In Enemy Hands hh-7

by David Weber

  In all his years of naval service, Tourville had seldom seen orbital defenses as massive as those which surrounded Hades, otherwise known as Cerberus-B-2, and its three largish moons. The data on it available to Count Tilly was severely limited, but Citizen Captain Vladovich had given her a fragmentary download when it was assumed she would accompany Tepes all the way in. He'd had to, for the planet-moon system was literally smothered with firepower which would have made short work of any ship which made a single wrong move. Yet even a cursory glance at Vladovich's information had been enough to show that StateSec's chronic distrust had produced a bizarre defensive arrangement whose like neither Tourville nor any member of his staff had ever imagined.

  There wasn't a single manned fortress in the entire star system. Shoals of mines, old-fashioned "contact" nukes designed to kill small craft as well as the laser buoys designed to shoot LAC’s and starships, and both seemingly thick enough to walk across, surrounded the planet and its moons, seeded with more sophisticated and modern energy platforms for good measure, and he suspected there were ground-based missiles on the planet, at least, if not on the moons. Taken all together, Hades must have had the raw combat power of a full squadron of super-dreadnoughts... but all of those weapons were remote-controlled from Camp Charon. There wasn't even an orbital cargo station. Everything within a good light-minute of the planet was covered by massive amounts of firepower, but no permanent manned orbital presence of any sort had been tolerated, and Tourville wondered why that was.

  To be sure, minefields and energy platforms were cheaper than manned systems would have been, and because they weren't manned, there was no need to come up with personnel to crew them. Of course, "cheap" was a purely relative term where defenses on this scale were concerned, but even purely relative savings mounted up. He could understand that, just as he understood that StateSec's decision, like that of InSec, before it, to conceal this place’s location from its own military had meant they couldn't call in Navy personnel to man its defenses. But surely they could have come up with sufficient personnel of their own to man at least a cargo station! That would have tremendously simplified the transshipment of freight (and prisoners) from orbit to surface, so why not do it? Were they so paranoid they didn't trust anyone, even their own, in orbit above them?

  He didn't know the answer to that, and he doubted he ever would. Nor did he understand why they'd bothered with orbital defenses at all. If they weren't going to let the Navy know where the system was and put a picket force into it, then all the mines and remote energy platforms in the galaxy were ultimately useless, for a planet suffered from one enormous tactical disadvantage: it couldn't dodge. An attacker always knew exactly where it was, and that meant a single battlecruiser, probably even a heavy cruiser, could take out every weapon orbiting Hades with old-fashioned nuclear warheads launched on purely ballistic courses from beyond the defenses' own range. A few dozen fifty or sixty-megaton detonations would blow gaping holes in the massive, interlocking shells of mines, and not even modern hardening could have prevented the EMP from at least temporarily crippling the electronics of any spaceborne platform that survived outright destruction. He supposed ground-based missiles on the planet or its moons (if, in fact, there were some) would survive, but any competent defensive planner knew purely orbital systems, even proper fortresses with bubble sidewalls, were ultimately useless against mobile attackers.

  The only explanation he could come up with was that whoever had ordered the immense (and wasted) expenditure to put this abortion together hadn't bothered to consult a competent defensive planner. Well, that actually made a sort of sense, didn't it? If you distrusted your own military personnel so much that you refused even to tell them a prison existed, far less where it was, lest they decide to attack it for some unimaginable reason, then you were hardly likely to ask those same people for advice on how to fortify it against themselves, now were you?

  But whatever the rationale behind the emplacements, Yuri was right; the paranoiacs who'd put them up would never allow a warship manned by anyone except their own people any closer to Hades than they had to. And parking Count Tilly clear out around Cerberus-B-3 would put her a full seventeen light-minutes from the prison planet, and condemn Tourville, Honeker, Bogdanovich, and Foraker to an almost three-hour pinnace flight to reach it. Well, at least Tilly would be well outside the range of the defensive shell, too. In his present mood, Lester Tourville had to consider that a major plus.

