Echoes Of Honor hh-8

by David Weber

  Not that "tidbit" was actually a word she would normally consider applying to Peep emergency rations. Prior to her arrival on Hell, she’d thought nothing could possibly taste worse than RMN e-rats.

  Well, you learn something new everyday, I suppose, she thought, then changed the subject.

  "Anything new from the patrols?" she asked, and McKeon shrugged.

  "Not really. Warner and I brought back those specimens Fritz wanted, but I don’t think they’re going to work out any better than the others. And Jasper and Anson ran into another of those bear-bobcat thingamies that was just as ill-tempered as the other two we’ve met." He made a disgusted sound. "It’s a damned shame the local beasties don’t know they can’t digest us. Maybe they’d leave us alone if they did."

  "Maybe not, too," Honor replied, stroking the comb up and down against her thigh to clear a clot of Nimitz fur from its teeth. "There are quite a few things people—or treecats—can’t digest very well, or even at all, that they still love the taste of. For all you know your bearcat might be perfectly happy to spend the afternoon munching on you. It might even consider you a low-calorie snack!"

  "It can consider me anything it likes," McKeon told her, "but if it gets close enough to me to be rude, I’m gonna feed it an appetizer of pulser darts."

  "Not very friendly, but probably prudent," she conceded. "At least the things are smaller than hexapumas or peak bears."

  "True." McKeon turned on the log and glanced over his shoulder at their encampment. Each of their two hijacked Peep assault shuttles was sixty-three meters in length, with a maximum wingspan of forty-three meters and a minimum span of over nineteen even with the wings in full oversweep for parking efficiency. Fervently as every member of their group might curse the hot, wet, rot-ridden, voracious jungle, hiding something the size of those two craft would have been an impossible challenge in most other kinds of terrain. As it was, the individual trees which supported the uppermost layer of the overhead canopy were just far enough apart that the pilots had been able to nudge their way between the thick trunks without actually knocking them over. And once the shuttles were down, the cammo netting which had been part of their standard supplies, coupled with the jungle’s vines, lianas, fronds, leaves, branches, and tree trunks had made concealing them a straightforward task. The sheer grunt labor involved in spreading the nets with only seventeen sets of hands and just four portable grav lifters available for the job had been daunting, but the alternative had been a great motivator. They’d all had more than enough of the Office of State Security’s hospitality.

  "How are the converters holding up?" he asked after a moment.

  "Still cranking out the current," Honor replied. She’d gotten the knot of fur out of the comb and went back to work on Nimitz. "The more I see of Peep survival equipment, the more impressed I am," she admitted, not looking up from her task. "I’d expected that most of it would be pretty shoddy compared to our own gear, but somebody in the PRH put some serious thought into equipping those two birds."

  "State Security," McKeon grunted sourly. "The SS gets the best of everything else, so why not survival gear, too?"

  "I don’t think that’s what happened here," Honor disagreed. "Harkness, Scotty, and Warner have gone through the operator’s manuals, and they’re all standard Navy publications. A little more simpleminded than any of ours would have been, but still Navy, not SS."

  McKeon made a noncommittal sound, and she smiled down at Nimitz as she tasted the other human’s urge to disagree with her. Alistair hated the very thought that anything the Peeps did or had could match the Manticoran equivalent.

  "Actually," she went on, "I think their power converters may even be a bit better than ours are. They’re a little bulkier and a lot more massive, but I suspect their output’s higher on a weight-for-weight basis."

  "Oh, yeah? Well at least their weapons still stink compared to ours!" McKeon told her, turning on her with a grin that acknowledged her teasing.

  "True," she said solemnly. "And I suppose if I simply had to choose between having, oh, a better graser mount for my ships of the wall, let’s say, or a more efficient emergency power converter for my lifeboats and shuttles, I guess I might opt for the graser. Mind you, it’d probably be a hard choice, though."

  "Especially under these circumstances," McKeon agreed much more seriously, and she looked up from Nimitz’s grooming to nod soberly.

