Echoes Of Honor

surrendered, Dague’s skipper refused to obey the cease-fire order. She fought a hit-and- run campaign against the Peeps’ merchant marine for over a T-year before they finally cornered her and pounded Dague to scrap. The Peeps shot her and her senior surviving officers for ‘piracy,’ and the junior officers got shipped to Hell where they couldn’t make any more trouble. I guess it was—what? About ten T- years, Henri?—after that when we met.'

'About ten,' Dessouix agreed. 'They transferred me to your camp to separate me from my men.'

'And how did the two of you end up at Inferno?' Honor asked after a moment.

'Oh, I’ve always been a troublemaker, Commodore,' Benson said with a bitter smile, and reached out to lay a hand on Dessouix’s shoulder. 'Henri here can tell you that.'

'Stop that,' Dessouix said. His tone was forceful, and he enunciated each word slowly and carefully, as he if were determined to make his weirdly accented Standard English comprehensible. 'It wasn’t your fault, bien-aimee. I made my own decision, Harriet. All of us did.'

'And I led all of you right into it,' she said flatly. But then she inhaled sharply and shook her head. 'Not but what he isn’t right, Dame Honor. He’s a stubborn man, my Henri.'

'And you aren’t?' Dessouix snorted with slightly less force.

'Not a man, at any rate,' Benson observed with a slow, lurking smile. It was the first Honor had seen from the other woman, and it softened her stern face into something almost gentle.

'I’d noticed,' Dessouix replied dryly, and Benson chuckled. Then she looked back at Honor.

'But you were asking how I wound up here. The answer’s simple enough, I’m afraid—ugly, but simple. You see, neither InSec nor these new Black Leg, StateSec bastards have ever seen any reason to worry about little things like the Deneb Accords. We’re not prisoners to them; we’re property. They can do anything the hell they like to us, and none of their ‘superior officers’ are going to so much as slap their wrists. So if you’re good looking and a Black Leg takes a hankering for you—'

She shrugged, and Honor’s face went harder than stone. Benson gazed into her one good eye for a second, then nodded.

'Exactly,' she said harshly. She looked away and drew a deep breath, and Honor could feel the iron discipline it took for the older woman to throttle the rage which threatened to explode within her.

'I was the senior officer in our old camp, which made me the CO,' the woman from Pegasus continued after a moment, her voice level with dearly bought dispassion, 'and there were two other prisoners there, friends of mine, who both helped me with camp management. They were twins—a brother and a sister. I never knew exactly what planet they were from. I think it was Haven itself, but they never said. I think they were afraid to, even here on Hell, but I knew they were politicals, not military. They really shouldn’t have been in the same camp as us military types, but they’d been on Hell a long time—almost as long as me—and InSec hadn’t been as careful about segregating us in the early days. But they were both good looking, and unlike me, they were second-generation prolong.'

One hand rose, stroking her blond braid. At this close range, Honor could see white hairs threaded through it, though they were hard to make out against the gold, and Benson’s tanned face was older than she’d first thought. Small wonder, if she was first-generation prolong, like Hamish Alexander. Now why did I think about him at a time like this? she wondered, but it was only a passing thought, and she kept her eye fixed on Benson.

'At any rate, about—what, six years ago, Henri?' She looked at Dessouix, who nodded, then back at Honor. 'About six local years ago, one of these new Black Leg bastards decided he wanted the sister. He was the flight engineer on the food run, and he ordered her onto the shuttle for the flight back to Styx.'

Honor shifted her weight, eyebrows quirked, and Benson paused, looking a question back at her.

'I didn’t mean to interrupt,' Honor half-apologized. 'But it was our understanding that no prisoners were allowed on Styx.'

'Prisoners aren’t; slaves are,' Benson said harshly. 'We don’t know how many—probably not more than a couple of hundred—and I guess it’s against official policy, but that doesn’t stop them. These sick bastards think they’re gods, Commodore. They can do whatever the hell they like— anything —and they don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t. So they drag off just enough of us to do the shit work on Styx for them... and for their beds.'

