Echoes Of Honor

'Just about anything you can think of, Sir,' Mayhew replied. 'Escape attempts, for a lot of them... or else they were guilty of being the kinds of officers and noncoms who’d insist on maintaining discipline and unit cohesion even in a prison camp. The troublemakers.'

'And they’ve been skimming them off and dumping them here, have they?' Honor murmured, and there was a wicked gleam in her good eye. 'You could almost say they’ve been distilling them out of the rest of their prison population, couldn’t you?'

'Yes, My Lady, you could,' Mayhew agreed. 'According to the best numbers Scotty and I could come up with, we figure there are between a hundred eighty and two hundred thousand military prisoners down here. It could run as high as two hundred and fifty, but that’s a maximum figure. The other three or four hundred thousand are civilians. About a third of those were shipped out after various civilian resistance groups from conquered planets were broken up, but most are the more usual run of political prisoners.'

'Um.' Honor frowned at that and rubbed the tip of her nose. After a moment, she moved her hand from her nose to Nimitz, stroking the ’cat’s spine.

'A high percentage of them are from Haven itself, with the biggest single block of them from Nouveau Paris,' Mayhew told her. 'Apparently, both InSec and StateSec concentrated their housecleaning on the capital.'

'Makes sense,' McKeon said again. 'Authority in the PRH has always been centralized, and every bit of it passes through the command and control nodes on Haven. Whoever controls the capital controls the rest of the Republic, so it’s not unreasonable for them to want to make damned sure potential troublemakers on Haven were under control. It’d probably work, too. ‘Hey, Prole! You get uppity around here, and—Pffft! Off to Hell with you!’ Except that since the Harris Assassination, they’ve been sending off ‘elitists’ instead of ‘proles,’ of course.'

'No doubt,' Honor said. 'But having them here in such numbers could certainly throw a spanner into the works for us.' McKeon looked a question at her, and she made a brushing-away gesture. 'I wouldn’t want to generalize, but I can’t help thinking political prisoners would probably be more likely, on average, to collaborate with StateSec.'

'Why?' McKeon’s surprise was evident. 'They’re here because they oppose what’s happening in Nouveau Paris, aren’t they?'

'They’re here because the people who were running the PRH when they were arrested thought they were a threat to whatever was happening in Nouveau Paris at the time,' Honor replied. 'It doesn’t follow that they really were, and as you yourself just pointed out, things have changed on the domestic front over the last eight or nine years. Some of those prisoners were probably as loyal to the PRH as you and I are to the Crown, whether the security forces thought they were or not. And even if they weren’t, people the Legislaturalists sent here might actually agree with what Pierre and his crowd have done since the coup. They could be looking for ways to demonstrate their loyalty to the new regime and possibly earn their release by informing on their fellows. Worse, they could be genuine patriots who hate what’s happening in the PRH right now but would be perfectly willing to turn in the Republic’s wartime enemies. For that matter, StateSec could probably plant spies and informers wherever it wanted by using the hostage approach and threatening the loved ones of anyone who refused to play its game.'

'I hadn’t thought of it that way,' McKeon acknowledged slowly.

'I’m not saying that there aren’t political prisoners who truly do oppose Pierre and Saint-Just and their thugs and who’d stand up beside us to prove it,' Honor said. 'Nor am I saying that there aren’t collaborators among the POWs. There are usually at least some potential weasels in any group, and even the spirits of men and women who would stand up to outright torture can be crushed by enough prolonged hopelessness.'

For just an instant, the right side of her face was almost as expressionless as the nerve-dead left side, and McKeon shivered. She was speaking from experience, he thought. About something she’d faced and stared down during her own long weeks in solitary confinement. She gazed at something no one else could see for several seconds, then shook herself.

'Still,' she said, 'at some point we’re going to have to take a chance on someone besides our own people, and I’d think military POWs who were captured fighting against the Peeps in defense of their own worlds or parked here to prevent them from becoming threats after their worlds were conquered are more likely to resist the temptation to collaborate. Not that I intend to leap to any sweeping generalizations. It’s going to have to be a case-by-case consideration.'

She stroked Nimitz again and the grim look in her eye turned into something almost like a twinkle. McKeon regarded her curiously, but she only shook her head, and he shrugged. He wasn’t positive how she did it, but she’d demonstrated an uncanny ability to read people too often in the past for him to doubt her ability to do it again.

'You’re probably right,' he said, 'but Jasper was saying something about how often they make their supply runs?'

'Yes, he was,' she agreed, and looked at Mayhew. 'Jasper?'

'Yes, My Lady.' Mayhew gestured at the map on the fold-down table. 'The red dots indicate known camp locations,' he explained. 'They’re not complete, of course. Even if Tepes ever had a complete list of camps, her latest data on them was almost two years out of date before Chief Harkness stole it. But we’re trying to update, and as you can see, the ones we know about are clustered on Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Delta’s too far into the antarctic to be a practical site, but even with half a million prisoners, they’ve got plenty of places to put them without sticking them down there. And as you can see, the camps get even thinner on the ground as you move into the equatorial zone here on Alpha.'

Honor nodded. Given the climate outside the shuttle, she could certainly understand that. Putting prisoners from most inhabited planets into those conditions would have been cruel and unusual punishment by any standard. While that probably wouldn’t have bothered StateSec particularly, the jungle also had a tendency to eat any permanent settlement or base, and that would have been a problem for them. Or something that required them to get up off their lazy duffs, anyway. They could force the prisoners to do any maintenance that was needed, but it would still have required them to provide tools and materials and the transport to deliver both. Unless, of course, they simply chose to let the camps disappear... and the prisoners with them, she thought grimly.

But the near total absence of camps right in the equatorial zone helped explain why she and her fellow escapees were smack in the middle of it, where no Peeps would have any reason to venture.

'As nearly as we can tell,' Mayhew went on, 'the camp populations average about twenty-five hundred personnel, which means they’ve got approximately two hundred sites in all. Obviously, there are none at all up here on Styx Island—Camp Charon itself is purely a staging point and central supply depot for the other sites—but the mainland camps are all a minimum of five hundred kilometers from one another. That spreads them out too much for the inmates of any camp to coordinate any sort of action with any other camp, given that the only way they could communicate would be to make physical contact.'

'I’d be a little cautious about making that assumption, if I were the Peeps, Jasper,' McKeon put in. 'Five hundred klicks sounds like a lot, especially when there aren’t any roads and the prisoners don’t have any air transport, but I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity. For example,' he leaned forward and tapped the huge lake scooped out of Alpha Continent’s northern quarter, then ran his finger down the rash of red dots along its shore, 'if they put camps on a body of water like this, then I’d expect the prisoners to be able to build—and hide—enough small craft to at least open communications with the other camps.'

'I wouldn’t disagree with you, Sir,' Mayhew said with a nod. 'And perhaps I should have said that the Peeps seem confident that it would be impossible for them to coordinate any effective action, not that all of the camps can be kept totally isolated from one another.'

'They could have achieved total isolation on an intercamp basis if they’d been willing to accept larger populations per camp, though,' Sanko offered thoughtfully. 'That would’ve brought the total number of camps down, and then they could have put a lot more space between them.

'They could have,' Honor agreed. 'But only at the expense of making each individual camp a thornier security problem. Twenty-five hundred people are a lot less of a threat than, say, thirty thousand, even if every single person in the smaller camp is in on whatever it is they might try to do. Besides, the larger the total inmate population at any given site, the easier it would be for any small, tightly organized group to disappear into the background clutter.'