She thought furiously for several more seconds, and then she smiled. It was a chill smile, and an ugly one, and Thomas Theisman shivered as he saw it.

"Very well, Doctor Montoya," she said coldly, "you're now in charge of keeping the animal alive." She nodded for the doctors guard to withdraw the flechette muzzle from the back of his head, and Montoya hurried over to kneel beside Foraker. "Do your best," Ransom told him. "I want it healthy when the prisoner goes to the scaffold."

Her smile turned even colder as she pictured Harrington’s reaction to seeing the animal in a cage, knowing that the instant she was dead, her precious "Nimitz" would follow, and she turned to the massively muscled female SS captain who had been the majors second-in-command.

"As far as the rest of these... people are concerned, Citizen Captain... de Sangro," she said, reading the nameplate on her chest, "their actions here were clearly unprovoked." A wave of her hand took in the groaning SS wounded, and the bodies of those who would never groan again. "Even under the Deneb Accords, a prisoner of war who attacks our personnel except in the course of an escape attempt or in direct self-defense forfeits the standard protections accorded to captured military personnel."

She turned to smile at Theisman, who clenched his jaw as yet again she cited the letter of the Accords correctly in order to pervert their intent.

"The Accords don't give us the right to execute them for their actions, which, of course, we would never choose to do, anyway," she told the StateSec officer piously for the benefit of the watching cameras. "In light of their murderous, unprovoked assault on our personnel, however, a more secure disposition is clearly in order in their case. Under my authority as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, I instruct you to take charge of them in the name of the Office of State Security for transport to and imprisonment at Camp Charon. They can be shipped out on the same transport as their ex-commander."

"Of course, Citizen Committeewoman!" the citizen captain barked, snapping one hand to her cap brim in salute, and Theisman felt physically ill with impotent rage.

He shouldn't have been surprised, he told himself, but he was. Even now he was. It was amazing how a lifetime of expecting at least semicivilized behavior out of one's superiors could prevent one from seeing something like this coming, he thought almost calmly, but in retrospect, it should have been manifest from the first. Of course Ransom had played out her cruel game. The committeewoman hadn't had to be a genius to figure out how Harrington was likely to react to the death sentence of her treecat. Even a casual perusal of her dossier would have made that obvious. The reaction of her officers when the SS clubbed her to the floor had been equally predictable, and Ransom had relied on it to provide the pretext to send every one of them off to Cerberus with Harrington.

Of course she had, and malice and triumph mingled in her smile as she turned back to Tourville.

"As for you, Citizen Rear Admiral," she said, "I believe you ought to return to Haven with me. What's happened here raises serious questions as to the quality of your judgment where these prisoners are concerned. I think you should drop by the Admiralty for a discussion of proper procedure for dealing with captured enemy personnel."

Tourville said nothing. He met her gaze levelly refusing to flinch, but that was all right with Ransom. She was willing to allow him his bravado. In fact, it would make the final outcome even more satisfactory.

"In fact," she went on, "I believe you should bring along your entire staff, and Citizen Commissioner Honeker." She glanced at Theisman. "Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville and his flagship will escort Tepes to the Cerberus System, Citizen Admiral," she told him. "Please have orders to that effect cut immediately."

"Yes, Citizen Committeewoman." Theisman managed to keep his voice more nearly normal than Tourville had been able to, but it was hard. And the fact that he'd succeeded made him feel contaminated.

"Then I think we're done," Ransom said brightly, and nodded to de Sangro. "See to having these..." she waved disdainfully at the battered, kneeling prisoners "...taken aboard ship, Citizen Captain. I'm sure we can find proper accommodations for them."

"At once, Citizen Committeewoman!"

The citizen captain saluted again, then jerked her head at her detail, and gun butts urged the prisoners back to their feet and out of the lounge. Those who couldn't walk were dragged, and as Thomas Theisman watched them go, he knew he would never feel clean again.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Pain.

A roaring sea of pain sent fiery combers flaring through her brain to shatter her thoughts like explosions of foam, and she locked her teeth against a moan of anguish. Her mind refused to function, yet even so she knew only a tiny portion of the crippling pain was truly her own. She felt bruised and cruelly battered where the gun butts had smashed into her, but the agony of broken bones and torn muscle tissue was someone else’s, and her soul cried out as the waves of hurt crashed over her from Nimitz.

She opened her eyes and blinked foggily, trying to resolve what she saw into a coherent image. It took her several long, dragging seconds to realize that she was slumped forward and sideways against the safety straps of a shuttle seat, staring down at the deck, and still more seconds oozed away before she could decide what to do about it.

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 now that could be true.