Honor Harrington (№8) - Echoes Of Honor

* * *

"What did you say?" Citizen Lieutenant Commander Proxmire demanded, staring in disbelief at his com officer.

"Camp Charon is under attack, Sir!" Citizen Lieutenant Agard repeated. If he hadn’t sounded as shocked and disbelieving as Proxmire felt, the citizen lieutenant commander would have suspected him of trying to pull some macabre kind of practical joke. But if it wasn’t a joke, then what the hell was it? How could anyone be attacking the base? The prisoners damned straight didn’t have the capability to do it, and no one else could possibly even have gotten here without first fighting his way through the orbital defenses!

And if someone was attacking the base, then what the hell was he supposed to do?

He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, thinking furiously. His was perhaps the most boring of all the State Security duty assignments in the Cerberus System, for he was Camp Charon’s emergency mailman, the only way Hades could get a message out to the rest of the galaxy if it needed to. Someone had to pull the duty, however mind-numbing it was, and Proxmire supposed he shouldn’t complain too loudly that his turn had finally come up. He’d spent over four T-years assigned to play diplomatic courier for various embassies before they stuck him here. That had certainly been a cushy slot, and he was due to be relieved from this one in another eight T-months, as he made a habit of reminding himself every morning.

Not that any of those bright and sunshiny thoughts helped a great deal. His forty thousand-ton courier boat was one of the fastest vessels in space, but she was also little more than a pair of Warshawski sails and a set of impellers, with strictly limited living space for her thirty-man crew. That was why half his people were usually down on Styx, rotating through enough liberty to keep bulkhead fever from driving them crazy and simultaneously giving the people still stuck upstairs aboard ship enough extra living space to stay sane. It was strictly against The Book, of course, but no base commander had ever objected. After all, there would be plenty of time to get the rest of Proxmire’s crew back upstairs before sending his ship off with a message. Besides, no CO on Hades had ever actually needed to use his communications ship, anyway.

Proxmire scrubbed harder, cursing his own complacency. Yet even as he cursed himself, he realized his error had been all but inevitable. No one had ever threatened Hades. Hell, no one but StateSec even knew where it was! And there had been no point in putting his people to any more hardship than they had to endure simply to satisfy the letter of the Regs. But now this—whatever this was!—was happening down there, and he had only half his crew on board and no orders from Citizen Brigadier Tresca. But—

"Start bringing up the impellers," he ordered harshly.

"Yes, Sir."

Proxmire nodded, then jerked his attention back to the display. It would take his ship almost forty minutes to bring her nodes up, and he hoped to hell that by the time they were on-line, the situation would have clarified enough down there that he wouldn’t need them after all.

* * *

Scotty Tremaine put the shuttle down, and the twin dorsal turrets whined as their heavy pulsers tracked across the base. The single ventral turret joined in, and hangers and parked ground vehicles blew apart under their ravening fire as the troop hatches sprang open.

Three hundred men and women streamed down the ramps, armed to the teeth and carefully briefed on their objectives. They split up into three groups as officers shouted orders, and then they were gone, flowing away into the chaos and flame like vengeful ghosts.

"Last man out!" Horace Harkness announced over the intercom. "Hatch closing... now! Good seal, Flight!"

"Copy," Tremaine replied, and the shuttle howled back into the heavens. There were no heavy anti-air defenses to challenge it—not anymore—and it took station directly above the heavy vehicle park, prepared to destroy any ground armor the garrison might manage to get into action.

"Move, move, move! " Jesus Ramirez bellowed. His team was the truly critical one. Alistair McKeon was leading a second group to seize the vehicle park and appropriate any heavy armor he could find, and Harriet Benson (and, inevitably, Henri Dessouix) led the third group to secure the perimeter of the landing field. Those were both vital missions, but Ramirez’s group left them to it and sliced straight across the base, charging for the very heart of the chaos of explosions and flame Commodore Harrington had sown, for their objective lay in the midst of that destruction. It was, in fact, the one defensive installation Commodore Harrington had very carefully left untouched, and the attackers had to secure it intact.

A small knot of SS troopers suddenly appeared out of the smoke. One or two of them had side arms; the others seemed to be completely unarmed, but they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no one was taking any chances. Pulse rifles whined and a grenade launcher coughed. One of the SS men might have been trying to surrender, but no one would ever know, and Ramirez and his people trampled the bodies underfoot.

