bait," he told her, and his gloating voice was right behind her ear, his breath hot on her bare skin. "Not long before that stiff neck of yours is gonna get a little longer." She said nothing, and not a muscle twitched, but he laughed, and his fingers squeezed her shoulder in a mocking parody of a caress. "I'm thinking maybe you'd like a little comforting before they haul your worthless ass to the gallows," he said, and his grip tightened, forcing her to turn to face him.
   His eyes roamed over her, and she felt the sickness behind them. There was no trace of comparison between the lust he felt and what she and Paul had shared. Indeed, Bergren's diseased hunger was worse even than what she had sensed from Pavel Young. Young had hated her. He'd wanted to punish her because her rejection of his advances had humiliated him in front of those he considered his peers. It had been a stupid, shallow hate, the hate of a person to whom other human beings were never people, but simply things which existed for his convenience, but at least it had been personal.
   Bergren's hate wasn't. It didn't matter to him who or what she was, except in as much as her passive resistance had frustrated his efforts to make her fear him. She might have been anyone, anyone at all, for the only thing that truly mattered to him was the infliction of pain. Physical, mental, spiritual... that didn't matter to him either, for his need to hurt and punish sprang not from any specific offense anyone had ever committed against him. It sprang from all of them, from every real or imagined slight or indignity he had ever "suffered." There was nothing to him but hate, and an empty core which hungered to devour and destroy anyone who refused to share his hate.
   Her artificial left eye was dead, its pupil fixed and its focus unchanging, but despite all she could do, her right eye flickered with cold contempt for the human-shaped corruption before her, and his mouth tightened in a snarl.
   "Yeah, cell bait," he told her, his voice softer and still uglier. "I think you need some comfort. So why don't you just open those legs of yours?"
   He licked his lips, and his eyes flicked to the female guard. Not that there was any chance she might intervene, for she was as diseased as any of Timmons' male personnel, and her anticipation was even more sickening than Bergren's.
   "C'mere, cell bait," he whispered, and the hand on her shoulder pulled her closer while his free hand reached for her breasts.
   But it never touched them. As he reached forward, Honor's left hand shot up like a striking viper, and he hissed in sudden pain as her fingers locked on his wrist like a vise. He tried to jerk free, but her hand might have been a steel clamp. Her passivity had lulled him into forgetting her heavy-grav origins, just as it had convinced him she would always be passive, and sudden fear, darker, uglier, and far stronger for its total unexpectedness, flickered in his eyes as she tightened her grip still further and the right side of her mouth curved in a parody of a smile.
   "Get your hand off me."
   The five words came out with a soft, dangerous clarity which surprised even Honor after so many endless days of silence. There was steel behind them, and a hunger which echoed Bergren’s own, and for just an instant, they froze his blood. But he recovered quickly, and stepped forward, trying to drive her back against the bulkhead.
   It didn't work. She scarcely even swayed, and then he grunted hoarsely, as she twisted her hand and the sudden explosion of pain in his wrist drove him to his knees.
   "Let him up, bitch!" The other guard stepped forward, reaching for the truncheon on her belt, and Honor turned her head to look into the other woman's eyes.
   "Touch me with that club, and I'll break your spine," she said flatly, and the SS woman froze before her total assurance. Then she shook herself.
   "I don't think so, cell bait!" she sneered. "You aren't going anywhere even if you do, and you won't like what the rest of 'em will do if you even try. Besides, you've got friends topside, remember?"
   She stepped forward with renewed confidence... and Bergren screamed as his wrist snapped in Honor's grip. She kicked him away from her and turned to face his companion, and the female guard flinched away from the cold, hungry fire in her eye.
   "You're right," Honor told her softly. "I do have friends 'topside,' and you can make me play your sick little games by threatening them. But not this one. Not even for them. And in case you've forgotten, Ransom wants me 'undamaged,' remember? So play your other games, Peep, but tell the rest of the garbage there are limits." Bergren started to heave to his knees, clutching his wrist, but Honor's right foot shot out, and its bare sole crashed into his mouth. He slammed into the corner, groaning and half-conscious, and the other guard shuddered, afraid, and hating Honor all the more for her fear.
