Echoes Of Honor

although his badly healed bones still hurt whenever he moved, he radiated a sense of cheerful confidence which did more for her own mood than she might have believed possible.

'Of course, they didn’t know they were doing us one,' she went on after a moment. 'And from their perspective, this actually makes sense. Nor is there any reason for them to change a longstanding policy like this one—after all, they don’t know we’re here, so they can’t possibly realize how much this could help us. That’s why I’m inclined to go with the data despite its age.'

'Um.' McKeon scratched his chin and squinted at nothing in particular, then nodded slowly. 'I can’t fault your logic, but I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d figured something out logically and been wrong.'

'True.' Honor gave Nimitz another caress, then flipped through the pages of Tremaine’s printout one more time. I wish I could ask Warner about this. Gerry and Solomon are good, and so is Scotty... although he can get just a little over enthusiastic. But they’re all junior to Alistair and me. None of them really want to argue with us. Alistair would tell me in a heartbeat if he thought I was wrong about something—God knows he’s done it in the past!—but he and I have known each other too long. We each know what the other is going to say before it gets said. That’s good when it’s time to execute orders, but it can keep us from seeing things in skull sessions. Warner doesn’t have that problem, and he’s smart as a whip. I found that out in Silesia, and I could really use his perspective here, too... if it wouldn’t be putting him so much on the spot. And, she admitted, if I could be certain his sense of duty wouldn’t rise up and bite us all on the backside.

She hated adding those qualifications. Caslet had put himself in his current predicament primarily because that very sense of duty had ranged him against StateSec at the side of Honor’s captured personnel, and her link to Nimitz let her sample his emotions. She knew he was her friend, that his actions before and during the breakout from Tepes had been motivated by stubborn integrity, mutual respect, and fundamental decency. Unfortunately, she also knew that a part of his personality was at war with the rest of him—not over what he had done, but over what he might still do. If he hadn’t broken his oath as an officer in the People’s Navy yet, he’d certainly come close, and she didn’t know how much more cooperation he could extend to her people, for the very traits that made her like and respect him so much gnawed at him with teeth made from the fragments of that oath.

But he wouldn’t really know anything more about this than we do, she reminded herself, so the least I can do is leave him alone where it’s concerned.

'Was Inferno covered in the last supply run?' she asked now.

'We don’t know, Ma’am,' Anson Lethridge replied. The ugly, almost brutish-looking Erewhon officer who had been Honor’s staff astrogator sat with Jasper Mayhew and Tremaine, all three of them facing aft from the shuttle’s tactical section hatch to where their superiors sat in the front row of passenger seats. 'The only deliveries we can absolutely confirm,' he went on in the cultivated tenor which always seemed oddly out of place coming from someone who looked like he did, 'were the ones where something came up that required com traffic with Camp Charon that we managed to tap—like the numbers of rations to be dropped off at Alpha-Seven-Niner.' He rubbed the neatly trimmed Van Dyke he had declined to shave off despite the climate and shrugged. 'If they didn’t discuss a particular drop, or we didn’t happen to hear it when they did, we can’t say for certain that a delivery was actually made. Assuming we’re right about the way they schedule the supply drops, then, yes, Inferno probably was covered, but there’s no way we can guarantee that.'

'I was afraid you’d say that.' She gave him one of her half-smiles, then sighed and rocked her chair back and forth in thought. 'I think we have to move on this,' she said finally, and looked at McKeon. He gazed back for two or three seconds, then nodded.

'All right. Gerry,' she turned to Metcalf, 'you and Sarah get with Chief Barstow.' She turned her head to glance a Tremaine, as well. 'Scotty, I’d like you and Chief Harkness to lend a hand, as well. I want both shuttles preflighted by nightfall.'

'Both shuttles?' McKeon asked, and she grinned wryly.

'Both. There’s not much point leaving one of them behind, and having both of them along may give us some extra flexibility if we need it.'

