Not that "tidbit" was actually a word she would normally consider applying to Peep emergency rations. Prior to her arrival on Hell, shed 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 dont think theyre 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 weve met." He made a disgusted sound. "Its a damned shame the local beasties dont know they cant digest us. Maybe theyd 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 peopleor treecatscant 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, Im 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 jungles 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. Theyd all had more than enough of the Office of State Securitys hospitality.
"How are the converters holding up?" he asked after a moment.
"Still cranking out the current," Honor replied. Shed 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. "Id 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 dont think thats what happened here," Honor disagreed. "Harkness, Scotty, and Warner have gone through the operators manuals, and theyre 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 humans 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. Theyre a little bulkier and a lot more massive, but I suspect their outputs 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, lets say, or a more efficient emergency power converter for my lifeboats and shuttles, I guess I might opt for the graser. Mind you, itd probably be a hard choice, though."
"Especially under these circumstances," McKeon agreed much more seriously, and she looked up from Nimitzs 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 Hells climate could not have been intentionally designed to be more brutal on delicate electronics and machinery. Senior Chief Barstows 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 shuttless 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, theyd been careful to land on the far side of the planet from the island HQ where StateSecs garrison of prison guards hung out, and so far as Harkness had been able to determine when he raided Tepes computers, the Peeps hadnt 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 hadnt 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 whod 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 producedbarelyenough 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 jungles external temperatures, and the dehumidifiers kept the all-invasive humidity at bay.