"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 wouldnt want to generalize, but I cant help thinking political prisoners would probably be more likely, on average, to collaborate with StateSec."
"Why?" McKeons surprise was evident. "Theyre here because they oppose whats happening in Nouveau Paris, arent they?"
"Theyre 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 doesnt 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 werent, 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 whats happening in the PRH right now but would be perfectly willing to turn in the Republics 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 hadnt thought of it that way," McKeon acknowledged slowly.
"Im not saying that there arent political prisoners who truly do oppose Pierre and Saint-Just and their thugs and whod stand up beside us to prove it," Honor said. "Nor am I saying that there arent 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 shed 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 were going to have to take a chance on someone besides our own people, and Id 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. Its 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 wasnt positive how she did it, but shed demonstrated an uncanny ability to read people too often in the past for him to doubt her ability to do it again.
"Youre 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. "Theyre 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 were trying to update, and as you can see, the ones we know about are clustered on Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Deltas too far into the antarctic to be a practical site, but even with half a million prisoners, theyve 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 wouldnt 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 theyve got approximately two hundred sites in all. Obviously, there are none at all up here on Styx IslandCamp Charon itself is purely a staging point and central supply depot for the other sitesbut 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."
"Id 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 arent any roads and the prisoners dont 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 Continents 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 Id expect the prisoners to be able to buildand hideenough small craft to at least open communications with the other camps."
"I wouldnt disagree with you, Sir," Mayhew said with a nod. "And perhaps I should have said that the Peeps seem confident that it would be impossible 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 theyd been willing to accept larger populations per camp, though," Sanko offered thoughtfully. "That wouldve 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 theyd intercepted "checked in with Charon, Flight Ops sent him the fresh numbers hed asked for, which tells us how many rations he dropped off at this campAlpha-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 dont knowand have no way of determining yetis 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 theyve taken the short time frame approach, since weve been listening to their comsats for over two weeks and this is the first traffic weve heard, but theres no way to prove that."