Honor Harrington (№7) - In Enemy Hands

His mouth tightened, and he wiped his face again, using the towel to hide his expression from the others as he remembered the one person who had accepted an offer from the Peeps. The pain of that cut deep, deeper than he'd ever imagined it could. Deeper, he sometimes thought, even than hearing that sadistic piece of human garbage sentence Lady Harrington to death. In the cosmic scale of events, Horace Harkness' defection probably didn't mean all that much. Its effect on the war would be minuscule, and as sources of anguish went, it shouldn't even come close to knowing that the woman Tremaine respected most in all the galaxy was going to die. He knew all that. But he also knew that what should be true and what was true were very different things.

He lowered the towel and sat on his bunk, staring at the featureless bulkhead, and despite anything he could do, his mind insisted on returning to his first deployment to Basilisk Station. He'd been almost as young as Carson Clinkscales and, hard as he tried to hide it, uncertain and afraid, but Harkness had taken him in hand. He'd taught a junior officer to be an officer, not by telling him what to do, but by showing him. By testing and pushing him, yes, but in the immemorial tradition not simply of the Queens Navy but of all navies. No doubt grizzled boatswains had taken young Carthaginian landlubbers in hand and made officers of them for the Punic Wars, Scotty thought, for that was a senior noncom's job. Whatever else their duties might include, they were the true keepers of the tribal wisdom, the elders responsible for setting each new generations feet upon the trail, and Horace Harkness had done that for Scotty Tremaine.

But he hadn't stopped there, and Scotty's eyes burned as he remembered all the other things he and Harkness had done together. Other than a single year when he'd been reassigned from the heavy cruiser Fearless to Captain McKeon’s Troubadour before the First Battle of Yeltsin, he and the senior chief had always been together. They'd served in Prince Adrian, and gone through Third Yeltsin together aboard her, and they'd been at the first two battles of Nightingale, as well. And when Scotty had transferred to HMS Wayfarer, Harkness had followed him, and the two of them had saved one another's lives... and those of every other survivor of the crippled Q-ship’s crew. He'd never been able to define their relationship, it hadn't been something that required definition, yet it had always been there, and deep inside, Scotty Tremaine had known he could never truly lose hope, however desperate the situation or however impossible the odds, as long as he had Harkness by his side.

And now he didn't, and it was as if some fundamental principle of physics had violated itself. One of the unwavering certainties of his life had crumbled in his hand, and that deeply wounded part of him wanted to scream at the universe for betraying him so. Only it wasn't the universe which had done it, and tantrums would change nothing.

He drew a deep breath and held it, mourning the death of the man Horace Harkness once had been, and once more forced himself to set his grief aside. It would return. He knew that, but he was also the senior officer in this compartment. It was his job to lead, to set an example, and he remembered the lessons Harkness had taught him before the final betrayal, and the need to live up to those lessons had taken on a strange, added urgency. It was almost as if as long as he honored them, in some perverse way it would mean Harkness hadn't fallen. And it was what Lady Harrington would have expected of him, and Captain McKeon. There were some people it was simply unthinkable to fail, and Scotty wondered if McKeon or Lady Harrington would ever know that it was the impossibility of allowing himself to come up short against their standards, not courage or dedication or patriotism, which truly kept him from admitting his despair to Clinkscales or Mayhew or Jamie Candless and Robert Whitman.

And, he admitted, pushing himself to his feet once more, it was Horace Harkness, as well. He'd learned the senior chief's lessons too well to abandon them now, whatever might have happened aboard Tepes.

James Candless watched Lieutenant Commander Tremaine cross the compartment to Ensign Clinkscales. Despite his own official status as a Marine officer, Candless felt out of place confined with these officers, and he knew Whitman felt the same. But he also knew that the true reason they felt so adrift and anchorless was that the central focus of their lives had been taken from them. They were Grayson armsmen, and their Steadholder was imprisoned and condemned to die, and they were still alive.

