by David Weber
"Thank you," Abigail replied gravely, even as somewhere inside she winced at how someone like Arpad Grigovakis would have responded to that greeting. "I am Midshipwoman Hearns, of Her Manticoran Majesty's Ship Gauntlet."
"Indeed?" Tobias cocked his head, then glanced at Sergeant Gutierrez and back at Abigail. "We are not precisely familiar with the Manticoran military here on Refuge, Mistress Hearns. But as a single small, lightly populated planet, we are—understandably, I think—cautious about unexpected contacts with outsiders. Particularly with unexpected warships. As such, I took the precaution of consulting our library about the Star Kingdom of Manticore when your ship first contacted us. Our records are somewhat out of date, but I notice that your uniform doesn't match the imagery in the file."
He gazed at her expectantly, and she smiled back at him. Sharp as a tack, this one. And it looks like the Captain was right about how wary these people might feel, she admitted, and nodded in acknowledgment of Tobias' point.
"You're correct, Sir," she said, and waved one hand in a small gesture at her sky-blue tunic and dark-blue trousers. "I'm currently serving aboard Gauntlet while completing my midshipwoman's cruise, but I'm not Manticoran, myself. I'm from Grayson, in the Yeltsin's Star System. We're allied with the Star Kingdom, and I've been attending the Royal Navy's academy at Saganami Island."
"Ah, I see," Tobias murmured, and nodded in apparent satisfaction. "I've heard of Grayson," he continued, "although I can scarcely claim that I'm at all familiar with your home world, Mistress Hearns."
He gazed at her speculatively, and she wondered what, precisely, he'd heard about Grayson. Whatever it was, it seemed to reassure him, at least to some extent, and his shoulders relaxed ever so slightly.
"Your captain's message said that you're visiting us as part of an investigation into possible acts of piracy," he said, after moment. "I'm afraid I'm not quite clear on exactly how he believes we can help you. We are a peaceful people, and as I'm sure is apparent to you, we keep much to ourselves."
"We understand that, Sir," Abigail assured him. "We—"
"Please," Tobias interrupted gently. "Call me Brother Tobias. I am no man's master or superior."
"Of course . . . Brother Tobias," Abigail said. "But, as I was saying, my Captain is simply following up the known movements of ships which we know were operating in this area and which subsequently disappeared. One of them was the Erewhonese destroyer Star Warrior, which called here some months ago. Another was the transport Windhover."
"Oh, yes, Windhover," Tobias murmured sadly, and he and his two companions signed themselves with a complicated gesture. Then he shook himself.
"I don't know that we have any information that can help you, Mistress Hearns. What we do know, however, we will willingly share with you and with your captain. As I said, we of the Fellowship of the Elect are a peaceful people who have renounced the ways of violence in all of its forms in accordance with His Word. Yet the blood of our murdered brothers and sisters cries out to us, as must the blood of any of God's children. Anything we can tell you which may aid in preventing additional, equally terrible crimes, we certainly will."
"I appreciate that deeply, Brother Tobias," Abigail told him sincerely.
"Then if you would accompany me, I will guide you to the Meeting House, where Brother Heinrich and some of our other Elders are waiting to speak with you."
"Thank you," Abigail said, then paused as Sergeant Gutierrez started to key his communicator.
"I think you can remain here, Sergeant," she said quietly, and it was Gutierrez's turn to pause, his hand on the com.
"With all due respect, Ma'am," he began in his deep, rumbling voice, and she shook her head.
"I don't believe I have anything to fear from Brother Tobias and his people, Sergeant," she said more crisply.
"Ma'am, that's not really the point," he replied. "Major Hill's orders were pretty specific."
"And so are mine, Sergeant," Abigail told him. "I can look after myself," she let her right hand make a small, unobtrusive gesture in the direction of the pulser holstered at her right hip, "and I don't think I'm in any danger. But these people are probably uncomfortable around armed personnel, and we're guests here. I see no reason to offend them unnecessarily."
"Ma'am," he began again in a dangerously patient voice, "I don't think you quite underst—"
"We're going to do this my way, Sergeant." Abigail's own voice was calm but firm. He glowered at her, but she held his eyes steadily with her own and refused to back down. "Keep an eye on the pinnace," she told him, "and I'll keep my com open so you can monitor."
