Echoes Of Honor

computer support, there wouldn’t even have been any need for them to be here at all—they could have left the routine listening watch up to the computers. Well, to be honest they could probably have trusted a simple listening watch to them anyway, but they were talking about Peep computers, which brought the ancient and honorable term 'kludge' forcibly to mind every time he had anything to do with them. No wonder Senior Chief Harkness had been able to fry the net aboard that damned battlecruiser! Worse, the shuttles had extremely limited computer support compared to their Allied equivalents. What they needed for flight ops, fire support missions, troop drops, and that sort of thing was adequate—not great, but adequate. But most functions that weren’t absolutely essential were done the old-fashioned way... by hand, or at least by extremely specific, canned software so limited, and with such crude heuristic functions, it made a man want to sit down and cry. Which meant real live human beings had to sit here to watch over the computers, because their AI functions were so stupid they would have gotten lost in downtown Landing on a night with a full moon if—

'Base, this is Harriman,' a bored voice said suddenly, spilling from the com speakers. 'You want to give me the count on Alpha-Seven-Niner?'

Sanko’s eyes widened, and his hands darted for the console even as Mayhew snapped upright in his chair at the tactical station.

'Harriman, you dickhead!' an exasperated female voice replied in a tone that could have blistered battle steel. 'I swear, you are stupider than a retarded rock! How the hell did you lose the numbers again?'

Mayhew’s fingers flew over the keyboard of the shuttle’s main computers while Sanko worked equally frantically at the communications station. All the information on Hades that Horace Harkness had managed to pull out of Tepes’ data bases before her destruction had been dumped from his minicomp to the shuttle’s larger memory, and Sanko heard a sound of triumph from Mayhew as something correlated between the overheard conversation and Harkness’ stolen data. At the same time, Sanko himself was working with the comsat serving as the relay link for the exchange between 'Harriman' and Camp Charon. His equipment might not be up to the high standards of the Royal Manticoran Navy, but it was newer than the opposition’s, and his updated software had let him into the satellite’s on-board computers without anyone dirtside knowing a thing about it. The tight-beam tap he’d set up had been cut entirely out of Camp Charon’s net, which meant the base’s traffic computers didn’t even know it was there to log, and his eyes glowed as information from the comsat began downloading smoothly to his own station. All the security and encryption data buried in the transmissions’ automatic security linkages spilled over the display before him, and his lips drew up in the snarl of a hunting Sphinx hexapuma.

'How do I know what happened to them?' Harriman growled at his critic. 'If I knew where the damned grunt list had gone, then it wouldn’t be lost, now would it?'

'Oh, fer cryin’ out loud!' Base muttered. 'It’s in your computers, dipshit—not scribbled down on a scrap of paper somewhere!'

'Oh, yeah?' Harriman sounded even more belligerent. 'Well I happen to be looking at the directory right this minute, Shrevner, and it ain’t here! So suppose you get off your lazy ass and get it to me? I’m coming up on the drop for Alpha-Seven-Eight in about twelve minutes, and I got lots of other stops still to make.'

'Jeezus!' the other voice snarled. 'You stupid goddamned pilots are so— Oh.' It cut off abruptly, and then a throat cleared itself. 'Here it is,' Base said in a much crisper (and less contemptuous) voice. 'Uploading now.'

No one spoke for a few seconds, and then a sharp snort came down the link from Harriman.

'Interesting time stamp on that data, Base,' he said almost genially. 'Looks to me like those numbers were compiled—what? Seventy minutes after I left?'

'Oh, screw you, Harriman!' Base snapped.

'In your dreams, sweetheart,' Harriman said with cloying sweetness, and Base cut the channel with a click.

'Did you get it?' Mayhew demanded.

'I think so.' Sanko punched more commands, calling up a review of the data he’d been too busy downloading to evaluate and felt his face stretch into an exultant grin. 'Looking good over here, Jasper! How about your side?'

'Speculative, but interesting,' Mayhew replied. He tapped a few queries of his own into the system, then nodded. 'I think it’s time we got Lady Harrington and Commodore McKeon in here, and then—'

'Base, this is Carson. I’m at Gamma-One-Seven, and I’ve got a problem. According to my numbers —'

The fresh voice rattled from the speakers, and Sanko and Mayhew dived back into their consoles.

* * *

'So that’s it, My Lady,' Mayhew said. 'We’ve picked up six more complete or partial conversations during the last ninety odd minutes. Of course, we’re only working the comsats that are line-of-sight to our own location, so I suspect we’ve missed others.'

'Makes sense,' Alistair McKeon rumbled from where he sat beside Honor. He rubbed his jaw, the tip of his tongue probing at the gaps a Peep pulse rifle’s butt had left in his teeth. It was a nervous gesture he’d developed aboard Tepes, and it seemed to help him think. 'You send out that many shuttles, you’re going to get com chatter. Especially when half your flight crews don’t seem to know their asses from their elbows!'

'Now, now, Alistair. Be nice,' Honor murmured with a small smile, and Nimitz bleeked a laugh from her lap. He’d finished shedding last week, and the sauna bath of the local climate was no longer the crushing burden it had been, but he was delighted whenever he and his person entered the shuttle’s air-conditioning. Now he showed McKeon his needle-sharp fangs in a lazy smile, and Honor chuckled. She gave the ’cat’s head a gentle caress, then leaned forward and peered at the map Mayhew had spread out over the shelf-like fold-down desk. The Peep shuttle’s only decent holo imaging capability was in the cockpit, but its tactical section was capable of using the same data that drove that display to print out an old-fashioned plaspaper map that was good enough for her current purposes. Now she bent a little closer, trying to read Mayhew’s small, neat handwritten notations, and suppressed another stab of regret for the loss of her cybernetic eye’s enhanced vision modes.

She finished deciphering her intelligence officer’s notes without it and sat back to ponder them. She’d developed a new nervous habit of her own, and her right palm caressed the stump of her left arm in a futile effort to do something about the 'phantom pain' of the missing limb. It was more of a phantom itch, really, and she supposed she should be grateful for small favors, but her inability to scratch the darned thing was maddening.

'Well, they don’t know their anatomical portions apart!' McKeon insisted with a gap-toothed grin. 'Hell, from the sound of this crap,' he tapped an index finger on a hardcopy transcript of the intercepted com traffic, 'these people couldn’t even find their asses without a detailed flight plan, a dozen nav beacons, and approach radar!'

'Maybe so, but I’m not going to complain about it,' Honor replied, and Nimitz made a soft sound of agreement.

'There is that,' McKeon agreed in turn. 'There certainly is that.'

Honor nodded and stopped rubbing at the arm that was no longer there to run her index finger over the map while she considered what they’d learned. Actually, most of it’s more a matter of simply confirming what Harkness already stole for us, but that’s worth doing, too, she told herself.

Contrary to the works of the pre-space poet Dante, Hell had four continents (and one very large island that didn’t quite qualify as continent number five), not nine circles. For the most part, neither State Security nor the exploration crews who’d originally surveyed the planet seemed to have been interested in wasting any inventiveness on naming those landmasses, either, and the continents had ended up designated simply as 'Alpha,' 'Beta,' 'Gamma,' and 'Delta.' Someone had put a little thought into naming the island, though Honor personally found the idea of calling it 'Styx' a little heavy-handed, but that was about the limit of their imaginativeness. Nor did she find the repetitions on the motif which had gone into naming the planet’s three moons Tartarus, Sheol, and Niflheim particularly entertaining. Oh course, no one had been interested in consulting her at the time the names were assigned, either.