'It also puts all of our eggs in one basket,' McKeon said. 'And two of them are harder to hide than one.' It wasn’t an argument, only an observation, and Honor nodded.

'I know, but I don’t want to split us up. Keeping everybody in one spot will concentrate our manpower, if we need it, and cut down on our com traffic even if we don’t. From the looks of the terrain in the area, we can probably hide both of them, if not quite as easily as we could hide a singleton, and keeping them—and us—together cuts the number of potential sighting opportunities in half. And let’s be realistic about this. If it all hits the fan so badly that a rescue mission or something like that would be necessary, keeping one shuttle in reserve isn’t likely to make that much difference. If Champ Charon figures out that we’re here at all before we’re ready to make our move, they should be able to handle anything we try without even breaking a sweat.'

McKeon nodded again, and she inhaled sharply.

'All right, people. Let’s be about it,' she said.

* * *

It should have been a fairly short hop. Camp Inferno was only about fourteen hundred kilometers from their original landing site, which would have been less than a twenty-minute flight at max for one of the shuttles. But they didn’t dare make the trip at max. They thought they’d located all of the recon satellites they had to worry about, and if they were right, they had a three-hour window when they ought to be clear of observation. But they couldn’t be certain about that. There could always be one they’d missed, and even if there hadn’t been, simple skin heat on a maximum-speed run might well be picked up by the weather satellites parked in geosynchronous orbit. So instead of high and fast, they would go low and slow, at less than mach one. Not only that, they would make the entire flight without counter-grav, which would both hide them from gravitic detectors and reduce power requirements enough that there would be no need to fire up their shuttles’ fusion plants.

There were, however, some drawbacks to that approach, and Scotty Tremaine and Geraldine Metcalf, tapped as pilots for the trip, spent a great deal of the flight muttering silent curses. Flying by old-fashioned, unaided eye at treetop level above the kind of jungle Hell produced, with all active sensors turned off to avoid betraying emissions, was no picnic. Tremaine almost took the top off a forest leviathan which suddenly reared up right in his flight path, and simple navigation was a pain in the posterior. They’d been able to fix their starting position with suitable accuracy, and the weather map which had first revealed Inferno’s existence to them fixed the camp’s latitude and longitude. Tremaine and Metcalf had worked out their courses before takeoff using that position data, but there were no handy navigation beacons upon which to take fixes en route, and the idea of using celestial navigation was ludicrous. They could have used the Peeps’ satellites as navigation aids—which, after all, was what the StateSec pilots did—but the satellites weren’t beacons. They transmitted only when queried from the ground, not continuously, and while hitting them with a tight beam from a moving shuttle was certainly possible, Honor and McKeon had decided that it also increased the chance of giving away their presence by an unacceptable percentage. Which meant the pilots were pretty much reduced to instruments no more sophisticated than a compass and their own eyesight, and over the length of a fourteen-hundred-kilometer flight, even small navigational errors could take them far off course.

That might not have been so bad if visibility had been better, but visibility wasn’t better. In fact, it stank. True, Hell’s trio of moons were all large and bright, but that actually made things worse, not better, for two of them—Tartarus and Niflheim—were above the horizon simultaneously, and the confusion of shadow and brightness those competing light sources cast across the tangled, uneven jungle canopy did bewildering things to human vision. Nor was Camp Inferno likely to offer much in the way of a landmark when they finally reached it. Presumably the jungle had been cut back immediately around it, if only to give the Peep shuttle pilots clearance on their grocery runs, but even a large clearing could disappear without any effort at all against such a confusing sea of treetops and shadow. And without electrical power, the kind of artificial light spill which might have been visible at long range was highly unlikely.

All of which meant the shuttles were going to spend more time than anyone liked to think about cruising around looking for their destination. Which not only increased the possibility that some weather sat or some unnoticed recon sat was going to spot them, but also the possibility that someone on the ground was going to hear