by David Weber
And the still greater unwisdom of underestimating their missiles’ range.
“Well…fuck,” she repeated.
Chapter 44
Once they reached the officers’ lounge, Zachariah pulled out a chair from the compartment’s single table and sat down. With a hand gesture, he invited Weiss and Juarez to join him.
He didn’t bother to extend the same invitation to Zhilov. Zachariah knew perfectly well why the Gaul had insisted they all needed to be in the same compartment—so he could murder the three of them at his convenience, should their capture become imminent. If there’d been any doubt about that, the fact that Zhilov hadn’t bothered to reseal his jacket after returning his pulser to its belt holster—and that he made no attempt to conceal the weapon afterward—had resolved it quite handily.
Stefka Juarez stared at that pulser for a moment before abruptly sitting down. She then transferred the stare to a blank stretch of the far bulkhead. Her olive complexion was dark enough she didn’t look pale, but her expression was so tightly drawn her face looked like a mask.
Gail Weiss seemed more relaxed. Much more, in fact. Rather than sitting, she moved over to the beverage dispenser.
“Anybody besides me want some coffee? Stefka? Zachariah?”
“I’ll have some,” Zachariah said. “Black, please. And thanks.”
Juarez just kept staring at the bulkhead.
Zachariah noted that Weiss hadn’t bothered to extend her invitation to Zhilov, either. That was interesting. He knew nothing about the woman or her personal history, but she clearly had a spine. She would neither quaver in front of the Gaul nor make any pointless attempt at placating him.
For the first time, he noticed that she was rather nice-looking. Tall, a bit on the heavy side; hazel eyes; a rich head of auburn hair. She wasn’t exactly pretty, and was certainly not beautiful, but she had the sort of open-featured face that reflected a strong and vivid personality.
This was a ridiculous time, however, to be contemplating the attractiveness of a woman he barely knew at all, and he shifted his attention back to Juarez as Weiss took her own seat at the table with both cups of coffee and slid one of them over to him.
“Stefka…” He really didn’t know her well enough for that familiarity, but Juarez was so tense he wanted to crack through her brittle exterior, “relax, will you? There’s really not much chance we won’t make it to the hyper limit.”
Juarez jerked her head around to look at him. “You’re just guessing! You don’t know that!”
Zachariah began to respond, then paused as Weiss tapped a command into the tabletop unit. The lounge’s smart wall came to life in response, showing them a duplicate of Prince Sundjata’s maneuvering plot. Not the most soothing of all possible images, he thought as he surveyed the imagery. The once-amber icon which had represented the freighter approaching Balcescu Station had turned crimson…and been joined by six smaller, equally crimson icons. Four of the quintet of smaller light dots which had been accelerating towards the station had now made turnover, decelerating just as hard towards rendezvous with it.
The fifth had not, and his coffee seemed suddenly less tasty at the confirmation that at least one of the attacking warships was in pursuit of Luigi Pirandello and their own vessel. Juarez clearly recognized the same thing, and she jabbed a finger at it.
“See?!” she demanded. “They are chasing us!”
“Maybe they are,” Weiss said calmly. “Doesn’t mean they’ll catch us, though. In fact, they won’t.”
“Oh, yeah? And what makes you so sure of that?” Juarez snapped back.
“The fact that astrogation is one of my specialties,” the other woman replied. She leaned back in her chair and gestured with her coffee cup at the display. “Even if that’s a Manty-built frigate, there’s no way it has the acceleration to overhaul us short of the wall. One of their LACs might have the legs for it, but if they’d brought LACs along, then they’d have been pulling somewhere closer to seven hundred G’s on their approach to the station. I’m entirely in favor of Captain Bogunov running as fast as we can just in case, even if that does put a bit more strain on the compensator than I’m entirely happy with. Every bit of additional velocity we can tack on to our base—and as quickly as we can tack it—is a really good idea, since things can always go wrong. For example, we could lose an impeller node. Chances are about one in four hundred thousand of that happening, you understand, but there’s something to be said for not taking any chances that it might. Unless it does, though, there’s no way they can catch us.”
