David Weber - In Enemy Hands

And now he didn't, and it was as if some fundamental principle of physics had violated itself. One of the unwavering certainties of his life had crumbled in his hand, and that deeply wounded part of him wanted to scream at the universe for betraying him so. Only it wasn't the universe which had done it, and tantrums would change nothing.

He drew a deep breath and held it, mourning the death of the man Horace Harkness once had been, and once more forced himself to set his grief aside. It would return. He knew that, but he was also the senior officer in this compartment. It was his job to lead—to set an example—and he remembered the lessons Harkness had taught him before the final betrayal, and the need to live up to those lessons had taken on a strange, added urgency. It was almost as if as long as he honored them, in some perverse way it would mean Harkness hadn't fallen. And it was what Lady Harrington would have expected of him—and Captain McKeon. There were some people it was simply unthinkable to fail, and Scotty wondered if McKeon or Lady Harrington would ever know that it was the impossibility of allowing himself to come up short against their standards, not courage or dedication or patriotism, which truly kept him from admitting his despair to Clinkscales or Mayhew or Jamie Candless and Robert Whitman.

And, he admitted, pushing himself to his feet once more, it was Horace Harkness, as well. He'd learned the senior chief's lessons too well to abandon them now, whatever might have happened aboard Tepes .

James Candless watched Lieutenant Commander Tremaine cross the compartment to Ensign Clinkscales. Despite his own official status as a Marine officer, Candless felt out of place confined with these officers, and he knew Whitman felt the same. But he also knew that the true reason they felt so adrift and anchorless was that the central focus of their lives had been taken from them. They were Grayson armsmen, and their Steadholder was imprisoned and condemned to die, and they were still alive.

That was the shame they both bore, Candless thought as Tremaine lowered himself to sit beside Clinkscales and speak quietly and encouragingly to the ensign. They should have died before they allowed anyone to lay hands on the Steadholder, and they hadn't. They hadn't been present when the Peeps sentenced her to death, and the officers who had been there hadn't wanted to tell them what had happened, but they knew. It wasn't their fault, yet that changed nothing. The Steadholder had been beaten and clubbed to the floor. Nimitz had been crippled and half-killed. And the woman they were sworn to protect had been dragged off, alone in the hands of people who hated her.

Candless gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as he fought the agony of failure. He knew Whitman shared it, yet not even Whitman knew the full depth of his own despair. For six years Candless had watched the Steadholder's back, he and Major LaFollet. For six years , always in their proper place, guarding her against her enemies and, when the need arose, against herself—against her own courage and need to risk herself for others. And now she was alone, Tester only knew where, enduring Tester only knew what abuse and knowing she would die, and Jamie Candless would be denied even the right to die by her side.

He opened his eyes once more, watching Tremaine and Clinkscales, seeing the new maturity in the ensign's face and recognizing the way in which facing his own helplessness had burned away Clinkscales' youthful uncertainty. He turned his head to glance at Whitman, washing his uniform by hand in the lavatory, and then at Lieutenant Mayhew, sitting in one corner and playing chess against Surgeon Lieutenant Walker on a board which existed only in their minds. They were going on, all of them, because they refused to give up, but for how much longer would that be true? Even if they'd known the voyage time to Hades, they had no chrono, no calendar, no way to tell how long they'd already been aboard. But they knew they would arrive eventually, and what then? What would happen when the Steadholder was dead, and they were only so many more nameless, forgotten inmates in a planet-sized prison?

He didn't know the answers to those questions, but it didn't really matter, for those answers wouldn't apply to him. He could no more save the Steadholder than he could somehow capture this entire ship, but one thing he could do, and the decision had come surprisingly easily to someone who'd never realized he harbored a strand of the berserker. They wouldn't let him die with the Steadholder... but sooner or later, somewhere, sometime, his chance would come. Not immediately. He refused to act hastily, for it was important he succeed, and he was determined that he would. At least one of them. At least one of the bastards in their black and red uniforms before he made them kill him—that was all he asked for... and all in the universe he would ever want again.

"All right, cell bait. Get dressed!" The sneering female guard threw the orange jumpsuit at Honor with one hand and stood back, peeling the thin plastic glove from her other hand.

Honor caught the scratchy fabric without even looking, staring straight in front of her as she had ever since the two guards entered her cell for the regular postmeal "suicide watch search." There were always two of them for the degrading ritual. Usually, as today, the second was Sergeant Bergren, who took special delight in any opportunity to humiliate her, but if it hadn't been him it would have been Hayman, or perhaps Timmons himself, for the second guard was always male. That was part of the degradation.

Even State Security had rules. Its personnel might ignore or violate them, but the official procedures existed, and—on paper, at least—they looked almost reasonable. But Timmons and his detail of two-legged animals understood how twisting those procedures without—quite—technically violating them only allowed even more scope to humiliate and debase anyone unfortunate enough to fall into their power. The letter of the regulations said strip searches and cavity searches of prisoners could be carried out only by security personnel of the same sex, and Timmons insisted that his thugs abide by that. But the regs also stipulated that a minimum of two guards must be present any time a priority prisoner was subjected to searches... and that second guard was always male.

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.