David Weber - In Enemy Hands

She struggled upright in her seat, the effort made awkward by the handcuffs locking her wrists behind her, and her vision blurred once more as the surges of Nimitz's pain filled her eyes with tears. The strange, deeper fusion which had possessed them both in the moment of their despair still gripped her, and her vision was oddly doubled. It wasn't just the effects of the blows she'd taken after all, she realized, for while part of her saw the deck and the shuttle's forward bulkhead, less than a meter in front of her, another part looked up through Nimitz's eyes at Fritz Montoya as the doctor bent urgently over him. The touch of Montoya's hands was gentle, yet each contact sent fresh agony ripping through them both, and the part of them which was still Honor hoped desperately that Fritz knew what he was doing. But he was trained in human physiology, not Sphinxian, and she tried to strangle at birth her dread of his potential ignorance, before the half of them which was Nimitz detected it.

She blinked again, gritted her teeth, and fought the duality of her senses. It was hard—hard—for every fiber of her being cried out to be with Nimitz. To share his pain in hopes of somehow easing it, and to prove to him he was not alone. Yet the maelstrom of pain and fear and need—not just hers and Nimitz's, but beating in from all the other prisoners in the shuttle, as well—sucked at her too strongly, crippling her ability to think, and she knew Nimitz was too lost in his own pain even to realize she was there. And so she battled to separate herself from him, to become herself once more.

She succeeded, and her success sent a flash of shame through her, as if she had somehow abandoned the 'cat. The need to go to him physically sent her wrists turning against their manacles, muscles straining to break free of them as if she thought she could somehow reach him if only she were unchained, but it was useless. She merely bruised herself, and even if she'd been unfettered, the SS guards would simply have clubbed her down once more if she tried to get to him. Her memory of events in the terminal lounge was chaotic, but she knew that much, and she set her teeth and fought for self-mastery.

At least the pain stabbing into her proved Nimitz was alive. She wanted to sob in relief at the knowledge, yet she couldn't understand why he was. She and the 'cat had recognized the gloating pleasure dancing behind Ransom's order to kill him. It was that pleasure, the certainty that Ransom truly meant it, which had spurred them to action, for they'd known they had nothing to lose. But somehow, for some reason, Nimitz was still alive, and she slowly exerted control over the pain and the confusing mental echoes of that closer union with the 'cat and made herself consider how that could be true.

Vague memories flickered, just beyond her grasp. She remembered launching Nimitz at Ransom clearly enough, and her own brief fight before the guards battered her to the floor, but everything else was foggy and unclear. She recalled a brief image of LaFollet, fighting to reach her side, and one of McKeon being beaten to his knees, and she bit her lip as she realized how dearly her defiance might have cost the others. But nothing suggested a reason for Nimitz to still be alive, unless...

She frowned as the faint echo of a voice threaded itself through her memories. She couldn't quite summon the words back to her, but she recognized the voice. It belonged to Shannon Foraker, and if she couldn't recall the words, their urgency came back to her clearly. Somehow Shannon must have convinced Ransom not to kill Nimitz on the spot, but how? And at what cost to herself?

Honor had no answers to those questions, and she turned her head, looking for someone else to ask them of. But there was no one beside her. She was alone in the front row of seats in which her body had been dumped, and she started to turn to look behind her, only to gasp in pain as a hand twisted cruelly in her hair. It kept her from turning, forced her to stare directly in front of her, and she locked her teeth still harder, cutting off any other sign of how much it hurt, as her tormentor spoke.

"You just stay where the hell you are, chica ." It was the SS captain who'd taken over the detail, and her accent was tantalizingly familiar. It took Honor a few seconds to realize that she'd heard it before, from Tomas Ramirez and other refugees from the Peeps' conquest of San Martin, the inhabited planet of Trevor's Star, and she wondered how the woman behind her felt now that her home world had been conquered in turn by the Alliance. At the moment, however, the origin of her accent meant far less to Honor than the sneering pleasure in her voice. "You don't talk, you don't turn your head, you don't do anything unless someone tells you to. You got that?"

Honor said nothing, and the hand in her hair turned its wrist, actually lifting her a few millimeters out of the seat by her scalp. San Martin's gravity was much heavier even than Sphinx's, and Honor bit her lip hard as the guard demonstrated the strength her birth world had given her. Honor had never imagined that simply pulling someone's hair could hurt that much, and the SS thug's voice went colder and harsher.

"I asked if you got that, chica! " she snapped.

"Yes." Honor made herself say the one word in the flattest voice she could, and managed—somehow—not to gasp in relief as the other woman snickered and released her hair with a contemptuous flicking motion. The pulsing of Nimitz's pain fogged Honor's ability to read the emotions of others, but she didn't need it to recognize the other's vicious satisfaction... and anticipation. This wasn't one of the cold, emotionless ones, Honor realized. This was one of the ones who enjoyed her work.

"Good. You're gonna have enough fun on the trip to Hell anyway, chica . Believe me—you don't want to borrow any more," the woman said.

Honor heard the soft brush of uniform fabric on upholstery as her tormentor leaned back in the seat behind her. Even without looking, Honor knew there was no one else in that row, either. Her captors had used it like some sort of moat, cutting her off from the support of her officers by physically separating her from them, and she knew it was only the first step.

Ransom's intentions were clear enough. Over the years, the PRH's security forces had discovered that it was much more effective to "disappear" troublemakers. It was a tactic InSec had used often enough against opponents of the Legislaturalist regime, and StateSec had brought it to a new, all-pervasive height. And it worked, she thought grimly, for there was an infinitely greater terror in knowing people you cared for could simply vanish. Death was terrible, yet it was an end, a conclusion. Disappearance was simply the doorway to ignorance and the cruelest emotion of all: hope that the one you loved still lived... somewhere. Which was what made it so effective—the ripple effect of a single "disappeared" individual could keep a dozen others in line in hopes that their submission would buy the life and eventual return of the person they loved.

But her case was different, for Ransom had orchestrated that entire confrontation before the cameras to officially justify Honor's execution. No doubt she could change her mind about going public later—the Secretary of Public Information could kill any story she wanted to, after all—but Honor didn't believe she would. She wanted her enemies, foreign and domestic, real or imagined, to know what had happened to Honor, and that meant Honor's death would be a special feature on the evening news. She could picture the solemn warnings about "violent content" and "viewer discretion," for they always preceded the broadcast imagery of "enemies of the People" paying for their crimes. Indeed, she was almost surprised, in a distant way, that she hadn't already been shot. There had to be countless convenient spots here in the Barnett System where a minor detail like that could be dealt with, so why send her all the way out to Camp Charon?