* * *

Citizen Major Steiner dragged herself to her feet. Her ears rang and her face was bloody, yet she knew she’d been incredibly lucky. The outer crystoplast wall of the control tower had been reduced to splinters and driven across her work area like shrapnel, cutting down and killing every other member of her crew, and she staggered towards the door. She had to get out of here, she thought dazedly. Had to find a weapon. There was only the one shuttle. There couldn’t be more than a couple of hundred people aboard it, and the defenders had them outnumbered ten-to-one, with armored vehicles and battle armor to support them. All they needed was time to recover from the shock and get themselves pulled back together, and—

She stepped out the door, moving more briskly, just as Henri Dessouix’s twenty-five-man platoon came around a corner, and a dozen pulse rifles opened fire as one.

If anyone had cared, it would have taken a forensic surgeon days to identify the remains.

* * *

"Go!" Alistair McKeon shouted, and half a dozen of his people dashed across the open ground towards the vehicle park. A handful of SS types had gotten themselves back together, and a light tribarrel opened fire from somewhere in the enlisted housing blocks facing the main vehicle building. Two of McKeon’s people went down, killed instantly, but the others cleared its field of fire before it could engage them.

The gunner would have been better advised to shoot at the hovering shuttle, instead, McKeon reflected grimly. Light as his weapon was, he was unlikely to have brought down the heavily armored assault craft, but he might have gotten lucky. Instead, all he’d managed to do was kill two people and attract the shuttle’s attention. It twisted around in midair, the nose dropped slightly, and the building from which the fire had come vomited flame and smoke as Honor put a missile into it and followed up with a half-second burst from her heavy bow-mounted tribarrels.

He waved the rest of his party forward, and they swept across the clear ground. A dozen or so technicians had been working on vehicles or tinkering with the powered armor stored in the base "Morgue," but only about half of them were armed, and those only with side arms. Some of them did their best, with far more guts than McKeon would have expected from SS thugs, and he lost eleven more men and women before he could secure the park. But then he had control of it, and he posted fifteen people to hold the Morgue and keep the garrison from getting to the powered battle armor stored there while the rest of his people began firing up the power plants on armored personnel carriers and light tanks.

McKeon stood on the rear deck of a tank, feeling the armored carapace shudder underfoot as the turbines began to whine, and his gap-toothed grin was a terrifying thing to see.

* * *

"Now!" Ramirez barked, and the woman beside him pressed the button. The beehive charge on the armored door ahead of them detonated, blowing the hatch apart, and Ramirez’s point team, armed with flechette guns and grenade launchers for this very eventuality, charged through the smoke almost before the debris had landed.

Pulser fire met them, and two of his people went down. But the third triggered a burst from her grenade launcher. The grenades whipped through the opening and exploded in a rippling snarl of light and fury, and the grenadier charged behind them.

They were only flash-bangs, light concussion weapons intended to stun and incapacitate, not to kill. Not because anyone felt any particular compassion for the people beyond that doorway, but because it was absolutely essential that they capture the equipment beyond it intact. Jesus Ramirez had already lost nineteen people on his way here, and he was determined to make their sacrifice count.

"Go! Go! " someone screamed, and another half dozen men and women lunged through the shattered door on the grenadier’s heels. Flechette guns coughed and bellowed, pulsers whined, and a single grenade—not a flash-bang this time, but something heavier—exploded thunderously. And then one of his people poked her head back out.

"Objective secure, Commodore!" she shouted. "We’ve got some blast damage, but nothing we can’t fix!"

"Maravilloso! " Ramirez pumped a fist in congratulations and loped forward, already reaching for his hand com.

* * *

"Commodore Ramirez has the control site, Commodore!" Senior Chief Barstow announced, and Honor felt the fierce flare of triumph rip through the skeleton crew still aboard the shuttle. It had taken almost twenty minutes longer than the ops plan had hoped for, because Ramirez’s group had gotten bogged down in half a dozen tiny, vicious firefights on its way in. But what mattered now was that the commodore had done it! He now controlled the ground base to which all of the planet’s orbital defenses were slaved. He couldn’t use them yet—even if he’d captured the control site completely undamaged, which was unlikely—because none of them knew the security codes. But they would have time to figure the codes out later, especially with Horace Harkness to tickle the StateSec computers, and what mattered for right now was that the Peeps couldn’t use them, either.

