by David Weber
"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 and the shuttle's forward bulkhead, less than a meter in front of her, another part looked up through Nimitz’s eyes at Fritz Montoya as the doctor bent urgently over him. The touch of Montoya’s hands was gentle, yet each contact sent fresh agony ripping through them both, and the part of them which was still Honor hoped desperately that Fritz knew what he was doing. But he was trained in human physiology, not Sphinxian, and she tried to strangle at birth her dread of his potential ignorance, before the half of them which was Nimitz detected it.
She blinked again, gritted her teeth, and fought the duality of her senses. It was hard, hard, for every fiber of her being cried out to be with Nimitz. To share his pain in hopes of somehow easing it, and to prove to him he was not alone. Yet the maelstrom of pain and fear and need, not just hers and Nimitz's, but beating in from all the other prisoners in the shuttle, as well, sucked at her too strongly, crippling her ability to think, and she knew Nimitz was too lost in his own pain even to realize she was there. And so she battled to separate herself from him, to become herself once more.
She succeeded, and her success sent a flash of shame through her, as if she had somehow abandoned the 'cat. The need to go to him physically sent her wrists turning against their manacles, muscles straining to break free of them as if she thought she could somehow reach him if only she were unchained, but it was useless. She merely bruised herself, and even if she'd been unfettered, the SS guards would simply have clubbed her down once more if she tried to get to him. Her memory of events in the terminal lounge was chaotic, but she knew that much, and she set her teeth and fought for self-mastery.
At least the pain stabbing into her proved Nimitz was alive. She wanted to sob in relief at the knowledge, yet she couldn't understand why he was. She and the 'cat had recognized the gloating pleasure dancing behind Ransom's order to kill him. It was that pleasure, the certainty that Ransom truly meant it, which had spurred them to action, for they'd known they had nothing to lose. But somehow, for some reason, Nimitz was still alive, and she slowly exerted control over the pain and the confusing mental echoes of that closer union with the 'cat and made herself now that could be true.
Vague memories flickered, just beyond her grasp. She remembered launching Nimitz at Ransom clearly enough, and her own brief fight before the guards battered her to the floor, but everything else was foggy and unclear. She recalled a brief image of LaFollet, fighting to reach her side, and one of McKeon being beaten to his knees, and she bit her lip as she realized how dearly her defiance might have cost the others. But nothing suggested a reason for Nimitz to still be alive, unless...
She frowned as the faint echo of a voice threaded itself through her memories. She couldn't quite summon the words back to her, but she recognized the voice. It belonged to Shannon Foraker, and if she couldn't recall the words, their urgency came back to her clearly. Somehow Shannon must have convinced Ransom not to kill Nimitz on the spot, but how? And at what cost to herself?
Honor had no answers to those questions, and she turned her head, looking for someone else to ask them of. But there was no one beside her. She was alone in the front row of seats in which her body had been dumped, and she started to turn to look behind her, only to gasp in pain as a hand twisted cruelly in her hair. It kept her from turning, forced her to stare directly in front of her, and she locked her teeth still harder, cutting off any other sign of how much it hurt, as her tormentor spoke.
"You just stay where the hell you are, chica." It was the SS captain who'd taken over the detail, and her accent was tantalizingly familiar. It took Honor a few seconds to realize that she'd heard it before, from Tomas Ramirez and other refugees from the Peeps' conquest of San Martin, the inhabited planet of Trevor’s Star, and she wondered how the woman behind her felt now that her home world had been conquered in turn by the Alliance. At the moment, however, the origin of her accent meant far less to Honor than the sneering pleasure in her voice. "You don't talk, you don't turn your head, you don't do anything unless someone tells you to. You got that?"
Honor said nothing, and the hand in her hair turned its wrist, actually lifting her a few millimeters out of the seat by her scalp. San Martin’s gravity was much heavier even than Sphinx's, and Honor bit her lip hard as the guard demonstrated the strength her birth world had given her. Honor had never imagined that simply pulling someone's hair could hurt that much, and the SS thug's voice went colder and harsher.
"I asked if you got that, chica!" she snapped.
"Yes." Honor made herself say the one word in the flattest voice she could, and managed, somehow, not to gasp in relief as the other woman snickered and released her hair with a contemptuous flicking motion. The pulsing of Nimitz’s pain fogged Honor's ability to read the emotions of others, but she didn't need it to recognize the other's vicious satisfaction... and anticipation. This wasn't one of the cold, emotionless ones, Honor realized. This was one of the ones who enjoyed her work.
"Good. You're gonna have enough fun on the trip to Hell anyway, chica. Believe me, you don't want to borrow any more," the woman said.