  "Very well," he said to Fraiser at last. "I assume Citizen Captain Hewitt already has that information?" Fraiser nodded, and Tourville shrugged. "In that case, inform Citizen Committeewoman Ransom her message has been received."

  No one on Flag Bridge missed the fact that he hadn't told Fraiser to acknowledge Ransom's message, thus confirming her orders would actually be obeyed. Nor did any of them, including Honeker, fail to grasp that by Navy standards, a simple, curt notice of receipt was, in fact, a none-too-veiled insult to the message's originator. It was possible Ransom might not realize that, but, frankly, Tourville no longer really cared what Cordelia Ransom did or did not realize.

  Count Tilly's vector diverged gradually from Tepes', and Tourville watched the small, bright dot of Cerberus-B-3 grow slowly on the main view screen.

  Horace Harkness twitched as the chrono under his pillow beeped. He'd taken it off his wrist and shoved it under the pillow to keep its sound from waking anyone else, and he swallowed a silent curse as it beeped again. He hadn't been to sleep all night, though no one would have thought it to look at him, or he hoped they wouldn't have, anyway, and he'd set the alarm as the only way he could think of to keep himself from checking the time at compulsive five-minute intervals. He'd been confident the pillow would swallow its sound completely, yet now that the thing had gone off, its muted voice seemed to echo in the darkened compartment like thunder.

  But that was all in his mind, he told himself firmly, not that his pulse rate seemed impressed by his firmness. It was only because the beep told him it was time to put his plans into operation. Well, that and the fact that he realized just what a piss-poor chance he had of actually carrying all this off. Unfortunately, they were the only plans he'd been able to come up with, which didn't offer him a lot of options.

  The chrono beeped yet again, and his hand darted under the pillow to silence it. Then he drew a deep breath, licked his lips, and sat up in his bunk. He swung his legs over the side and stood very slowly, bare feet silent on the decksole. Heinrich Johnson's deep, slow breathing and Hugh Candleman’s nasal snores didn't even falter, and his jaw clenched. This was the part he'd hated most when he planned it, but he had no choice, and he drifted across the deck like a ghost. The faint glow of the night-light Candleman insisted on leaving on lent a dim illumination to the compartment, which let him watch where he was going as he moved noiselessly towards Johnson's bunk. He reached its head and paused, drawing another of those deep silent breaths, and then he struck.

  His left hand snapped out, grasping Johnson’s chin and yanking it upward, pushing the back of the StateSec man's head harder into his pillow and arching his neck. The corporal's eyes opened, unfocused and confused, but he hadn't even realized he was awake, much less what was happening, when Harkness' right hand came down like an axe. Johnson started to suck in air, but any shout he might have given died in an agonized wheeze as his larynx shattered. He thrashed and jerked, hands pawing at his throat while he fought for breath that wouldn't come, but Harkness had already turned away. Heinrich Johnson was already a dead man; he simply hadn't realized it yet, and Harkness still had Candleman to worry about.

  The second StateSec guard made a snorting sound and stirred sleepily. For all their violence, Johnson’s death throes weren't very loud, and Candleman never had a chance to realize what the harsh, choking sounds which had penetrated his sleep might portend. He was still moving muzzily towards the boundary of wakefulness when two callused hands locked on his head and twisted explosively. For just an instant, the
sickening crunch of vertebrae seemed to completely bury the sounds of Johnson’s fading, desperate efforts to breathe, and then those sounds, too, died, and Horace Harkness stood back in the darkness, closed his eyes, and shuddered with sick loathing.

  It wasn't the first time he'd killed, but it was the first time he'd killed someone he actually knew or done it with his bare hands rather than missiles or an energy mount, and it was different this way. He felt unclean, for neither Johnson nor Candleman had even guessed what was coming. But that had been the point. He couldn't have allowed them to guess, and so he'd had to become their partner, their good friend and buddy the venal ex-Manty, so that he could murder them in their sleep.

  His fists clenched at his sides, and he stood motionless but for the tiny shudders he couldn't quite still. But then his nostrils flared, and he opened his eyes once more. He'd already been through this when he planned the entire thing, and he'd been right then. He'd had no choice, and he knew it, and however pleasant Johnson and Candleman might have been drinking beer while they planned their next scam, they'd also been StateSec thugs. God only knew how many people they'd helped others of their kind to torture or kill. That thought might be an attempt to salve his conscience, but that didn't make it untrue, either, and he turned away from the dead men to their lockers.