He hesitated, clearly hovering on the brink of further objections, then inhaled deeply. It was obvious he didn't think much of her order, and she suspected he didn't think a great deal more of the judgment of the person who'd given it. For that matter, she was far from certain Commander Watson would approve of her decision when they got back to the ship and Gutierrez reported. But the captain had emphasized that they were not to step upon these people's sensibilities or beliefs.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," he said finally.
"Thank you, Sergeant," she said, and turned back to Brother Tobias. "Whenever you're ready, Brother," she told him.
* * *
HMS Gauntlet moved steadily outward from the planet of Refuge. She wasn't in any particular hurry, but Captain Oversteegen had decided he might as well actually go ahead and update his charts on the Tiberian System. As Commander Watson had suggested, it provided a perfectly acceptable reason to move Gauntlet away from the planet. And if he was going to use it as a pretext, he might as well get some genuine use out of it. Besides, it would be a worthwhile exercise for Lieutenant Commander Atkins' department.
"How's it going, Valeria?" Commander Watson asked, and the astrogator looked up from a conversation with her senior yeoman.
"Pretty well, actually," she replied. "We're not turning up any serious discrepancies, but it's pretty obvious that whoever ran the original survey on the system wasn't exactly interested in dotting all the 'i's and crossing all the 't's."
"How so?" Watson asked.
"Like I said, it's nothing major. But there are some minor system bodies that never got cataloged at all. For instance, Refuge has a secondary moon—more of a captured hunk of loose rock, actually—that doesn't appear. We're finding some other little items like that. Small stuff, nothing significant or worth worrying about. But it's an interesting exercise, especially for my newbies."
"Good, but don't get too attached to it. I don't imagine we'll be hanging around very long after we recover Ms. Hearns and her party."
"Understood." Atkins looked around for a moment, then leaned closer to the executive officer. "Is it true she left her watchdogs at the pinnace?" she asked quietly, with a slight smile.
"Now, how did you hear that?" Watson responded.
"Chief Palmer made some observations for me on his way to the planet," Atkins said. "When he reported them to Chief Abrams, he . . . might have commented on it."
"I see." Watson snorted. "You know, the grapevine aboard this ship must be made out of fiber optic, given how quick it works!" She shook her head. "In answer to your question, however, yes. She left Gutierrez and his people at the landing field. I don't think the Sergeant was particularly happy about it, either."
"He doesn't think she's actually in any sort of danger, does he?" Atkins asked in a more serious tone.
"On a planet full of nonviolent religious types?" Watson snorted again, harder, then paused. "Well, Gutierrez is a Marine, so I suppose he could be a little less trusting than us Navy types. But my read right this minute is that he's just a bit on the disgusted side. I think he's put her down as one of those Little Ms. Sunshine types who think the universe is populated solely by kindly, helpful souls."
"Abigail?" Atkins shook her head. "She's a Grayson, Ma'am."
"I know that. You know that. Hell, Gutierrez knows that! But he's also down on a planet we don't know anything about, real
ly, on a first-hand basis, and his pablum-brained midshipwoman has just gone traipsing off on her own with the locals. Not something exactly designed to give a Marine the most lively possible faith in her judgment."
"You think it was the wrong decision?" Atkins asked curiously.
"No, not really. I'm going to give her a little grief over it, when we get her back aboard, and suggest that I sent those Marines along for a reason. But I'm not going to smack her for it, because I think I know why she did it. Besides, she's the one down there, not me, and over all, I think I have considerable faith in her judgment."
"Well," Atkins said, after a glance at the bulkhead time/date display, "she's been dirtside for almost four hours now. Nothing seems to have gone wrong so far, and I suppose she should be heading back shortly."
"As a matter of fact, she's on her way back to the pinnace right now," Watson agreed, "and—"
"Hyper footprint!" The tactical rating whose report interrupted the exec sounded surprised, but his voice was crisp. "Looks like two ships in company, bearing zero-three-four by zero-one-niner!"