“They don’t have to catch as to kill us with missiles,” Juarez pointed out. She didn’t sound a lot calmer, Zachariah noted.
“No, but they’d still have to bring us into missile range,” Weiss replied. “And, like I say, nothing this side of a LAC is going to manage that, either.”
“Are you sure it’s not a LAC?” Zachariah asked.
“Positive,” Weiss said firmly. “First, Bogunov’s sensor officer would have to be completely incompetent to be unable to distinguish between a light attack craft and a destroyer or a frigate. Secondly, like I said, if it was a LAC, it would already be showing a hell of a lot more acceleration than we’re seeing.” She sipped coffee, then twitched her head at the smart wall again. “And since it is a frigate, it can’t have the mass or volume to mount the sorts of launchers the Manties’ long-range missiles need. So, it doesn’t have a LAC’s legs to run us down, and it doesn’t have a cruiser or battlecruiser’s missile range to kill us if it can’t catch as.”
She took another sip from her coffee. Which was also black, Zachariah noted approvingly. Like everyone else in his family except weak-sister JoAnne, Zachariah sneered at adulterating the beverage essential to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom.
Juarez was now staring at Weiss with the same intensity she’d lavished upon the bulkhead earlier. But where her stare had been blank before, it now bordered on hostility.
“And what makes you such an expert on the subject?” she demanded.
“The fact that I am an expert on the subject. Project Mir—” Weiss began, then stopped and flicked a glance in Zhilov’s direction. The Gaul clearly wasn’t concerned about maintaining security about project code names at this point, however, but habits died hard, so she shrugged, then looked back at Juarez.
“The project I headed up,” she continued, naming no names, “was devoted to the study of naval tactics. Which, for anyone with a brain—that excludes pretty much the entire officer corps of the Sollies’ Battle Fleet, of course—means constant and careful analysis of the Manty-Haven war. If it would settle your nerves, I can lecture you into a state of utter stupor on the capabilities of any class of warships in the galaxy.”
A crooked half-smile came to her face. “I’ll grant you, my expertise is academic, not hands-on. But I’m not the one flying this ship. Captain Bogunov is—and I’ve seen nothing so far that leads me to think she’s no good at it.”
* * *
Fourteen million kilometers astern of Prince Sundjata, Captain Roldão Brandt had reached a far less happy conclusion on the command deck of Luigi Pirandello, and he glared at Prince Sundjata’s icon. It was probably small souled of him to resent Caroline Bogunov’s good fortune, but that didn’t keep him from wishing their positions were reversed. He’d picked up Colonel Ali bin Muhammad’s transmission to Somogyi—his ship was eighteen million kilometers from Balcescu Station but almost directly on bin Muhammad’s transmission path and the colonel hadn’t bothered to encrypt his transmission or use a whisker laser—so there was no question at all in his mind about just who the star system’s unwelcome visitors were. And looking at the numbers on his display, there was no doubt that even at his best acceleration the frigate pursuing his ship could bring her into missile range in no more than another hour or so.
Unlike Prince Sundjata.
He looked up from his display and glanced at Genora Hinkley, his second officer, who shook her head.
“No way, Captain,” Genora said. “No way we’re going to out run the bastards.”
“So you think we should just go ahead and stop running?” Brandt asked, and Hinkley shrugged.
Brandt thought about it for a moment, then shook his head and answered his own question.
“So far, we’re still way out of weapons’ range,” he said. “It’s going to take them a while to change that, and in the meantime, who knows what may happen?” He removed his cap, ran his fingers through his hair, and twitched a smile. “Their compensator may fail. Or they may blow two or three nodes and have to reduce acceleration. Or it might turn out there’s more trouble aboard the station than they counted on and they end up recalled to help deal with it.”