  Both of them were locked, but Horace Harkness had opened quite a few locks which had belonged to someone else over the course of a checkered career, and he had the advantage of having watched their owners open these dozens of times. He input the combinations quickly, and his mouth twitched in a hungry smile as the lockers' internal lights gleamed on his dead watchdogs' weapons.

  He strapped Johnson’s gun belt around his own waist before he drew and checked the pulser. Magazine and capacitor both showed full, and he went quickly through the belt pouches to confirm the presence of extra magazines and power packs. Then he shoved one of the corporal's uniform tunics and a pair of trousers into a laundry bag and turned to Candleman's locker. He made the same check on the private's side arm and hung the second gun belt diagonally from right shoulder to left hip like a bandoleer, then closed the lockers, scooped up the minicomp he'd used to rig the game software, and plugged it into the access slot on the compartment bulkhead.

  He used Johnson’s password to log on. Had computers cared about such things, Tepes' computer might have been amazed by the quantum leap in the programming skills of Citizen Corporal Heinrich Johnson, SN SS-1002-56722-0531-HV. But computers didn't care, and Harkness flipped quickly through the pathways he'd established while Johnson and Candleman assumed he was simply rigging the outcomes of games for them.

  He hadn't dared make any major changes on the main system lest one of the officers or NCOs who were computer literate stumble across his work, but that hadn't prevented him from making all those changes well in advance on the minicomp. Of course, seeing to it his little packages were activated at the proper time and in the proper order was going to be a bit of a problem, but he hoped he'd taken that sufficiently into account. And there was one bit of programming he had been forced to change ahead of time. Now he checked it and grunted in satisfaction; it had activated eighteen minutes and twenty-one seconds earlier, exactly as instructed, and he grinned. There were still a thousand things that could go wrong, but that had been the part that worried him most. Now he had to do the next most dangerous bit, and he flicked a function key.

  As far as anyone else aboard PNS Tepes was concerned, nothing at all happened, but Harkness and his minicomp knew better. Throughout the battlecruiser’s electronic guts, half a dozen programs changed abruptly, overwritten by the versions of themselves which Harkness had downloaded to his minicomp and altered, in most cases subtly; in others not so subtly, days or even weeks before.

  Despite the size of some of the programs and program groups involved, the substitutions flicked into place with a speed which would have been inconceivable to anyone who'd lived in the days of chips and printed circuits, and the breath Harkness hadn't realized he was holding whooshed out as confirmation of his commands' execution blinked on his display. Then he logged off, pulled the minicomp out of its slot, shoved it into his pocket, slung the laundry bag with Johnson's uniform over his shoulder, and walked quickly to the end of the compartment. The ventilation grille would be a tight fit, but that was the least of his worries at the moment.

  Warner Caslet squared his shoulders and straightened his spine as the lift stopped and the doors slid open. The last four weeks had been even worse than he'd expected, less because of any active unpleasantness than because of his complete impotence. He'd known exactly what was going to happen to Honor Harrington and her people, and there'd been no more he could do about that than there'd been anything he could do about whatever Cordelia Ransom intended to do with him. He was a bit surprised, when he thought about it, that she'd been content to leave her "military liaison" with the prisoners alone for so long, though that might have been because he'd underestimated her intelligence. Perhaps she'd simply realized that the longer she kept the Sword of Damocles suspended above his head, the worse it would hurt when she finally let it fall and proved any hope he'd allowed himself to feel was only an illusion.

  But whatever else might be about to happen, Tepes was about to cross the perimeter of the satellites protecting the planet Hades. In fact, she was little more than half an hour out of parking orbit, though he wasn't really supposed to know that. He didn't quite understand the point in trying to conceal it from him, unless it was simply part of StateSec's mania for keeping everything to itself, but it hadn't proved particularly difficult to discover anyway. And because he knew what was about to happen, he'd decided to pay another visit to Alistair McKeon and Andreas Venizelos.

