by David Weber
"Which is another point in favor of hitting the Harlequin," Dominick added. "An attack at Tyler's Star will help confirm that drift toward Silesia, putting Walther that much farther off their calculations."
"Only if they figure out it was us before the Jansci arrives," Vaccares said. But it was a losing argument, and he knew it. The commodore was so in love with this convoluted plan he and Charles had constructed that he would never believe the Manties wouldn't dance the proper steps to the tune Charles was piping for them.
But it was still his duty to try to inject some caution here. "Regardless, Sir, the fact remains that we'll be risking contact or possibly a direct confrontation for only questionable rewards."
"Wait a minute," Charles said, suddenly cautious. "Confrontation?"
"The Tyler's Star solar research station has been known to play host to Manty warships on occasion," Dominick told him. "Didn't I mention that?"
"No, you did not," Charles said darkly. "I trust you'll be positioning our attack well out of range of both the station and any guests it might have."
"Why?" Dominick demanded. "I thought you just said you were pleased with the crew's performance."
"I said they had performed their duties well," Charles corrected. "They're not ready to try the Crippler against a warship quite yet."
"And how much longer before this elusive bar is reached?" Dominick pressed, starting to sound angry. "First you said it would take five trials against merchies. Next it was seven. Now we've done eight, and you're still not satisfied."
"The ability of this crew to climb a learning curve is not under my control, Commodore," Charles said icily. "A warship's impellers are more complex than those of a merchantman, and that reduces the Crippler's effective range by anywhere from twenty to thirty percent."
Dominick drew himself up in his chair. "May I remind you that the primary goal of this mission is to confirm the effectiveness of this weapon you're so eager to sell us?"
"And may I remind you that President Harris put that decision in my hands?" Charles countered. "Besides, you have confirmed the Crippler's effectiveness. Eight times in a row, in fact."
He lifted a hand, palm toward the commodore. "You'll get your chance at a Manty warship," he said, all calm and quiet and soothing now. "But not until you're ready. I'm sure none of us wants to have the ship we're riding in blown out from under us."
Dominick took a deep breath. "No, of course not," he said, his voice still edged with impatience. "And I'll be the first to admit your plan has worked perfectly so far. But there were three prongs to this mission, and as yet I'm not sure we've achieved even one of them."
"I understand your frustration, Commodore," Charles said. "But when your goal is to take out two birds with one stone, the birds must come together at the right place and the right time. Patience is a necessary virtue."
He waved a hand. "And actually, Bird Number Two has almost certainly already fallen. The Manties will have penetrated our emission disguise by now and concluded an Andermani is running amok among their shipping. Once we've taken the Jansci, they'll be all primed to look the wrong direction for those responsible."
"I hope you're right," Dominick said with a sigh. "Looting Manty merchantmen can make for a satisfying afternoon's diversion, but it's hardly enough to return triumphantly to Haven with."
"Oh, you'll have your triumphant return, Commodore," Charles assured him, smiling tightly. "After all, it's not every day when a PRN officer brings home the weapon that will spell Manticore's death."
Dominick drew himself up again, this time with pride, and Vaccares mentally shook his head. Charles knew the buttons to push, all right. Knew them backwards and forwards, and could hit them with his eyes closed.
Who was this man, anyway?
"Captain, return to your bridge," Dominick said, his voice suddenly sonorous, as if he were speaking for posterity. "Set course for Tyler's Star."
* * *
Cardones had left the Basilisk with Admiral Hemphill's offhanded comment about him someday being snatched up by ONI still ringing in his ears, and with the private conviction that such an assignment was to be avoided like a Peep ship of the wall.
By the time Tech Team Four arrived in the Arendscheldt System, however, he wasn't nearly so sure about the latter.
