In Enemy Hands

which he'd faced then. He never had answered them. He'd put them aside, refused to think about them, and now... Now it was all too likely he never would know the answers. Yet as he stared into the hazel eyes of the bulkhead portrait, he also knew he would always feel a dark, personal responsibility for what had happened. She never would have been sent to Adler if she hadn't reported back for duty early, and if not for whatever he'd given away that night in her library, she wouldn't have reported early. And so, in a way no one else would ever know, it was his fault.

He never knew exactly how long he stood staring into the face of the long-dead protector for whom his flagship was named, but finally he drew a deep, painful breath and shook himself.

There was no reason to assume she was dead, he told his conscience. She'd already demonstrated an uncanny ability to survive, and there were almost always some survivors from any ship. Until, and unless, her death was positively confirmed, she would survive in his mind. She had to.

He turned from the portrait and sat once more behind his desk. He started to reach for the message board Robards had left, but then he drew his hand back. That, too, could wait, his brain insisted firmly, and he turned back to his terminal and the reams of reports awaiting him. He'd never thought the endless, bureaucratic details of activating a fleet command could be welcome, but today they were, and he dove into them like a man seeking refuge from demons.

Thomas Theisman’s dark green tunic was flung untidily across the back of a chair, his stocking feet rested on a beaten copper coffee table, the neck of his blouse had been dragged untidily open, and he stared moodily into his glass. Not even a citizen admiral could afford the prices Old Earth whiskey brought in the PRH these days, and Theisman seldom drank. He certainly wasn't enough of a drinker to have built up his own supply of liquor, but his logistics officer had managed to turn up a brand of imitation Old Earth whiskey bottled right here in Barnett. Drinker or no, Theisman suspected this was a pretty poor imitation, a conclusion he'd reached when the first glass cauterized his taste buds. The copious quantity he'd consumed since churned in his stomach with a virulence which had done nothing to change his judgment of its quality, but at least it was having the desired effect of anesthetizing his brain, and he poured more of the amber liquid over the ice in his glass while he cursed the bitch goddess of coincidence.

Cordelia Ransom had been in the Barnett System for ten days before the dispatch boat from Tourville arrived, and he'd let himself begin to feel a glimmer of hope. Her HD crews were everywhere, intruding into everything, getting under everyone's feet, and generally playing havoc with the efficiency of his command. Even his enlisted personnel had been uneasy at having Public Information crawling all over them, and his intelligence staffers had run themselves frantic trying to guard against potential security breaches.

It must have been nice, he'd thought, to have lived before the Warshawski sail had made true interstellar communication possible once more. Today it might take dispatch boats weeks or even months to complete their voyages, but, unfortunately, they always did seem to get there in the end. The great news agencies like United Faxes Intragalactic, Reuters of Beowulf, and the Interstellar News Service, all headquartered in the Solarian League, were bad enough, but at least restricted access and alert security could limit the damage they did. Not that any measures could be absolutely counted upon, and the League’s official insistence on 'freedom of the press' made it even harder. Their correspondents seemed to think their press passes made them gods, and DuQuesne Base's Marine security types had grabbed a pair of stringers, one with UFI and the other with INS, trying to sneak aboard a freight shuttle with the evident intention of getting onboard interviews from the crew of the superdreadnought for which it was bound.

All in all, however, Theisman felt reasonably confident of his ability to protect operational security from outsiders; it was his own propagandists he feared. God knew NavInt and StateSec spent enough time, and money, paying neutral agents for recordings of the Manties' domestic news and information broadcasts. Those broadcasts were weeks or even months old by the time they reached the analysts, yet the intelligence types always managed to glean at least some useful information from them, if only by helping to fill in background. He had to assume the Alliance returned the compliment where the Republic was concerned, which meant a single wrong word in a propaganda broadcast could blow secrets the Navy had spent months hiding, and all because some Public Information writer who neither understood nor cared about operational realities wanted a good sound bite.

