by David Weber
"Um." McKeon scratched his chin and squinted at nothing in particular, then nodded slowly. "I can’t fault your logic, but I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d figured something out logically and been wrong."
"True." Honor gave Nimitz another caress, then flipped through the pages of Tremaine’s printout one more time. I wish I could ask Warner about this. Gerry and Solomon are good, and so is Scotty... although he can get just a little over enthusiastic. But they’re all junior to Alistair and me. None of them really want to argue with us. Alistair would tell me in a heartbeat if he thought I was wrong about something—God knows he’s done it in the past!—but he and I have known each other too long. We each know what the other is going to say before it gets said. That’s good when it’s time to execute orders, but it can keep us from seeing things in skull sessions. Warner doesn’t have that problem, and he’s smart as a whip. I found that out in Silesia, and I could really use his perspective here, too... if it wouldn’t be putting him so much on the spot. And, she admitted, if I could be certain his sense of duty wouldn’t rise up and bite us all on the backside.
She hated adding those qualifications. Caslet had put himself in his current predicament primarily because that very sense of duty had ranged him against StateSec at the side of Honor’s captured personnel, and her link to Nimitz let her sample his emotions. She knew he was her friend, that his actions before and during the breakout from Tepes had been motivated by stubborn integrity, mutual respect, and fundamental decency. Unfortunately, she also knew that a part of his personality was at war with the rest of him—not over what he had done, but over what he might still do. If he hadn’t broken his oath as an officer in the People’s Navy yet, he’d certainly come close, and she didn’t know how much more cooperation he could extend to her people, for the very traits that made her like and respect him so much gnawed at him with teeth made from the fragments of that oath.
But he wouldn’t really know anything more about this than we do, she reminded herself, so the least I can do is leave him alone where it’s concerned.
"Was Inferno covered in the last supply run?" she asked now.
"We don’t know, Ma’am," Anson Lethridge replied. The ugly, almost brutish-looking Erewhon officer who had been Honor’s staff astrogator sat with Jasper Mayhew and Tremaine, all three of them facing aft from the shuttle’s tactical section hatch to where their superiors sat in the front row of passenger seats. "The only deliveries we can absolutely confirm," he went on in the cultivated tenor which always seemed oddly out of place coming from someone who looked like he did, "were the ones where something came up that required com traffic with Camp Charon that we managed to tap—like the numbers of rations to be dropped off at Alpha-Seven-Niner." He rubbed the neatly trimmed Van Dyke he had declined to shave off despite the climate and shrugged. "If they didn’t discuss a particular drop, or we didn’t happen to hear it when they did, we can’t say for certain that a delivery was actually made. Assuming we’re right about the way they schedule the supply drops, then, yes, Inferno probably was covered, but there’s no way we can guarantee that."
"I was afraid you’d say that." She gave him one of her half-smiles, then sighed and rocked her chair back and forth in thought. "I think we have to move on this," she said finally, and looked at McKeon. He gazed back for two or three seconds, then nodded.
"All right. Gerry," she turned to Metcalf, "you and Sarah get with Chief Barstow." She turned her head to glance a Tremaine, as well. "Scotty, I’d like you and Chief Harkness to lend a hand, as well. I want both shuttles preflighted by nightfall."
"Both shuttles?" McKeon asked, and she grinned wryly.
"Both. There’s not much point leaving one of them behind, and having both of them along may give us some extra flexibility if we need it."
"It also puts all of our eggs in one basket," McKeon said. "And two of them are harder to hide than one." It wasn’t an argument, only an observation, and Honor nodded.
"I know, but I don’t want to split us up. Keeping everybody in one spot will concentrate our manpower, if we need it, and cut down on our com traffic even if we don’t. From the looks of the terrain in the area, we can probably hide both of them, if not quite as easily as we could hide a singleton, and keeping them—and us—together cuts the number of potential sighting opportunities in half. And let’s be realistic about this. If it all hits the fan so badly that a rescue mission or something like that would be necessary, keeping one shuttle in reserve isn’t likely to make that much difference. If Champ Charon figures out that we’re here at all before we’re ready to make our move, they should be able to handle anything we try without even breaking a sweat."
