"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."
"Youre 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 didnt 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 oneafter all, they dont know were here, so they cant possibly realize how much this could help us. Thats why Im inclined to go with the data despite its age."
"Um." McKeon scratched his chin and squinted at nothing in particular, then nodded slowly. "I cant fault your logic, but I wish I had a dollar for every time Id figured something out logically and been wrong."
"True." Honor gave Nimitz another caress, then flipped through the pages of Tremaines 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 theyre 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 somethingGod knows hes 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. Thats good when its time to execute orders, but it can keep us from seeing things in skull sessions. Warner doesnt have that problem, and hes smart as a whip. I found that out in Silesia, and I could really use his perspective here, too... if it wouldnt be putting him so much on the spot. And, she admitted, if I could be certain his sense of duty wouldnt 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 Honors 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 himnot over what he had done, but over what he might still do. If he hadnt broken his oath as an officer in the Peoples Navy yet, hed certainly come close, and she didnt 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 wouldnt really know anything more about this than we do, she reminded herself, so the least I can do is leave him alone where its concerned.
"Was Inferno covered in the last supply run?" she asked now.
"We dont know, Maam," Anson Lethridge replied. The ugly, almost brutish-looking Erewhon officer who had been Honors staff astrogator sat with Jasper Mayhew and Tremaine, all three of them facing aft from the shuttles 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 taplike 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 didnt discuss a particular drop, or we didnt happen to hear it when they did, we cant say for certain that a delivery was actually made. Assuming were right about the way they schedule the supply drops, then, yes, Inferno probably was covered, but theres no way we can guarantee that."
"I was afraid youd 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, Id 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. Theres 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 wasnt an argument, only an observation, and Honor nodded.
"I know, but I dont 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 dont. 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 themand ustogether cuts the number of potential sighting opportunities in half. And lets 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 isnt likely to make that much difference. If Champ Charon figures out that were here at all before were 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. Lets 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 didnt dare make the trip at max. They thought theyd 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 couldnt be certain about that. There could always be one theyd missed, and even if there hadnt 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. Theyd been able to fix their starting position with suitable accuracy, and the weather map which had first revealed Infernos existence to them fixed the camps 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 aidswhich, after all, was what the StateSec pilots didbut the satellites werent 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.