Watson wheeled towards him, eyebrows rising, then crossed quickly back to the command chair at the center of the bridge and hit the button that deployed the tactical repeater plot. She gazed down into it, watching until CIC updated it with the red caret that indicated an unidentified hyper footprint on Gauntlet's starboard bow at just over sixteen light-minutes.
"Well, well, well," she murmured, and pressed a com stud on the chair arm.
"Captain speakin'," Michael Oversteegen's voice acknowledged.
"Sir, it's the Exec," she told him. "We've got an unidentified hyper footprint at roughly two hundred and eighty-eight million kilometers. Looks like it might be a pair of them."
"Do we, indeed?" Oversteegen said in a thoughtful voice. "Now, what do you think someone might be doin' in a system like Tiberian?"
"Well, Sir, unless they're as noble, virtuous, and aboveboard as we are, then I suppose it's possible they might be nasty old pirates."
"The same thought had occurred t' me," Oversteegen said, and then his voice went crisper. "Send the crew t' Action Stations, Linda. I'm on my way."
Abigail leaned back in her comfortable chair in the pinnace's passenger compartment, watching the dark indigo of Refuge's stratosphere give way to the black of space, and considered what she'd learned from Brother Tobias and Brother Heinrich.
It wasn't much, she reflected. In fact, she doubted she'd learned a single thing that hadn't already been included in the captain's ONI analyses. Except that it was pretty evident that the captain had been right about the way Star Warrior's captain had rubbed the Refugians the wrong way during his own visit to Tiberian.
It wasn't anything Tobias or Heinrich had said, so much as the way they hadn't said it, she thought. She hated to admit it, but their attitude towards Star Warrior and her crew was precisely the same as the one certain Graysons must have had when Lady Harrington first visited Yeltsin's Star. The irreligious outsiders had come blundering into their star system, bringing with them all of their own, hopelessly secular concerns and all of their readiness to shed blood, and they'd hated it.
It seemed likely to Abigail that both Star Warrior's captain and the landing party from the Erewhonese cruiser which had followed up the destroyer's disappearance had taken exactly the wrong tack with the Fellowship of the Elect. She was sure they hadn't deliberately stepped on the Refugians' sensibilities, but they did seem to have radiated precisely the sort of eagerness to find and destroy their enemies which the Refugian religion would have found most distasteful.
And whatever might have been true in Star Warrior's case, the cruiser which had followed her to Tiberian had obviously been in vengeance-seeking mode. Clearly, the members of her crew who had spoken with Brother Heinrich and his fellow Elders had been both baffled by and at least a little contemptuous of the locals' rejection of their own eagerness to hunt down and destroy whoever had attacked their destroyer.
To be fair to the Fellowship's Elders, they'd recognized that however nonviolent their own religion might be, the suppression of the sort of piracy which had apparently murdered several thousand of their fellow believers was an abomination in the sight of God. That hadn't made them happy about their Erewhonese visitors' attitudes, however. Nor had it made them any less aware of their own religion's commands against violence, and their cooperation, however sincere, had been grudging.
It had taken Abigail a good hour to overcome that grudgingness, herself, and she'd come to the reluctant conclusion that Captain Oversteegen had chosen the right person for the job, after all. It irked her enormously. Which, she had been forced to admit, was petty of her . . . which only made it even more irksome, of course. Her own beliefs were in a great many ways very different from those of the Refugians. For one thing, while Father Church taught that violence should never be a first resort, his doctrine also enshrined the belief that it was the duty of the godly to use whatever tools were required when evil threatened. As Saint Austen had said, "He who does not oppose evil by all means in his power becomes its accomplice." The Church of Humanity believed that—helped, no doubt, she admitted, by the threat Masada had presented for so long—and she found the Refugians' hesitance to take up the sword themselves very difficult to understand. Or to sympathize with. Yet at least she understood its basis and depth, and that meant she was undoubtedly a far better choice as Gauntlet's emissary than any of her hopelessly secular fellow middies would have been.
Now if only the trip had actually turned up some vital information that would have led them to the pirates! Unfortunately, as helpful as the Elders had been, in the end, they hadn't been able to tell her anything that seemed significant to her. She'd recorded the entire meeting, and the captain might be able to find something in the recording that she'd missed at the time, but she doubted it. Which meant—
"Excuse me, Ms. Hearns."