She stabbed the com stud again.

"Cub, this is Wolf. You are go. Repeat, you are, go!"

"Cub copies go, Wolf," Geraldine Metcalf’s voice replied. "We’re on our way, Skipper."

* * *

Half a planet away from Camp Charon, Shuttle Two screamed straight up with Geraldine Metcalf and Sarah DuChene at the controls. Master Chief Gianna Ascher, who had been the senior noncom in Prince Adrian’s combat information center, manned her tac section, with Senior Chief Halburton as her flight engineer. It wasn’t the first time Metcalf and DuChene had taken this shuttle into action, but this time they were running late, and they glanced at one another grimly as the sky beyond the cockpit windows began to turn dark indigo.

* * *

"Well?" Citizen Lieutenant Commander Proxmire snapped at his hapless com officer.

"Sir, I can’t get a response from anybody down there," Agard replied unhappily. "Base Ops went off the air almost immediately, and all I’m picking up now is a bunch of encrypted transmissions I assume are combat chatter. I can’t tell who’s saying what to who, but you can see for yourself how it looks."

He gestured at the holo display, and Proxmire bit his lip. The courier boat didn’t carry a true tactical section, for she was completely unarmed. But she had a fairly respectable sensor suite, and the sky over Styx was cloudless and clear. That was enough to let them generate a needle-sharp view of events there, and his stomach knotted at what he saw. The fire, smoke, and chaos was even more widespread, but the display projected the icons of armored vehicles moving out of the vehicle park. Unfortunately, they seemed to be firing on SS positions, not the attackers. And if anything had been needed to confirm who was in control of them, that damned assault shuttle wasn’t firing at them. In fact, it was providing them with fire support!

He shook his head numbly. Surely this was impossible. It had to be impossible! He still had no idea at all who those people were or where they had come from, but they’d taken barely forty minutes to overrun the most critical sectors of the base. The garrison was cut off from its heavy weapons—for that matter, the attackers were using its own weapons against it!—and simple numbers meant very little against someone who controlled the air and had all the heavy firepower.

But as long as the shuttle stayed occupied down there, it wasn’t bothering Proxmire. And as long as he was free to go summon help, it didn’t really matter whether or not the enemy—whoever the hell he was—managed to overrun the base.

"Impellers in thirty-five seconds, Skipper!" his harassed second engineer reported, and he smiled thinly.

* * *

"There she is, Gerry," Lieutenant Commander DuChene murmured as the courier boat’s icon appeared in her HUD.

"Got it," Metcalf acknowledged, adjusting her heading slightly. "Gianna?"

"I’ve got her, Ma’am," Master Chief Ascher replied, "but these sensors are pure crap." She sniffed disdainfully, and despite her own tension, Metcalf grinned. She and Ascher had worked together aboard Prince Adrian for almost two T-years, and she knew how proud the master chief had been of the people and equipment aboard her lost ship.

"Just tell me what you can, Gianna," she said.

"I can’t—" Ascher began, then stopped dead. There was a moment of silence, and her voice was flat when she spoke again. "Her impellers are hot, Ma’am. She’s already underway."

"Shit!" Metcalf breathed, and looked at DuChene. "Have you got a shot, Sarah?"

"Not a good one," DuChene replied tensely.

"Talk to me about accel curves, Gianna!" Metcalf commanded.

"We’ve got the velocity advantage now, but she’s got a deeper compensator sump and a hell of a lot more brute power than us, Ma’am. She can pull about five hundred and thirty gees to our four hundred, but our present velocity is about four thousand KPH—make it sixty-seven KPS—and hers is only about twenty-seven KPS. Current range is one-three-point-three-five k-klicks, and she’ll match our velocity in a little over thirty-one seconds, so we’ll equalize at range one-two-point-seven-two k-klicks. After that, she’ll pull away from us at one and a quarter KPS-squared."

"Sarah?" Metcalf looked back at DuChene, and the lieutenant commander chewed her lip for a moment, then sighed unhappily.

