Echoes Of Honor

* * *

'Is the Chief sure, Scotty?' Honor Harrington asked that evening. She and Alistair McKeon sat with Commodore Ramirez and Captain Benson in Ramirez’ hut, and the insect equivalents of Hell’s ecology buzzed and whined as they battered themselves with typical buggish obstinacy against the vegetable-oil lamps hanging overhead.

'I’m afraid so, Ma’am,' Tremaine replied. 'The molycircs themselves are gone, and we don’t have a replacement crypto component. He and Chief Ascher are trying to cobble something up from the com gear, but there’re all kinds of system incompatibilities. Even if they manage to jury-rig a short-term fix, it won’t exactly be what I’d call reliable.' He shook his head. 'Sorry, Ma’am, but it looks like Shuttle Two’s IFF beacon is down for good.'

'Damn,' McKeon muttered. Honor glanced at him, then looked back at Tremaine.

'Have he and Chief Barstow checked Number One’s beacon?'

'Yes, Ma’am. It seems to be fine,' Tremaine said, very carefully not stressing the verb or adding so far to his reply. Honor heard it anyway, and the living side of her mouth quirked wryly.

'Well, go on back to them, please, and tell them I know they’ll do their best for us,' she said.

'Yes, Ma’am.' Tremaine saluted and turned to leave, and she laughed.

'In the morning will be soon enough, Scotty! Don’t go wandering around the woods in the dark—you might get eaten by a bearcat!'

'Drop by my hut, Commander,' Harriet Benson put in. After two months of practice, most of Honor’s people could follow her slurred speech now without too much difficulty. 'Henri and I’ll be glad to put you up tonight. Besides, he’s been thinking about that last move of yours,' she went on when Tremaine glanced at her. 'He and Commander Caslet think they’ve found a way to get out of it after all.'

Honor hid a small grimace at Benson’s remark. None of the inmates of Inferno ever attached the 'Citizen' to the front of Warner Caslet’s rank title. None of them were particularly comfortable about having a Peep naval officer in their midst, but they weren’t as un comfortable about it as Honor had feared they would be, either. Apparently there were enough Legislaturalist ex-officers scattered among Hell’s political prisoners for the regular POWs to have developed a live-and-let-live attitude. Indeed, Honor suspected that their term for StateSec personnel—'Black Leg'—had evolved as much as a way to differentiate between the real enemy and Peeps who were fellow inmates as from the black trousers of the SS uniform. Not that Inferno’s inhabitants intended to take any chances with Caslet. Everyone had been quite polite to him, especially after Honor’s people had had a chance to take them aside and explain how this particular Peep came to be on Hell, but they kept an eye on him. And there was a specific reason he’d been assigned to the hut Benson and Dessouix shared.

'So they’re ganging up on me now, are they, Ma’am?' Tremaine asked Benson with a grin, unaware of his CO’s thoughts. 'Well, they’re wrong. I bet I know what they’ve thought up, and it’s still mate in six!'

'Try not to hurt their feelings too badly, Scotty,' Honor advised. 'I understand Lieutenant Dessouix is quite proficient at unarmed combat.' Which, of course, was one of the main reasons Caslet roomed with him.

'Ha! If he doesn’t want his feelings hurt, he shouldn’t have whupped up on me like that in the first two games, Ma’am!' Tremaine retorted with a twinkle, then saluted his superiors and disappeared into the night.

'An entertaining young fellow,' Ramirez noted in his deep, rumbling voice, and Nimitz bleeked in amused agreement from his place on the hand-hewn plank table. Benson reached out and rubbed him between the ears, and he pressed back against her touch with a buzzing purr.

'He is that,' Honor agreed, watching Benson pet Nimitz.

