Echoes Of Honor

she let no sign of it show in her face. She only gazed at Benson, waiting, and felt the older woman draw composure from her own appearance of calm.

'We lasted about three months,' the blond captain said finally, 'and each month the bastards would fly over as if for a supply run, then just hover there, looking down at us. We all knew what they wanted, and people are people everywhere, Commodore. Some of us wanted to go ahead and hand Amy over before we all died, but the rest of us—' She sighed. 'The rest of us were too damned stubborn, and too damned sick of being used, and too damned mad. We refused to give her up. Hell, we refused to let her give herself up, because we were all pretty sure how they’d treat her once they got her back to Styx.'

She fell silent once more, brooding over the cold poison of old memories.

'I think we were all a little out of our heads,' she said. 'I know I was. I mean, it didn’t really make any sense for two thousand people to starve themselves to death—or gradually poison themselves with those damned false-potatoes—just to protect a single person. But it was... I don’t know. The principle of the thing, I suppose. We just couldn’t do it—not and still think of ourselves as human beings.

'And then Amy took it out of our hands.'

Benson’s hands tightened like talons on her knees, and the only sounds were the wind in the leaves and the harsh, distant warbling of some alien creature in the forests of Hell.

'When the shuttle came back the fourth time, she stepped out where the crew could see her.' Benson’s voice was that of a machine, hammered out of old iron. 'She surprised us, got past us to the pad before we could stop her, and just stood there, looking up at them. And then, when the shuttle landed, she drew her knife—' Benson jutted her chin at the stone blades still tucked into LaFollet’s belt '—and cut her own throat in front of them.'

Andrew LaFollet inhaled sharply, and Honor felt the shock and fury lashing through him. He was a Grayson, product of a society which had protected women—sometimes against their own wishes—with near fanaticism for almost a thousand years, and Benson’s story hit him like a hammer.

'They left,' she said emptily. 'Just lifted and left her lying there like a butchered animal. And they waited another month, letting us think she’d killed herself for nothing, before they resumed the food flights.' She bared her teeth in a snarl. 'Eleven of my people died of starvation in that last month, Commodore. We hadn’t lost any up until then, but eleven of them died. Another fifteen suicided rather than starve, because they knew the food flights would never resume, and that was exactly what those murdering bastards wanted them to do!'

'Doucement, ma petite,' Henri said softly. He reached out and captured one of her hands in dark, strong fingers and squeezed it. Benson bit her lip for a moment, then shrugged angrily.

'At any rate, that’s how Henri and I wound up here, Dame Honor. We’re lifers, because they dragged us ‘ringleaders’ off to Inferno as an added example to the others.'

'I see,' Honor said quietly.

'I think you do, Commodore,' Benson replied, gazing back at her. Their eyes held for several seconds, and then Honor stepped back a bit from the intensity of the moment.

'Obviously, I still have a great many more questions,' she said, making her tone come out sounding as natural as her own crippled mouth permitted. And aren’t we all a battered and bedamned lot? she thought with a flash of true humor. Benson and Dessouix from their 'false-potatoes' and me from nerve damage. Lord, it’s a wonder we can understand ourselves, much less anyone else! Nimitz followed her thought and bleeked a quiet laugh from her lap, and she shook herself.

'As I say, I still have questions,' she said more easily, 'but there’s one I hope you can answer for me right now.'

'Such as?' Benson asked.

'Such as just what you and Lieutenant Dessouix were doing when my people, um, invited you to come talk to me.'

'Doing?' Benson repeated blankly.

'Yes. We could figure out some of what was going on out there,' Honor told her, waving her hand in the direction of the camp clearing, 'but you and the Lieutenant had us stumped.'

'Oh, that!' Benson’s expression cleared, and then she laughed with an edge of embarrassment. 'We were... well, call it bird-watching, Dame Honor.'

'Bird—watching?' Honor blinked, and Benson shrugged.

'Well, they’re not really birds, of course. Hell doesn’t have birds. But they’re close enough analogues, and they’re pretty.' She shrugged again. 'It’s an interest we share—a hobby, I suppose—and yesterday and today were our free days, so we decided to see if we couldn’t spot a mated group we’ve been seeing foraging in the sword grass for the last couple of weeks. You do realize, don’t you, that all native life here on Hell is trisexual?' Her expression brightened with genuine interest. 'Actually, there are four sexes, but we think only three of them are immediately involved in procreation,' she explained. 'The fourth is a neuter, but it’s actually the one that does the nursing in the mammal equivalents, and it seems to do most of the foraging or hunting for the others. And the birth rates for all four sexes seem to be set by some sort of biomechanism that—'

She stopped abruptly, and blushed. The effect looked fascinating on her stern, captain’s face, and Dessouix laughed delightedly.

'You see, Dame Honor?' he said after a moment, 'even here in Hell, some people have hobbies.'

'Yes, I do see,' Honor replied with one of her half-smiles. Then she leaned back against the tree, studying them both for several silent seconds while her mind worked.

Nimitz pressed his chin against her knee, chest rumbling with the merest whisper of his normal buzzing purr. Benson’s and Dessouix’s emotions had lashed him like a whip during their explanation of how they’d come to Camp Inferno, but he’d weathered that storm, and now he lay calmly in Honor’s lap, relaxed in its aftermath.

He was comfortable with these people, she realized. And, truth to tell, so was she. She sensed dark, dangerous currents in both Benson and Dessouix, wounded places deep inside them, and the bleak, unforgiving fury of the berserker lurked somewhere at Benson’s heart. But she had it under iron control, Honor knew. And if she hadn’t developed something like it in over sixty years on this worthless piece of dirt, she’d have to be a psychopath herself.

And the critical thing just now was that Honor knew through Nimitz that every word they’d just told her was the truth. More, she sensed the curiosity they had somehow managed to lock down, the torrent of questions they longed to pour out at her. And their dreadful, burning hope that perhaps, just perhaps, her appearance in their lives might mean... something. They didn’t know what that 'something' might be—not yet—but they hungered for the chance, however fleeting, to strike back somehow against their captors. And after hearing their tale, Honor could understand that perfectly.

'Are you the senior officer here at Inferno, too?' she asked Benson.

'No,' the captain replied, and Honor shrugged mentally. It would have been asking too much of the gods of chance for her to just happen to grab the camp’s CO for her first contact, she supposed.

'Actually, I suppose I am the senior officer in some respects,' Benson went on after a moment. 'I was in the second draft of military prisoners sent to Hell, so technically, I guess, I’m ‘senior’ to just about everybody on the damned planet! But the senior lifer here in Inferno is a fellow named Ramirez, a commodore from San Martin.' She grinned wryly. 'In some ways, I think they built Inferno just for him, because he was a very, very bad boy while the Peeps were trying to take Trevor’s Star. He was the senior surviving officer from the SMN task force that covered the Trevor’s Star end of your wormhole junction while the last refugee ships ran for it, too, and he made more waves when they first dumped him on Hell than Henri and I ever did.'

'He sounds impressive,' Honor mused, then cocked her head and gazed at her two 'guests.' 'Would the two of you be willing to serve as my... emissaries to him, I suppose?'

Benson and Dessouix looked at one another for a moment, then shrugged almost in unison and turned back to Honor.

'What, exactly, did you have in mind?' Benson asked with an edge of caution.

'From what you’ve said, it sounds unlikely that the Peeps have spies in Camp Inferno,' Honor told her. 'If