Echoes Of Honor hh-8

by David Weber

  "What sort of ‘mischief’ were they getting into?" McKeon asked in an interested tone.

  "Just about anything you can think of, Sir," Mayhew replied. "Escape attempts, for a lot of them... or else they were guilty of being the kinds of officers and noncoms who’d insist on maintaining discipline and unit cohesion even in a prison camp. The troublemakers."

  "And they’ve been skimming them off and dumping them here, have they?" Honor murmured, and there was a wicked gleam in her good eye. "You could almost say they’ve been distilling them out of the rest of their prison population, couldn’t you?"

  "Yes, My Lady, you could," Mayhew agreed. "According to the best numbers Scotty and I could come up with, we figure there are between a hundred eighty and two hundred thousand military prisoners down here. It could run as high as two hundred and fifty, but that’s a maximum figure. The other three or four hundred thousand are civilians. About a third of those were shipped out after various civilian resistance groups from conquered planets were broken up, but most are the more usual run of political prisoners."

  "Um." Honor frowned at that and rubbed the tip of her nose. After a moment, she moved her hand from her nose to Nimitz, stroking the ’cat’s spine.

  "A high percentage of them are from Haven itself, with the biggest single block of them from Nouveau Paris," Mayhew told her. "Apparently, both InSec and StateSec concentrated their housecleaning on the capital."

  "Makes sense," McKeon said again. "Authority in the PRH has always been centralized, and every bit of it passes through the command and control nodes on Haven. Whoever controls the capital controls the rest of the Republic, so it’s not unreasonable for them to want to make damned sure potential troublemakers on Haven were under control. It’d probably work, too. ‘Hey, Prole! You get uppity around here, and—Pffft! Off to Hell with you!’ Except that since the Harris Assassination, they’ve been sending off ‘elitists’ instead of ‘proles,’ of course."

  "No doubt," Honor said. "But having them here in such numbers could certainly throw a spanner into the works for us." McKeon looked a question at her, and she made a brushing-away gesture. "I wouldn’t want to generalize, but I can’t help thinking political prisoners would probably be more likely, on average, to collaborate with StateSec."

  "Why?" McKeon’s surprise was evident. "They’re here because they oppose what’s happening in Nouveau Paris, aren’t they?"

  "They’re here because the people who were running the PRH when they were arrested thought they were a threat to whatever was happening in Nouveau Paris at the time," Honor replied. "It doesn’t follow that they really were, and as you yourself just pointed out, things have changed on the domestic front over the last eight or nine years. Some of those prisoners were probably as loyal to the PRH as you and I are to the Crown, whether the security forces thought they were or not. And even if they weren’t, people the Legislaturalists sent here might actually agree with what Pierre and his crowd have done since the coup. They could be looking for ways to demonstrate their loyalty to the new regime and possibly earn their release by informing on their fellows. Worse, they could be genuine patriots who hate what’s happening in the PRH right now but would be perfectly willing to turn in the Republic’s wartime enemies. For that matter, StateSec could probably plant spies and informers wherever it wanted by using the hostage approach and threatening the loved ones of anyone who refused to play its game."

  "I hadn’t thought of it that way," McKeon acknowledged slowly.

  "I’m not saying that there aren’t political prisoners who truly do oppose Pierre and Saint-Just and their thugs and who’d stand up beside us to prove it," Honor said. "Nor am I saying that there aren’t collaborators among the POWs. There are usually at least some potential weasels in any group, and even the spirits of men and women who would stand up to outright torture can be crushed by enough prolonged hopelessness."

  For just an instant, the right side of her face was almost as expressionless as the nerve-dead left side, and McKeon shivered. She was speaking from experience, he thought. About something she’d faced and stared down during her own long weeks in solitary confinement. She gazed at something no one else could see for several seconds, then shook herself.

