David Weber - In Enemy Hands

"You're wrong, Fritz," she said, resting her hand lightly on the 'cat's head. "The real good news is that he's alive, and I owe you and Shannon Foraker for that, don't I?"

"Foraker more than me," Montoya half disagreed. He opened his mouth to say something more, then shut it again as someone pulled the curtains back.

Honor turned her head, and her right eyebrow rose in fresh surprise as she recognized the hazel-eyed man in Peep uniform standing beside Alistair McKeon. Warner Caslet grinned crookedly at her and shrugged.

"I didn't expect to meet under conditions like these, Milady," he told her wryly. "Given the alternative—for both of us—however, I'm delighted to have the opportunity."

"Warner," she said wonderingly, then looked at McKeon. The broad-shouldered captain looked almost as worn as she felt, and there were gaps in his teeth when he smiled, but his eyes were bright as he took the hand she held out to him.

"Long way from Basilisk Station, isn't it?" he said, and Honor surprised herself with a chuckle.

"I suppose it is," she agreed, and looked past him at Horace Harkness. The senior chief looked almost bashful, as if he wanted to shuffle his feet while he stared down at his toes, and she looked back at McKeon and raised her eyebrow once more.

"I've got a feeling Sergeant-Major Babcock is going to be proud of her husband when we get him home," the captain said with a grin. "He's the one who got us all out."

"So I understand." Honor turned her gaze on Harkness once more, and this time the senior chief did look down at his toes.

"Yes, Ma'am. He sort of, um, convinced the Peeps he'd gone over to them, got access to one of their minicomputers—I'll let him give you the details later—and hacked into their main system. He set up the entire breakout... and just as an encore, he managed to arrange things so the Peeps think we're all dead."

"I don't—" Honor began, then stopped. There was too much going on here, and she wasn't in shape to assimilate all of it. That would have to come later, and she suspected it was going to take quite a while for them to tell her everything, but for now...

"I want to hear all about it when I'm in shape to understand it all," she told her subordinates. "But for now, what I really need is a status report."

"Yes, Ma'am," McKeon said, and rubbed his eyebrow for a moment, as if marshaling his thoughts. "Basically, Ma'am, we're on the surface of the planet Hades. Thanks to the fact that Harkness here is probably the most devious hacker outside a maximum security prison—excuse me; outside any other maximum security prison—we managed to get off Tepes once she was in planetary orbit. More than that, he blew the whole ship the hell up, and the Peeps think we went with her."

"He—?" Honor blinked, then looked at Harkness. "You blew the ship up , Senior Chief?" she asked very carefully.

"Uh, yes, Ma'am," Harkness mumbled, turning an alarming shade of red. "Actually, ah, I sort of, well..."

"He demonstrated what happens when a pinnace brings its wedge up inside a boat bay, Skipper," McKeon told her, and Honor blinked again, with a sort of appalled respect.

"I see," she said, and then the right side of her mouth twitched. "Remind me to never, ever get you angry at me , Horace."

Harkness went an even darker crimson as she used his first name for the first time in the eleven years they'd known one another. He started to mumble something, then stopped, looked at her, and shrugged helplessly.

"He also pulled a lot of information on Hades out of Tepes ' database," McKeon went on, as much to save Harkness from more embarrassment as to bring Honor up to date. "I've been looking it over since we planeted, and I can see why the Peeps figure this is a pretty secure prison."

"Oh?" Honor returned her gaze to him with renewed attentiveness.

"Yes, Ma'am. It's simple enough: there's not a single thing on the entire planet which a human can metabolize." Honor's eye narrowed, and he nodded. "You've got it, Skipper. They don't need to lock anyone up ; all they have to do is lock the prisoners out of the food depot. We don't have figures on the prisoner population, but if the rumors are true, they've been dumping military and political prisoners here for something like seventy years, and most of the people they've dumped had prolong. There have to be thousands of 'inmates' down here, but the Peeps have them spread out across the surface of an entire planet in relatively small packets, and they can't stray far from wherever they were dumped in the first place because that's where the Peeps deliver their rations."

"I see." Honor's fingers stroked Nimitz's ears, and she frowned. "How big is the garrison?"

"Again, we don't have precise figures, but I'd estimate there're around a thousand or fifteen hundred of them. Their main facility is on an island in the middle of Hades' biggest ocean, it's covered by satellite reconnaissance, and according to Tepes ' database, they've got light and medium antiair defenses around the base. The only contact between there and the rest of the planet is by air, and once they've been shipped down to the surface, no prisoners are allowed on the island." McKeon shrugged. "Since they control the only food source, and the only means to get to that food source, and the orbital defenses around the planet, security's never been a real big concern for them."

"I see," Honor repeated, then flicked her hand at the bulkheads around them. "But now?" she suggested.

"Now that might just change," McKeon agreed with an unpleasant smile. "Thanks to Harkness here, we've got a pair of heavy assault shuttles with almost full loads of external ordnance, full small arms racks, and a fair amount of unpowered armor."

Honor felt both eyebrows rise and gave Harkness another respectful look.

"We're also pretty sure the Peeps don't know we're here," McKeon went on. "From what Harkness pulled out of Tepes ' database, they've got a good satellite surveillance net, but it concentrates on covering their main facility, and we touched down on the far side of the planet. We made dead-stick approaches without using impeller drive, too, and we didn't cut in the countergrav until we were under a hundred meters. There's no way anyone saw us make reentry or land, and this place is covered in triple-canopy jungle, so camouflaging the shuttles once we had them down wasn't exactly hard. Besides, we've been down for over three local days now. If they had any suspicion we'd made it out when Tepes blew, we'd be neck deep in recon flights. Under the circumstances, StateSec would probably even have called in Count Tilly 's small craft to look for us, and we've seen zip air traffic."

"All right," Honor said after a moment. "It sounds to me like you're right about that part of it, but where do we go from here?"

"That's up to you, Ma'am, and frankly, I'm just as happy it is," McKeon said candidly. "We're down and concealed for the moment, and we've got some hardware to work with and enough emergency rations to carry us for up to five months if we're careful. But there are only eighteen of us—twenty, if we count Warner and Nimitz—" he nodded to the Peep officer with a wryly apologetic grin "—and the bad guys have a hell of a lot more firepower than we do. Not to mention an established base, at least a dozen armed pinnaces of their own, and those damned satellites to watch their backs. Any way you look at it, Ma'am, we're pretty damned outnumbered!"

"Outnumbered, Alistair?" Honor leaned back, her thin fingers buried in Nimitz's warm, soft fur. She looked more like a gaunt, half-starved wolf than ever, with her shaved hair, half-dead face, and amputated arm, but the feral gleam of a pack leader glittered in her remaining eye. She swept that eye over the men around her, and the right side of her upper lip curled back to bare her teeth.