The ship itself had been his first shock. From the outside, the Shadow had looked just like any of the hundreds of other fast dispatch boats that darted through hyper-space carrying news and messages between the stars. Inside, though, it was another story entirely. Though designed for a crew of twelve, the ship was so crammed with sensors, esoteric surveillance gear, analysis workrooms, and fabrications shops that the seven of them were quite comfortably crowded. Half of the equipment was so new or so secret that he hadn't even heard of it, and better than half looked like it was fresh out of the box. The computer's tac systems alone, with the kind of sifting capability he would have given his right arm for back on the old Fearless, were enough to make his mouth water.
The team itself had been his second shock. The only Intelligence people he'd ever run into before had been the handful of officers who'd given lectures back on Saganami Island, and every one of them had come across as cold and drab. His first impression of this group, as they sat around the Basilisk's briefing table, hadn't done anything to change that image.
But once aboard the Shadow—and, perhaps more importantly, out from under Hemphill's gaze—they had suddenly become human. Right from the start he'd been able to sense a close camaraderie between them, the kind of relationship that had existed among Fearless's bridge crew once Captain Harrington had finally whipped them all into shape. On the surface, the relationship seemed to completely ignore rank, but after a few days of observation he realized that such considerations were indeed still there, forming an unseen foundation for everything else. As familiar and joking as Petty Officers Jackson and Swofford might get with Lieutenant Commander Damana, Cardones could sense an invisible line which neither of them would ever cross. And for his part, Damana scrupulously avoided invoking his own rank when kidding them back.
His third shock had been Captain Sandler.
His impression of her at the conference was that she was as cold and correct as her teammates, except that maybe she talked more than they did. But once again, those first impressions had been deceiving. Correct she undoubtedly was, and as the team's commander she made sure to keep herself aloof from the general verbal horseplay that went on among the others. But that didn't mean she was humorless, or that she hadn't connected solidly with the rest of her people.
And not only with her people, but also with this intruder who had been thrust into their close-knit company. Once they were underway, she personally gave Cardones a tour of the ship, reintroduced him to her team in their now more relaxed mode, and gave him full access to any of the analysis programs and equipment he might wish to use. She'd also sketched out for him the accomplishments of each member of her team, and in the process had subtly made sure to remind each of them of what Cardones and Fearless had pulled off at Basilisk Station. It was done so smoothly that only afterward did it occur to him that the history lesson had been carefully designed to slip him seamlessly into a place in the invisible shipboard hierarchy.
In retrospect, it was a lot like the way Captain Harrington had gone about turning a ship full of resentful, sullen misfits into an efficient, coordinated fighting force. And as the light-years disappeared behind them and he got to know her better, he realized there was a lot more about Captain Sandler that reminded him of Captain Harrington.
Her competence, for starters. Like Harrington, Sandler seemed to know everything about her ship. Not as well as the designated experts, perhaps, but well enough to keep up to speed on whatever the others were doing and to be able to offer informed suggestions. She was smart and quick-witted, too, able to pull together apparently unconnected bits of information in a way no one else had gotten around to seeing yet.
But most o
f all, he could see Captain Harrington's reflection in the way Sandler cared for her people. And as he'd seen once, that made all the difference when the excrement hit the fan.
Which, he realized as they eased alongside the darkened, silent hulk that had once been the Manticoran merchant ship Lorelei, might be happening very soon.
"All right," Sandler said as the boarding party finished the checks on their hardsuits. "Jack, you and Jessie keep a close eye on the sensors. If Rafe's analysis is right, they might have someone lying doggo out there waiting to take a crack at us."
Even through his nervousness, Cardones felt a trickle of pleasure at Sandler's mention of his name. It hadn't been his analysis alone—certainly Sandler and Damana had each had a hand in it—but it was typical of her to give her subordinates credit where it was deserved. And Cardones was the one who'd first noticed that the mysterious lad with the super grav lance seemed to be focusing on high-tech cargo shipments.