"These birds weren’t designed to kill starships—not even small ones," she said, and Metcalf nodded impatiently. She was a tactical officer herself. But she was also a better pilot than DuChene, and the missiles were DuChene’s responsibility. "I can take her out, but it’ll be an awful long-range shot for our weapons at this range, especially if she knows they’re coming and takes evasive action. But if we’re only going to close the range by six hundred klicks..."

She paused, and Metcalf nodded in grim understanding while her thoughts flickered like lightning, considering options and outcomes, weighing and discarding alternatives.

Courier boats didn’t mount point defense, and they weren’t equipped with the sophisticated electronic warfare suites of warships. But the shuttle didn’t carry the nuclear and laser warheads which warships normally fired at one another, either. Even its limited number of impeller-head missiles, designed for combat with other small craft, had been expended during the breakout from Tepes. Those which remained were intended primarily for short-range work against planetary targets, and they all carried chemical warheads, and that was the problem. Although those warheads were many times as efficient as any chemical explosives from pre-Diaspora history, they still required direct hits, and at this range, scoring a direct hit against a non evading target would be hard enough with ground attack missiles. Worse, stopping anything the size of that courier boat would require multiple hits, not just one. All of which meant that at this range, they would have to fire without warning to prevent the target from taking evasive action or rolling to interpose its impeller wedge... and they couldn’t reduce the range enough to change that.

Which meant they couldn’t take the risk of even trying to convince the crew to surrender alive.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. They were supposed to be too confused to light their drive off this quickly, and we were supposed to get here sooner. It wouldn’t matter how short-legged our birds are if they couldn’t move. Hell, for that matter we could’ve forced them to surrender with plain old pulsers, because there wouldn’t have been anything else they could do! But now—

Now if she took a chance, demanded their surrender, gave them even the tiniest warning, they just might get clean away. And if they did, they would bring back enough firepower to turn Hell into a glazed billiard ball. And that meant—

All her flashing thoughts took less than three seconds, and she inhaled deeply.

"Take the shot," Lieutenant Commander Geraldine Metcalf said quietly.

And may God have mercy on us all.

* * *

"Sir, I’m picking up something overtaking from astern."

"What?" Proxmire spun his command chair to face his astrogator. "What kind of ‘something’?"

"I’m not certain, Sir." The woman was doubling for the courier boat’s absent tactical officer (although applying the term "tactical officer" to someone who controlled only sensors and no weapons had always struck Proxmire as a bit ridiculous), and she sounded doubtful as she tapped keys.

"It’s some kind of small craft," she announced a second later, "but I’m not getting a transponder code from it."

"No IFF?" Proxmire demanded as an icy fist seemed to grip his stomach and squeeze.

"No, Sir. It’s—" The woman froze, and then her head whipped towards Proxmire. "It’s launching on us! "

But by then the first of sixteen missiles were in final acquisition, and it was much too late.

* * *

"Wolf, this is Cub." The voice in Honor’s earbug sounded drained. "The target is dead. I repeat, the target is dead. We’re closing to look for survivors... but I don’t think there’ll be many."

"Understood, Cub," Honor said quietly. She looked down on the carnage below her. The Peeps were falling back—in fact, they were running for their lives—but they still had an enormous advantage in sheer numbers. She needed Metcalf and DuChene to return to Inferno and bring up the rest of the inmates as reinforcements, but she couldn’t tell them that. Not yet. Like them, she was a naval officer, and she, too, knew the code. You did not abandon possible survivors—yours or the enemy’s—and especially not when you were the one who had killed their ship. And yet—

"Expedite your search, Cub," she said calmly. "We need you down here ASAP."

"Understood, Wolf. We’ll make it as quick as we can," Metcalf replied, "and—" She paused suddenly, and then she laughed harshly, the sound cold and ugly with self-loathing. "It shouldn’t take long anyway. Her fusion bottle just failed."

Honor winced, but she couldn’t let herself think about that just now.

"Understood, Gerry," she said instead. And then she cut the circuit and turned her attention back to her targeting HUD, searching for more people to kill.