  McKeon had so far given only the most rudimentary consideration to what to do next. Getting the escapees down in one piece, convincing the Peeps they were all dead in order to head off any search parties, hiding the assault shuttles against accidental detection, and exploring their local environs had been quite enough to keep him busy. Yet he suspected Honor was already several steps along in working out their next move, and he was certain those shuttles were central to whatever she had in mind. But Hell’s climate could not have been intentionally designed to be more brutal on delicate electronics and machinery. Senior Chief Barstow’s work parties were kept busy on a daily business, pruning back the vines and other undergrowth which insisted on trying to infiltrate the intakes for the shuttles’s turbines or crawl up into the electronics bays through open landing gear doors. For all that, the shuttles’ battle steel hulls were undoubtedly immune to anything even Hell could throw at them, but high humidity, high temperature, and the mold, mildew, and fungus which came with that kind of environment could eat the guts right out of them, leaving nothing but useless shells.

  That was why it was as essential to keep their environmental systems up and running as it was to keep the local plant life outside them, but doing that required power. Not a lot of it compared to even a small starship, perhaps, but a hell of a lot when it came to hiding a power plant from overhead sensors. Of course, they’d been careful to land on the far side of the planet from the island HQ where StateSec’s garrison of prison guards hung out, and so far as Harkness had been able to determine when he raided Tepes’ computers, the Peeps hadn’t planted any of their prison colonies within a thousand kilometers of their present location. All of which meant that, logically, there should be no reason for the Peeps to be looking for anything out here in the middle of the jungle.

  Neither Alistair McKeon nor Honor Harrington were particularly fond of including words like "should" in their planning, however. And even if there hadn’t been the possibility of detection by satellite or airborne sensors, running the shuttles’ onboard fusion plants would quickly have eaten up their available reaction mass even at standby levels.

  But the Peeps who’d planned the equipment list for those shuttles had provided them with at least twice the thermal converter capability an equivalent Manticoran small craft would have boasted. Although the intention had probably been for the converters to provide power to recharge weapon power packs and other small items of personal gear, they also produced—barely—enough power to keep both shuttles’ environmental plants on-line. Temperatures inside the craft were several degrees higher than anyone would have kept them in regular service, but the interiors felt downright frigid compared to the jungle’s external temperatures, and the dehumidifiers kept the all-invasive humidity at bay.

  And they also provide just enough power to produce a teeny bit of ice, McKeon thought, wistfully recalling the chill freshness of Honor’s water bottle. That coolness was already little more than a memory, and an ignoble part of him wanted to "borrow" her bottle for just one more sip, but he suppressed it sternly. That was her water, and so were the nutrients in it, just as the extra ration pack in the rucksack was specifically earmarked for her. Besides, he thought with a hidden smile, Fritz would hurt me if I took anything remotely caloric away from her—and well he should!

  The temptation to smile faded, and he shook his head. The enhanced metabolism that went with Honor’s genetically engineered heavy-grav muscles had turned her scarecrow-gaunt during her imprisonment. Unlike anyone else in her small command, she was actually gaining weight on a diet of e-rats, which
spoke volumes for how poorly her SS gaolers had treated her. But she was still at least ten kilos underweight, and however much she might dislike the notion that her people were "pampering" her or "taking care of her," Alistair McKeon intended to go right on doing exactly that until Fritz Montoya pronounced her fully recovered.

  "Have you had any thoughts on our next move?" he asked her, and she raised her right eyebrow at him. It was the first time he’d come right out and asked, and she hid a grin as she realized he must be beginning to consider her truly on the mend if he was willing to push her on command decisions.

  "A few," she acknowledged. She finished grooming Nimitz and slipped the comb into her hip pocket, then reached down and removed the water bottle from her rucksack. McKeon suppressed an automatic urge to take it away and open it for her. He might have two hands to her one, but he also had a pretty shrewd notion how she would react if he tried it, and so he sat and watched, instead.

  She clamped the bottle between her knees to unscrew the top, then set its cap on the log beside her and held it for Nimitz. The ’cat pushed himself upright, lurching without the use of his crippled limb, and reached for the bottle with both true-hands. He took a long, deep drink of the iced water, then sighed in bliss and leaned back against Honor, rubbing his head against her breastbone as she replaced the cap and tucked the bottle away once more.