If that was true, and not just an illusion created by too small a statistical sample, a small ship loaded with top-of-the-line ONI gadgetry might be too good a target for them to pass up. Indeed, Damana had speculated that a ship like the Shadow might actually be the true prize the raiders were going for, and the destroyed merchies merely the bait.
But if Damana was worried about that possibility, it didn't show in his voice. "Don't worry, Skipper, we're on it," he called back from the command deck where he and Jessica Hauptman were standing watch. "We can have the wedge and sidewalls back up in nothing flat if we need to."
"Right." Sandler swept her gaze around the group. "All right, people. Let's go take a look."
She led the way through the hatch, handling her SUT thruster pack like it was something she'd been issued at birth. Pampas followed, with Swofford and Jackson moving up close behind him. Cardones, as the second senior officer of the party, brought up the rear.
It was an eerie passage. Every ship Cardones had ever seen before had been manned by somebody, either its regular personnel or a refitting shipyard team or at least a skeleton crew. Some signs of activity, of a human presence, had always been present.
But the Lorelei had none of that. It was floating dead in space, alone and deserted, like a giant metal corpse.
Like a giant metal tomb.
He felt his flesh creeping beneath his suit. He'd seen dead bodies before, certainly, most recently those of his friends and shipmates aboard the Fearless. But there was something different about a military crew, somehow, with men and women who'd been trained for battle and had gone down fighting against an enemy of the Queen. The Lorelei's crew, in contrast, had had neither the training or the weapons.
And if Hemphill and the ONI analysts were right, by the time their attackers arrived, they hadn't even had the protection of an impeller wedge. Or any way at all to escape.
"Like sitting ducks," someone murmured.
"Yes," Sandler said grimly.
Only then did Cardones realize that the first voice had been his.
The carnage was as bad as he'd expected. To his mild surprise, though, his reaction turned out to be not nearly as bad as he'd feared.
For that, he knew, he had Sandler to thank. Instead of leaving him hanging, with nothing to do but stare at the floating bodies of the merchantman's crew and dwell on how they'd died, she had immediately ordered him to go with Pampas to examine the forward impeller nodes. At the same time, she'd sent Swofford and Jackson to the stern to look at the ones there.
Which, of course, left the grisly task of examining the dead solely to herself. Something else, Cardones thought as he and Pampas headed toward the bow, that Captain Harrington would have done.
The bow nodes looked just about the way impeller nodes always looked.
Pampas obviously saw the same thing. "No obvious damage," he reported as he drifted in front of the first node, fingering its surface like a phrenologist looking for bumps. "Guess we'll have to go deeper. Pop the tool kit, Rafe, and hand me a universal socket."
They stayed aboard the Lorelei for sixteen hours, approximately two hours past the point where Cardones's own brain began to fog over. Pride alone dictated that he hide his fatigue as he continued to assist Pampas, but apparently even ONI's supermen were subject to the same frailties as standard-issue mortals. As the last of those sixteen hours crawled past, the muffled curses at dropped tools or fumbled components grew steadily more frequent, until Sandler finally bowed to the inevitable and ordered everyone back to the Shadow for a hot meal and seven hours of sleep.
Seven hours and fifteen minutes later, they were back aboard the Lorelei.
And after twelve more hours aboard her, they had it all. Or at least as much they were going to get.
"There's not a lot I can tell you yet, Skipper," Pampas said tiredly as they gathered around the wardroom table with their steaming cups of coffee or tea or cocoa. "Not until we finish tapping into the rest of the diagnostic jacks and can build a complete system map. But the one thing that is clear is that all of them went down together."
"The forward and after groups both?" Damana asked.
"All of them," Pampas confirmed. "That alone tells us something new is going on here."
"Unless that's how a grav lance normally affects things," Jackson pointed out.
Sandler looked at Cardones. "Rafe?" she invited.
"It wasn't the way our grav lance behaved," Cardones said, shaking his head. "It didn't affect the Q-ship's impeller nodes at all, for one thing. And even in destroying their sidewall, it only took down the starboard side, the side nearest us."
