Honor understood what Timmons expected that to do to her. Once he might even have been right to expect it, too. But not now. The years when the shadow of Pavel Young had blighted her life were long over, for she'd come to grips with its poison. The days she'd spent working out with men had helped put it behind her, but what had truly forced the poison from her system had been Paul Tankersley's love, and she drew the memory of that love about her now, like armor. The animal behind the leering eyes gloating over her naked humiliation might be male, but whatever else he was, Honor would never call him a man, and the bottomless contempt she felt for him—and for all her captors—fused with her memories of Paul and her own refusal to let such creatures defeat her. It was that fusion of strengths, each potent in its own right and yet so much more than the sum of their parts when all of them flowed together, which let her catch the jumpsuit without even a change of expression or the flicker of an eyelid.
She started to put it on, gazing at the blank bulkhead as she ignored her guards, and under their surface delight in mocking and humiliating her, she sensed their deeper bafflement and anger. She confused them, for with no way to know the true wellsprings of her strength, they couldn't understand it. They couldn't grasp what allowed her to maintain her maddening lack of response, but they knew that it wasn't the same thing as passivity. That this prisoner chose to ignore them as a form of defiance, not escape or surrender. Whatever the source of her inner toughness, it allowed her to elude them in a deep, fundamental way no one else had ever achieved, and they hated her for it.
Honor understood their confusion. All their experience told them their abuse and systematic denial of her humanity should have broken her. It should have brought her defiance crashing down, for it always had before, and on the surface of things, she knew, it should have done so this time, as well.
Her grim, featureless cell had no mirror, but she didn't need one to know what she looked like. Their precious regulations proscribed any sort of cybernetic prostheses or bioenhancement for prisoners, and one of their techs had disabled her artificial eye... and the synthetic nerves in the left side of her face. It had been a gratuitous insult, a gloating deprivation which served no useful purpose. Certainly there had been no possible way in which her eye or facial nerves could be considered a "security risk"! But that hadn't prevented them from doing it, and the relative crudity of their tech base had prevented them from simply shutting her implants down. With neither the access codes nor the technology to derive them, they'd taken a brute force approach and simply burned them out, blinding her left eye and reducing half her face to dead, numb immobility. Honor suspected the damage was irreparable and that complete replacement would be required... or would have been, if she'd been going to live long enough to receive it.
Nor had their petty cruelties stopped there. They'd shaved her head under the guise of "hygiene," cutting away the braids she'd spent so many years growing. But there, at least, their efforts to dehumanize her had hit a pothole that actually amused her, for they seemed unaware that she'd cut her own hair almost that short for the better part of thirty years for the sake of convenience. Whatever they might have hoped, the loss of her braids was scarcely likely to cause her resistance to crumble.
Yet for all that her spirit remained unbroken, she also knew, mirror or no, that her confinement was gradually grinding her away. Timmons seemed unaware of her enhanced metabolism or its need for fuel. She didn't know if that was true or if he simply wanted her to beg for the additional food she required, and it didn't really matter. She'd long since decided she would die before asking him for anything.
The living side of her face had grown gaunt, and her muscle tone was slowly rotting under the impact of poor diet and lack of exercise. She knew Cordelia Ransom had wanted her in good shape for the cameras when they hanged her, and she took a certain grim, perverse satisfaction in knowing what Ransom would actually get. Yet inside, where she guarded the walls of her spirit's fortress, she knew she was growing dangerously detached. She had no clear idea how long she'd been in this cell where the light and the temperature never changed, where there was nothing to read or do, where no distraction was ever offered except for her meals and the mocking humiliation of the guards. No doubt they were drawing close to their destination and her execution, yet somehow that hardly seemed to matter. She hadn't spoken a word to her captors in the entire time she'd been here—however long that had been—and she sometimes thought, in the drifting stillness of her thoughts when she was alone, that perhaps she had forgotten how to speak. In an odd sort of way, she'd become a mute, withdrawing from the parts of her brain which engaged others in conversation in order to buttress the vital areas of her core. There was a sense of diminution in that loss of speech, a sense of yet another anchor to the world about her fraying its cable, and she knew it was only one facet of her own deliberate internal disconnection from the sadists who controlled her physical existence.
But there was one other anchor, one her guards knew nothing about, which she knew would never fail her. It was faint, reduced by distance to a shadow of what it once had been, yet it was there, and because it was, she knew that Nimitz was still alive.
She clung to that anchor, not as a drowning woman to a spar, but as a lover to her beloved, for she felt his pain—physical, continuing still, and spiritual as he sensed her pain and could not heal it—and she knew that now, as never before, they needed one another. And that one blessing, at least, they had, for none of the sadistic, hating creatures aboard PNS Tepes ever guessed their link still existed, that they fed one another over it. Not with hope, for there was no hope, but with something more important. With love. With the absolute assurance that they would always be there for one another, that neither of them would be allowed to go down into the dark alone, whatever the Peeps intended.
And that was the final leg of her strength, the one Lieutenant Timmons and Sergeant Bergren and Corporal Hayman could never take from her.
She stepped into the bottom of the jumpsuit and started to work her arms into the top's sleeves, but a hand gripped her shoulder. She stopped dressing, standing motionless, and despite her hard-won detachment, her heart beat harder, for it was Bergren's hand.
"Getting close to arrival day, cell bait," he told her, and his gloating voice was right behind her ear, his breath hot on her bare skin. "Not long before that stiff neck of yours is gonna get a little longer." She said nothing, and not a muscle twitched, but he laughed, and his fingers squeezed her shoulder in a mocking parody of a caress. "I'm thinking maybe you'd like a little comforting before they haul your worthless ass to the gallows," he said, and his grip tightened, forcing her to turn to face him.
His eyes roamed over her, and she felt the sickness behind them. There was no trace of comparison between the lust he felt and what she and Paul had shared. Indeed, Bergren's diseased hunger was worse even than what she had sensed from Pavel Young. Young had hated her. He'd wanted to punish her because her rejection of his advances had humiliated him in front of those he considered his peers. It had been a stupid, shallow hate—the hate of a person to whom other human beings were never people, but simply things which existed for his convenience—but at least it had been personal.