   "You can come back with your friends and do whatever you want," she said in that same soft voice. "I know that. But you'd better bring all of them, Peep, and after it's over, there's no way, no way in this universe, you'll deliver me to Ransom alive."
   The live half of her lips smiled a thin, terrifying smile, and the guard stepped back involuntarily, clutching her truncheon, trying to understand how the balance of power in this cell could shift so totally in such a tiny instant when she held all the cards. But then she looked into the single brown eye of the gaunt, half-naked woman facing her, and a wolf looked back at her, a wounded pack leader, starved and weakened, who had been goaded and harried by the hounds on its back trail but would be harried no more. A wolf who would die where it stood rather than be driven further. A wolf, she realized shakenly, who was actually willing, perhaps even eager, to die if only it could lock its fangs on the throats of the mongrels howling at its heels.
   She looked into that hungry, dangerous eye, and she knew then. Knew exactly how the balance had shifted.
   She removed her hand very carefully from her truncheon, and, never taking her eyes from Honors face, bent down, hoisted a moaning, semiconscious Bergren to his feet, and dragged him from the cell without another word. And as she locked the door behind her, a deeply hidden part of her wondered uneasily if she was locking the wolf into its cage... or herself safely outside it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

   "So what's on the schedule today?"
   Horace Harkness, late of the Manticoran Navy, leaned back in the comfortable recliner, hands folded behind his head, and wiggled his bootless toes at his "escorts" as he asked the question. Citizen Corporal Heinrich Johnson and Citizen Private Hugh Candleman had been assigned as his permanent keepers when he decided to change sides. Their purpose had been plain enough, to discourage any thoughts of inappropriate activities on his part, and Harkness knew the two State Security goons had been chosen because they were big, strong, tough, and well trained in the art of dismantling their fellow man with their bare hands. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that those qualities pretty much exhausted the list of their employable skills, but no one could have everything.
   "Not much, I think," Johnson replied. The corporal wasn't as broad as Harkness, but he was several centimeters taller, and he looked impressive in his black-and-red uniform as he fished in his tunic pocket for his memo pad. He found it and keyed the display, then squinted down at it. "Got another HD interview scheduled for thirteen-thirty," he announced after a moment. "Then Citizen Commander Jewel wants to talk to you about the Manties' com systems some more. That's scheduled for, uh, seventeen hundred. 'Side from that, you've got nothing but free time." He shoved the pad back into his pocket and chuckled. "Looks like they must really like you, Harkness."
   "What's not to like?" Harkness replied with a lazy grin, and both StateSec men laughed. A prize like Horace Harkness didn't drop into Public Information's lap every day, and the fact that he was a missile tech familiar with the FTL transmitters mounted in the Manties' recon drones made him even more valuable as a source of technical data R&D would make good use of. But the larger implications of propaganda broadcasts and technological information were beyond Johnson and Candleman’s mental horizons. They had their own reasons to be happy Harkness had decided to defect, and those reasons had nothing at all to do with his value to the PRH in general.
   "So, you have any luck with Parley's Crossing yet?" Candleman asked now, and Harkness' grin turned from lazy to evil.
   "Oh ye of little faith," he murmured. "I told you I could, ah, enhance the odds, didn't I? Here."
   He drew a data chip from his shirt pocket and sailed it across the compartment to Candleman, who caught it eagerly. The private peered down at the featureless chip as if he thought he should be able to read its data with his unassisted eye, and for all Harkness knew, Candleman did think so.
   "How's it work?" Johnson asked from where he lounged against the opposite bulkhead, and Harkness shrugged.
   "Its a more complicated than the others 'cause there's so many more variables," he said, "and the multiplayer versions complicate things even further. So instead of setting it up so you guys can predict the outcome, I set it up so you can force the outcome while you're playing."
   "Huh?" Candleman put in, and Harkness hid a desire to sigh in exasperation behind another friendly smile.
   Technically, both his watchdogs were high school graduates, and Johnson actually had two years of college on his resume. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon one's perspective, they'd both been Dolists, and their schooling had been provided courtesy of the PRH's educational system. It had been theoretically possible to acquire a worthwhile education from that source, but doing so had required an individual to use the resources available to educate himself, because after so many decades of debasing the concept of achievement in the name of "democratization" and "student validation," no one in the teaching establishment had had a clue as to how to truly educate someone else.
