Echoes Of Honor

'I’d say that sounds like a reasonable thing to do,' she agreed. 'Of course, exactly how we do it is an interesting question.'

'Shoot, Honor—that’s simple!' McKeon told her with a grin. 'We just sick Fritz on it. He’ll set up one of his famous preventive care programs, prescribe a little exercise, schedule it for regular office visits, and we’ll be home free!'

This time Ramirez and Benson joined Honor’s laughter. Fritz Montoya had already proved worth his weight in anything anyone would have cared to name to Camp Inferno. Relatively few medical officers got sent to Hell, and of those who had been sent there, none had been further exiled to Inferno. For the most part, the local germs tended to leave the indigestible human interlopers alone, but there were a few indigenous diseases which were as stubbornly persistent in attacking them as shuttlesquitos or bearcats. And, of course, there was always the potential for food poisoning, accidents, or some purely terrestrial bug to wreak havoc. More than one of Hell’s camps had been completely depopulated between supply runs, and Montoya had found himself with a backlog of minor complaints and injuries to deal with.

His facilities were nonexistent, and his medical supplies were limited to the emergency supplies aboard the shuttles, but he was very good at his job. Although he’d been reduced almost to the primitive capabilities of a late prespace physician on Old Earth, he’d handled everything that came his way with aplomb. But he’d also almost had a fit over some of Camp Inferno’s routine procedures. He’d completely overhauled their garbage disposal practices, for example, and he’d instigated an inflexible schedule of regular checkups. He’d even rooted out the most sedentary of the camp’s inhabitants and badgered Benson into reworking the work assignments to see to it that they got sufficient exercise. For the most part, the camp’s inhabitants were still at the bemused stage where he was concerned, as if they hadn’t quite decided what to make of this alien bundle of energy, but they were far too glad to see him to resent him.

Honor hid a fresh mental grimace at the thought. That was another thing the Peeps couldn’t have cared less about. The way StateSec saw it, it was cheaper for them to lose an entire camp of two or three thousand prisoners than to bother to provide proper medical care. If someone got sick or injured, he or she lived or died on his or her own, with only the crude facilities and resources fellow prisoners might be able to cobble up to keep them alive.

I suppose I should be grateful they even bother to lace the inmates’ rations with contraceptives, she thought grimly. Not that they do it to be nice. Kids would just be more mouths for them to feed, after all. And God only knows what the infant mortality rate would look like in a place like this without proper medical support!

'I’m sure Fritz would be touched by your faith in his medical prowess,' she told McKeon dryly, shaking off her gloomy thoughts. 'Unfortunately, I doubt even his superb bedside manner would impress molycircs very much.'

'I don’t know about that,' McKeon argued with a grin. 'Every time he starts in on me about exercise and diet, I get instantly healthy in self-defense!'

'But you’re easily led and highly suggestible, Alistair,' Honor said sweetly, and he laughed.

'You are feeling sleepy, very sleepy,' she intoned sonorously, wiggling the fingers of her hand in front of his eyes. 'Your eyelids are growing heavier and heavier.'

'They are not,' he replied—then blinked suddenly and stretched in a prodigious yawn. Honor laughed delightedly, echoed by Nimitz’s bleek of amusement, and McKeon gave both of them an injured look as he finished stretching.

'I, Dame Honor, am neither suggestible nor easily led,' he told her severely. 'Claims to that effect are base lies, I’ll have you and your friend know! However—' he yawned again '—I’ve been up all day and so, purely coincidentally, I do find myself just a bit sleepy at the moment. The which being so, I think I should take myself off to bed. I’ll see you all in the morning.'

'Good night, Alistair,' she said, and smiled as he sketched a salute and disappeared into the night with a chuckle.

'You two are really close, aren’t you?' Benson observed quietly after McKeon had vanished. Honor raised an eyebrow at her, and the blond captain shrugged. 'Not like me and Henri, I know. But the way you look out for each other—'

'We go back a long way,' Honor replied with another of her half-smiles, and bent to rest her chin companionably on the top of Nimitz’s head. 'I guess it’s sort of a habit to watch out for each other by now, but Alistair seems to get stuck with more of that than I do, bless him.'

'I know. Henri and I made the hike back to your shuttles with you, remember?' Benson said dryly. 'I was impressed by the comprehensiveness of his vocabulary. I don’t think he repeated himself more than twice.'

'He probably wouldn’t have been so mad if I hadn’t snuck off without mentioning it to him,' Honor said, and her right cheek dimpled while her good eye gleamed in memory. 'Of course, he wouldn’t have let me leave him behind if I had mentioned it to him, either. Sometimes I think he just doesn’t understand the chain of command at all!'

'Ha!' Ramirez’ laugh rumbled around the hut like rolling thunder. 'From what I’ve seen of you so far, that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Dame Honor!'

'Nonsense. I always respect the chain of command!' Honor protested with a chuckle.

'Indeed?' It was Benson’s turn to shake her head. 'I’ve heard about your antics at—Hancock Station, was it called?' She laughed out loud at Honor’s startled expression. 'Your people are proud of you, Honor. They like to talk, and to be honest, Henri and I encouraged them to. We needed to get a feel for you, if we were going to trust you with our lives.' She shrugged. 'It didn’t take us long to make our minds up once they started opening up with us.'

Honor felt her face heat and looked down at Nimitz, rolling him gently over on his back to stroke his belly fur. She concentrated on that with great intensity for the next several seconds, then looked back up once her blush had cooled.

'You don’t want to believe everything you hear,' she said with commendable composure. 'Sometimes people exaggerate a bit.'

'No doubt,' Ramirez agreed, tacitly letting her off the hook, and she gave him a grateful half-smile.

'In the meantime, though,' Benson said, accepting the change of subject, 'the loss of the shuttle beacon does make me more anxious about Lunch Basket.'

'Me, too,' Honor admitted. 'It cuts our operational safety margin in half, and we still don’t know when we’ll finally get a chance to try it.' She grimaced. 'They really aren’t cooperating very well, are they?'

'I’m sure it’s only because they don’t know what we’re planning,' Ramirez told her wryly. 'They’re much too courteous to be this difficult if they had any idea how inconvenient for us it is.'

'Right. Sure!' Honor snorted, and all three of them chuckled. Yet there was an undeniable edge of worry behind the humor, and she leaned back in her chair, stroking Nimitz rhythmically, while she thought.

The key to her plan was the combination of the food supply runs from Styx and the Peeps’ lousy communications security. Her analysts had been right about the schedule on which the Peeps operated; they made a whole clutch of supply runs in a relatively short period—usually about three days—once per month. Given Camp Inferno’s 'punishment' status, it was usually one of the last camps to be visited, which was another factor in Honor’s plan.

Between runs, the Black Legs stayed put on Styx, amusing themselves and leaving the prisoner population to its own devices, and despite the guard force’s obvious laziness, she reflected, it really was an effective prison system. No doubt the absolute cost of the operation was impressive, but on a per-prisoner basis, it must be ludicrously low. All the Peeps did when they needed another camp was to pick a spot and dump the appropriate number of inmates on it, along with some unpowered hand tools and a minimal amount of building material. Their total investment was a couple of dozen each of axes, hammers, hand saws, picks, and shovels, enough wire to put up a perimeter against the local predators, a few kilos of nails, and—if they were feeling particularly generous— some extruded plastic panels with which to roof the inmates’ huts. If a few hut-builders got munched on by the neighborhood’s wildlife before they got their camp built, well, that was no skin off the Peeps’ noses. There were always plenty more prisoners where they’d come from.

StateSec didn’t even carry the expense of shipping in and issuing the sort of preserved emergency rations