'I see,' Honor said, and her voice had the frozen edge of a scalpel.

'I imagine you do,' Benson said, her mouth twisting bitterly. 'Anyway, the son of a bitch ordered Amy aboard the shuttle, and she panicked. No one ever comes back from Styx, Dame Honor, so she tried to run, but he wasn’t having that. He went after her, and Adam jumped him. It was stupid, I guess, but he loved his sister, and he knew exactly what the bastard wanted her for. He even managed to deck the Peep... and that was when the pilot stepped out of the shuttle with a pulse rifle and blew him apart.'

She fell silent once more, staring down at her hands.

'I wanted to kill them all,' she said in a voice grown suddenly distant and cold. 'I wanted to drag them off their frigging shuttle and rip them apart with my bare hands, and we could have done it.' She looked up at Honor with a corpse smile. 'Oh, yes, it’s been done, Commodore. Twice. But the Peeps have a very simple policy. That’s why I was so upset when I thought you’d attacked one of the food runs, because if you hit one of their shuttle flights, then no more shuttles ever come to your camp. Period. They just—' her right hand flipped in a throwing away gesture '—write you off, and when the food supplies don’t come...' Her voice trailed off, and she shrugged.

'I knew that, so I knew we couldn’t storm the shuttle, however much the twisted, murdering pieces of shit deserved it. But I couldn’t just let them have Amy, either—not after Adam died for her. So when the Black Legs started after her again, I blocked them.'

'Blocked them?' Honor repeated, and Dessouix laughed harshly.

'She stepped right into the bastards’ way,' he said with fierce pride. 'Right in their ugly faces. And she wouldn’t move. I thought they were going to shoot her, but she wouldn’t back off a centimeter.'

'And neither would Henri,' Benson said softly. 'He stepped up beside me, and then a couple more followed him, and then a dozen, until finally there must have been two or three hundred of us. We didn’t lift a finger, not even when they tried butt-stroking us out of the way. We only stood there, with someone else stepping into the same place, and wouldn’t let them past, until, finally, they gave up and left.'

She looked back up at Honor, gray eyes bright, glinting with the memory of the moment, the solidarity of her people at her back, but then her gaze fell once more, and Honor tasted the bitterness of her emotions, like lye in Nimitz’s link.

'But they got even with us,' she said softly. 'They cut off the food shipments anyway.' She drew another deep breath. 'You’ve noticed mine and Henri’s ‘accents’?' she asked

'Well, yes, actually,' Honor admitted, surprised into tactlessness by the non sequitur, and Benson laughed mirthlessly.

'They aren’t accents,' she said flatly. 'They’re speech impediments. You probably haven’t been on-planet long enough to realize it, but there actually is one plant we can eat and at least partially metabolize. We call it ‘false-potato,’ and it tastes like— Well, you don’t want to know what it tastes like... and I’d certainly like to forget. But for some reason, our digestive systems can break it down—partially, as I say—and we can even live on it for a while. Not a long time, but if we use it to eke out terrestrial foods, it can carry us. Unfortunately, there’s some kind of trace toxin in it that seems to accumulate in the brain and affect the speech centers almost like a stroke. We don’t have a lot of doctors here on Hell, and I never had a chance to talk to anyone from one of the other camps, so I don’t know if they’ve even figured out humans can eat the damned stuff, much less why or exactly how it affects us. But we knew, and when the food flights stopped, we didn’t have any choice but to eat it. It was either that or eat each other,' she added in a voice leached of all emotion, 'and we weren’t ready for that yet.'

'They were in the other camps—the other two the Tiges-Noires let starve to death,' Henri said softly to Honor, and Benson nodded.

'Yes, they were,' she agreed heavily. 'Eventually. We know they were, because the Peep psychos made holo chips of it and made all the rest of us watch them just to be sure their little demonstration was effective.'

'Sweet Tester,' Honor heard LaFollet whisper behind her, and her own stomach knotted with nausea, but