Echoes Of Honor

"The question," Honor mused aloud, "is how often they make their delivery flights."

"I’ve been ru

"Go on," Honor invited.

"Well, Commander Lethridge and Scotty and I have been playing with the stuff the Chief managed to pull out of Tepes’ secure data base," Mayhew said. "He didn’t have the time to pay a whole lot of attention to the planet—he was too busy figuring out how to get to the ship’s control systems and get us down here in the first place—but there were some interesting numbers in the dirtside data he’d never gotten a chance to look at. As nearly as Scotty and I can figure out, there are at least a half-million prisoners down here."

"A half-million? " Honor repeated, and Mayhew nodded.

"At least," he repeated. "Remember that they’ve been dumping what they considered to be their real hard cases here for eighty T-years, My Lady. We’ve got fairly hard numbers on the military POWs they’ve sent here. Most of them are from the various star systems the Peeps picked off early on, from Tambourine to Trevor’s Star. You had to be a pretty dangerous fellow to get sent to Hell, of course—sort of the cream of the crop, the kind of people who were likely to start building resistance cells if you were left to your own devices. Of course, if State Security had been ru

"At any rate, there weren’t very many additions to the POW population for about ten years before they attacked the Alliance, and the nature of the POWs sent here since the war started is a bit different from what I’d expected." Honor raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. "If I were StateSec, and I had a prison whose security I felt absolutely confident about, that’s where I’d send the prisoners I figured had really sensitive information. I could take my time getting it out of them, and I’d have complete physical security while I went about it—they couldn’t escape, no one could break them out, and for that matter, no one could even know that was where I had them, since the location of the system itself was classified. But StateSec apparently prefers to do its interrogating closer to the center of the Republic, probably on Haven itself. Instead of using Hell as a holding area for prize prisoners, they’ve been using it as a dumping ground. People who make trouble in other camps get sent here, where they can’t get into any more mischief."

"What sort of ‘mischief’ were they getting into?" McKeon asked in an interested tone.

"Just about anything you can think of, Sir," Mayhew replied. "Escape attempts, for a lot of them... or else they were guilty of being the kinds of officers and noncoms who’d insist on maintaining discipline and unit cohesion even in a prison camp. The troublemakers."

"And they’ve been skimming them off and dumping them here, have they?" Honor murmured, and there was a wicked gleam in her good eye. "You could almost say they’ve been distilling them out of the rest of their prison population, couldn’t you?"

"Yes, My Lady, you could," Mayhew agreed. "According to the best numbers Scotty and I could come up with, we figure there are between a hundred eighty and two hundred thousand military prisoners down here. It could run as high as two hundred and fifty, but that’s a maximum figure. The other three or four hundred thousand are civilians. About a third of those were shipped out after various civilian resistance groups from conquered planets were broken up, but most are the more usual run of political prisoners."

"Um." Honor frowned at that and rubbed the tip of her nose. After a moment, she moved her hand from her nose to Nimitz, stroking the ’cat’s spine.

"A high percentage of them are from Haven itself, with the biggest single block of them from Nouveau Paris," Mayhew told her. "Apparently, both InSec and StateSec concentrated their housecleaning on the capital."

"Makes sense," McKeon said again. "Authority in the PRH has always been centralized, and every bit of it passes through the command and control nodes on Haven. Whoever controls the capital controls the rest of the Republic, so it’s not unreasonable for them to want to make damned sure potential troublemakers on Haven were under control. It’d probably work, too. ‘Hey, Prole! You get uppity around here, and—Pffft! Off to Hell with you!’ Except that since the Harris Assassination, they’ve been sending off ‘elitists’ instead of ‘proles,’ of course."

"No doubt," Honor said. "But having them here in such numbers could certainly throw a spa

"Why?" McKeon’s surprise was evident. "They’re here because they oppose what’s happening in Nouveau Paris, aren’t they?"

"They’re here because the people who were ru

"I hadn’t thought of it that way," McKeon acknowledged slowly.

"I’m not saying that there aren’t political prisoners who truly do oppose Pierre and Saint-Just and their thugs and who’d stand up beside us to prove it," Honor said. "Nor am I saying that there aren’t collaborators among the POWs. There are usually at least some potential weasels in any group, and even the spirits of men and women who would stand up to outright torture can be crushed by enough prolonged hopelessness."

For just an instant, the right side of her face was almost as expressionless as the nerve-dead left side, and McKeon shivered. She was speaking from experience, he thought. About something she’d faced and stared down during her own long weeks in solitary confinement. She gazed at something no one else could see for several seconds, then shook herself.

"Still," she said, "at some point we’re going to have to take a chance on someone besides our own people, and I’d think military POWs who were captured fighting against the Peeps in defense of their own worlds or parked here to prevent them from becoming threats after their worlds were conquered are more likely to resist the temptation to collaborate. Not that I intend to leap to any sweeping generalizations. It’s going to have to be a case-by-case consideration."

She stroked Nimitz again and the grim look in her eye turned into something almost like a twinkle. McKeon regarded her curiously, but she only shook her head, and he shrugged. He wasn’t positive how she did it, but she’d demonstrated an unca