In Enemy Hands

for maximum dispersion, and there was no place to hide.

'Citizen Admiral?' Lester Tourville looked up quickly, for there was something very odd about Shannon Foraker’s tone.

'What?' he asked, and the ops officer frowned.

'I think you'd better look at this, Sir,' she said. 'Tepes' active sensors just went down.'

'What?' Tourville said again, in a very different tone, and Foraker nodded.

'Every one of them, Sir.' Foraker had gotten even more careless, or deliberate, about her 'elitist' vocabulary over the last month, but this time Tourville was certain she'd used 'Sir' without even thinking about it. 'They shouldn't have done that,' she went on. 'They're through the main minefields and into orbit, but nobody in her right mind would shut down her radar.'

Tourville nodded and walked quickly across the deck towards her station, for she was right. Tepes might be in her designated parking orbit, but with so many mines floating around the possibility of one having strayed into her orbital path could never be completely ruled out.

'Anything from her at all, Harrison?' he demanded.

'Negative, Citizen Admiral,' the com officer replied. 'I don't, Just a second, Citizen Admiral.' Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser listened to his earbug intently, then turned to Tourville. 'Citizen Captain Hewitt reports that he was receiving a message from Citizen Captain Vladovich, Citizen Admiral. Apparently the transmission was interrupted in the middle of a sentence.'

Tourville and Bogdanovich looked at one another, then turned as one to Everard Honeker. The People's commissioner looked back at them, as confused as either of the naval officers but not as immediately concerned. Unlike them, he didn't fully understand just how massive an interruption Tepes' systems had just apparently suffered.

Tourville saw Honeker’s incomprehension and started to speak, then stopped himself and looked back down at Foraker. The tac officer was bent over her display with focused intensity, and he glanced at it himself rather than disturb her.

The relative orbital positions of Hades and Cerberus-B-3 were such that Count Titty had passed within less than two light-minutes of the former on her vector for the latter. Hades now lay almost exactly three and a half light-minutes off her starboard bow, moving away from her at a little over 26,000 KPS as she continued to decelerate towards Cerberus-B-3, and he glanced back up at Citizen Commander Lowe.

'Assume we go to maximum military power. How soon could we reach Tepes?'

Lowe punched numbers into her panel quickly, then looked back up.

'We'll need a little over eighty-three minutes to decelerate to rest relative to Hades, Citizen Admiral. If we go for a least-time flight from that point, we can reach the planet in another hundred and seventeen minutes, call it three hours and twenty minutes total, but our relative velocity would be over thirty-six thousand KPS. If we go for a zero-velocity intercept, it'll add almost another hour to the flight profile.'

Tourville grunted and turned back to Foraker's panel. He drew a cigar from his pocket and unwrapped it slowly, never taking his eyes from the data on the display. He had the cigar half-way to his mouth when Foraker sucked in an audible breath and his own hand froze.

'Citiz...'

'I see it, Shannon,' he said quietly, and his hand moved the cigar the rest of the way to his mouth. 'How bad is it?' he asked almost absently.

'I can't say, Citizen Admiral. But look here and here.' She tapped a secondary display at her elbow, and Tourville nodded slowly as he scanned the readouts.

'Stay on it,' he told her, then beckoned for Honeker and Bogdanovich to join him.

'I don't know what's happening, but something sure as hell just went wrong aboard Tepes,' he told them in a flat, lowered voice.

'What do you mean, 'wrong'?' Honeker asked tautly.

'Citizen Commissioner, warships don't just suddenly go off the air unless something very unusual happens to them. And Citizen Commander Foraker just picked up debris and atmosphere loss. I'd say she's suffered at least one major hull breach.'

'A hull breach?' Honeker stared at him in disbelief, and Tourville nodded grimly.

'I don't know what caused it, and the air loss is low enough, for now, at least, to indicate that they managed to seal off the damaged areas. But whatever’s going on over there is serious, Citizen Commissioner. Very serious.'

'I see.' Honeker rubbed sweaty palms together and made himself take a deep breath. 'What do you propose to do about it, Citizen Admiral?' he asked quietly.

'What we're seeing now happened at least four minutes ago,' Tourville told him, still in that flat tone. 'By now, she could already have blown up, and we wouldn't know it. But if she's in serious trouble, she's going to need help.'

'And you propose taking Tilly to render it,' Honeker said.

'Yes. Sir. The only problem is that we don't know what she may have already told Camp Charon... or how they may react if we suddenly head for the planet when they told us to stay the hell away from it.'

'Understood.' Honeker stood another moment, still rubbing his hands together, then looked at Fraiser. 'Contact Camp Charon, Citizen Lieutenant. Inform them that we are going to the assistance of Tepes on my authority at our best acceleration and request that they confirm the minefields have been safed for our passage.'

Honor Harrington rose and faced the door of her cell as it opened, and the right side of her face was almost as expressionless as the dead left side.

It wasn't easy to keep it that way. Timmons had taken great pleasure in informing her that the next time her cell was opened would be for her trip to the hangman. That would have been enough to make maintaining her composure difficult even without the flashes of emotion she'd begun receiving from Nimitz. They were too far apart, their link stretched too thin, for her to tell exactly what the 'cat was feeling, but there was a sense of... movement, and sharper flashes of pain, as if the movement hurt him. At first she'd been certain he was being transported to the planet to die with her as Ransom had promised, yet she'd become steadily less positive, for a flush of excitement and a strange, fierce determination seemed to have wrapped itself about all of his other emotions. She had no idea what might have caused it. For that matter, it might all be nothing more than a delusion on her part, inspired by her own fear and half-starved weakness. But whatever else was happening, she would meet Timmons and his ghouls without flinching.

The door lock clacked, and she braced herself as it swung open. And then...

'My Lady! Lady Harrington!'

Honor staggered, her good eye flaring wide, as Andrew LaFollet shouted her name. Her personal armsman stood in the open doorway, face haggard and his normally immaculate uniform ragged, and he cradled a flechette gun in his arms.

Not possible, her brain told her calmly. This is not possible. It has to be a hallucination.

But it wasn't, and she stumbled forward as he freed one hand from the gun and held it out to her. Her working eye misted, making it hard to see, but his hand was warm and firm as it closed on her too-thin fingers. He squeezed hard, and Honor dragged in a deep, shuddery breath and put her arms around him, hugging him fiercely.

'We're here to get you out, My Lady,' he said into her shoulder, and she nodded and made herself release him. She stood back, blinking to clear her vision, and saw his face change as he took in her own appearance. The