   The problem was that genuinely self-motivated people are rare. Without someone else to explain it to them, most young people don't understand why learning is important in the first place. There are always exceptions to that broad generalization, but the majority of human beings learn from experience, not precept, and until someone experiences the consequences of being uneducated, he seldom feels a driving need to correct the situation. Creating a desire to learn in someone who hasn't already been caught in the gears requires an entire support structure, a society in which ones elders make it clear that one is expected to acquire knowledge and training in its use. And that sort of society was precisely what the prewar Dolists had lacked, for the Basic Living Stipend had been handed over like clockwork however unproductive they might have been. Besides, what had there been for a Dolist to use an education on?
   Perhaps even worse, the prewar Legislaturalists had gone to some lengths to make the answer to that last question "nothing," for knowledge was a dangerous thing. They hadn't wanted the Dolists educated or involved in making the system work. They might have been an almost intolerable, parasitic drag on a moribund economy, but as long as the BLS had sufficed to support their accustomed lifestyles, they'd felt no particular urge to demand the right to participate in the making of political decisions. That, after all, had been the original bargain between their ancestors and those of the Legislaturalists. In return for being "taken care of," the citizens of the PRH had surrendered all decision-making to the people who ran the machine, and until the machine collapsed, no one had felt any need to fix the host of things wrong with it.
   On the grand scale, the mutual suicide pact between the Legislaturalists and their education establishment was academic as far as Harkness was concerned, but on a personal level, its consequences had become very important indeed, for Johnson and Candleman were typical products of the system from which they came. That meant they suffered from an appalling ignorance few Manticorans would have believed was possible. People who could barely handle basic math or, like Candleman, suffered from what anything but the Peep Office of Education would have called functional illiteracy, were of strictly limited utility to a modern war machine, because maintaining or servicing any equipment more complex than a pulse rifle required at least some familiarity with the basic principles of electronics, cybernetics, gravity theory, and any of scores of other disciplines. Anyone could be trained to operate modern hardware, simply surviving in a technological society required at least a surface competence, but for people like Johnson and Candleman, that competence was like the math ability conferred by learning to make change in a shopping mall. They had no more comprehension of what went on behind the input keys and the displays than someone from preindustrial Terra would have had.
   That was the main reason the majority of maintenance duties in the People’s Navy were assigned either to officers or to senior noncoms. If the prewar PN had wanted competent technicians, it had been forced to train them itself, and it simply hadn't had most of its conscripts long enough to overcome the disabilities with which they arrived. Its only real choice had been to train them first as operators and only secondly as true technicians, and that took time. Years of it, in most cases, which meant it was only really practical to train the people who formed its long-term, professional core.
   The Peoples Marines had faced the same problems, though on a somewhat lesser scale. Battle armor and support weapons weren't something one wanted in the hands of technical ignoramuses, and the days when the dregs of an uneducated society could be turned into first-line soldiers without massive remedial training had gone out with the bolt-action rifle, but the Marines had always been a long-service outfit, with a lower percentage of conscripts. Coupled with their (relatively) simpler equipment, they'd been able to impose a more uniform level of training which came far closer to matching the tactical competence of their Manticoran counterparts, although maintenance remained a chronic problem even for them.
   But the heavy losses the Peoples Navy and Marines had suffered in the opening stages of the war, not to mention the officer purges which had followed the Harris Assassinations and the casualties suffered in things like the Leveller Uprising, had cut dangerously deep into the military's trained manpower. The Committee of Public Safety had acted to recall veterans who had completed their terms of service, which had almost covered the initial shortfalls, but the only real solution had to be the education and training of the required replacements to a modern standard... preferably before they got to boot camp. There were enough realists in the PRH to recognize that, and whatever her other shortcomings, Cordelia Ransom had managed to sell it to the Mob, as well. In a sort of insanely twisted logic, the need to fight a war started to preserve a parasitic life style had led to a situation in which the parasites in question were actually willing, even eager, to abandon their parasite status, repair their schools, and learn how to provide the support their military required. It was a pity the thought of making the same repairs hadn't occurred to anyone when it might actually have averted the war in the first place.