The ’cat had set about captivating Camp Inferno’s inmates with all his customary skill, and he had every one of them wrapped around his thumb by now. Not that he hadn’t had more reasons than usual for being his charming self. The seduction process had given him—and Honor—the opportunity to sample the emotions of every human being in the camp. A few of them were hanging on the ragged edge, with a dangerous degree of instability after their endless, hopeless years on Hell, and she had quietly discussed her concerns about those people with Ramirez and Benson, but only one of Inferno’s six hundred and twelve inhabitants had been a genuine security risk.

Honor had been dumbfounded to discover that the Peeps really had planted an agent in Inferno, and the other inmates had been even more shocked than she. The man in question had been their resident expert on how to spin and weave the local equivalent of flax to provide the fabric Dessouix and his two assistants used to clothe the inmates. That had made him a vital cog in the camp’s small, survival-oriented economy, and almost all of the other prisoners had regarded him as a personal friend, as well. The thought that he was actually a StateSec agent planted to betray their trust had been more than enough to produce a murderous fury in his fellow prisoners.

Only he hadn’t actually been an 'agent' at all; he was simply an informer. It was a subtle difference, but it had kept Ramirez from ordering (or allowing) his execution when, acting on Honor’s suggestion, Benson and Dessouix found the short-range com set hidden in his mattress. Had they failed to find it before the next food drop brought a shuttle into his com range, a single short report from him would have killed them all, and they knew it. But they’d also discovered why he’d become a StateSec agent, and it was hard to fault a man for agreeing to do anything which might save his lover from execution.

So instead of killing him, they’d simply taken away his com set and detailed half a dozen others to keep an eye on him. All things taken together, Honor was just as glad it had worked out that way. Whatever else he might have been, too many of the camp inmates had considered him a friend for too many years, and things were going to be ugly enough without having to begin killing their own.

'—on Basilisk Station?'

She blinked and looked up as she realized McKeon had been speaking to her.

'Sorry, Alistair. I was thinking about something else,' she apologized. 'What did you say?'

'I asked if you remembered what a puppy Scotty was at Basilisk,' McKeon said, then grinned at Ramirez and Benson. 'He meant well, but lord was he green!'

'And he was also—what? A couple of hundred thousand richer by the end of the deployment?' Honor shot back with a half-grin of her own.

'At least,' McKeon agreed. 'He had a real nose for spotting contraband,' he explained to the other two. 'Made him very popular with his crewmates when the Admiralty started handing out the prize money.'

'I imagine it would!' Benson laughed.

'But he’s a levelheaded young man, too,' Honor said, and her grin faded as she remembered a time that 'levelheaded young man' had saved her career.

'I can believe that, too,' Benson said. She glanced at Honor as if she’d caught a hint of what had been left unspoken, but she chose not to push for more. Instead, she shook herself, and her expression became much more serious. 'How badly is this likely to affect our plans?'

'If nothing happens to Shuttle One’s beacon, it won’t affect them at all,' Honor replied. She held out her hand to Nimitz, and the ’cat rose and limped over to her. She lifted him down into her lap and leaned back, holding him to her chest while her good eye met the gazes of her three senior subordinates. 'We were always going to have to task one of the shuttles to deal with the courier boat,' she reminded them, 'and an IFF beacon won’t matter one way or the other for that part of the operation.'

'And if something does happen to Shuttle One’s beacon?' McKeon asked quietly.

'In that case, we either figure out how to take a supply shuttle intact, or else we abandon Lunch Basket entirely and go for a more direct approach,' Honor replied, equally quietly, and the living side of her face was grim.

None of her listeners cared for that, yet none of them disagreed, either. For all its complexity, 'Operation Lunch Basket,' as Honor had decided to christen her ops plan, offered their best chance of success, and they all knew it. In fact, it was probably their only real chance. Trying any of the fallback plans was far more likely to get them killed than get them off Hell, but no one mentioned that either. After all, getting themselves killed trying was better than staying on Hell.

'In that case,' McKeon said after a moment, 'I guess we’d better just concentrate on not having anything happen to One’s beacon.' His tone was so droll Honor chuckled almost despite herself and shook her head at him.