The screen returned no answer, and he sighed, gave himself another shake, and returned to his unpacking.
"Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in!"
Honor refused to turn her head or even move her eyes to locate the man who'd spoken. Instead, she stood very still, looking straight ahead, and tried to keep her face from reflecting the sinking sensation in her belly as she looked down the bare, gray-painted passage. Humans were humans, wherever they were from or wherever they went. There were inevitably troublemakers in any group of them, and every warship had its brig to deal with that contingency. But this ship's brig was far larger than any Honor had ever seen, and the harsh lighting, dreary gray bulkheads, and strong smell of disinfectant could have been specifically designed to crush the soul of anyone consigned to it.
And no doubt they were designed to do that, she thought. This wasn't simply a facility to hold prisoners; it was the first stage in a process designed to reduce them to pliable, servile obedience... assuming they weren't simply disposed of, instead.
She drew a mental breath and refused to let that thought drag her under. Her mind was clearer now, for the sweeping waves of Nimitz's pain had retreated. She didn't know if that was because Montoya had managed to ease that pain or if it was simply a factor of the distance between them, and she was torn between gratitude for her returning mental clarity and anguish over the separation. But giving into the anguish wouldn't help her, she reminded herself, and clearheadedness might.
"Snotty bitch, isn't she?" the male voice commented when she simply stood silently, waiting. "I imagine we can fix that."
Someone snickered, but Citizen Captain de Sangro shook her head.
"None of that, Timmons. Committeewoman Ransom wants this one delivered intact. Any breakage'll come out of someone's skin, and it won't be mine."
"Hmpf!" the man called Timmons snorted, then hawked and spat on the deck. The gobbet of spittle landed two centimeters from Honor's foot, and the naval officer in her noted the act with distant disgust. That sort of behavior would never be tolerated, if only on hygienic grounds, aboard any Manticoran ship, but no one seemed to care here. "No breakage, huh? That takes a lot of the fun out of it, de Sangro."
"My heart bleeds for you," the captain said. "Look, I've got better things to do than flap my gums at you. Suppose you just sign for this puta, and I'll be on my way."
"Always in a friggin' hurry, aren't you?" Timmons chuckled. "All right, all right! Give me the damned board."
Honor stood motionless while Timmons scrawled a signature and offered his thumbprint to the memo board's scanner. Her face showed no emotion as she was signed for like some piece of cargo. Indeed, her expressionlessness might have been mistaken for passivity by anyone who'd never seen her in the salle working out at coup de vitesse or honing her swordsmanship. She harbored no illusions that any martial arts skills could save her from whatever was going to happen, but she hadn't acquired them solely for purposes of combat. She'd spent forty years learning to draw upon their discipline and focus at need... and she'd never before needed either of those qualities as much as she knew she needed them now.
"There y'go," Timmons said, handing the board back to de Sangro. "Signed, sealed, and deelivered. You have a nice day now, de Sangro."
"Asshole," de Sangro snorted, and waved the other two members of her detail back into the lift, leaving Honor with Timmons and his detail.
A second or two passed in silence, and then hands grabbed her upper arms and jerked her around. The motion was quick and brutal, designed to surprise and disorient her, but she relaxed into it, the same way she rode a sparring partner's attack in the salle, and it failed to do either. The lack of resistance threw the man behind her off center, instead, and he half-staggered, his hands tightening on her arms as he found himself holding on for balance. He growled a curse, and the right corner of her mouth twitched with a bitter almost-smile. It was a petty triumph, but knowing this was a battle where ultimate victory was impossible made every triumph, however small, important.
The turn brought her face to face with Timmons, and she didn't care much for what she saw. The man was at least a couple of centimeters taller than she was, with broad shoulders and a face that actually had a sort of rough handsomeness, and he wore the insignia of a first lieutenant in the People's Marines, which she assumed denoted the same rank for State Security ground forces, as well. His hair was neatly trimmed, his uniform was freshly pressed, and the teeth that showed when he smiled were strong and white, yet that immaculate appearance was only a mask, a false surface that failed utterly to conceal something very different.
Despite her self-control, Honor blinked in surprise as she realized what that something was... and why his mask failed to hide it from her. It was as if Timmons carried the stink of rotting blood around with him, and he did. But not in any physical sense. What she was sensing came from inside him, and her nostrils flared as she realized that even so far separated from Nimitz she could scarcely feel his pain, she was picking up someone else's emotions. That had never happened before. Or she didn't think it had, anyway, but she didn't really know, for she'd never tried to read another's emotions on the rare occasions when she and the 'cat had been physically separated. Was this something new? Or something she could have done any time she'd tried? And with her sense of Nimitz's presence so faint, was she reading Timmons through the 'cat at all... or on her own?
The moment of discovery distracted her, breaking her cocoon of expressionless calm ever so briefly, but Timmons didn't notice. His attention was on the memo board he'd accepted from de Sangro. He punched the page key several times, scanning the screens of data for at least five minutes. Then he looked up with another white-toothed smile, and Honor hid an inner shiver. Sphinxian life forms were immune to the Old Earth disease of hydrophobia, but if a hexapuma could have contracted that sickness, it might have smiled like that.
"We've got us a special prisoner here, boys and girls," he told his detail. "This here is Honor Harrington. I'm sure you've heard of her?" Unpleasant laughter answered, and he chuckled. "Thought you might have. 'Course, she's come down in the world a mite. Says here they're taking her to Camp Charon to stretch her neck a little. Pity."
The blood stink of his emotions was stronger now, and Honor's stomach churned, but she had her expression back under control, and her eyes looked straight through him. He didn't like that. She could feel it in him—the anger fusing with a sadism worse than anything she'd sensed from de Sangro—and knew her lack of response was dangerous. But there was nothing she could do that wasn't dangerous.
She waited for his fuming emotions to spill over, but they didn't, and she felt an even deeper shiver of fear as she realized that underneath that calm, smiling exterior Timmons actually enjoyed the boil of fury. The anger and taste for cruelty which filled him were like drugs, something which put an edge on his life, and the need to restrain them only made that edge sharper. It was as if the denial of immediate gratification refined or distilled them, making the anticipation of loosing them almost sweeter than the actual moment when he did.
"According to this," he went on in a voice whose calm drawl fooled neither him nor Honor, "some of her friends are coming along for the ride, but they're military. They'll be riding topside, and she'll be all alone down here. Kinda makes you feel sorry for her, doesn't it?"