  She spent a few seconds stroking the angle of his jaw, and his purr was much livelier than it had been. She suspected they were getting towards the bottom of even his ability to shed, and she shared the taste of his pleasure as he realized how much cooler he felt. She chuckled and gave his jaw another rub, then looked back up at McKeon.

  "I think I’m beginning to get the rough pieces into place up here," she told him, tapping her temple with her index finger. "We’re going to have to move carefully, though. And it’s going to take some time."

  "Moving carefully is no problem," McKeon replied. "Time, though. That could be a bit of a complication, depending on how much of it we’ll need."

  "I think we’ll be all right," Honor said thoughtfully. "The real bottleneck is food, of course."

  "Of course," McKeon agreed. Like most small craft aboard a warship, the shuttles had been supplied for use as life boats in an emergency. Normally, that meant a week or so worth of food for a reasonable load of survivors, but the escapees rattled around inside their two stolen shuttles like a handful of peas. What would have carried a "reasonable" number of survivors for a week would feed all of them for months, and his own initial estimate of how long their food would last had been overly pessimistic by a factor of at least forty percent. Yet there was still a limit to how long they could last without some alternate source of food, and he and Honor both felt it creeping up upon them.

  "Has Fritz turned up anything at all?" he asked after a moment.

  "I’m afraid not." Honor sighed. "He’s run everything we could get our hands on through the analyzer, and unless the stuff you and Warner brought back is radically different from anything else he’s checked, there’s not much hope there. Our digestive systems can isolate most of the inorganics we need from the local plant life, and most of it won’t kill us out of hand if we eat it, but that’s about it. We don’t even have the right enzymes to break down the local equivalent of cellulose, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want a big lump of undigestible plant fiber moving through my gizzards. At any rate, we’re certainly not going to be able to stretch our e-rats by browsing on the local flora or fauna."

  "I wish I could say I was surprised," McKeon observed, then snorted a chuckle. "But what the hell, Skipper! If it was going to be easy, they wouldn’t have needed us to deal with it, now would they?"

  "True. Too true," Honor agreed. She wrapped her arm around Nimitz, hugging him for several moments, then looked back at McKeon.

  "At the same time, I think it’s time we were about it," she told him quietly. "I know you and Fritz are still watching over me like a pair of anxious hens, but I really am recovered enough to get started." He opened his mouth, as if to object, then closed it again, and she reached across to pat him on the knee with her remaining hand. "Don’t worry so much, Alistair. Nimitz and I are tough."

  "I know you are," he muttered, "it’s just that it’s so damned un—" He cut himself off and twitched a shrug. "I guess I should have figured out by now that the universe really is unfair, but sometimes I get awful tired of watching it do its level damned best to chew you up and spit you back out. So humor me and take it easy, okay?"

  "Okay." Her soprano was just the tiniest bit husky, and she patted his knee again. But then she sat back and drew a deep breath. "On the other hand, what I have in mind for starters shouldn’t take too much out of me or anyone else."

  "Ah?" McKeon cocked his head at her, and she nodded.

  "I want Harkness, Scotty, and Russ to break out the satellite com gear and figure out a way to sneak into the Peep com system."

  "‘Sneak in,’" McKeon repeated carefully.

  "For now, all I want to do is find a way to listen to their traffic and get a feel for their procedures. Eventually, we may need to see if we can’t hack our way into Camp Charon’s computers, as well."

  "That’s a tall order with the gear we’ve got here," McKeon warned. "The hacking part, I mean. And unless they’re total idiots, there’s no way their central systems would accept reprogramming from a remote location."

  "I know. I’m not thinking of programming, only of stealing more data from them. And if things work the way I’d like them to, we may never have to do even that. But I want the capability in place if it turns out that we need it. And if Harkness can hack the central computers of a StateSec battlecruiser with only a minicomp, I figure he’s got to have a pretty fair shot at infiltrating a simple com net. Especially since the bad guys ‘know’ no one else on the entire planet has any electronic capability at all."