  "Still," she said, "at some point we’re going to have to take a chance on someone besides our own people, and I’d think military POWs who were captured fighting against the Peeps in defense of their own worlds or parked here to prevent them from becoming threats after their worlds were conquered are more likely to resist the temptation to collaborate. Not that I intend to leap to any sweeping generalizations. It’s going to have to be a case-by-case consideration."

  She stroked Nimitz again and the grim look in her eye turned into something almost like a twinkle. McKeon regarded her curiously, but she only shook her head, and he shrugged. He wasn’t positive how she did it, but she’d demonstrated an uncanny ability to read people too often in the past for him to doubt her ability to do it again.

  "You’re probably right," he said, "but Jasper was saying something about how often they make their supply runs?"

  "Yes, he was," she agreed, and looked at Mayhew. "Jasper?"

  "Yes, My Lady." Mayhew gestured at the map on the fold-down table. "The red dots indicate known camp locations," he explained. "They’re not complete, of course. Even if Tepes ever had a complete list of camps, her latest data on them was almost two years out of date before Chief Harkness stole it. But we’re trying to update, and as you can see, the ones we know about are clustered on Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Delta’s too far into the antarctic to be a practical site, but even with half a million prisoners, they’ve got plenty of places to put them without sticking them down there. And as you can see, the camps get even thinner on the ground as you move into the equatorial zone here on Alpha."

  Honor nodded. Given the climate outside the shuttle, she could certainly understand that. Putting prisoners from most inhabited planets into those conditions would have been cruel and unusual punishment by any standard. While that probably wouldn’t have bothered StateSec particularly, the jungle also had a tendency to eat any permanent settlement or base, and that would have been a problem for them. Or something that required them to get up off their lazy duffs, anyway. They could force the prisoners to do any maintenance that was needed, but it would still have required them to provide tools and materials and the transport to deliver both. Unless, of course, they simply chose to let the camps disappear... and the prisoners with them, she thought grimly.

  But the near total absence of camps right in the equatorial zone helped explain why she and her fellow escapees were smack in the middle of it, where no Peeps would have any reason to venture.

  "As nearly as we can tell," Mayhew went on, "the camp populations average about twenty-five hundred personnel, which means they’ve got approximately two hundred sites in all. Obviously, there are none at all up here on Styx Island—Camp Charon itself is purely a staging point and central supply depot for the other sites—but the mainland camps are all a minimum of five hundred kilometers from one another. That spreads them out too much for the inmates of any camp to coordinate any sort of action with any other camp, given that the only way they could communicate would be to make physical contact."

  "I’d be a little cautious about making that assumption, if I were the Peeps, Jasper," McKeon put in. "Five hundred klicks sounds like a lot, especially when there aren’t any roads and the prisoners don’t have any air transport, but I have a lot of faith in human ingenuity. For example," he leaned forward and tapped the huge lake scooped out of Alpha Continent’s northern quarter, then ran his finger down the rash of red dots along its shore, "if they put camps on a body of water like this, then I’d expect the prisoners to be able to build—and hide—enough small craft to at least open communications with the other camps."

  "I wouldn’t disagree with you, Sir," Mayhew said with a nod. "And perhaps I should have said that the Peeps seem confident that it would be imposs
ible for them to coordinate any effective action, not that all of the camps can be kept totally isolated from one another."

  "They could have achieved total isolation on an intercamp basis if they’d been willing to accept larger populations per camp, though," Sanko offered thoughtfully. "That would’ve brought the total number of camps down, and then they could have put a lot more space between them.

  "They could have," Honor agreed. "But only at the expense of making each individual camp a thornier security problem. Twenty-five hundred people are a lot less of a threat than, say, thirty thousand, even if every single person in the smaller camp is in on whatever it is they might try to do. Besides, the larger the total inmate population at any given site, the easier it would be for any small, tightly organized group to disappear into the background clutter."

  Sanko nodded, and she returned her one-eyed gaze to Mayhew and gestured for him to go on.

