Echoes Of Honor

'‘Hit one of them’?' Honor repeated.

'Hit one of the supply shuttles,' the other woman said harshly, and the horror in her face—and emotions—had turned accusing.

'No, we haven’t hit one of the supply shuttles,' Honor replied.

'Oh, sure,' the blonde said. 'You found the guns growing wild in the woods!'

'No, we took these from the Peeps,' Honor told her calmly. 'But we took them before we ever hit atmosphere.' Both newcomers were staring at her now, as if at a lunatic, and the living side of her mouth smiled grimly. 'Did either of you happen to see a rather large explosion up there about five T-months ago?' she asked, and jerked her thumb at the sky, invisible beyond the tree branches.

'Yeah,' the blonde said very slowly, drawing the word out, and her eyes were narrow again. 'Matter of fact, we saw quite a few of ’em. Why?'

'Because that was us arriving,' Honor said dryly. LaFollet shifted beside her, and she felt his unhappiness. He didn’t want her telling these strangers so much about them so quickly, but Honor only touched him on the shoulder. He stilled his fidgeting, and she gave him a brief smile. Unless she decided that she could trust these two—fully—then they would be returning to the hidden shuttles with her and her companions, at gunpoint if necessary. But for now, she had to convince them she was telling the truth, because if she didn’t, they would never trust her, which meant she would never be able to trust them.

'You?' the woman asked, brow furrowing in disbelief, and she nodded.

'Us. The Peeps captured us in the Adler System and turned us over to StateSec to ship out here. Their plans included hanging me on arrival, but some of my people had... other ideas.'

'Ideas?' the blonde parroted, and Honor nodded again.

'Let’s just say that one of my chiefs has a way with computers. He got access to the ship’s net and took the entire system down, and in the confusion, the rest of my people broke me out of solitary confinement, seized control of a boat bay, stole us some transport, and blew the ship up as they left.' She felt a fresh, wrenching stab of loss and grief for the people who had died making that possible, but she let none of it show in her face. Not now. Not until she had convinced these people that she was telling them the truth.

'And just how the hell did they do that?' the other woman asked in obvious skepticism, and Honor smiled crookedly at her.

'They demonstrated what happens when you bring up a pinnace’s impeller wedge inside a boat bay,' she said very softly. The other woman showed no reaction at all for two or three seconds, and then she flinched as if someone had just punched her in the belly.

'My God! ' she whispered. 'But that—'

'Killed everyone on board,' Honor finished for her grimly. 'That’s right. We took out the entire ship... and no one dirtside knows we got out—and down—alive. With, as I said, somewhat better equipment than you seem to have.'

'How do you know?' the man demanded, speaking for the first time. His speech was similar to his companion’s, but even more slurred and hard to follow, and he made an impatient gesture when Honor cocked her head at him. 'How do you know they don’t know?' he amplified in his almost incomprehensible accent, speaking very slowly and with an obvious effort at clarity.

'Let’s just say we’ve been checking their mail,' Honor replied.

'But that means—' The woman was staring at her, and then she wheeled back to her companion. 'Henri, they’ve got a pinnace!' she hissed. 'Sweet Jesus, they’ve got a pinnace!'

'But—' Henri began, and then stopped dead. The two of them stared at one another, expressions utterly stunned, and then turned back as one to Honor, and this time suspicion and fear had been replaced by raw, blazing excitement.

'You do, don’t you?' the woman demanded. 'You’ve got a pinnace, and— My God, you must have the com equipment to go with it!'

'Something like that,' Honor replied, watching her carefully and privately astonished by how quickly the other woman had put things together. Of course, it must be obvious that if they’d gotten down without the Peeps knowing about it they had to at least have a lifeboat, but this woman had gotten past her disbelief and shock to put all the clues together far more rapidly than Honor would have believed was possible. Was that because her odd accent made her sound like some sort of untutored bumpkin from a hick planet whose schools couldn’t even teach their people to speak proper Standard English?

'But why are you—?' the blonde began, speaking almost absently, as if to herself. Then she stopped again. 'Of course,' she said very softly. 'Of course. You’re looking for manpower, aren’t you, Commodore? And you figured Camp Inferno was the best place to recruit it?'

'Something like that,' Honor repeated, astonished afresh and trying not to show it. She didn’t know how long this woman had been a prisoner, but captivity obviously hadn’t done a thing to slow down her mental processes.

'Well I will be dipped in shit,' the other woman said almost prayerfully, and then stepped forward so quickly not even LaFollet had time to react. Honor felt her armsman flinch beside her, but the blonde only held out her right hand, and Honor tasted the wild, almost manic delight flaring through her.

'Pleased to meet you, Commodore Harrington. Very pleased to meet you! My name’s Benson, Harriet Benson,' she said in that slurred accent, 'and this—' she nodded her head at her companion '—is Henri Dessouix. Back about two lifetimes ago, I was a captain in the Pegasus System Navy, and Henri here was a lieutenant in the Gaston Marines. I’ve been stuck on this miserable ball of dirt for something like sixty-five T-years, and I have never been more delighted to make someone’s acquaintance in my life!'

Chapter Thirteen

'So that’s about the long and the short of it,' Benson said fifteen minutes later. Complete introductions had been made all round, and the two POWs sat cross-legged under the shade of the same tree with Honor while LaFollet hovered watchfully at her shoulder and Mayhew and Clinkscales stood guard. 'I was dumb enough—and also young, stupid, and pissed off enough—to join up with the effort to organize a resistance movement after the surrender, and InSec dumped me here in a heartbeat.' She grimaced. 'If I’d realized no one else was going to be able to stand up to their goddamned navy for the next half century, I probably would’ve kept my head down back home, instead.'

Honor nodded. She had only a vague notion of the Pegasus System’s location, but she knew it was close to the Haven System... and that it had been one of the PRH’s very first conquests. And from the flavor of Harriet Benson’s emotions and the steel she sensed at the older woman’s core, she strongly suspected the captain would have attempted to resist the Peeps whatever she had or hadn’t known about the future.

'And you, Lieutenant?' she asked courteously, looking at Dessouix.

'Henri got shipped in about ten years after I did,' Benson replied for him. Honor was a bit startled for a moment by the other woman’s interruption, but Dessouix only nodded with a small smile, and there was no resentment in his emotions. Was it his accent? It was certainly much thicker than Benson’s, so perhaps he routinely let her do most of the talking.

'From where?' she asked.

'Toulon, in the Gaston System,' Benson said. 'When the Peeps moved in on Toulon, the Gaston Space Forces gave them a better fight than we did in Pegasus. Then again,' her mouth twisted, 'they knew the bastards were coming. The first thing we knew about it was the arrival of the lead task force.'

She brooded in silence for a few moments, then shrugged.

'Anyway, Henri was serving in the Marine detachment aboard one of their ships—'

'The Dague,' Dessouix put in.

'Yes, the Dague.' Benson nodded. 'And when the system government