  "A point," McKeon agreed. "Definitely a point. All right, Skipper. I’ll go collect the three of them and tell them to get started assembling their gear." He chuckled and climbed to his feet with a grin. "When they figure out they’ll get to start spending time in the air-conditioned luxury of one of the shuttles, I probably won’t even have to kick any butt to get them started, either!"

  Chapter Nine

  "You know," Lieutenant Russell Sanko observed, "if these people would just talk to each other every so often, we might get something accomplished here."

  "I’m sure that if they only knew how much they’re inconveniencing you they’d run right out and start gabbing away," Jasper Mayhew replied with a grin. "In the meantime, we’ve only been listening for two weeks, and—" He shrugged, tipped his comfortable chair well back under the air return and luxuriated in the cool, dry air that spilled down over him.

  "You’re a hedonist, Mayhew," Sanko growled.

  "Nonsense. I’m simply the product of a hostile planetary environment," Mayhew said comfortably. "It’s not my fault if that sort of insecure life experience imposes survival-oriented psychoses on people. All us Graysons get horribly nervous when we have to operate out in the open, with unfiltered air all around us." He gave a dramatic shudder. "It’s a psychological thing. Incurable. That’s the real reason Lady Harrington assigned me to this, you know. Medical considerations. Elevated pulse and adrenaline levels." He shook his head sadly. "It’s a terrible thing to require this sort of air-conditioned luxury solely for medical reasons."

  "Yeah, sure."

  Mayhew chuckled, and Sanko shook his head and returned his attention to the com console. He and the Grayson were about the same age—actually, at twenty-nine, Mayhew was three years older—and they were both senior-grade lieutenants. Technically, Mayhew had about three T-months seniority on Sanko, and he’d been Lady Harrington’s staff intelligence officer before they all landed in enemy hands, while Sanko had been HMS Prince Adrian’s com officer. By ancient and honorable tradition, there was always an unstated rivalry between the members of a flag of
ficer’s staff and the work-a-day stiffs who ran the ships of that officer’s squadron or task force, even when they all came from the same navy. But Mayhew was a comfortable person to work with, and however laid back he cared to appear, he was sharp as a vibro blade and, like most Graysons Sanko had met, always ready to lend a hand. He was also some relation to Protector Benjamin, but he seldom talked about it, and he seemed thankfully immune to the arrogance Sanko had seen out of certain Manticorans of far less exalted birth.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t really matter how pleasant one’s partner was if there was nothing for the two of you to work on, and that seemed to be the case here.

  It should have been simple, Sanko thought balefully. After all, the Peeps had a planet-wide com net whose security they trusted totally, for reasons which made perfectly good sense. Not only did the StateSec garrison have the only tech base and power generation facilities on the entire planet, but their com messages were all transmitted using the latest in secure equipment. Well, not the absolute latest, even by Peep standards, but pretty darn good. Sanko was a communications specialist himself, and the SS’s equipment was considerably better than any of the classified Navy briefings he’d attended had suggested it ought to be. Not as good as the Star Kingdom’s, but better than it should have been, and Camp Charon had received the very best available when it was built.

  Fortunately, Hell seemed to have fallen a bit behind on its upgrades since then. The planetary garrison had an impressive satellite net—why shouldn’t they, when counter-grav made it dirt cheap to hang comsats and weather sats wherever you wanted them?—but their ground stations were getting a little long in the tooth. And, of course, the people they didn’t know were trying to eavesdrop on them just happened to have a pair of assault shuttles which, up until very recently, had also belonged to StateSec... and had been fitted with the very latest in secure communication links. In fact, the systems Sanko was using were probably at least fifteen or twenty T-years newer than the Peep ground stations, and they’d been expressly designed to interface with older equipment as well as their own contemporaries. Which meant Sanko and Mayhew—and Senior Chief Harkness and Lieutenant Commander Tremaine, or Lieutenant Commander Lethridge and Ensign Clinkscales, who’d pulled the other two watches for the same duty—ought to be able to open up that "secure com net" like a pack of e-rats.