  "Whatever their rationale for spreading the prisoners around, and however good or bad their logic," the Grayson officer said, "the point I was going to make is that when this flight—" he tapped the transcript of the first transmission they’d intercepted "—checked in with Charon, Flight Ops sent him the fresh numbers he’d asked for, which tells us how many rations he dropped off at this camp—Alpha-Seven-Niner: just over two hundred and twenty-five thousand. Assuming there are twenty-five hundred prisoners there, that would be enough food for about one T-month, and that checks against this other intercept, which gave us the same kind of numbers for camp Beta-Two-Eight. So it looks like about a once-a-month supply cycle for all of them. What we don’t know—and have no way of determining yet—is whether they spread their supply runs out or make them all in a relatively short time window. Given the general laziness with which they seem to operate, I could see them doing it either way. They could make a handful of daily flights and gradually rotate through all the camps, which would let them assign the duty to different pilots every day without overloading any one flight crew. Or they could choose to squeeze all of them into an all-hands operation over just a day or two each month so they could all spend the rest of their time sitting around. At the moment, it looks to me like they’ve taken the short time frame approach, since we’ve been listening to their comsats for over two weeks and this is the first traffic we’ve heard, but there’s no way to prove that."

  "A month," Honor murmured. She contemplated something only she could see once again, then nodded. "All right, Alistair," she said crisply, "that gives us a time window for any given camp, anyway. And I think Jasper’s probably right, that they do make a major supply effort once a month. If so, we’ve got some idea of the interval we have to work with. All we need to do is figure out what we’re going to do with it."

  Chapter Ten

  "Now that’s interesting," Lieutenant Commander Scotty Tremaine murmured.

  "What is?" a soft Grayson accent asked.

  The sandy-haired lieutenant commander took his eyes from his display and turned to look at the other officer in the compartment. Commander Solomon Marchant had been the executive officer of the Grayson heavy cruiser Jason Alvarez before they all wound up in Peep hands. Tremaine’s slot as Lady Harrington’s staff electronics officer had brought him into contact with her flagship’s exec on a regular basis, and Tremaine rather liked the black-haired commander. Unlike some of his fellow Graysons, Marchant was singularly free of any special awe for the Royal Manticoran Navy. He respected it, but the RMN had learned just as many lessons, proportionately speaking, from its experience with the GSN, and he knew it. He was also no man to suffer fools lightly, and he could jerk someone up short with the best of them, but he usually assumed you were an adult human being who knew what you were doing until you proved differently.

  "I just picked up on something we’ve all overlooked before," Tremaine said, answering the commander’s question. Marchant quirked his right eyebrow, and Tremaine waved a hand at the computer display in front of him. "I should have noticed it sooner, but somehow it went right past me. And Jasper and Anson, I guess."

  "So what is it?" Marchant asked with the merest trace of exaggerated patience, and Tremaine hid a mental smile. Everybody was going just a bit stir crazy with so little to do. The classic concept of castaways working diligently—if not desperately—to provide for their continued survival simply didn’t apply here. There was no way they could live off the land anyway, so there was no planting or hunting to do. And given the dire necessity of keeping their presence a secret, any avoidable activity which might attract attention was out of the question. Commodore McKeon’s patrols had explored the surrounding jungle in all directions for a good thirty klicks, but once that was done and the fiberoptic land lines for a net of undetectable remote passive sensors had been emplaced, their people had been told to stay close to home and keep under cover. Which meant that, aside from those fortunate souls like Senior Chief Linda Barstow, who had been Chief of the Bay in Prince Adrian’s Boat Bay Two and had taken over responsibility for maintenance on their shuttles, there was very little to keep a person’s brain working. In fact, commissioned officers were almost begging Barstow to let them help out with the grunt work just to avoid sitting around on their hands.

  Lady Harrington recognized that, and she’d parceled out assignments in an effort to give everyone at least something to do. Some of it might be little better than make-work, but none of the people who had survived to escape from PNS Tepes were idiots, and it couldn’t hurt to have as many intelligent perspectives as possible on the raw data they were managing to acquire in dribs and drabs. Which was how Commander Marchant found himself playing fifth wheel and sounding board for Tremaine’s analysis sessions while Lieutenant Commander Metcalf and Lieutenant Commander DuChene did the same for Mayhew and Lethridge, respectively.

