David Weber - In Enemy Hands

"Get your hand off me."

The five words came out with a soft, dangerous clarity which surprised even Honor after so many endless days of silence. There was steel behind them, and a hunger which echoed Bergren's own, and for just an instant, they froze his blood. But he recovered quickly, and stepped forward, trying to drive her back against the bulkhead.

It didn't work. She scarcely even swayed, and then he grunted hoarsely, as she twisted her hand and the sudden explosion of pain in his wrist drove him to his knees.

"Let him up, bitch!" The other guard stepped forward, reaching for the truncheon on her belt, and Honor turned her head to look into the other woman's eyes.

"Touch me with that club, and I'll break your spine," she said flatly, and the SS woman froze before her total assurance. Then she shook herself.

"I don't think so, cell bait!" she sneered. "You aren't going anywhere even if you do, and you won't like what the rest of 'em will do if you even try. Besides, you've got friends topside, remember?"

She stepped forward with renewed confidence... and Bergren screamed as his wrist snapped in Honor's grip. She kicked him away from her and turned to face his companion, and the female guard flinched away from the cold, hungry fire in her eye.

"You're right," Honor told her softly. "I do have friends 'topside,' and you can make me play your sick little games by threatening them. But not this one. Not even for them. And in case you've forgotten, Ransom wants me 'undamaged,' remember? So play your other games, Peep, but tell the rest of the garbage there are limits." Bergren started to heave to his knees, clutching his wrist, but Honor's right foot shot out, and its bare sole crashed into his mouth. He slammed into the corner, groaning and half-conscious, and the other guard shuddered—afraid, and hating Honor all the more for her fear.

"You can come back with your friends and do whatever you want," she said in that same soft voice. "I know that. But you'd better bring all of them, Peep, and after it's over, there's no way—no way in this universe—you'll deliver me to Ransom alive."

The live half of her lips smiled a thin, terrifying smile, and the guard stepped back involuntarily, clutching her truncheon, trying to understand how the balance of power in this cell could shift so totally in such a tiny instant when she held all the cards. But then she looked into the single brown eye of the gaunt, half-naked woman facing her, and a wolf looked back at her—a wounded pack leader, starved and weakened, who had been goaded and harried by the hounds on its back trail but would be harried no more. A wolf who would die where it stood rather than be driven further. A wolf, she realized shakenly, who was actually willing—perhaps even eager —to die if only it could lock its fangs on the throats of the mongrels howling at its heels.

She looked into that hungry, dangerous eye, and she knew then. Knew exactly how the balance had shifted.

She removed her hand very carefully from her truncheon, and, never taking her eyes from Honor's face, bent down, hoisted a moaning, semiconscious Bergren to his feet, and dragged him from the cell without another word. And as she locked the door behind her, a deeply hidden part of her wondered uneasily if she was locking the wolf into its cage... or herself safely outside it.

"So what's on the schedule today?"

Horace Harkness, late of the Manticoran Navy, leaned back in the comfortable recliner, hands folded behind his head, and wiggled his bootless toes at his "escorts" as he asked the question. Citizen Corporal Heinrich Johnson and Citizen Private Hugh Candleman had been assigned as his permanent keepers when he decided to change sides. Their purpose had been plain enough—to discourage any thoughts of inappropriate activities on his part—and Harkness knew the two State Security goons had been chosen because they were big, strong, tough, and well trained in the art of dismantling their fellow man with their bare hands. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that those qualities pretty much exhausted the list of their employable skills, but no one could have everything.

"Not much—I think," Johnson replied. The corporal wasn't as broad as Harkness, but he was several centimeters taller, and he looked impressive in his black-and-red uniform as he fished in his tunic pocket for his memo pad. He found it and keyed the display, then squinted down at it. "Got another HD interview scheduled for thirteen-thirty," he announced after a moment. "Then Citizen Commander Jewel wants to talk to you about the Manties' com systems some more. That's scheduled for, uh, seventeen hundred. 'Side from that, you've got nothing but free time." He shoved the pad back into his pocket and chuckled. "Looks like they must really like you, Harkness."

"What's not to like?" Harkness replied with a lazy grin, and both StateSec men laughed. A prize like Horace Harkness didn't drop into Public Information's lap every day, and the fact that he was a missile tech familiar with the FTL transmitters mounted in the Manties' recon drones made him even more valuable as a source of technical data R&D would make good use of. But the larger implications of propaganda broadcasts and technological information were beyond Johnson and Candleman's mental horizons. They had their own reasons to be happy Harkness had decided to defect, and those reasons had nothing at all to do with his value to the PRH in general.

"So, you have any luck with Farley's Crossing yet?" Candleman asked now, and Harkness' grin turned from lazy to evil.

"Oh ye of little faith," he murmured. "I told you I could, ah, enhance the odds, didn't I? Here."

He drew a data chip from his shirt pocket and scaled it across the compartment to Candleman, who caught it eagerly. The private peered down at the featureless chip as if he thought he should be able to read its data with his unassisted eye, and for all Harkness knew, Candleman did think so.

"How's it work?" Johnson asked from where he lounged against the opposite bulkhead, and Harkness shrugged.

"It's a more complicated than the others 'cause there's so many more variables," he said, "and the multiplayer versions complicate things even further. So instead of setting it up so you guys can predict the outcome, I set it up so you can force the outcome while you're playing."

"Huh?" Candleman put in, and Harkness hid a desire to sigh in exasperation behind another friendly smile.

Technically, both his watchdogs were high school graduates, and Johnson actually had two years of college on his résumé. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending upon one's perspective—they'd both been Dolists, and their schooling had been provided courtesy of the PRH's educational system. It had been theoretically possible to acquire a worthwhile education from that source, but doing so had required an individual to use the resources available to educate himself , because after so many decades of debasing the concept of achievement in the name of "democratization" and "student validation," no one in the teaching establishment had had a clue as to how to truly educate someone else .

The problem was that genuinely self-motivated people are rare. Without someone else to explain it to them, most young people don't understand why learning is important in the first place. There are always exceptions to that broad generalization, but the majority of human beings learn from experience, not precept, and until someone experiences the consequences of being un educated, he seldom feels a driving need to correct the situation. Creating a desire to learn in someone who hasn't already been caught in the gears requires an entire support structure, a society in which one's elders make it clear that one is expected to acquire knowledge and training in its use. And that sort of society was precisely what the prewar Dolists had lacked, for the Basic Living Stipend had been handed over like clockwork however unproductive they might have been. Besides, what had there been for a Dolist to use an education on?