by David Weber
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 slam
med 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.
The Peoples Marines had faced the same problems, though on a somewhat lesser scale. Battle armor and support weapons weren't something one wanted in the hands of technical ignoramuses, and the days when the dregs of an uneducated society could be turned into first-line soldiers without massive remedial training had gone out with the bolt-action rifle, but the Marines had always been a long-service outfit, with a lower percentage of conscripts. Coupled with their (relatively) simpler equipment, they'd been able to impose a more uniform level of training which came far closer to matching the tactical competence of their Manticoran counterparts, although maintenance remained a chronic problem even for them.
But the heavy losses the Peoples Navy and Marines had suffered in the opening stages of the war, not to mention the officer purges which had followed the Harris Assassinations and the casualties suffered in things like the Leveller Uprising, had cut dangerously deep into the military's trained manpower. The Committee of Public Safety had acted to recall veterans who had completed their terms of service, which had almost covered the initial shortfalls, but the only real solution had to be the education and training of the required replacements to a modern standard... preferably before they got to boot camp. There were enough realists in the PRH to recognize that, and whatever her other shortcomings, Cordelia Ransom had managed to sell it to the Mob, as well. In a sort of insanely twisted logic, the need to fight a war started to preserve a parasitic life style had led to a situation in which the parasites in question were actually willing, even eager, to abandon their parasite status, repair their schools, and learn how to provide the support their military required. It was a pity the thought of making the same repairs hadn't occurred to anyone when it might actually have averted the war in the first place.