"He—?" Honor blinked, then looked at Harkness. "You blew the ship up, Senior Chief?" she asked very carefully.
"Uh, yes, Ma'am," Harkness mumbled, turning an alarming shade of red. "Actually, ah, I sort of, well..."
"He demonstrated what happens when a pinnace brings its wedge up inside a boat bay, Skipper," McKeon told her, and Honor blinked again, with a sort of appalled respect.
"I see," she said, and then the right side of her mouth twitched. "Remind me to never, ever get you angry at me, Horace."
Harkness went an even darker crimson as she used his first name for the first time in the eleven years they'd known one another. He started to mumble something, then stopped, looked at her, and shrugged helplessly.
"He also pulled a lot of information on Hades out of Tepes' database," McKeon went on, as much to save Harkness from more embarrassment as to bring Honor up to date. "I've been looking it over since we planeted, and I can see why the Peeps figure this is a pretty secure prison."
"Oh?" Honor returned her gaze to him with renewed attentiveness.
"Yes, Ma'am. It's simple enough: there's not a single thing on the entire planet which a human can metabolize." Honor's eye narrowed, and he nodded. "You've got it, Skipper. They don't need to lock anyone up; all they have to do is lock the prisoners out of the food depot. We don't have figures on the prisoner population, but if the rumors are true, they've been dumping military and political prisoners here for something like seventy years, and most of the people they've dumped had prolong. There have to be thousands of 'inmates' down here, but the Peeps have them spread out across the surface of an entire planet in relatively small packets, and they can't stray far from wherever they were dumped in the first place because that's where the Peeps deliver their rations."
"I see." Honor's fingers stroked Nimitz's ears, and she frowned. "How big is the garrison?"
"Again, we don't have precise figures, but I'd estimate there're around a thousand or fifteen hundred of them. Their main facility is on an island in the middle of Hades' biggest ocean, it's covered by satellite reconnaissance, and according to Tepes' database, they've got light and medium antiair defenses around the base. The only contact between there and the rest of the planet is by air, and once they've been shipped down to the surface, no prisoners are allowed on the island." McKeon shrugged. "Since they control the only food source, and the only means to get to that food source, and the orbital defenses around the planet, security's never been a real big concern for them."
"I see," Honor repeated, then flicked her hand at the bulkheads around them. "But now?" she suggested.
"Now that might just change," McKeon agreed with an unpleasant smile. "Thanks to Harkness here, we've got a pair of heavy assault shuttles with almost full loads of external ordnance, full small arms racks, and a fair amount of unpowered armor."
Honor felt both eyebrows rise and gave Harkness another respectful look.
"We're also pretty sure the Peeps don't know we're here," McKeon went on. "From what Harkness pulled out of Tepes' database, they've got a good satellite surveillance net, but it concentrates on covering their main facility, and we touched down on the far side of the planet. We made dead-stick approaches without using impeller drive, too, and we didn't cut in the countergrav until we were under a hundred meters. There's no way anyone saw us make reentry or land, and this place is covered in triple-canopy jungle, so camouflaging the shuttles once we had them down wasn't exactly hard. Besides, we've been down for over three local days now. If they had any suspicion we'd made it out when Tepes blew, we'd be neck deep in recon flights. Under the circumstances, StateSec would probably even have called in Count Tilly's small craft to look for us, and we've seen zip air traffic."
"All right," Honor said after a moment. "It sounds to me like you're right about that part of it, but where do we go from here?"
"That's up to you, Ma'am, and frankly, I'm just as happy it is," McKeon said candidly. "We're down and concealed for the moment, and we've got some hardware to work with and enough emergency rations to carry us for up to five months if we're careful. But there are only eighteen of us—twenty, if we count Warner and Nimitz—" he nodded to the Peep officer with a wryly apologetic grin "—and the bad guys have a hell of a lot more firepower than we do. Not to mention an established base, at least a dozen armed pinnaces of their own, and those damned satellites to watch their backs. Any way you look at it, Ma'am, we're pretty damned outnumbered!"
"Outnumbered, Alistair?" Honor leaned back, her thin fingers buried in Nimitz's warm, soft fur. She looked more like a gaunt, half-starved wolf than ever, with her shaved hair, half-dead face, and amputated arm, but the feral gleam of a pack leader glittered in her remaining eye. She swept that eye over the men around her, and the right side of her upper lip curled back to bare her teeth.
"You people got us out of Tepes and down to this planet," she told them. "There were two or three thousand people on that ship, with guns and the combinations to our cells, but you still got us out, and we've got a lot more to work with now than you had then, now don't we?"
She held McKeon's eyes until he nodded, then swept her gaze over the others once more, and she could not have defined or described the wild, fierce flow of her emotions if her soul had depended upon it. But it didn't matter. She didn't need to define or describe anything, for she felt the same determination, the same defiance, echoing back at her from her officers. She didn't realize how much those emotions focused on her, had no true concept of the way they viewed her as their living victory totem, and that didn't matter either. What mattered was the moment, the sense of naked swords raised in the dawn and the roar of massed voices ready to defy the gods themselves behind her. And as she heard the inner echo of that defiance, she knew it didn't matter at all that she had less than twenty people and only two sublight shuttles on a planet a light-century and a half from the nearest friendly territory, for it was inconceivable that the Peeps could keep her people here. Not after all they'd already done.
"If anyone's outnumbered here," Lady Dame Honor Harrington told her friends softly, "it's the Peeps."
Illustrations