   In the meantime, however, people with real educations remained in critically short supply, and they were needed not just for the military, but also to operate the Republic’s civilian and industrial infrastructure. Balancing personnel allocations between the combat arms and the people who made the weapons with which the combat arms fought remained an enormous problem for the PRH. The situation was improving, and far more quickly than the more complacent Allied leaders would have believed possible, but for the foreseeable future, manpower supplies would remain tight.
   But there was at least one area in which people with minimal educations could be readily employed by the State, and that brought Harkness back to Johnson and Candleman. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the mind either of them had been issued; it was simply that no one had ever bothered to acquaint those minds with their own potentials. They were ignorant, not stupid, and State Security didn't need hyper physicists. For that matter, even with ships like Tepes in its inventory, StateSec didn't need an enormous number of missile and gravitics techs, and those could be poached from the Navy with a suitable use of the security forces' absolute priority.
   What StateSec did need, however, were shock troops and enforcers who could be relied upon to take orders and break the heads of any enemies of the People at whom they might be aimed. Seventy-five or eighty percent of its personnel fell into that category, and it didn't take a lot of education to squeeze a pulser trigger or club a dissenter. By the standards of their peers, Johnson and Candleman were of above average ability... and neither of them would have been allowed to serve aboard any ship to which Harkness had ever been assigned anyway. There was a point, after all, where ignorance became stupidity, for one could hardly expect people, however inherently bright, to allow for or protect themselves against dangers no one had ever bothered to tell them existed.
   And just at the moment, Harkness' watchdogs were demonstrating that very fact.
   "Look," he said after a moment, still smiling at Candleman, "Parley's Crossing isn't like the other games I've, um, modified for you guys. This one's actually a simplified version of a real Navy training simulator, and that means its parameters are a lot more complex than the other packages, right?"
   He paused, eyebrows raised, and Candleman glanced at Johnson. The corporal nodded, which seemed to reassure him, and he turned attentively back to Harkness.
   The Manticoran felt a brief twinge of guilt as the StateSec thug looked at him with trusting eyes terrifyingly devoid of any understanding of what he was talking about. Harkness had spent enough time in the service to feel confident that anyone StateSec might have assigned to him would have been receptive to the concept of rigging the ship's electronic games library. The combination of boredom, greed, and a very human (if ignoble) desire to put one over on one’s fellows had produced the same ambition in virtually every Manticoran ship in which Harkness had ever served, and those factors operated even more strongly aboard Tepes. Still, he knew he'd been lucky to draw these two, for Johnson was an operator and black marketeer from way back. He was actually quite competent within the limits of what he knew, but he was also as greedy as they came, and neither he nor Candleman had the background to realize the consequences of giving Harkness access to the games library.
   Not that Harkness had leapt right out to make the offer. The possibility of doing anything which might jeopardize his arrangement with Committeewoman Ransom was unthinkable, and so he'd done exactly what was asked of him. He'd recorded dozens of propaganda broadcasts in which he cheerfully perjured his immortal soul with accounts of all the "war crimes" he'd either observed or helped commit. Other recordings, when they were broadcast, would appeal earnestly to his ex-countrymen to follow his example and defect to their true class allies rather than continuing to serve their plutocratic exploiters. And while he'd been careful to warn Citizen Commander Jewel that he was only a technician with a severely limited understanding of the theory behind the grav pulse generators he'd learned to service, he'd also spent hours discussing the system with her and giving her pointers towards how it worked. By now, he calculated, he'd committed at least thirty different forms of treason, certainly enough to make it impossible (or, at least, fatally inadvisable) for him ever to return home.
   As he'd proved his bona fides to their superiors and received a steadily greater freedom of movement, Johnson and Candleman had come to regard their guard duty as more and more of a formality. The awe inspiring heights his own black market and smuggling activities had attained during his pre-Basilisk career hadn't hurt, either. Once Johnson’s guard came down and the two of them began swapping tales of past exploits, the corporal had quickly realized he was in the presence of either a true maestro whose attainments dwarfed anything he himself had ever even dared to contemplate, or the greatest liar in the known universe.