  He shouldn't do it, of course. He'd been brought along specifically to take official responsibility for the prisoners' condition, but deliberately seeking additional contact with them only chipped away at whatever tiny chance of survival he might still have. He knew that, but he couldn't help himself.

  Despite his official status, he'd been unable to gain access to Lady Harrington, who, after all, wasn't a military prisoner... officially, and his single attempt to ferret out a report on her condition had met with a rebuff so savage that he hadn't dared to pursue it. But he had been able to get in to see the people who were still considered military POWs virtually at will. Perhaps that was because he hadn't asked permission; he'd simply taken advantage of his rank and "liaison" duties to bulldoze his way past the StateSec lieutenant responsible for them. He hadn't really expected to get away with it, but apparently the lieutenant hadn't reported his visits to higher authority, unless, of course, said higher authority had decided to give him enough rope for a suitable noose and use the security cameras to record the proof of his apostasy. After all, what legitimate reason could an officer of the PRH have for hobnobbing with captured enemies of the People any more than his official responsibilities absolutely demanded? No doubt the HD chips would prove useful at his trial... assuming anyone bothered to give him one.

  Now he stepped through the lift doors and nodded curtly to the four guards at the security console halfway down the passage. The StateSec troopers looked up in alarm, straightening their spines and setting down illicit coffee cups, then relaxed as they saw it was only Caslet. Even disregarding whatever the rumor mill suggested might or might not happen to him down the road, he was merely a naval officer, and the duty watch sergeant waved for the others to stay put as he strolled down the passage to greet the visitor.

  "What can I do for you, Citizen Commander?" he asked without bothering to salute.

  "I'd like to speak with the senior prisoners, Citizen Sergeant Innis," Caslet replied, and the guard shrugged.

  "No skin off my nose," he grunted, and waved an arm to bring one of the other three over as he turned to lead the way to the locked hatch. The woman behind the desk answered his gesture, unracked a flechette gun, and crossed to stand five feet back, covering the hatch, and only then d
id the sergeant input the door lock's combination.

  "Look alive, Manties!" he shouted through the opening hatch. "You got a visitor."

  The compartment lighting came up as the hatch opened, and Caslet felt a twinge of guilt as sleepy men sat up in their bunks. It was the middle of the night by Tepes' clocks, but if he'd waited till morning, they would have been gone before he could see them.

  He nodded to the sergeant once more and stepped into the compartment so that Innis could close it behind him. Yawns turned into stillness as sudden, tense speculation replaced sleepiness in the POWs' eyes, but Caslet only stood there, hands folded behind him, and waited for them to finish waking up.

  The first time he'd come to visit these men, their welcome had been frigid. He hadn't blamed them for that. Indeed, he'd expected it to be even worse, but that was because he hadn't known "Colonel" LaFollet was in the same compartment. Lady Harrington's armsman had recognized him and introduced him to the others, and the way LaFollet had done it had told them this Peep was different. By now, Caslet had actually formed a tenuous friendship with McKeon. Venizelos remained more suspicious, but like McKeon, and, especially, LaFollet and Montoya, he'd been too grateful for Caslet’s efforts to obtain additional medical supplies for Nimitz to maintain any active hostility.

  Thoughts of the treecat carried Caslet across the compartment towards LaFollet’s bunk, and his heart twisted with familiar distress as Nimitz struggled up in the nest of blankets at its foot to greet him. Treecats' bones knitted more rapidly than human bones, but no one in Tepes' crew had been interested in providing the tools Montoya would have required to repair Nimitz's injuries properly. The 'cat had regained much of his strength, but his shattered midshoulder and arm were twisted and crippled, "healed" in the merely approximate positions Montoya had been able to manage. The injury had robbed him of his normal, flowing grace, and the pain in his eyes and half-flattened ears as he made himself move was grievous to behold, but the 'cat refused to let self-pity rule him. Now he pushed himself into an almost fully upright position, listing slightly to the right as his crippled side dragged at his balance, and bleeked a welcome to Caslet.