Honor heard the soft brush of uniform fabric on upholstery as her tormentor leaned back in the seat behind her. Even without looking, Honor knew there was no one else in that row, either. Her captors had used it like some sort of moat, cutting her off from the support of her officers by physically separating her from them, and she knew it was only the first step.
Ransoms intentions were clear enough. Over the years, the PRH’s security forces had discovered that it was much more effective to "disappear" troublemakers. It was a tactic InSec had used often enough against opponents of the Legislaturalist regime, and StateSec had brought it to a new, all-pervasive height. And it worked, she thought grimly, for there was an infinitely greater terror in knowing people you cared for could simply vanish. Death was terrible, yet it was an end, a conclusion. Disappearance was simply the doorway to ignorance and the cruelest emotion of all: hope that the one you loved still lived... somewhere. Which was what made it so effective, the ripple effect of a single "disappeared" individual could keep a dozen others in line in hopes that their submission would buy the life and eventual return of the person they loved.
> But her case was different, for Ransom had orchestrated that entire confrontation before the cameras to officially justify Honors execution. No doubt she could change her mind about going public later, the Secretary of Public Information could kill any story she wanted to, after all, but Honor didn't believe she would. She wanted her enemies, foreign and domestic, real or imagined, to know what had happened to Honor, and that meant Honors death would be a special feature on the evening news. She could picture the solemn warnings about "violent content" and "viewer discretion," for they always preceded the broadcast imagery of "enemies of the People" paying for their crimes. Indeed, she was almost surprised, in a distant way, that she hadn't already been shot. There had to be countless convenient spots here in the Barnett System where a minor detail like that could be dealt with, so why send her all the way out to Camp Charon?
It was pointless to wonder about such details, but she couldn't stop herself. There was a sort of dreadful fascination to contemplating her own cold-blooded murder, and she wondered if perhaps Ransom had chosen Camp Charon for her execution in order to confirm the facility's existence. If so, the event would mark a major change in a policy InSec had established decades earlier and StateSec had maintained since, and one of those detached corners of her brain wondered if she should be flattered to be the catalyst for it.
For seventy-odd years, the Legislaturalists and then the Committee of Public Safety had steadfastly denied that there was any such planet as Hades or place as Camp Charon. Their existence was no more than a vicious rumor circulated by opponents of the regime, with no foundation in fact. Indeed, the Legislaturalists' denials had been so consistent that the Star Kingdom’s intelligence agencies had almost been prepared to believe them. After all, as more than one analyst had pointed out, rumors of such a prison planet would be almost as effective as the reality for controlling the Peep population, and feeding the rumor mill would also be far cheaper than actually creating a Camp Charon.
But the consensus had been that the camp was real, and over the years a few dozen once-"disappeared" enemies had been "rehabilitated" amid rumors they'd been held there. And their fragmentary descriptions fitted together to paint a picture of the planet officially named Hades but called "Hell" by anyone who had ever been sent there. No one outside the PRH’s security forces knew where it was, but all reports agreed escape was impossible, and stories abounded that the most recalcitrant military and political prisoners the Republic had taken in seventy T-years had been dispatched to its surface.
And now Ransom intended to use the occasion of Honors execution to confirm the places existence. For a moment, the thought that Ransom felt so threatened, that she believed the Committee of Public Safety's control was so fragile, that she wanted to be certain her enemies knew the iron fist really existed, that all the rumors of the suppressive power of StateSec were founded on fact, woke a distant stir of hope within Honor. It was like proof that there was a chink in the enemy's armor.
But any elation died even more quickly than it had come. Whatever all of this might imply about the ultimate fate of the People’s Republic and the outcome of the war, Honor Harrington would not be around to see it happen, and she felt the hopelessness of her future crash in on her once more while she stared at the bulkhead. She knew she was supposed to feel hopeless, that the female thug behind her had deliberately driven that feeling home as the first step in crushing her spirit, but knowing that and being able to resist it were two different things. Her memory replayed the exact words of Cordelia Ransoms sentence of death again and again, like a defective recording, as if, she thought, something inside her were determined to grind home the lesson that she and Nimitz had no future. It was a stupid thought, yet she couldn't shake it off, and she wasn't certain she even wanted to, for somehow the act of admitting what awaited her left her feeling washed out and clear. Perhaps it was the confirmation, she thought. Perhaps actually hearing herself condemned had resolved the uncertainty and extinguished the last tormenting embers some stubborn scrap of hope had kept alive.
In its own way, there was a mercy in that. If there was no longer any hope, then neither was there any reason to act as if there were, and she felt the comfort of apathy reaching out to her. She could let go of her dignity, she thought almost dreamily. She could abandon the pretense of pride and courage, for clinging to those qualities would only challenge her captors to crush them, and surely they had no real significance to a dead woman. Why try to maintain the mask, play the role of the Queen's officer facing adversity with fortitude?