That was the shame they both bore, Candless thought as Tremaine lowered himself to sit beside Clinkscales and speak quietly and encouragingly to the ensign. They should have died before they allowed anyone to lay hands on the Steadholder, and they hadn't. They hadn't been present when the Peeps sentenced her to death, and the officers who had been there hadn't wanted to tell them what had happened, but they knew. It wasn't their fault, yet that changed nothing. The Steadholder had been beaten and clubbed to the floor. Nimitz had been crippled and half-killed. And the woman they were sworn to protect had been dragged off, alone in the hands of people who hated her.

Candless gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as he fought the agony of failure. He knew Whitman shared it, yet not even Whitman knew the full depth of his own despair. For six years Candless had watched the Steadholder’s back, he and Major LaFollet. For six years, always in their proper place, guarding her against her enemies and, when the need arose, against herself, against her own courage and need to risk herself for others. And now she was alone, Tester only knew where, enduring Tester only knew what abuse and knowing she would die, and Jamie Candless would be denied even the right to die by her side.

He opened his eyes once more, watching Tremaine and Clinkscales, seeing the new maturity in the ensign's face and recognizing the way in which facing his own helplessness had burned away Clinkscales' youthful uncertainty. He turned his head to glance at Whitman, washing his uniform by hand in the lavatory, and then at Lieutenant Mayhew, sitting in one corner and playing chess against Surgeon Lieutenant Walker on a board which existed only in their minds. They were going on, all of them, because they refused to give up, but for how much longer would that be true? Even if they'd known the voyage time to Hades, they had no chrono, no calendar, no way to tell how long they'd already been aboard. But they knew they would arrive eventually, and what then? What would happen when the Steadholder was dead, and they were only so many more nameless, forgotten inmates in a planet-sized prison? He didn't know the answers to those questions, but it didn't really matter, for those answers wouldn't apply to him. He could no more save the Steadholder than he could somehow capture this entire ship, but one thing he could do, and the decision had come surprisingly easily to someone who'd never realized he harbored a strand of the berserker. They wouldn't let him die with the Steadholder... but sooner or later, somewhere, sometime, his chance would come. Not immediately. He refused to act hastily, for it was important he succeed, and he was determined that he would. At least one of them. At least one of the bastards in their black and red uniforms before he made them kill him, that was all he asked for... and all in the universe he would ever want again.

"All right, cell bait. Get dressed!" The sneering female guard threw the orange jumpsuit at Honor with one hand and stood back, peeling the thin plastic glove from her other hand.

Honor caught the scratchy fabric without even looking, staring straight in front of her as she had ever since the two guards entered her cell for the regular postmeal "suicide watch search." There were always two of them for the degrading ritual. Usually, as today, the second was Sergeant Bergren, who took special delight in any opportunity to humiliate her, but if it hadn't been him it would have been Hayman, or perhaps Timmons himself, for the second guard was always male. That was part of the degradation.

Even State Security had rules. Its personnel might ignore or violate them, but the official procedures existed, and, on paper, at least, they looked almost reasonable. But Timmons and his detail of two-legged animals understood how twisting those procedures without, quite, technically violating them only allowed even more scope to humiliate and debase anyone unfortunate enough to fall into their power. The letter of the regulations said strip searches and cavity searches of prisoners could be carried out only by security personnel of the same sex, and Timmons insisted that his thugs abide by that. But the regs also stipulated that a minimum of two guards must be present any time a priority prisoner was subjected to searches... and that second guard was always male.

Honor understood what Timmons expected that to do to her. Once he might even have been right to expect it, too. But not now. The years when the shadow of Pavel Young had blighted her life were long over, for she'd come to grips with its poison. The days she'd spent working out with men had helped put it behind her, but what had truly forced the poison from her system had been Paul Tankersley’s love, and she drew the memory of that love about her now, like armor. The animal behind the leering eyes gloating over her naked humiliation might be male, but whatever else he was, Honor would never call him a man, and the bottomless contempt she felt for him, and for all her captors, fused with her memories of Paul and her own refusal to let such creatures defeat her. It was that fusion of strengths, each potent in its own right and yet so much more than the sum of their parts when all of them flowed together, which let her catch the jumpsuit without even a change of expression or the flicker of an eyelid.