But for all the monumental pain in the ass Ransom's presence had been, his own contacts with her had encouraged him to hope that perhaps he hadn't been set up to be the scapegoat when Barnett fell. He couldn't be certain, of course. Whatever else she might be, Cordelia Ransom would have made a wonderful poker player, but she'd spent too much time with him and recorded too much footage of interviews with him for him to believe she intended simply to write him off along with Barnett, and the scripts from which his interviewers worked had reinforced that hope. Much of the propaganda content had been too blatant (and strident) for his taste, but the HD clips were clearly designed to present one Thomas Theisman in the most heroic light possible. Surely Public wouldn't invest so much time, and the personal attention of its director, in building up someone it intended to toss aside. After all, the loss of a public hero couldn't help but hurt civilian morale, could it? Especially when the Secretary of Public Information had personally presented that hero as the Republic's champion.

The thought of being made the Committee of Public Safety's paladin had been hard for Theisman to stomach, yet if that was the price of survival, he'd been willing, even relieved, to pay it. But even as he'd begun to think Ransom's interest in him might spell salvation, coincidence had been waiting to put yet another stain upon his conscience. For if Ransom hadn't been in Barnett to make specials portraying Thomas Theisman as a hero, she never would have seen Tourville's dispatch.

The citizen admiral growled a curse and threw back another long swallow. The alcohol burned going down and seemed to explode in his stomach, but he appeared to have reached the limit of the solace it could offer, and he leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

He wasn't certain how Tourville had gotten his people’s commissioner to sign off on his plan for dealing with his prisoners, but it had been obvious from the dispatch that the fix was in. Tourville had intended to send all of his prisoners, including the officers, to the Navy's facility in Tarragon. The prison camps there were hardly luxury hotels, but unlike the SS, the Navy had a strong vested interest in treating captured Allied military personnel decently. More than that, the Solarian League's Prisoner of War Commission, which monitored the belligerents for compliance with the provisions of the Deneb Accords, maintained an office in Tarragon and compiled lists of all incoming prisoners. That meant the Star Kingdom would have been informed within weeks of Prince Adrian's fate... and that Honor Harrington would have been safe. Nothing could have protected her against the possibility that StateSec would demand she be turned over, but the SS had so far followed a policy of leaving POWs in military hands once they got there in the first place. Tourville and Theisman could at least have hoped they would adhere to the same policy in Harrington’s case, and even if they hadn't wanted to, her location would have been a matter of public record, and her prominence would have added another layer of protection. Surely not even the SS would be stupid enough to mistreat her in the full glare of publicity. Think what propaganda opportunities that would have offered the Alliance!

But Ransom's presence had derailed Tourville's efforts, and her own orders had sent a chill down Theisman’s spine. She'd overridden Tourville's plan to send all of his prisoners to Tarragon and insisted that all senior officers and a sampling of senior petty officers be delivered to Barnett, instead. That much had probably been inevitable, once she'd learned of Harrington's capture, but what frightened Theisman was the order to suppress all mention of that capture. No one, not the League inspectors, not the Manties, not even the Navy at large, no one was to be told Harrington was now a prisoner, and an order like that sounded ominous alarms for any citizen of the PRH.

The Legislaturalists' old prewar Office of Internal Security had been frightening enough. The formality of trials had been an irritating nuisance which InSec had felt no particular need to burden itself with, and everyone had heard whispered tales of someone who had been made to disappear by InSec, or the Mental Hygiene Police, or one of their countless sister agencies. But State Security was worse. No one needed whispered reports now, for StateSec wanted its citizens to know about arrests and punishments. And trials were no longer irritating nuisances; they had become golden opportunities for propaganda and tools to legitimize SS atrocities. Yet the first stage in the process remained unchanged. Show trials might come later, but until StateSec decided how it wanted to deal with any given individual, that person was made to vanish. He could always be