   As the tales accumulated, he'd been forced to accept that Harkness truly was a man of enormous talent... and a kindred soul. He'd sought advice, cautiously, at first, on certain of his own operations, and Harkness' suggestions had increased his profit margin by over twenty percent within the first week. From there, it had been a natural enough step to introduce him to the gambling empire the corporal helped run on the side. The real head of illicit operations aboard Tepes was Staff Sergeant Boyce, but Johnson was one of his senior assistants, and the fact that gambling aboard ship was totally against regulations made Boyce's empire even more lucrative, since no one was likely to go to an officer and complain over any losses he might suffer. But the sergeant was always on the lookout for ways to maximize his profits, and he'd been delighted when Johnson was able to up his take by something like forty percent. He'd also decided not to ask the corporal how he'd managed it, on the theory, apparently, that what he didn't know he couldn't be guilty of, and turned the entire gaming operation over to Johnson.
   Which, in many ways, meant he'd actually turned it over to Horace Harkness, for the games in Tepes' libraries were far easier to manipulate than any which would have been found aboard a Manticoran ship.
   Harkness had been astounded when he realized just how obsolescent they were. Several were actually variants of games he'd first encountered fifty T-years before, at the very beginning of his naval career. He'd always assumed, correctly, as it turned out, that the Peeps' military hardware (and the software that ran it) had to be at least comparable to the RMN's. It was clearly inferior, but if it hadn't been at least within shouting range, the war would have been over years ago. That assumption was the reason it hadn't occurred to him that something which formed the basis for shipboard gambling could be so extremely simple-minded... or have such primitive security features. It was a given that any game which could be rigged would be rigged, sooner or later, and those aboard Manticoran ships were regularly inspected by electronics teams from Engineering to be sure they hadn't been. Perhaps more to the point, the people who designed those games (and their security features) knew some very clever, extremely well-trained people would bend all their formidable talents on breaking those security features.
   But there weren't all that many well-trained people in the People's Navy... and there were even fewer in StateSec. Which meant the games library contained an entire raft of programs with security arrangements which were laughably simple for anyone who'd cut his eyeteeth on Manticoran software. Harkness had started out slowly, altering the odds slightly in the house's favor on half a dozen card and dice games. He hadn't needed to do any more than that to prove his point, and Johnson's avarice had taken over nicely from there.
   From Harkness' viewpoint, there'd been a large element of risk in the project. Not in fixing the software, that part had been child's play, but because in order to fix it in the first place, he'd had to have access to the library in which it was stored, and if Johnson's superiors had discovered even an ex- Manticoran had any such thing, the consequences would have been dire. But Johnson had every reason to conceal what was going on... and no idea why his superiors would have been upset.
   As far as Johnson or Candleman were concerned, the games library was merely that: the games library. It was simply a place somewhere in the mass of computers they didn't really understand where the games were stored, and they knew they had no access to anything else in the system. But Horace Harkness was an artist. His ability to work the RMN personnel system to ensure that he always wound up assigned wherever Scotty Tremaine was assigned had baffled many an observer, but that was because none of them realized he'd actually managed to hack into BuPers' records. He might have reformed considerably since his first tour on Basilisk Station with Tremaine and Lady Harrington, and he'd certainly abandoned the various contraband operations he'd maintained on the side, but a man liked to keep his hand in... And the security fences which had been erected to block a crew of techno-illiterates from access they shouldn't have were laughable barriers for anyone who'd broken the security on the classified records of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Bureau of Personnel.
   Which meant that, for the last two weeks, Harkness had prowled the bowels of PNS Tepes' information and control systems almost at will. Aside from tinkering with the gaming software, he'd been careful to make no changes lest he leave footprints which could be tracked back to him, but he'd amassed an enormous amount of knowledge about the ship, its course, its destination, its crew, and its operating procedures. The fact that Johnson and Candleman regarded his hacking activities as nothing short of black magic had helped enormously, for they'd granted him the sort of working privacy which had been the prerogative of wizards throughout history. That meant he hadn't had to figure out a way to carry out his explorations while they looked over his shoulder every second. In fact, they normally left him undisturbed on one side of the compartment, working away on the minicomp they'd been thoughtful enough to provide, while they played old-fashioned poker on the other side. Just to be safe, he'd created his own version of what was still called a "boss program" to instantly shift the display to something innocuous if one of them had decided to get curious, but he'd scarcely ever needed it.
