LaFollet prowled watchfully around their resting point for another couple of minutes, and despite her earlier teasing, he moved with almost the silence of a Sphinx snow leopard. Not that I could hear a herd of Beowulf buffalo through my own pulse just now, she thought wryly, then looked up as her armsman blended out of the darkness and squatted easily beside her. He turned to look at her, his expression unreadable behind his night-vision goggles. But she didn’t need to read his expression. Thanks to Nimitz, she could read his emotions directly, and she felt very much like a little girl under the gaze of a teacher who wondered where her homework had gotten to. Nimitz leaned back against her breasts in his carrier and bleeked softly, and neither his radiated amusement nor the taste of LaFollet’s affectionate resignation helped a lot. But she managed a wry half-smile and wiped sweat from her forehead before she let her hand fall to the ’cat’s head.
"I hope you’re not feeling too justified, Andrew," she said quietly, and he chuckled, then shook his head.
"My Lady, I’ve given up expecting prudence out of you," he told her.
"I’m not that bad!" she protested, and he chuckled again, louder.
"No, you’re not; you’re worse," he said. "Much worse. But that’s all right, My Lady. We wouldn’t know what to do with you if you weren’t. And all other things being equal, I guess we’ll keep you anyway."
"Oh, thank you," she muttered, and heard a snort of laughter out of the darkness from roughly Jasper Mayhew’s direction. One thing about being marooned here, she thought. There’s too few of us for us to go all formal on each other. That was a vast relief in many ways. She’d grown accustomed to her status as Steadholder Harrington, though it still felt unnatural sometimes, and she’d been a part of the stratified world of the Navy’s rank structure since she was seventeen T-years old, and she understood the value of military discipline and authority. But her present "command" was even smaller than the one she’d held when she’d skippered LAC 113 twenty-eight T-years ago, and she’d learned then that informality was just as valuable, as long as the chain of authority remained intact, in a group which must be tight knit and completely interdependent. More to the point at just this moment, it felt good not to be removed or barricaded off from people who were friends as well as subordinates.
"How far have we come, do you think?" she asked after a moment, and LaFollet raised one wrist to consult the dimly glowing readouts on it.
"I make it about nineteen klicks, My Lady."
She nodded and leaned the back of her head against her tree while she thought. No wonder she was tired. The undergrowth here might be sparse compared to that around their initial landing site, but it was still more than enough to pose an exhausting obstacle, especially once night had fallen. It had slowed their pace to a crawl, and even with their night vision equipment, each of them had managed to find more than enough vines, low-growing branches, shrubbery, tree roots, and old-fashioned rocks and holes in the ground to trip over. Honor herself had fallen only twice, but the loss of her arm made it very difficult to catch herself. The first time, she’d come down hard enough to rip the left knee out of her trousers. The heavily scabbed scrape on her kneecap from that was painful enough to give her an irritating limp, but the second fall had been worse. All she’d been able to manage that time was to wrap her remaining arm around Nimitz and tuck her right shoulder under so that she landed on it and rolled rather than crushing the ’cat under her weight. Jasper Mayhew had appeared out of nowhere to help her up after that one, and despite her need to avoid any more "pampering" than she absolutely had to put up with, she’d let herself lean on him for several seconds until her head stopped spinning.
Now she worked the shoulder cautiously, feeling the bruising and relieved she hadn’t sprained it as she’d initially feared, while she considered their progress. She couldn’t see the sky from where she sat, but here and there the light of Hell’s moons spilled through breaks in the tree cover to make small, brilliant patches of silver on tree trunks and undergrowth. Sheol must be almost down by now, she thought, and Tartarus would be setting in an hour or so. They had about three more hours of darkness to cover the last four or five kilometers to Camp Inferno, and she drew a deep breath and pushed herself back to her feet. LaFollet cocked his head and looked up at her, and she grinned again and patted him on the shoulder.
"I may be weak, Andrew, but I’m not decrepit yet."
"I never thought you were, My Lady," he assured her. "I only thought you were too stubborn for your own good." He rose easily, regarding her with that same, measuring air for a few more seconds, then nodded and set off once more without another word.
"So that’s Camp Inferno," Honor murmured.
She and the three Graysons lay belly-down on a small, steep hill to the east of their objective, and she rested her chin on the back of her hand as she contemplated the camp. Several tall trees grew on the hilltop, promising both additional cover and at least some shade once the sun came up, but most of the hill was overgrown in head-high, stiff, sword-like grass. The area around the huddle of structures below them, on the other hand, had obviously been completely clear-cut when the camp was put in, although two or three years must have passed since the last time it was brushed back. Clusters of saplings had sprung back up out of the grass of the clearing, and the western side of the fence surrounding the camp was covered in a thick, leafy canopy of vines. It all gave the place a disheveled, somehow slovenly look.
On the other hand, she reflected, first impressions might be misleading. The grass had been cut or trampled down in something almost like a fifteen-meter moat around the enclosed area, and that stuff on the fence might actually have been trained to grow there. Four larger huts, all built out of native materials, were packed tightly along the inner face of the fence there, and unless she was mistaken, that thicket of vines would start offering them shade from very shortly after local noon.
A ceramacrete landing pad and some sort of storage sheds thrust up through the grass about a kilometer north of the camp, and a plastic water tank stood on tall, spindly-looking legs almost at the center of the fenced enclosure. A windmill squeaked with endless, inanimate patience, its plaintive sound clear and forlorn in the predawn stillness, and water splashed from an overflow pipe on the tank. Clearly the windmill powered a pump to keep the tank filled, but it was equally clear that no one had used any of that mechanical power to generate electricity.
The explanation for the lights she’d seen during their approach was obvious enough from where they lay, concealed by yet more of that tall, stiff grass. There were four gates in the fence, located at the four major points of the compass and all tightly closed at the moment, and beaten dirt tracks connected them to form a cross-shaped intersection just south of the water tank. Two rows of dimly glowing lanterns on three-meter posts bordered each lane, and pairs of much brighter lanterns marked their intersection.
"How many do you think, My Lady?" Carson Clinkscales asked quietly. It was highly unlikely that anyone could have heard them from here even if anyone were awake to listen, but all of them spoke only in hushed tones anyway.
"I don’t know," she told him honestly. Nimitz lay close beside her, and she took her hand out from under her chin to scratch his jaw while she pondered the ensign’s question. Those were big huts down there. Depending on how tightly the prisoners were packed into them, there might be anywhere from fifteen to fifty people in each of them. So split the difference and call it thirty or so, she thought. In that case...