She started to put it on, gazing at the blank bulkhead as she ignored her guards, and under their surface delight in mocking and humiliating her, she sensed their deeper bafflement and anger. She confused them, for with no way to know the true wellsprings of her strength, they couldn't understand it. They couldn't grasp what allowed her to maintain her maddening lack of response, but they knew that it wasn't the same thing as passivity. That this prisoner chose to ignore them as a form of defiance, not escape or surrender. Whatever the source of her inner toughness, it allowed her to elude them in a deep, fundamental way no one else had ever achieved, and they hated her for it.

Honor understood their confusion. All their experience told them their abuse and systematic denial of her humanity should have broken her. It should have brought her defiance crashing down, for it always had before, and on the surface of things, she knew, it should have done so this time, as well.

Her grim, featureless cell had no mirror, but she didn't need one to know what she looked like. Their precious regulations proscribed any sort of cybernetic prostheses or bioenhancement for prisoners, and one of their techs had disabled her artificial eye... and the synthetic nerves in the left side of her face. It had been a gratuitous insult, a gloating deprivation which served no useful purpose. Certainly there had been no possible way in which her eye or facial nerves could be considered a "security risk"! But that hadn't prevented them from doing it, and the relative crudity of their tech base had prevented them from simply shutting her implants down. With neither the access codes nor the technology to derive them, they'd taken a brute force approach and simply burned them out, blinding her left eye and reducing half her face to dead, numb immobility. Honor suspected the damage was irreparable and that complete replacement would be required... or would have been, if she'd been going to live long enough to receive it.

Nor had their petty cruelties stopped there. They'd shaved her head under the guise of "hygiene," cutting away the braids she'd spent so many years growing. But there, at least, their efforts to dehumanize her had hit a pothole that actually amused her, for they seemed unaware that she'd cut her own hair almost that short for the better part of thirty years for the sake of convenience. Whatever they might have hoped, the loss of her braids was scarcely likely to cause her resistance to crumble.

Yet for all that her spirit remained unbroken, she also knew, mirror or no, that her confinement was gradually grinding her away. Timmons seemed unaware of her enhanced metabolism or its need for fuel. She didn't know if that was true or if he simply wanted her to beg for the additional food she required, and it didn't really matter. She'd long since decided she would die before asking him for anything.

The living side of her face had grown gaunt, and her muscle tone was slowly rotting under the impact of poor diet and lack of exercise. She knew Cordelia Ransom had wanted her in good shape for the cameras when they hanged her, and she took a certain grim, perverse satisfaction in knowing what Ransom would actually get. Yet inside, where she guarded the walls of her spirits fortress, she knew she was growing dangerously detached. She had no clear idea how long she'd been in this cell where the light and the temperature never changed, where there was nothing to read or do, where no distraction was ever offered except for her meals and the mocking humiliation of the guards. No doubt they were drawing close to their destination and her execution, yet somehow that hardly seemed to matter. She hadn't spoken a word to her captors in the entire time she'd been here, however long that had been, and she sometimes thought, in the drifting stillness of her thoughts when she was alone, that perhaps she had forgotten how to speak. In an odd sort of way, she'd become a mute, withdrawing from the parts of her brain which engaged others in conversation in order to buttress the vital areas of her core. There was a sense of diminution in that loss of speech, a sense of yet another anchor to the world about her fraying its cable, and she knew it was only one facet of her own deliberate internal disconnection from the sadists who controlled her physical existence.

But there was one other anchor, one her guards knew nothing about, which she knew would never fail her. It was faint, reduced by distance to a shadow of what it once had been, yet it was there, and because it was, she knew that Nimitz was still alive.