“And just how likely are any of those to happen?” Hinkley asked with what might actually have been a tiny edge of humor. Gallows humor, perhaps, but still humor.
“A tad more likely than the system’s primary suddenly deciding to go nova,” Brandt told him. “Not a lot more likely, maybe, but more likely. And in the meantime, I figure it’s smarter to play the hand all the way out rather than fold any earlier than we have to.”
“Our compensator’s more likely to fail than theirs is,” Hinkley pointed out, and Brandt shrugged.
“Of course it is. If it goes, though, at least it’ll be fast. And to be honest, I’d rather take my chances with compensator failure than with a ship load of ex-slaves. Half of them are probably ex-Ballroom, for that matter! I’d really, really rather not make their acquaintance, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Oh, it’s definitely all the same to me!” Hinkley said fervently.
“Good. On the other hand, let’s get some security in place. I don’t want the cargo getting wind of this—the last thing we need is for them to try to break out and seize the ship—and I don’t want any of our more panic-prone people on this bridge to argue with any decisions I may have to make.”
“On it,” Hinkley agreed laconically.
* * *
“I’m not arguing. I’m just telling you that I’m doing the best I can,” Zoltan Somogyi tried to speak as calmly as he could, although he rather suspected that the sweat streaking his face suggested he was less than happy about the situation. “Look, I’m no angel, but do you think I want to give you an excuse to slaughter all of us?!”
The face on his com display seemed unmoved by his plea, and he swallowed a desire to curse wildly.
He and Bordás had done their best to prevent panic, but their efforts had not been blessed by success. What he’d wanted to do was to sit on any news of the situation until the Torch assault shuttles had already docked and begun disgorging their troops. The sudden emergence of four shuttles’ worth of armed-to-the-teeth Marines who already knew combat was probable should have gone through any attempted resistance like a graser through Swiss cheese, and with just about the same consequences the cheese would have suffered. While that would have been a bit hard on anyone who got in their way, it should also be fast enough for them to secure control of the slave holds before any of his less tightly wrapped personnel did something profoundly stupid and got all of them killed. Under the circumstances, Somogyi would have been just delighted to sustain the collateral damage involved if it kept his own personal hide intact.
Unfortunately, word had leaked almost instantly. He was pretty sure it had been someone in Flight Control, not that it really mattered. The station’s personnel had been given almost fourteen minutes to go from flat-footed surprise to fullbore panic, and things had gone downhill from the moment the word broke. Now the shuttles were less than three minutes out, and things were not looking good from the perspective of Angela Somogyi’s little boy Zoltan.
“The first thing we did,” he told Colonel Ali bin Muhammad, “was to lock out the jettison command.” He didn’t much care for the way the ex-slave’s eyes flickered at his use of the word “jettison,” but he also had no choice but to continue. “You know how they’re set up. I’ve got an armed guard sitting on the master panel here on the command deck, but there are local command stations on each of the holds. For now, we’ve managed to lock them down, but there are some people on the station who don’t trust your offer not to shoot them out of hand if we surrender. Or maybe they’re just crazies—I don’t know! But somebody’s trying to hack into the local control station on Hold Number Three. I’ve got security people trying to fight their way in to stop them, and my people here on the command deck are trying to keep them locked out, but we’re losing ground and if they cut the physical links between our systems and the local station, then there won’t be anything I can—”
“It sounds to me like you have a problem then, Mister Somogyi,” Ali bin Muhammad said coldly. “I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I don’t feel a huge amount of sympathy for you.”
“I don’t want your damn sympathy!” Somogyi snapped, then shoved himself physically back in his command chair. “I want to stay alive,” he said frankly then, his tone flat, “and for that to happen those slaves you’re so eager to rescue have to stay alive, too. So I know you hate my guts and the guts of everyone else on the station, but at this moment, you and I want the same thing, whatever our reasons for it.”