  "Well," he said now, "it seems that there’s one prisoner camp here on Alpha that doesn’t have a number." Marchant leaned back in his chair with a questioning expression, and Tremaine smiled at him. "It’s got a name, instead: Camp Inferno. And it’s not exactly prime real estate. As a matter of fact, it’s the only camp on the entire planet that’s located directly on the equator."

  "On the—?" Marchant stood and crossed to the map beside Tremaine’s work station to peer at the map he’d called up on his display. "I don’t see it," he said after a moment.

  "That’s because this is our original map, and Inferno isn’t on it," Tremaine told him. "When Jasper and I generated the original, we used an old camp survey from Tepes’ files, and this one wasn’t listed. But yesterday Russ pulled a major telemetry download from the weather sats. It included weather maps for Alpha, with the camp sites indicated, including half a dozen that’re new since the file survey we used was last updated. Like these." He tapped a key and new red dots appeared on his display, one of them flashing brightly. "And lo and behold, there was this camp we hadn’t mapped sitting dead center on Alpha where it shouldn’t have been. So when I came on watch this afternoon, I started trying to chase it down. I thought at first that it was just another new camp, but then I found this—" he tapped more keys and the display changed again, transmuting into a terse StateSec internal memo "—in one of Tepes’ secure files on Hades, and it turns out it’s not a new camp at all. The survey just hadn’t mapped it—apparently for security reasons."

  "I see." Marchant said, and smothered a smile, for Tremaine had added the last phrase in tones of profound disgust that he understood only too well. None of the Manticoran or Grayson castaways had yet been able to figure out what sort of reasoning (or substitute therefor) StateSec called upon when it decided when it was going to get security conscious and when it wasn’t, but the logic tree involved promised to be twistier than most.

  The Grayson officer stooped to look over Tremaine’s shoulder, green eyes flicking over the memo, and then he inhaled sharply.

  "I do see," he said in a very different tone. "And I think we should get Lady Harrington and Commodore McKeon in on this ASAP."

  * *
*

  "My, my, my," Honor said softly, gazing at a hardcopy of the data Tremaine had found. "How very convenient... maybe."

  "It certainly seems to offer a possibility, at any rate, Ma’am," Geraldine Metcalf observed. The dark-eyed, sandy-blond lieutenant commander had been McKeon’s tac officer aboard Prince Adrian, and her Gryphon accent was more pronounced than usual as she, too, pondered the data.

  "I agree, Gerry," McKeon said, "but let’s not jump to any conclusions here. Scotty’s memo is over two T-years old. A lot could’ve changed in that long, and aside from the food supply, there’s no time limit on our operations. If there’ve been any changes, we could screw ourselves over mightily by jumping too quick. I’d prefer to take it a little slow and check things out first rather than rush in and wind up hanging ourselves."

  "No argument from me, Skipper," Metcalf told him. "But if this is right—" she tapped the hardcopy "—then the bad guys just did us a great big favor."

  "You’re certainly right about that," Honor said. She leaned back and frowned in thought while her hand caressed Nimitz with slow, gentle strokes. The ’cat lay in her lap once more, for his crippled mid-limb made it all but impossible for him to ride in his usual position on her shoulder, but both of them were in much better health than they had been. Her weight was coming back up and his pelt had been reduced to a bearable insulation factor, and although his badly healed bones still hurt whenever he moved, he radiated a sense of cheerful confidence which did more for her own mood than she might have believed possible.

  "Of course, they didn’t know they were doing us one," she went on after a moment. "And from their perspective, this actually makes sense. Nor is there any reason for them to change a longstanding policy like this one—after all, they don’t know we’re here, so they can’t possibly realize how much this could help us. That’s why I’m inclined to go with the data despite its age."