She clung to that anchor, not as a drowning woman to a spar, but as a lover to her beloved, for she felt his pain, physical, continuing still, and spiritual as he sensed her pain and could not heal it, and she knew that now, as never before, they needed one another. And that one blessing, at least, they had, for none of the sadistic, hating creatures aboard PNS Tepes ever guessed their link still existed, that they fed one another over it. Not with hope, for there was no hope, but with something more important. With love. With the absolute assurance that they would always be there for one another, that neither of them would be allowed to go down into the dark alone, whatever the Peeps intended.

And that was the final leg of her strength, the one Lieutenant Timmons and Sergeant Bergren and Corporal Hayman could never take from her.

She stepped into the bottom of the jumpsuit and started to work her arms into the top's sleeves, but a hand gripped her shoulder. She stopped dressing, standing motionless, and despite her hard-won detachment, her heart beat harder, for it was Bergren's hand.

"Getting close to arrival day, cell bait," he told her, and his gloating voice was right behind her ear, his breath hot on her bare skin. "Not long before that stiff neck of yours is gonna get a little longer." She said nothing, and not a muscle twitched, but he laughed, and his fingers squeezed her shoulder in a mocking parody of a caress. "I'm thinking maybe you'd like a little comforting before they haul your worthless ass to the gallows," he said, and his grip tightened, forcing her to turn to face him.

His eyes roamed over her, and she felt the sickness behind them. There was no trace of comparison between the lust he felt and what she and Paul had shared. Indeed, Bergren's diseased hunger was worse even than what she had sensed from Pavel Young. Young had hated her. He'd wanted to punish her because her rejection of his advances had humiliated him in front of those he considered his peers. It had been a stupid, shallow hate, the hate of a person to whom other human beings were never people, but simply things which existed for his convenience, but at least it had been personal.

Bergren's hate wasn't. It didn't matter to him who or what she was, except in as much as her passive resistance had frustrated his efforts to make her fear him. She might have been anyone, anyone at all, for the only thing that truly mattered to him was the infliction of pain. Physical, mental, spiritual... that didn't matter to him either, for his need to hurt and punish sprang not from any specific offense anyone had ever committed against him. It sprang from all of them, from every real or imagined slight or indignity he had ever "suffered." There was nothing to him but hate, and an empty core which hungered to devour and destroy anyone who refused to share his hate.

Her artificial left eye was dead, its pupil fixed and its focus unchanging, but despite all she could do, her right eye flickered with cold contempt for the human-shaped corruption before her, and his mouth tightened in a snarl.

"Yeah, cell bait," he told her, his voice softer and still uglier. "I think you need some comfort. So why don't you just open those legs of yours?"

He licked his lips, and his eyes flicked to the female guard. Not that there was any chance she might intervene, for she was as diseased as any of Timmons' male personnel, and her anticipation was even more sickening than Bergren's.

"C'mere, cell bait," he whispered, and the hand on her shoulder pulled her closer while his free hand reached for her breasts.

But it never touched them. As he reached forward, Honor's left hand shot up like a striking viper, and he hissed in sudden pain as her fingers locked on his wrist like a vise. He tried to jerk free, but her hand might have been a steel clamp. Her passivity had lulled him into forgetting her heavy-grav origins, just as it had convinced him she would always be passive, and sudden fear, darker, uglier, and far stronger for its total unexpectedness, flickered in his eyes as she tightened her grip still further and the right side of her mouth curved in a parody of a smile.

"Get your hand off me."

The five words came out with a soft, dangerous clarity which surprised even Honor after so many endless days of silence. There was steel behind them, and a hunger which echoed Bergren’s own, and for just an instant, they froze his blood. But he recovered quickly, and stepped forward, trying to drive her back against the bulkhead.

It didn't work. She scarcely even swayed, and then he grunted hoarsely, as she twisted her hand and the sudden explosion of pain in his wrist drove him to his knees.

"Let him up, bitch!" The other guard stepped forward, reaching for the truncheon on her belt, and Honor turned her head to look into the other woman's eyes.

