"Is Two still on station?" he asked. Honor leaned to the side, peering through the armorplast on her side of the cockpit, but she couldn’t see anything. Senior Chief Harkness, however, had a better view from his location.
"Sticking to you like glue, Sir," he said. "She’s dropped back a little on your starboard quarter, but she’s holding position nicely."
"That, Chief Harkness, is because she is an officer and a lady. And unlike people who don’t tell me they’ve seen things until we’re past them, she’s also good at her job."
"You just keep right on, Sir," Harkness told him comfortably. "And the next time you need to find your posterior, you can use your own flashlight."
"I’m shocked—shocked —that you could say such a thing to an officer and a gentleman," Tremaine returned in a slightly distracted tone. He was leaning forward, eyes sweeping the night. "I’d think that after all these years, you’d at l—"
He broke off suddenly, and the shuttle’s speed dropped still further.
"I do believe I may owe you an apology, Chief," he murmured. "A small one, at least." He glanced at Honor. "Do you see it, Ma’am?"
"I do." Honor raised an old-fashioned pair of binoculars, once more missing her cybernetic eye’s vision enhancement as she peered through them with her right eye. It wasn’t much—no more than what looked like a torch or two burning against the blackness of the jungle—and she felt a distant surprise that Harkness had seen it at all. Of course, he does have access to the tac sensors from back there, she reminded herself, but Peep passives are nothing to write home about.
"How do you want to handle it, Ma’am?" Tremaine asked, and tension burned under his deceptively calm tone.
"Warn Commander Metcalf, and then take us up another few hundred meters," she replied. "Let’s see if we can’t find another break in this canopy."
"Yes, Ma’am." He thumbed a button on the stick to flash the running light atop the vertical stabilizer once, then eased the stick back and fed a little more power to the air-breathing turbines. The big shuttle angled smoothly upwards while its companion, warned by the flash of light, broke right and stayed low, tracking him visually against the moon-bright sky. He climbed another three hundred meters, then leveled out, sweeping around the dim lights Harkness had spotted.
They were easier to see from the greater altitude, and the live side of Honor’s mouth frowned as she studied them through the binoculars. There were actually two double rows of light sources, set at right angles. Most of them were quite dim, but five or six of them flared brighter where the two lines crossed, and she thought she could make out faint reflections of what looked like flat roofs of some sort. She stared at them a moment longer, then laid the binocculars in her lap and rubbed her good eye with the heel of her hand in an effort to scrub away the ache of concentration.
Nimitz bleeked softly at her from where he lay beside her seat in a highly nonregulation nest of folded blankets, and she smiled down at him reassuringly. Then she lifted the glasses again, studying the jungle.
"What’s that line to the east?" she asked after a moment.
"How far from the camp, My Lady?" Jasper Mayhew’s voice came over the com.
"It looks like—what, Scotty? Twenty or twenty-five klicks?"
"Something like that, Ma’am," Tremaine replied. "Chief?"
"I make it twenty-three from here, Ma’am," Harkness said from the tac section after a moment, studying the frustratingly vague output of his passive sensors.
"In that case, I think it’s a river, My Lady," Mayhew said, and she heard the rustle and crackle of plaspaper as he studied the hardcopy map he and Russell Sanko had put together. "The Tepes download didn’t give any terrain details, but that’s what it looked like from the weather sat maps we picked up. If it is a river, it’s not much of one, though."
"Um." Honor laid the binoculars back down and rubbed her nose in thought, then looked at Scotty. "Think you could take a shuttle through there without counter-grav?"
"Without—?" Tremaine looked at her for a moment, then inhaled sharply. "Sure," he said, far more confidently than he could possibly feel, and Honor chuckled.
"Don’t get your testosterone in an uproar on me now, Scotty. I’m serious. Can you get us in there?"
"Probably, Ma’am," he said after a moment, then added, grudgingly, "but I can’t guarantee it. With one of our own pinnaces, yes. But this is a big brute, Ma’am. She’s a lot heavier on the controls, and I haven’t really experimented with her vectored thrust yet."
"But you think you could do it."
"Yes, Ma’am."
Honor thought for several more seconds, then sighed and shook her head.
"I’d like to take you up on that," she said, "but I don’t think we can risk it. Chief Harkness?"
"Aye, Ma’am?"
"Go ahead and fire up the plant, Chief."
"Aye, aye, Ma’am. I’m starting light-off now. We should be nominal in about four minutes."
"Thank you, Chief. Signal Commander Metcalf please, Scotty."
"Yes, Ma’am." Tremaine banked the big shuttle to expose its full wingspan to Metcalf’s lower position and flashed both wingtip lights twice.
"Answering flash from Shuttle Two, Ma’am," a Grayson voice reported.
"Thank you, Carson," Honor replied, and leaned back beside Tremaine. Firing up the fusion plants and bringing up the counter-grav added somewhat to the risk of detection if any recon sat happened to be looking their way. She’d hoped to avoid that, but she’d also known she might not be able to. That was why she’d arranged a signal to warn Metcalf without breaking com silence. At least the plants shouldn’t be on-line for long, she told herself, and the counter-grav would make it much, much safer—and easier—to get the shuttles down.
"I’ve got power to the counter-grav, Ma’am," Tremaine reported, breaking in on her thoughts, and she nodded.
"See that ‘S’-curve to the south?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma’am."
"It looks like the widest break in the tree cover we’ve got. See if you can get us in there on its west bank."
"Yes, Ma’am." Tremaine almost managed not to sound dubious, and Honor felt the right side of her mouth quirking in another grin as he banked again and came back around. Her hand dropped down beside her to rest on Nimitz’s flank, and she felt a wiry, long-fingered true-hand pat her wrist in reply, and then Tremaine was dumping altitude and speed alike.
Despite his comments about the shuttle’s controls, he brought the big craft in with a delicacy a Sphinx finch might have envied. The counter-grav let him fold the wings, which had been swept fully forward for their low-speed examination of possible landing sites, back into their high-speed position without losing control, and she heard turbines whine as he held a moderate apparent weight on the shuttle and vectored thrust downward. The sixty-three-meter fuselage slid almost daintily towards the ground, hovering with ponderous grace, and Honor peered through the armorplast windscreen.
The break in the canopy was a river, and shallow water rushed and tumbled over mossy boulders in a torrent of moon-struck white and black. The trees grew right up to the banks, but the humidity was far lower here in the center of the continent than it had been at their peninsular landing site, and the growth looked less lush and thick. Or she hoped it did, anyway. It was hard to be sure, and the last thing they needed was to suck something into a turbine.
"Over there, Ma’am. To port," Tremaine said. "What about there?"
"Um." Honor twisted in her seat to look in the indicated direction. It looked like one of the trees—and a titan among titans, at that—must have fallen and taken two or three others with it. The result was a breach in the overhead cover that seemed to offer a way under the remaining canopy.