McKeon nodded again, and she inhaled sharply.
"All right, people. Let’s be about it," she said.
* * *
It should have been a fairly short hop. Camp Inferno was only about fourteen hundred kilometers from their original landing site, which would have been less than a twenty-minute flight at max for one of the shuttles. But they didn’t dare make the trip at max. They thought they’d located all of the recon satellites they had to worry about, and if they were right, they had a three-hour window when they ought to be clear of observation. But they couldn’t be certain about that. There could always be one they’d missed, and even if there hadn’t been, simple skin heat on a maximum-speed run might well be picked up by the weather satellites parked in geosynchronous orbit. So instead of high and fast, they would go low and slow, at less than mach one. Not only that, they would make the entire flight without counter-grav, which would both hide them from gravitic detectors and reduce power requirements enough that there would be no need to fire up their shuttles’ fusion plants.
There were, however, some drawbacks to that approach, and Scotty Tremaine and Geraldine Metcalf, tapped as pilots for the trip, spent a great deal of the flight muttering silent curses. Flying by old-fashioned, unaided eye at treetop level above the kind of jungle Hell produced, with all active sensors turned off to avoid betraying emissions, was no picnic. Tremaine almost took the top off a forest leviathan which suddenly reared up right in his flight path, and simple navigation was a pain in the posterior. They’d been able to fix their starting position with suitable accuracy, and the weather map which had first revealed Inferno’s existence to them fixed the camp’s latitude and longitude. Tremaine and Metcalf had worked out their courses before takeoff using that position data, but there were no handy navigation beacons upon which to take fixes en route, and the idea of using celestial navigation was ludicrous. They could have used the Peeps’ satellites as navigation aids—which, after all, was what the StateSec pilots did—but the satellites weren’t beacons. They transmitted only when queried from the ground, not continuously, and while hitting them with a tight beam from a moving shuttle was certainly possible, Honor and McKeon had decided that it also increased the chance of giving away their presence by an unacceptable percentage. Which meant the pilots were pretty much reduced to instruments no more sophisticated than a compass and their own eyesight, and over the length of a fourteen-hundred-kilometer flight, even small navigational errors could take them far off course.
That might not have been so bad if visibility had been better, but visibility wasn’t better. In fact, it stank. True, Hell’s trio of moons were all large and bright, but that actually made things worse, not better, for two of them—Tartarus and Niflheim—were above the horizon simultaneously, and the confusion of shadow and brightness those competing light sources cast across the tangled, uneven jungle canopy did bewildering things to human vision. Nor was Camp Inferno likely to offer much in the way of a landmark when they finally reached it. Presumably the jungle had been cut back immediately around it, if only to give the Peep shuttle pilots clearance on their grocery runs, but even a large clearing could disappear without any effort at all against such a confusing sea of treetops and shadow. And without electrical power, the kind of artificial light spill which might have been visib
le at long range was highly unlikely.
All of which meant the shuttles were going to spend more time than anyone liked to think about cruising around looking for their destination. Which not only increased the possibility that some weather sat or some unnoticed recon sat was going to spot them, but also the possibility that someone on the ground was going to hear them and wonder what SS aircraft were doing overhead in the middle of the night.
Which wouldn’t be a problem, Honor thought, sitting in the copilot’s seat of Tremaine’s shuttle and peering out through the windscreen, if we could be sure StateSec hasn’t planted informers down there. And much as I hate to admit it, if I were StateSec, this is one camp where I’d make darn sure I had at least one or two spies in place.
"We ought to have seen something by now, Ma’am," Tremaine said. Most people would never have noticed the strain in his voice, but Honor had known him since he was a brand-new ensign on his first deployment, and she turned to give him one of her half-smiles.
"Patience, Scotty," she said. "Patience. We’ve hardly started looking yet."
He grimaced at his controls, then sighed and forced his shoulders to relax.