"Touch me with that club, and I'll break your spine," she said flatly, and the SS woman froze before her total assurance. Then she shook herself.

"I don't think so, cell bait!" she sneered. "You aren't going anywhere even if you do, and you won't like what the rest of 'em will do if you even try. Besides, you've got friends topside, remember?"

She stepped forward with renewed confidence... and Bergren screamed as his wrist snapped in Honor's grip. She kicked him away from her and turned to face his companion, and the female guard flinched away from the cold, hungry fire in her eye.

"You're right," Honor told her softly. "I do have friends 'topside,' and you can make me play your sick little games by threatening them. But not this one. Not even for them. And in case you've forgotten, Ransom wants me 'undamaged,' remember? So play your other games, Peep, but tell the rest of the garbage there are limits." Bergren started to heave to his knees, clutching his wrist, but Honor's right foot shot out, and its bare sole crashed into his mouth. He slammed into the corner, groaning and half-conscious, and the other guard shuddered, afraid, and hating Honor all the more for her fear.

"You can come back with your friends and do whatever you want," she said in that same soft voice. "I know that. But you'd better bring all of them, Peep, and after it's over, there's no way, no way in this universe, you'll deliver me to Ransom alive."

The live half of her lips smiled a thin, terrifying smile, and the guard stepped back involuntarily, clutching her truncheon, trying to understand how the balance of power in this cell could shift so totally in such a tiny instant when she held all the cards. But then she looked into the single brown eye of the gaunt, half-naked woman facing her, and a wolf looked back at her, a wounded pack leader, starved and weakened, who had been goaded and harried by the hounds on its back trail but would be harried no more. A wolf who would die where it stood rather than be driven further. A wolf, she realized shakenly, who was actually willing, perhaps even eager, to die if only it could lock its fangs on the throats of the mongrels howling at its heels.

She looked into that hungry, dangerous eye, and she knew then. Knew exactly how the balance had shifted.

She removed her hand very carefully from her truncheon, and, never taking her eyes from Honors face, bent down, hoisted a moaning, semiconscious Bergren to his feet, and dragged him from the cell without another word. And as she locked the door behind her, a deeply hidden part of her wondered uneasily if she was locking the wolf into its cage... or herself safely outside it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

"So what's on the schedule today?"

Horace Harkness, late of the Manticoran Navy, leaned back in the comfortable recliner, hands folded behind his head, and wiggled his bootless toes at his "escorts" as he asked the question. Citizen Corporal Heinrich Johnson and Citizen Private Hugh Candleman had been assigned as his permanent keepers when he decided to change sides. Their purpose had been plain enough, to discourage any thoughts of inappropriate activities on his part, and Harkness knew the two State Security goons had been chosen because they were big, strong, tough, and well trained in the art of dismantling their fellow man with their bare hands. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that those qualities pretty much exhausted the list of their employable skills, but no one could have everything.

"Not much, I think," Johnson replied. The corporal wasn't as broad as Harkness, but he was several centimeters taller, and he looked impressive in his black-and-red uniform as he fished in his tunic pocket for his memo pad. He found it and keyed the display, then squinted down at it. "Got another HD interview scheduled for thirteen-thirty," he announced after a moment. "Then Citizen Commander Jewel wants to talk to you about the Manties' com systems some more. That's scheduled for, uh, seventeen hundred. 'Side from that, you've got nothing but free time." He shoved the pad back into his pocket and chuckled. "Looks like they must really like you, Harkness."

"What's not to like?" Harkness replied with a lazy grin, and both StateSec men laughed. A prize like Horace Harkness didn't drop into Public Information's lap every day, and the fact that he was a missile tech familiar with the FTL transmitters mounted in the Manties' recon drones made him even more valuable as a source of technical data R&D would make good use of. But the larger implications of propaganda broadcasts and technological information were beyond Johnson and Candleman’s mental horizons. They had their own reasons to be happy Harkness had decided to defect, and those reasons had nothing at all to do with his value to the PRH in general.