Donald Ali bin Muhammad felt a faint—very faint—stir of respect for the Balcescu Station CO. Not enough to make him want to do anything except put a pulser dart squarely between the man’s eyes, of course. Unfortunately, Somogyi had a point. A very good point, in fact.
Donald looked at the secondary com screen by his right knee and a skinsuited Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza looked back at him from it. She’d been monitoring his communications with Somogyi while her command shuttle decelerated towards the station. Now he worked one eyebrow at her.
“I’ve been looking at the schematic he uploaded to us,” Kabweza said, her voice audible in his earbug, although Somogyi couldn’t hear it. “As nearly as we can tell, it matches everything we already knew about its layout. I think he’s being straight with us—if only to save his own ass, of course—and I think we can do it. But it’s not going to be pretty.”
Donald pressed the stud that muted Somogyi’s end of the link and shrugged.
“I can live with plenty of ‘not pretty’ where these people are concerned Ayibongwinkosi. But how confident are you about that second ‘I think’ of yours?”
“Confident we can take out the bastards trying to hack the system? Completely. Whether or not we can do it without spacing the slaves ourselves is something else. The odds are in our favor, though. And let’s be honest here. If we don’t get in there before the SOBs crack the security lockout, then all those people are as good as dead anyway. Nobody who wasn’t all the way around the bend would even be thinking about spacing any slaves with my people about to reach right down their throats and rip their hearts out.”
She had a point, Donald thought. And—
“They just cut the physical connection,” Somogyi said harshly. “We’re done from here, Colonel. And the handful of security people I’ve got down there only have sidearms, certainly not enough firepower to fight their way in.”
The station commander’s expression was haggard, his eyes desperate, and Donald released the muting stud.
“Then we’ll just have to see about doing it ourselves, Mister Somogyi,” he said coldly. “You might want to suggest to your people that they stay the hell out of our way.”
* * *
“You heard the Colonel, Wat,” Kabweza said to Lieutenant Wat Tyler, the commanding officer of the platoon assigned to her command shuttle. “Are your people clear on what we’re doing?”
“Clear, Ma’am!” Tyler assured her. “We don’t have enough time for any fancy planning, so I figure we go with a modification of an Alpha Breach?”
“Works,” Kabweza approved. She punched a quick command into her console, and a schematic of Balcescu Station appeared on the HUDs of both her own and Tyler’s skinsuit helmets. She manipulated it quickly, highlighting four points on th
e station’s skin. “About here, I think,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am.” Tyler tapped a command of his own into the data pad on his left forearm, dropping the same image to his senior noncoms. Confirmation of receipt came back almost instantly, and he nodded in satisfaction. Then he looked back at Kabweza. “I’m guessing you’re not planning on staying here aboard the shuttle?”
Technically, it was a question. His tone of voice made it a statement, and Kabweza smiled at him.
“Listen up, People!” he announced over the platoon’s general link. “The Old Lady’s taking us in in person. That means she’s the one who’s going to be doing the post-op critique of just how well you do. You might want to bear that in mind.”
* * *
“Shit!”
Aatifa Villanueva flung herself to the deck as another burst of pulser darts sizzled past her from the twisted and ruined hatch and ricocheted madly off a bulkhead. None of the ricochets came her way, fortunately, but a shrill scream from somewhere behind her said someone else had been less fortunate.
“This is fucking crazy!” Alexi Grigorev shouted from beside her. “There’s no way we’re getting in there!”
Grigorev had been Villanueva’s partner for almost a year now, and she’d found him considerably closer to tolerable than a lot of the people she’d worked with in her career with the Jessyk Combine. He did have a way of belaboring the obvious sometimes, though.
“And just what the hell do you think is going to happen if we don’t get in there, Alyusha?” She heard the desperation in her own tone, but there wasn’t much she could do about that at the moment. “We lose one of those slaves—just one—and we might as well cut our own throats!”