"I know, Ma’am," he admitted. "And I know anything down there is going to be the next best thing to invisible, but—" He broke off and shrugged again, and she chuckled.
"But you want to spot it anyway and get down on the ground where it’s safe, right?" she suggested.
"Well, actually, yes, Ma’am." He turned his head to grin back at her. "I guess I always have been a little on the impatient side, haven’t I?"
"Just a little," she agreed.
"Well, I come by it naturally," he said, "and—"
"’Scuse me, Mr. Tremaine," a voice broke in over the com, "but I think I see something."
"And where would that happen to be, Chief?" Tremaine inquired. "You really ought to be a bit more precise in making these minor sighting reports, you know," he added severely.
"Yes, Sir. Sorry ’bout that, Sir. Guess I’m just getting old, Sir," Senior Chief Harkness replied so earnestly Honor had to turn a laugh into a smothered cough. "I’ll try not to let it happen again, Sir," Harkness went on. "Maybe next time I can find you a younger, fitter flight engineer, Sir. And then—"
"And then you can tell me where you saw whatever you saw before I come back there and have Master Chief Ascher take care of you for me, Chief!" Tremaine interrupted.
"Ha! Threats now, is it?" Harkness sniffed over the com, but he was tapping keys back in the tac section even as he spoke. A heads-up holo display glowed suddenly, painting a rough map against the windscreen with a blinking icon to indicate the approximate location of whatever Harkness had seen. The icon was well astern and to port of them, and Tremaine brought the shuttle around in a wide curve.
"Is Two still on station?" he asked. Honor leaned to the side, peering through the armorplast on her side of the cockpit, but she couldn’t see anything. Senior Chief Harkness, however, had a better view from his location.
"Sticking to you like glue, Sir," he said. "She’s dropped back a little on your starboard quarter, but she’s holding position nicely."
"That, Chief Harkness, is because she is an officer and a lady. And unlike people who don’t tell me they’ve seen things until we’re past them, she’s also good at her job."
"You just keep right on, Sir," Harkness told him comfortably. "And the next time you need to find your posterior, you can use your own flashlight."
"I’m shocked—shocked —that you could say such a thing to an officer and a gentleman," Tremaine returned in a slightly distracted tone. He was leaning forward, eyes sweeping the night. "I’d think that after all these years, you’d at l—"
He broke off suddenly, and the shuttle’s speed dropped still further.
"I do believe I may owe you an apology, Chief," he murmured. "A small one, at least." He glanced at Honor. "Do you see it, Ma’am?"
"I do." Honor raised an old-fashioned pair of binoculars, once more missing her cybernetic eye’s vision enhancement as she peered through them with her right eye. It wasn’t much—no more than what looked like a torch or two burning against the blackness of the jungle—and she felt a distant surprise that Harkness had seen it at all. Of course, he does have access to the tac sensors from back there, she reminded herself, but Peep passives are nothing to write home about.
"How do you want to handle it, Ma’am?" Tremaine asked, and tension burned under his deceptively calm tone.
"Warn Commander Metcalf, and then take us up another few hundred meters," she replied. "Let’s see if we can’t find another break in this canopy."
"Yes, Ma’am." He thumbed a button on the stick to flash the running light atop the vertical stabilizer once, then eased the stick back and fed a little more power to the air-breathing turbines. The big shuttle angled smoothly upwards while its companion, warned by the flash of light, broke right and stayed low, tracking him visually against the moon-bright sky. He climbed another three hundred meters, then leveled out, sweeping around the dim lights Harkness had spotted.
They were easier to see from the greater altitude, and the live side of Honor’s mouth frowned as she studied them through the binoculars. There were actually two double rows of light sources, set at right angles. Most of them were quite dim, but five or six of them flared brighter where the two lines crossed, and she thought she could make out faint reflections of what looked like flat roofs of some sort. She stared at them a moment longer, then laid the binocculars in her lap and rubbed her good eye with the heel of her hand in an effort to scrub away the ache of concentration.
Nimitz bleeked softly at her from where he lay beside her seat in a highly nonregulation nest of folded blankets, and she smiled down at him reassuringly. Then she lifted the glasses again, studying the jungle.