Abigail looked up, startled out of her thoughts by Chief Palmer's voice.
"Yes, Chief. What is it?"
"Ma'am, the Captain is on the com. He wants to speak to you."
"Oh, damn!" Haicheng Ringstorff muttered in tones of profound disgust. "Tell me you're lying, George!"
"I wish." If possible, Lithgow sounded even more disgusted than his superior. "But it's confirmed. It's Tyler and Lamar, all right. And our nosy friend couldn't have missed their footprints if he'd tried."
"Crap." Ringstorff shoved himself back in his chair and glared at his com display. Not that he was pissed off with Lithgow. Then he sighed and shook his head in resignation.
"Well, this is why we kept Maurersberger and Morakis on station. Has the Erewhonese challenged Tyler and Lamar yet?"
"No." Lithgow grimaced. "He's changed course to head directly towards them, but he hasn't said a word yet."
"That's going to change, I'm sure," Ringstorff said grimly. "Not that it matters very much. We can't let him go home and tell the rest of his navy about us."
"I know that's the plan," Lithgow said just a bit cautiously, "but is it really the best idea?" Ringstorff frowned at him, and Lithgow shrugged. "Like you, I figure even the Four Yahoos can take a single Erewhonese cruiser. But even after we do, aren't we still fucked? They obviously sent this fellow along to backtrack their destroyer, so if we pop him in Tiberian, they're bound to close in on the system—probably within another few weeks—which will make it impossible for us to go on operating here, anyway. At this point, we can still avoid action if we want to. So why not just pull out, if we're going to have to relocate our operational base whatever happens?"
"You're probably—no, you're certainly—right that we're going to have to find another place to park ourselves," Ringstorff conceded. "But the SOP for the situation was laid out in our initial orders. Now, mind you, I'm perfectly willing to tell whoever wrote those orders to go screw himself, under the right circumstances, but in this case, I think he had a point. If we zap this turkey, it absolutely denies the Erewhonese any inf
ormation about us. All they'll know is that they lost a destroyer and a cruiser after investigating this system. They're bound to figure that they actually lost them in this system, but if there are no survivors and we nuke the cruiser's wreckage the way we did the tin-can's, they'll never be able to confirm that absolutely. And whatever they may suspect, they won't have any way to guesstimate what we used to take their ships out. If we let this one get away, they'll know we have at least two units, and they'll probably have a pretty good indication that the two they know about were in the heavy cruiser range themselves."
"I can see that. But they're going to figure we must have at least that much firepower, whatever it was aboard, to take their ships out in the first place," Lithgow pointed out.
"Probably." Ringstorff nodded. "On the other hand, they won't be able to be positive that we didn't somehow manage to ambush their cruiser with several smaller units. But, frankly, the main reason I'm willing to take this fellow on is that the Yahoos need the experience."
Lithgow's eyebrows rose, and Ringstorff shrugged.
"I've never been happy about the fact that the basic plan said we had to lie completely doggo—before the home office authorized our . . . peripheral operations, of course—but then be ready at the drop of a hat to produce four heavy cruisers prepared, if necessary, to take on light Erewhonese or Peep naval forces. You really think these jackasses are going to be prepared to stand up to regular naval units at anything remotely resembling even odds, Solly hardware or no?"
"Well . . ."
"Exactly. Maurersberger and Tyler nearly pissed themselves when they had to jump a single destroyer! Let's face it, they may be the best in the business when it comes to slaughtering passenger liners and unarmed merchies, but that's a whole different proposition from taking on regular men-of-war. So the way I see it, this busybody cruiser represents an opportunity, as well as a monumental pain in the ass. We ought to be able to take him out fairly easily, given the odds. If we can, well and good. It eliminates a possible information source for the other side, and simultaneously gives our 'gallant captains' some genuine combat experience and a victory which ought to be a morale enhancer if the balloon ever really goes up on the main op. And if we can't take a single Erewhonese heavy cruiser, then this is damned well a better time to find out than when the entire operation might depend on our ability to do the same thing."