"As far as you know," Hauptman put in pointedly. "Your sensors were pretty far gone by then, weren't they?"
"Yes, but they weren't so far gone that we couldn't get ranging readings as we pumped out our energy torpedoes," Cardones told her. "And the post-battle analysis of the destruction pattern clearly indicated that her port sidewall was still up when the torpedoes started ripping the guts out of her."
"Makes sense," Swofford murmured. "Just having that much metal between sidewall generators would make it hard for even a concentrated grav pulse to take out everything at once."
"Which makes this all the more ominous," Pampas said. "Something coming from the outside shouldn't be able to knock out every single node at the same time like it did."
"On the other hand, it's not like the nodes are running independently, either," Sandler pointed out. "In fact, aren't they pretty solidly interconnected, at least on a software and control level?"
"Right, but only on a software and control level," Pampas said. "You could bring down all the nodes at once by blowing the computer or frying the control lines, at least theoretically. But that's not what happened here. At least," he added, lifting his eyebrows questioningly at Swofford, "that's not what happened in the forward nodes."
"It's not what happened in the after ones, either," Swofford confirmed. "We took a good look at the control system before we started plugging into the diagnostics. None of the lines were fried."
"There is, of course, one other possibility," Cardones spoke up.
All eyes turned to him. "Yes?" Sandler prompted.
Silently, Cardones cursed the fatigue-driven fogginess that had made him open his mouth. It was such a ridiculous idea. . . . "It's a really slim possibility," he hedged. "I'm not sure it's even worth bringing up."
"Well, we won't know that until we hear it, will we?" Damana said reasonably. "Come on, we're too tired for Twenty Questions."
Cardones gave up. "I was just wondering if it was possible for the nodes to have been blown from the inside," he said hesitantly. "I mean, as . . . sabotage."
He had expected snorts of derision or at the very least a matching set of skyward-rolled eyeballs. But to his surprise—and relief—neither happened. "Interesting," Damana commented. "Seems to me there's one tiny problem with it, though."
"It would be tricky to pull off—" Cardones admitted.
"I wasn't referring to the technical difficulties
," Damana cut him off gently. "I was thinking more about the fact that all the members of the crew have been accounted for out there."
Cardones grimaced. He'd felt vaguely like a fool even before bringing it up. Now, at least, he knew the specific parameters of that feeling. "Oh. Right."
"It was a good idea, though," Damana said encouragingly.
"And not one I'm ready to toss out with the bath water quite yet, actually," Sandler said, sounding thoughtful. "True, the number and gender of bodies match up with the official ship's manifest; but who's to say they didn't take on a passenger or extra hand somewhere along the way?"
"Wouldn't they have logged it if they had?" Jackson asked.
"They're supposed to," Hauptman said. "But if someone knew his way around a computer well enough to bring down the impeller, he'd certainly know how to edit a few log entries. My problem is why anyone would bother doing such a thing in the first place."
"Well, there's the cargo, for starters," Jackson said dryly. "Worth—what did we decide? Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-three million?"
"Sure, but why cripple the ship?" Hauptman said. "If you're going to shut down the impeller, why not do it in such a way that you can bring it up again afterward? That way you can have the cargo and the ship."
"Unless it's a gigantic disinformation scheme," Sandler said. "We've already speculated that someone might have staged these attacks for the purpose of getting their hands on an ONI task ship."
"Which didn't happen," Damana pointed out.
"Yet," Pampas reminded him.
"If they haven't hit us by now, they're not coming," Damana insisted. "But if you're suggesting this is a variation of that scenario, Skipper, I can't see the point. What would they hope to gain?"
"Actually, the Captain may be on to something," Swofford said, rubbing meditatively at his lower lip. "Suppose we brought back a report saying that someone was able to do thus-and-so to a ship's impellers from a million klicks away. What do you suppose BuWeaps' response would be?"