"What’s that line to the east?" she asked after a moment.
"How far from the camp, My Lady?" Jasper Mayhew’s voice came over the com.
"It looks like—what, Scotty? Twenty or twenty-five klicks?"
"Something like that, Ma’am," Tremaine replied. "Chief?"
"I make it twenty-three from here, Ma’am," Harkness said from the tac section after a moment, studying the frustratingly vague output of his passive sensors.
"In that case, I think it’s a river, My Lady," Mayhew said, and she heard the rustle and crackle of plaspaper as he studied the hardcopy map he and Russell Sanko had put together. "The Tepes download didn’t give any terrain details, but that’s what it looked like from the weather sat maps we picked up. If it is a river, it’s not much of one, though."
"Um." Honor laid the binoculars back down and rubbed her nose in thought, then looked at Scotty. "Think you could take a shuttle through there without counter-grav?"
"Without—?" Tremaine looked at her for a moment, then inhaled sharply. "Sure," he said, far more confidently than he could possibly feel, and Honor chuckled.
"Don’t get your testosterone in an uproar on me now, Scotty. I’m serious. Can you get us in there?"
"Probably, Ma’am," he said after a moment, then added, grudgingly, "but I can’t guarantee it. With one of our own pinnaces, yes. But this is a big brute, Ma’am. She’s a lot heavier on the controls, and I haven’t really experimented with her vectored thrust yet."
"But you think you could do it."
"Yes, Ma’am."
Honor thought for several more seconds, then sighed and shook her head.
"I’d like to take you up on that," she said, "but I don’t think we can risk it. Chief Harkness?"
"Aye, Ma’am?"
"Go ahead and fire up the plant, Chief."
"Aye, aye, Ma’am. I’m starting light-off now. We should be nominal in about four minutes."
"Thank you, Chief. Signal Commander Metcalf please, Scotty."
"Yes, Ma’am." Tremaine banked the big shuttle to expose its full wingspan to Metcalf’s lower position and flashed both wingtip lights twice.
"Answering f
lash from Shuttle Two, Ma’am," a Grayson voice reported.
"Thank you, Carson," Honor replied, and leaned back beside Tremaine. Firing up the fusion plants and bringing up the counter-grav added somewhat to the risk of detection if any recon sat happened to be looking their way. She’d hoped to avoid that, but she’d also known she might not be able to. That was why she’d arranged a signal to warn Metcalf without breaking com silence. At least the plants shouldn’t be on-line for long, she told herself, and the counter-grav would make it much, much safer—and easier—to get the shuttles down.
"I’ve got power to the counter-grav, Ma’am," Tremaine reported, breaking in on her thoughts, and she nodded.
"See that ‘S’-curve to the south?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma’am."
"It looks like the widest break in the tree cover we’ve got. See if you can get us in there on its west bank."
"Yes, Ma’am." Tremaine almost managed not to sound dubious, and Honor felt the right side of her mouth quirking in another grin as he banked again and came back around. Her hand dropped down beside her to rest on Nimitz’s flank, and she felt a wiry, long-fingered true-hand pat her wrist in reply, and then Tremaine was dumping altitude and speed alike.
Despite his comments about the shuttle’s controls, he brought the big craft in with a delicacy a Sphinx finch might have envied. The counter-grav let him fold the wings, which had been swept fully forward for their low-speed examination of possible landing sites, back into their high-speed position without losing control, and she heard turbines whine as he held a moderate apparent weight on the shuttle and vectored thrust downward. The sixty-three-meter fuselage slid almost daintily towards the ground, hovering with ponderous grace, and Honor peered through the armorplast windscreen.
The break in the canopy was a river, and shallow water rushed and tumbled over mossy boulders in a torrent of moon-struck white and black. The trees grew right up to the banks, but the humidity was far lower here in the center of the continent than it had been at their peninsular landing site, and the growth looked less lush and thick. Or she hoped it did, anyway. It was hard to be sure, and the last thing they needed was to suck something into a turbine.