In Enemy Hands

before she planned this afternoons events, and her estimate of Harrington’s reaction to the order to kill the 'cat had been right on the money. The problem was that there were too many blank spots in the file for her to know whether or not Foraker was right.

She growled a mental curse as she admitted that. The clips from Grayson news broadcasts were their best source of information on treecats, for Harrington was a planetary heroine. She was always good copy on her adopted planet, and her bond to the beast was endlessly fascinating to her public. Unfortunately, the Graysons actually knew very little about how it all worked. Their coverage had warned Ransom that the animal was both dangerous and more intelligent than most people would have guessed, just as it had told her the best way to hurt Harrington would be to take it away from her and kill it, but she had no information at all on the actual nature of the bond between them.

Her eyes moved to Harrington, still twitching on the floor, and narrowed. The way she lay, half-turned on one side and curled around, mimicked the posture of the 'cat. Indeed, allowing for the fact that the animal had six limbs and Harrington had only four, it was virtually identical. But she wasn't even conscious. She couldn't have adopted that posture deliberately, and that argued for at least the possibility that Foraker had it right.

On the other hand, Foraker felt she owed Harrington something. Was she gutsy enough, and stupid enough, to risk spinning such a lie to protect the Manticoran?

'Just how did you happen to come by this knowledge, Citizen Commander?' the committeewoman asked after a long, fulminating moment.

'Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville assigned me as liaison to the prisoners aboard Count Tilly' Foraker replied without hesitation. 'In the course of those duties, I asked Doctor Montoya about any possible specialized health needs they might have. Under the circumstances, he felt it best to alert me to the nature of Commo... of the prisoner's bond with the 'cat.'

'I see,' Ransom said very slowly. A part of her was certain Foraker was lying, but only a part, and the Manty surgeon had supported the ops officer quickly and smoothly enough. She wanted that disgusting beast dead, but what if Foraker and Montoya were telling the truth? Her plans for recording the details of Harrington’s execution would go into the crapper if she had the 'cat killed and Harrington actually did die or go catatonic.

She thought furiously for several more seconds, and then she smiled. It was a chill smile, and an ugly one, and Thomas Theisman shivered as he saw it.

'Very well, Doctor Montoya,' she said coldly, 'you're now in charge of keeping the animal alive.' She nodded for the doctors guard to withdraw the flechette muzzle from the back of his head, and Montoya hurried over to kneel beside Foraker. 'Do your best,' Ransom told him. 'I want it healthy when the prisoner goes to the scaffold.'

Her smile turned even colder as she pictured Harrington’s reaction to seeing the animal in a cage, knowing that the instant she was dead, her precious 'Nimitz' would follow, and she turned to the massively muscled female SS captain who had been the majors second-in-command.

'As far as the rest of these... people are concerned, Citizen Captain... de Sangro,' she said, reading the nameplate on her chest, 'their actions here were clearly unprovoked.' A wave of her hand took in the groaning SS wounded, and the bodies of those who would never groan again. 'Even under the Deneb Accords, a prisoner of war who attacks our personnel except in the course of an escape attempt or in direct self-defense forfeits the standard protections accorded to captured military personnel.'

She turned to smile at Theisman, who clenched his jaw as yet again she cited the letter of the Accords correctly in order to pervert their intent.

'The Accords don't give us the right to execute them for their actions, which, of course, we would never choose to do, anyway,' she told the StateSec officer piously for the benefit of the watching cameras. 'In light of their murderous, unprovoked assault on our personnel, however, a more secure disposition is clearly in order in their case. Under my authority as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, I instruct you to take charge of them in the name of the Office of State Security for transport to and imprisonment at Camp Charon. They can be shipped out on the same transport as their ex-commander.'

'Of course, Citizen Committeewoman!' the citizen captain barked, snapping one hand to her cap brim in salute, and Theisman felt physically ill with impotent rage.

He shouldn't have been surprised, he told himself, but he was. Even now he was. It was amazing how a lifetime of expecting at least semicivilized behavior out of one's superiors could prevent one from seeing something like this coming, he thought almost calmly, but in retrospect, it should have been manifest from the first. Of course Ransom had played out her cruel game. The committeewoman hadn't had to be a genius to figure out how Harrington was likely to react to the death sentence of her treecat. Even a casual perusal of her dossier would have made that obvious. The reaction of her officers when the SS clubbed her to the floor had been equally predictable, and Ransom had relied on it to provide the pretext to send every one of them off to Cerberus with Harrington.

Of course she had, and malice and triumph mingled in her smile as she turned back to Tourville.

'As for you, Citizen Rear Admiral,' she said, 'I believe you ought to return to Haven with me. What's happened here raises serious questions as to the quality of your judgment where these prisoners are concerned. I think you should drop by the Admiralty for a discussion of proper procedure for dealing with captured enemy personnel.'

Tourville said nothing. He met her gaze levelly refusing to flinch, but that was all right with Ransom. She was willing to allow him his bravado. In fact, it would make the final outcome even more satisfactory.

'In fact,' she went on, 'I believe you should bring along your entire staff, and Citizen Commissioner Honeker.' She glanced at Theisman. 'Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville and his flagship will escort Tepes to the Cerberus System, Citizen Admiral,' she told him. 'Please have orders to that effect cut immediately.'

'Yes, Citizen Committeewoman.' Theisman managed to keep his voice more nearly normal than Tourville had been able to, but it was hard. And the fact that he'd succeeded made him feel contaminated.

'Then I think we're done,' Ransom said brightly, and nodded to de Sangro. 'See to having these...' she waved disdainfully at the battered, kneeling prisoners '...taken aboard ship, Citizen Captain. I'm sure we can find proper accommodations for them.'

'At once, Citizen Committeewoman!'

The citizen captain saluted again, then jerked her head at her detail, and gun butts urged the prisoners back to their feet and out of the lounge. Those who couldn't walk were dragged, and as Thomas Theisman watched them go, he knew he would never feel clean again.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Pain.

A roaring sea of pain sent fiery combers flaring through her brain to shatter her thoughts like explosions of foam, and she locked her teeth against a moan of anguish. Her mind refused to function, yet even so she knew only a tiny portion of the crippling pain was truly her own. She felt bruised and cruelly battered where the gun butts had smashed into her, but the agony of broken bones and torn muscle tissue was someone else’s, and her soul cried out as the waves of hurt crashed over her from Nimitz.

She opened her eyes and blinked foggily, trying to resolve what she saw into a coherent image. It took her several long, dragging seconds to realize that she was slumped forward and sideways against the safety straps of a shuttle seat, staring down at the deck, and still more seconds oozed away before she could decide what to do about it.

She struggled upright in her seat, the effort made awkward by the handcuffs locking her wrists behind her, and her vision blurred once more as the surges of Nimitz’s pain filled her eyes with tears. The strange, deeper fusion which had possessed them both in the moment of their despair still gripped her, and her vision was oddly doubled. It wasn't just the effects of the blows she'd taken after all, she realized, for while part of her saw the deck