"So, you have any luck with Parley's Crossing yet?" Candleman asked now, and Harkness' grin turned from lazy to evil.

"Oh ye of little faith," he murmured. "I told you I could, ah, enhance the odds, didn't I? Here."

He drew a data chip from his shirt pocket and sailed it across the compartment to Candleman, who caught it eagerly. The private peered down at the featureless chip as if he thought he should be able to read its data with his unassisted eye, and for all Harkness knew, Candleman did think so.

"How's it work?" Johnson asked from where he lounged against the opposite bulkhead, and Harkness shrugged.

"Its a more complicated than the others 'cause there's so many more variables," he said, "and the multiplayer versions complicate things even further. So instead of setting it up so you guys can predict the outcome, I set it up so you can force the outcome while you're playing."

"Huh?" Candleman put in, and Harkness hid a desire to sigh in exasperation behind another friendly smile.

Technically, both his watchdogs were high school graduates, and Johnson actually had two years of college on his resume. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon one's perspective, they'd both been Dolists, and their schooling had been provided courtesy of the PRH's educational system. It had been theoretically possible to acquire a worthwhile education from that source, but doing so had required an individual to use the resources available to educate himself, because after so many decades of debasing the concept of achievement in the name of "democratization" and "student validation," no one in the teaching establishment had had a clue as to how to truly educate someone else.

The problem was that genuinely self-motivated people are rare. Without someone else to explain it to them, most young people don't understand why learning is important in the first place. There are always exceptions to that broad generalization, but the majority of human beings learn from experience, not precept, and until someone experiences the consequences of being uneducated, he seldom feels a driving need to correct the situation. Creating a desire to learn in someone who hasn't already been caught in the gears requires an entire support structure, a society in which ones elders make it clear that one is expected to acquire knowledge and training in its use. And that sort of society was precisely what the prewar Dolists had lacked, for the Basic Living Stipend had been handed over like clockwork however unproductive they might have been. Besides, what had there been for a Dolist to use an education on?

Perhaps even worse, the prewar Legislaturalists had gone to some lengths to make the answer to that last question "nothing," for knowledge was a dangerous thing. They hadn't wanted the Dolists educated or involved in making the system work. They might have been an almost intolerable, parasitic drag on a moribund economy, but as long as the BLS had sufficed to support their accustomed lifestyles, they'd felt no particular urge to demand the right to participate in the making of political decisions. That, after all, had been the original bargain between their ancestors and those of the Legislaturalists. In return for being "taken care of," the citizens of the PRH had surrendered all decision-making to the people who ran the machine, and until the machine collapsed, no one had felt any need to fix the host of things wrong with it.

On the grand scale, the mutual suicide pact between the Legislaturalists and their education establishment was academic as far as Harkness was concerned, but on a personal level, its consequences had become very important indeed, for Johnson and Candleman were typical products of the system from which they came. That meant they suffered from an appalling ignorance few Manticorans would have believed was possible. People who could barely handle basic math or, like Candleman, suffered from what anything but the Peep Office of Education would have called functional illiteracy, were of strictly limited utility to a modern war machine, because maintaining or servicing any equipment more complex than a pulse rifle required at least some familiarity with the basic principles of electronics, cybernetics, gravity theory, and any of scores of other disciplines. Anyone could be trained to operate modern hardware, simply surviving in a technological society required at least a surface competence, but for people like Johnson and Candleman, that competence was like the math ability conferred by learning to make change in a shopping mall. They had no more comprehension of what went on behind the input keys and the displays than someone from preindustrial Terra would have had.

That was the main reason the majority of maintenance duties in the People’s Navy were assigned either to officers or to senior noncoms. If the prewar PN had wanted competent technicians, it had been forced to train them itself, and it simply hadn't had most of its conscripts long enough to overcome the disabilities with which they arrived. Its only real choice had been to train them first as operators and only secondly as true technicians, and that took time. Years of it, in most cases, which meant it was only really practical to train the people who formed its long-term, professional core.