In Enemy Hands

"I can't say, Citizen Admiral. But look here and here." She tapped a secondary display at her elbow, and Tourville nodded slowly as he sca

"Stay on it," he told her, then beckoned for Honeker and Bogdanovich to join him.

"I don't know what's happening, but something sure as hell just went wrong aboard Tepes," he told them in a flat, lowered voice.

"What do you mean, 'wrong'?" Honeker asked tautly.

"Citizen Commissioner, warships don't just suddenly go off the air unless something very unusual happens to them. And Citizen Commander Foraker just picked up debris and atmosphere loss. I'd say she's suffered at least one major hull breach."

"A hull breach?" Honeker stared at him in disbelief, and Tourville nodded grimly.

"I don't know what caused it, and the air loss is low enough, for now, at least, to indicate that they managed to seal off the damaged areas. But whatever’s going on over there is serious, Citizen Commissioner. Very serious."

"I see." Honeker rubbed sweaty palms together and made himself take a deep breath. "What do you propose to do about it, Citizen Admiral?" he asked quietly.

"What we're seeing now happened at least four minutes ago," Tourville told him, still in that flat tone. "By now, she could already have blown up, and we wouldn't know it. But if she's in serious trouble, she's going to need help."

"And you propose taking Tilly to render it," Honeker said.

"Yes. Sir. The only problem is that we don't know what she may have already told Camp Charon... or how they may react if we suddenly head for the planet when they told us to stay the hell away from it."

"Understood." Honeker stood another moment, still rubbing his hands together, then looked at Fraiser. "Contact Camp Charon, Citizen Lieutenant. Inform them that we are going to the assistance of Tepes on my authority at our best acceleration and request that they confirm the minefields have been safed for our passage."

Honor Harrington rose and faced the door of her cell as it opened, and the right side of her face was almost as expressionless as the dead left side.

It wasn't easy to keep it that way. Timmons had taken great pleasure in informing her that the next time her cell was opened would be for her trip to the hangman. That would have been enough to make maintaining her composure difficult even without the flashes of emotion she'd begun receiving from Nimitz. They were too far apart, their link stretched too thin, for her to tell exactly what the 'cat was feeling, but there was a sense of... movement, and sharper flashes of pain, as if the movement hurt him. At first she'd been certain he was being transported to the planet to die with her as Ransom had promised, yet she'd become steadily less positive, for a flush of excitement and a strange, fierce determination seemed to have wrapped itself about all of his other emotions. She had no idea what might have caused it. For that matter, it might all be nothing more than a delusion on her part, inspired by her own fear and half-starved weakness. But whatever else was happening, she would meet Timmons and his ghouls without flinching.

The door lock clacked, and she braced herself as it swung open. And then...

"My Lady! Lady Harrington!"

Honor staggered, her good eye flaring wide, as Andrew LaFollet shouted her name. Her personal armsman stood in the open doorway, face haggard and his normally immaculate uniform ragged, and he cradled a flechette gun in his arms.

Not possible, her brain told her calmly. This is not possible. It has to be a hallucination.

But it wasn't, and she stumbled forward as he freed one hand from the gun and held it out to her. Her working eye misted, making it hard to see, but his hand was warm and firm as it closed on her too-thin fingers. He squeezed hard, and Honor dragged in a deep, shuddery breath and put her arms around him, hugging him fiercely.

"We're here to get you out, My Lady," he said into her shoulder, and she nodded and made herself release him. She stood back, blinking to clear her vision, and saw his face change as he took in her own appearance. The brightly colored jumpsuit seemed two sizes too big for her wasted body, and his gray eyes went harder than steel as he took in the dead side of her face. He opened his mouth, but she shook her head.

"No time, Andrew," she told him huskily. "No time. Later."

He gazed at her for a fraction of a second longer, and then shook himself like a dog shedding water from its coat.

"Yes, My Lady," he said, and nodded to someone else. Whoever it was was to her left, and Honor turned quickly, then inhaled in fresh surprise as Andreas Venizelos stepped to her side and fastened a gun belt around her waist. He looked up from his work to meet her eyes with a tense, strained smile, and she touched his shoulder for a moment, then drew the pulser and checked it quickly.

"This way, My Lady," LaFollet said urgently, and she turned to follow him... then stopped. Four bodies lay on the deck, all oozing blood from multiple flechette hits. She recognized two guards whose names she'd never bothered to learn, and Timmons... and Robert Whitman.

"Bob," she whispered. She started to go to her knees beside him, but LaFollet gripped her upper arm and shook his head fiercely.

"There's no time, My Lady!" If Honor had known him even a little less well, she would have hated him in that moment, for the words came out brusque and harsh, devoid of any emotion. But she did know him, and she recognized the matching anguish behind that mask of nonfeeling as he tugged on her arm again. "We've got to get moving, My Lady. They got the alarm out before Bob killed them."

Honor nodded and tried to clear her mind as Candless appeared on her other side and he and LaFollet half-lifted her down into the lift shaft. Marcia McGinley was waiting to help, and Honor clung to her for a moment while her armsmen jumped down beside her. She tried to speak, but her ops officer only gave her a short, fierce hug, picked up a flechette gun of her own, and vanished into the shafts dimness on Candless' heels while Venizelos joined Honor and LaFollet.

"At least we've got plenty of guns," the commander told Honor grimly, handing her a flechette gun to go with her pulser. "I stocked up on spare magazines, too."

"Come on, My Lady," LaFollet said urgently, and he and Venizelos urged her into motion.

"They're trying the lift again!" Alistair McKeon heard someone shout, and a grenade launcher coughed in rapid fire.

Three grenades sizzled past him and dropped neatly through the doors the first assault attempt had left jammed half open, and there was a moment of silence. Then the screams began a half heartbeat before the grenades exploded in rapid succession. Their effect in the enclosed lift shaft must have been indescribable, but Jasper Mayhew sent two more after them.

McKeon grunted in satisfaction, but he also looked at Solomon Marchant.

"We need somebody in position to actually see who's coming down that shaft," he said urgently. "The one thing we don't want is to accidentally kill our own people if they come that way with Lady Harrington!"

"I'll take care of it," the Grayson assured him, and waved for Clinkscales to join him as he loped over to the jammed lift. The lift at the other end of the bay gallery appeared undamaged so far, but Russ Sanko and Senior Chief Halburton were camped right outside its doors with a plasma rifle dug in behind a barricade of shattered machinery and equipment pallets.

Another of Harkness' programs had locked all the lifts to Boat Bay Four, a fact the Peeps obviously had already discovered. So far, they were restricting themselves to the forward lift only, and since they couldn't use the lift car itself, they'd come down the shaft and tried to blow the doors into the gallery. They'd partially succeeded, and the explosion when they blew the doors had killed Chief Reilly, but the rest of McKeon's people had massacred the entire assault team before it could clear the shaft. The undamaged rear lift remained a threat, but McKeon had decided against blowing it himself. Honor might need it, and Sanko and Halburton made a pretty effective security measure. Anyone who tried to use it to attack the boat bay might get as far as opening the doors; he certainly wouldn't get any further.