   In fact, his biggest problem now was that he'd completed his preparations. Only a fraction of the hours he'd spent on the minicomp had actually been devoted to modifying game software, but Johnson and Candleman assumed his time had all been directed towards the ends they knew about, and if he suddenly cut back on those hours but continued to keep up with their requests for software modification, even they might begin to wonder why it was suddenly taking so much less time. That was why he'd suggested altering Parley's Crossing, which was an extremely simplistic recreation of the last major fleet engagement ever fought by the navy of the Solarian League. Simplistic or no, a game designed to let up to ten players on a side control over six hundred ships was more complicated than the other games by several orders of magnitude, and he'd been confident that the time required to put in the fix would eat up his free time quite nicely.
   But now that it was finished, he still had to explain it to his partners in crime, and he drew a deep breath.
   "You see," he began, "there are an enormous number of variables in this program, and the fact that, in a really big game, every ship in it is being individually controlled by someone, by another human player, not simply the computer, only makes that worse. That means I've gotta be careful how I come at it, 'cause any brute force approach is likely to be pretty damned noticeable, okay?"
   Candleman said nothing, but Johnson nodded.
   "I can see that," the corporal agreed. "You figure that if, say, the order of arrival in the Tango Variant suddenly started favoring the Sollies every time it was played, or if one players ships started disobeying his orders, somebody'd get wise."
   "Exactly!" Harkness congratulated him. "So what I did, I set it up so that when you plug one of the user IDs I've flagged into the player queue, you get a little edge. You'll have to be careful using it, but basically, if you double-tap the firing key in an iffy situation, the computer will add a fifty-percent bonus to your probability of scoring a hit."
   "Oh boy! That part I understand!" Candleman put in happily.
   "Figured you would," Harkness told him with a grin. "Like I say, you've gotta be careful not to overuse it, but it should give you a good advantage in a close situation. I've also worked in an adjustment to the damage allocation subroutine. If one of 'our' ships takes a hit, the damage allocator will reduce the damage applied to it. That part still needs a little work to fine tune it, and I've got a few more ideas, but basically, what you guys are gonna have to do is play this one out on a game-for-game basis. 'Course, with this kind of edge, you oughta be able to sharp some poor sucker pretty damned well."
   "I'd think so, yeah," Johnson agreed with a smile. "Thanks." He took the chip from Candleman and bounced it in his palm for a moment. "You're all right, Harkness," he said after a second. "And you're worth every centicredit of your cut, too."
   "Glad you think so," Harkness said with an answering smile. "I like to think I earn my way wherever I am, Corp, and I always look after my friends."

Chapter Twenty-Seven

   "Message from Tepes, Citizen Admiral."
   Lester Tourville raised a hand at Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser’s announcement, interrupting his conversation with Citizen Captain Bogdanovich and Everard Honeker, and turned towards the com officer.
   "What does it say, Harrison?" His voice carried no emotion whatsoever, yet its very neutrality seemed to shout his tension, for Count Tilly was six hundred and ninety hours out of Barnett, with the white, G3 furnace of Cerberus-B twenty-four light-minutes ahead of her.
   "Tepes will continue to a parking orbit around Hades, but we're to place ourselves in orbit around Cerberus-B-3, Citizen Admiral," Fraiser replied respectfully, then paused and cleared his throat. "There's a personal attachment from Citizen Committeewoman Ransom," he added. "She says that you, Citizen Commissioner Honeker, Citizen Captain Bogdanovich, and Citizen Commander Foraker should report to her on Hades by pinnace at oh-nine-hundred local tomorrow."
   "Well isn't that just ducky," Bogdanovich grunted with an obvious disgust every member of Tourville's staff understood only too well. Their original orders had been to accompany Tepes clear to Hades, and the abrupt change at this late date struck all of them as being almost as incompetent as it was insulting. "They don't want a Navy ship any closer to their precious prison than they have to let her," Bogdanovich went on. "Probably think we'd open fire on it or some goddamned thing!"
   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.