Chapter Twenty-Five

A chime sounded, and Honor looked up from the terminal in front of her. She pressed a button on the desk console which had once belonged to Citizen Brigadier Tresca, and the door to the office (which had also once belonged to Citizen Brigadier Tresca, but he was dead and no longer needed either of them) slid open to reveal Alistair McKeon in conversation with Andrew LaFollet. The armsman had left Honor's side long enough to participate in the capture of the vehicle park and picked up a minor flesh wound in the process. But Fritz Montoya had access to a proper base hospital again at last, and LaFollet's injury was responding nicely to quick heal. More to the point, perhaps, his Steadholder had a proper office for him to stand sentry outside of once again, and while he might still be out of his proper uniform, he'd settled back into his appointed role with an almost audible sigh of relief.

McKeon glanced up as the door opened and nodded to Honor over LaFollet's shoulder. He obviously wanted to finish whatever he'd been saying to her armsman, but his expression was grim, and her stomach muscles tightened as she caught the taste of his emotions. Warner Caslet was with him, and the Peep officer looked even grimmer than McKeon.

Nimitz raised his head from where he drowsed on the perch Honor and LaFollet had rigged for him. He'd been napping there a lot over the last five days, and despite her apprehension over whatever had brought McKeon here with such an expression, Honor felt her own spirits lift as she reached up to scratch the 'cat's ears. His buzzing purr and a gentle wave of love answered her caress, and then he rose and stretched deeply but carefully. His crippled mid-limb and twisted pelvis continued to stab him with pain at any injudicious movement, yet he radiated a sense of complacency as he contemplated the change in their circumstances. Not only was Styx much cooler than Camp Inferno had been, but the installations they'd captured from the Peeps even had air-conditioning. And as if that weren't enough, he'd quickly discovered that the huge StateSec farms on the island produced celery.

Actually, it had been Carson Clinkscales who'd discovered that fact. He'd turned up outside Honor's quarters on their second morning on Styx and almost shyly extended a fresh head of celery, still damp with dew, and Nimitz had been in heaven. He'd always been fond of Clinkscales, but the ensign's gift had moved the young Grayson officer into the select circle of his closest friends.

Honor smiled in memory, but then her smile faded. McKeon had finished whatever he'd been saying to LaFollet, and now he and Caslet walked into her office.

"Good morning, Alistair. Warner." She greeted them calmly, allowing herself to show no trace of her reaction to the anxiety they radiated.

"Good morning, Ma'am," Caslet said. McKeon only nodded, which would have been a sure sign of his worry even if she hadn't been able to feel his emotions, and she waved at the chairs which faced her desk.

They sat at her silent invitation, and she tipped back in her own new, comfortable chair to study them briefly. Their sojourn on Hell had given both of them weathered complexions and leaned them down—McKeon, in particular, had lost a good two centimeters of waistline. Well, that was fair enough. Even Honor's normally pale complexion had turned a golden bronze, and she'd actually begun getting back some of her muscle mass despite the awkwardness of exercising with only one arm. Which, a corner of her brain thought dryly, she had just discovered was nowhere near as awkward as trying to operate a console keyboard one-handed.

But the other thing Honor and McKeon had in common was the pulser each of them still wore... and which Caslet did not.

"You look unhappy about something, Alistair," she said after a moment. "Why?"

"We found two more bodies this morning, Ma'am," McKeon said flatly, and Honor winced at the bleak sense of helplessness behind his words. She quirked the eyebrow above her good eye, and his mouth twisted. Then he sighed. "It wasn't pretty, Honor. Whoever did it took their time with both of them. It looks to me like there must have been five or six killers, and some of the mutilations were definitely sexual."

"I see." She leaned back once more and rubbed her face with her fingers. It seemed almost natural after all these months to feel nothing at all from the pressure on her left cheek, and at the moment she wished she could feel nothing at all deep inside, either. But only for a moment. Then she crushed the self-pitying thought under a ruthless mental heel and lowered her hand.

"Any idea at all who did it?"

"I don't think it was any of our people from Inferno," McKeon replied, and glanced at Caslet.

"I don't think it was, either, Ma'am," the Peep said. In some ways, he had become even more isolated since the capture of Camp Charon, for the flood of SS prisoners they'd taken regarded him with the bitter contempt reserved for traitors, while the island's liberated slaves couldn't have cared less how he came to be here. All they cared about was that he was a Peep officer... and that was why he had to be accompanied at all times by an armed guard.

