Echoes Of Honor

punishment camp.'

'Well, they certainly put it in the right place for that, My Lady!' Clinkscales muttered, and she heard the sharp smack of his hand as he swatted another of the insects Sarah DuChene had christened 'shuttlesquitos.' It was fortunate that they didn’t swarm like the Old Terran mosquitos they outwardly resembled, because a 'swarm' of blood-drinking predators with wingspans wider than Honor’s palm would have been deadly. On the other hand, it would have been even more fortunate if they’d realized that however good human beings might taste, they couldn’t live off them. In fact, human blood seemed to kill them quickly... which didn’t keep their surviving brainless relatives from darting in for their own quick solo drinks.

'I could really learn to hate this place,' the ensign added wryly, and she chuckled. Whatever else happened to Clinkscales, he was no longer the shy, clumsy, perpetual accident looking to happen he’d been when he first joined the Eighteenth Cruiser Squadron’s staff as her flag lieutenant, and she rather liked the tough young man he’d turned into.

'I suspect that was the Peeps’ idea,' she told him, and it was his turn for a chuckle to rumble around in his broad chest. 'On the other hand, I have no intention of complaining about their logic. Not when they’ve been kind enough to concentrate the very people I want to meet in one nice, neat spot like this.'

Three other heads nodded, and Nimitz bleeked his own agreement. It was clear from the memo Scotty Tremaine had pulled out of the Tepes data that StateSec used Camp Inferno as a dumping site for troublemakers from all the other camps. Apparently, prisoners who sufficiently disturbed the status quo to tick their captors off without quite inspiring StateSec to simply shoot them and be done with it were shipped off to Inferno. An average sentence here for a first-time visitor was one local year—a bit shorter than a T-year— with longer terms for repeat offenders, and at least some of the inmates had been sent here permanently. Which, she suspected, was the real reason Inferno existed at all. It was a punishment short of shooting which everyone knew about, and cycling bad boys and girls through it on a semiregular basis would keep its existence—and threat —in the fronts of people’s brains. And leaving some of them here permanently was a pointed hint that even on Hell, StateSec could always make someone’s life still more miserable... and leave it that way.

But the people who ran Hell didn’t know there were rats in their woodwork, Honor thought, her remaining eye glinting dangerously in the darkness. They had no idea that a handful of castaways might want to find some local allies for the general purpose of raising all the hell they could. Or that the castaways in question had hijacked a pair of StateSec’s own assault shuttles... with full arms racks. If there really were six hundred people down there, then Honor had just about enough pulsers and pulse rifles—and grenade launchers, plasma rifles, and tribarrels—to give every one of them at least one weapon each, and wouldn’t that be a nasty surprise for the Peeps.

Long, sharp fangs those rats have, Mr. Peep, she thought viciously. If, that is, the people down in that camp really are the troublemakers you seem to think they are. And there’s only one way to find that out, now isn’t there?

'All right,' she said softly. 'Let’s pull back under the trees and get some sort of overhead cover rigged. I want plenty of shade for all of us by the time the sun really hits. But keep it unobtrusive.'

'Yes, My Lady.' LaFollet nodded to her, then jerked his head at Mayhew and Clinkscales, and the other two officers faded back from the lip of the hill. He himself lay motionless beside Honor, watching her peer through her electronic binoculars one more time, then quirked an eyebrow at her.

'Any thoughts on exactly how we go about making contact, My Lady?' he asked, and she shrugged.

'We’ll have to play it by ear, but we’ve got enough food for three or four days, and there’s plenty of water.' She nodded her head at the stream from the water tank and pump where it snaked under the fence and meandered in their direction. 'I’m not in any rush. We’ll watch them for a while, see how they spend their time. Ideally, I’d like to catch one or two of them outside the camp on their own and get a feel for how things are organized in there before we jump right in with both feet.'

'Makes sense to me, My Lady,' he said after a moment. 'Jasper and Carson and I will take turns playing lookout once we get the camp set up.'

'I can—' Honor began, but he shook his head firmly.

'No,' he said in a soft, flat voice. 'You were probably right about coming along, My Lady, but we can do this just as well without you, and I want you rested when the time comes to actually talk to these people. And I don’t want you dragging Nimitz out of the shade, either.'

'You fight dirty,' she told him after a moment, and his teeth flashed in a smile.

'That’s because you don’t leave me much choice, My Lady,' he told her, and jerked a thumb in the direction of the trees. 'Now march!' he commanded.

Chapter Twelve

'I think those two look like our best bet, Andrew,' Honor said quietly. It was the morning of their second day of watching Camp Inferno, and she lay in the fork of a tree four meters above the ground while she peered through her binoculars. LaFollet hadn’t liked the notion of letting his one-armed Steadholder climb a tree, and he didn’t like the notion of her turning loose of the tree trunk to use her one working hand to hold the binoculars to her working eye, but she hadn’t given him much say in the matter. At least she’d let him help her with the climb, and now he hovered over her watchfully. And, he admitted, she wasn’t really all that likely to fall. The trees here were very different from the almost-palms where they had originally landed. Instead of smooth, almost branchless trunks, they had rough, hairy bark and thick, flattened branches that shoved out from the main trunk in every direction. Rather than rise to a point, their foliage made them look almost like huge inverted cones, for they grew progressively broader as they grew taller and the individual branches grew thinner but the network of them spread wider and wider. The branch on which his Steadholder lay was fairly near the bottom of that spreading process, and it was two or three times the thickness of her own body, more like a shelf than a 'branch.'

Not that it kept him from worrying.

He clamped his jaws on a fresh urge to protest and looked up at Nimitz. The ’cat was a couple of meters higher up the central trunk, clinging with his good limbs as he sank ivory claws into the rough bark, and LaFollet had taken a certain perverse pleasure in watching the Steadholder worry over him as he hauled himself awkwardly up the trunk. It was the first time he’d attempted any climbing since their arrival on Hell, and he’d done much better than LaFollet had expected from watching his lurching progress on the ground. He still looked undeniably clumsy compared to his usual, flowing gracefulness, and his obvious pain still made something deep down inside the armsman hurt, but there was no self-pity in Nimitz. He clearly considered himself a going concern once more, if on a somewhat limited level, and he flirted his bushy tail with an undeniable air of amusement as he bleeked down at LaFollet.

The armsman looked away, shading his eyes with one hand as he peered at the pair of humans the Steadholder was studying so intently. He couldn’t make out many details from here, but he could pick out enough to tell they were the same pair he’d watched yesterday. The man was short and bald as an egg, with skin so black it looked purple, and he favored brightly, almost garishly colored garments. The woman with him was at least fifteen centimeters taller than he was, dressed in somber shades of gray and with a single golden braid of hair that hung to her belt. A more unlikely looking pair would have been hard to imagine, and he’d wondered, that first day, just what they thought were doing as they moved slowly along the very edge of the camp’s cleared zone.

He still didn’t have an answer for that. It was almost as if they were peering into the forest beyond the open grasslands, searching for something, but there was little urgency in their movements. Indeed, they walked so slowly—and spent so long standing motionless between bursts of walking—that he was half inclined to believe their experiences here on Hell had driven them over the brink.

'You’re sure you want to talk to them, My Lady?' he asked finally, trying unsuccessfully to keep his own doubtfulness out of his voice.

'I think so, yes,' Honor said calmly.

'But... they look so... so—' LaFollet broke off, unable to find the exact word he wanted, and Honor chuckled.