Just let go, an inner voice urged. They're going to do their best to break you, you've already seen that much, so why not let them? Why put yourself through what trying to stop them will cost you? Go along with them, play whatever part they insist you play. It won't mean anything. It would only mean something if you had a choice. If there were any option that would let it make a difference, and there isn't one.
It was insidious, that voice, and tempting, and a coldly rational core of her knew it was even right. There was no logical reason to subject herself to what her captors would do if she defied them, not when she was going to die in the end, anyway. But there were reasons, she realized, thoughts still wandering with that odd, crystal clarity. Not logical ones, no, but reasons which were no less important because they were illogical.
In the end, no one except the Peeps would know what she did and how she did it, nor would the way she conducted herself mean a thing to anyone... except her. That was the crux of it. How she faced her captors and her death mattered to her, and if she was going to die, and if Nimitz was going to die with her, they must do so on their feet. Not because she was a Queen's officer. Not even because she owed her people an example. She was, and she did, and that was important, but that identity and that debt were simply part and parcel of who she was. In the ultimate analysis, they mattered only because they mattered to her, not because of what anyone else might think. No. The real reason for refusing to surrender was that she and Nimitz owed themselves that final dignity, that last defiance of the people like the woman behind her who would do anything in their power to take it from them. Resisting their enemies would invite those enemies to fill whatever time she and her beloved friend had left with brutality and humiliation, yet even as she faced that, she also felt a subtle strength flowing back into her.
It wasn't like the strength she'd summoned when she took a ship into combat, or like the courage she donned like armor when she led her people to what she expected to be their deaths. As she faced herself in that moment of odd clarity, she realized that the strength she'd summoned on those other occasions had always held an edge of... not bravado, but something like it. Something that was real enough, but intended for others, not for her. In a way, it was a gift, a power which came to her from outside to permit her to carry her people with her when there was nothing else. A confluence of duty and responsibility, of the determination to do her job because others depended upon her, because she'd sworn an oath to do it and would die before she broke that promise, and because the rules required her to play the game out to the final throw. And behind that intersection of duty, determination, and the needs of others was tradition, the example of the Star Kingdom’s great captains, who served as model, inspiration, and challenge in one. How many times had she reached out to share the mantle of Edward Saganami or Travis Webster or Ellen D'Orville without even realizing that was what she was doing?
But the strength she felt now had nothing to do with those external sources or the need to do her duty for the sake of others. For the first time in her memory, she stood in a place where none of those things mattered. No, that wasn't right. They mattered, but they'd become secondary, subordinate to her duty to herself and to Nimitz, and their support had become secondary as well. What she felt now was her strength, hers and Nimitz’s, and the desperation faded from her eyes as that awareness flowed into her.
How odd, she thought. She'd had to come to this point, to realize everything she
was and all she might yet have become were going to end, to be blotted out, to find the true strength hidden at her core. But she'd found it now, and as she looked at it with clear mental eyes, she realized this strength had no end. It might fade, might be driven out of her for a time. Indeed, it could be suppressed and overborne again and again, but it would always return, for it was her and she was it. She was too self-honest and too much the realist to lie to herself. Given enough time and determination, experts like the creatures who worked for State Security could destroy anyone, yet in its own way, that was the point. They could destroy her. With the right drugs, the right abuse and pressures, they could smash her, even reprogram her into someone else entirely. But that was simply another form of execution, and so long as she lived, so long as a trace of the person she was and had always been remained, so would the strength which filled her now. In that sense, no one could take it from her; she could only surrender it herself.
Commodore Lady Dame Honor Harrington sat in the shuttle seat, face and body bruised and aching, hands chained behind her while Nimitz’s anguish pulsed through her and her calm expression was no longer merely a mask to deceive her enemies.
"You can go in now, Citizen Commander."
"Thank you." Warner Caslet's curtness wasn't directed at the yeoman outside Citizen Admiral Theisman's office. In fact, he rather regretted speaking so sharply to Citizen Chief Maynard, and he knew it was dangerous, as well, but he couldn't help it. He was too angry to give such thoughts the weight they should have held... and that, of course, was what made his sharpness dangerous.
He stepped into Theisman's office and paused as he saw Dennis LePic standing at one end of the citizen admiral's desk. It was only a brief pause, and then his feet carried him across the carpet to face his superiors. The sight of the people’s commissioner sent a splash of cold water through him, as if reiterating all the reasons he already knew he must conceal his anger, yet it also made that anger still worse. Not because he blamed LePic, personally, for what had happened, but because LePic, for all his efforts to be a decent human being, had voluntarily associated himself with the people he did blame.