"Why not?" Honor asked him.

"Largely because of the mutilations, Ma'am," he replied steadily. "I'm sure some of the people from Inferno would love to massacre every SS thug they could lay hands on, and, to be honest, I don't blame them. But this—" He shook his head grimly. "Whoever did this really hated their targets. I'm no psych type, but the nature of the mutilations certainly suggests to me that at least some of the killers were people who'd been hauled back here as sex slaves. And, frankly," he met her gaze levelly, "I blame them even less for wanting revenge than I blame the people from Inferno."

"I see." Honor frowned down at her terminal, rubbing the edge of the console with a long index finger while she considered what he'd said.

He was right, of course. As Harriet Benson had told her that first day, the SS garrison had regarded the prisoners in their charge as property. Worse than that: as toys. And too many of them had played with their "toys" like cruel, spiteful children twisting the heads off puppies to see what would happen. Most of the outright sex slaves they'd dragged back to Styx had been political prisoners—civilians from the PRH itself—which had probably indicated at least a modicum of caution on the garrison's part. Most military services gave their people at least rudimentary hand-to-hand training, after all.

But the wheel had turned full circle now. Two-thirds of the SS garrison had been killed, wounded, or captured, but at least six or seven hundred of them had so far escaped apprehension. And on Styx, unlike the rest of Hell, they could actually go bush and live off the land while they tried to keep on evading capture. Honor and her allies had far too little manpower to hunt them down on an island this huge, and Styx had been so completely terraformed that, except for the warmer temperature and lower gravity, it actually made Honor homesick for Sphinx. Fugitives wouldn't even need to know a thing about edible wild plants, for the planetary farms covered scores of square kilometers.

Unfortunately for the Peeps, however, their slaves knew the island even better than they did. There had been a clandestine communication net between the sex slaves and the farms' slave laborers—many of whom had been playthings themselves before their "owners" tired of them—for decades. In fact, over twenty escaped slaves had been in hiding when Honor attacked Styx. They'd contrived their escapes by faking their own deaths—suicide by drowning had been a favorite, given the currents and deep-water predators off Styx's southwestern coast—and the farm laborers had concealed and helped feed some of them for years. But escaping discovery had required them to find hiding places all over the island... which meant the liberated slaves were much better than Honor's people at deducing where their erstwhile masters might be hiding now. For that matter, they were better at it than the Peeps were at finding hiding places on the run, and some of them had no interest at all in waiting for the courts-martial Honor and Jesus Ramirez had promised them. Nor were they shy about dumping the results of their grisly handiwork where other fleeing Peeps might find it.

The good news, she thought, is that sheer terror is probably going to encourage the rest of the garrison to turn themselves in before someone catches up and murders them. The bad news is that I never wanted anything like this to happen. I promised them justice, not animal vengeance, and I won't let myself or people under my command be turned into the very thing I hate!

She drew a deep breath and looked up from the console. "I suppose I can't really blame them for wanting to get even either," she said quietly, and saw her friends' eyes flicker to the dead side of her own face. She ignored that and shook her head. "Nonetheless, we have our own responsibilities as civilized human beings, and that means we can't let this pass unchallenged, however much we may sympathize with the killers' motivations. Warner," she turned her good eye on the Peep officer, "I want you to talk to the prisoners. I know they hate you... and I know you hate talking to them. But you're the closest thing we've got to a neutral party."

She paused, watching him intently. His expression was pinched, but finally he nodded.

"Thank you," she said softly. "What do you want me to say to them, Ma'am?"

"Tell them what's been happening. Explain to them that I don't want it to go on, but that I simply don't have the manpower to stop it or patrol the entire island."

McKeon twitched unhappily in his chair at that, and she gave him a crooked half-grin.

"It's not going to come as any surprise to them, Alistair, and it's not like we'll be giving away critical military information! Besides, prison guards are always outnumbered by their prisoners. The whole reason to build a prison is to economize on your guard force, and these people certainly know that if anyone does! And if they get any ideas, all they have to do is look up at the tribarrels in the watch towers around their compound to see why acting on them would be a serious mistake."