Shadow of Freedom-eARC

by David Weber

  Or it had been until today, at any rate. Unfortunately, Dueñas wasn’t the one who was going to pay the heaviest price. Or who’d already paid it, for that matter. MacNaughtan hadn’t known Dubroskaya well—she hadn’t been in-system long enough—but she’d sure as hell deserved better than she’d gotten! And the MacNaughtan clan had been around long enough for him to know that with Dubroskaya dead, Dueñas was going to heap all the responsibility for what had happened here on her, if he could. It was amazing how convenient dead scapegoats who weren’t around to dispute what had happened could be.

  And if anything else goes wrong, he’s going to hang the responsibility for that on anyone he can, too. Which puts me right in the line of fire, and—

  His earbug chimed again, louder, and he growled a silent mental curse as it added a priority sequence to the signal.

  He looked around for a moment, then crooked a finger at Commander Tad Rankeillor, his executive officer.

  “Take the throne for a minute, Tad,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the command chair where he should technically have parked his posterior. “Apparently I have to take a call.”

  “Hell of a time for it,” Rankeillor grunted. The SSS wasn’t all that big on spit and polish, and MacNaughtan and Rankeillor had known one another since boyhood. “Tell Maura I said hi.”

  “It’s not Maura,” MacNaughtan said, hovering on the edge of a grin despite the catastrophe looming its way towards them. He and Maura had been married for less than six local months, and Rankeillor had been his best man.

  “Sure it isn’t.” Rankeillor rolled his eyes.

  “Not her combination,” MacNaughtan said, and Rankeillor’s eyes stopped rolling and narrowed.

  “Who the hell else would com you at a moment like this?”

  “If you’ll take the damned deck, I’ll find out!” MacNaughtan said tartly, and Rankeillor nodded.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You’re relieved.”

  “I stand relieved,” MacNaughtan replied. Spit and polish or not, there were some formalities and procedures which simply had to be observed.

  Rankeillor moved closer to the master plot, and MacNaughtan stepped back a few paces, far enough to stay out of everyone else’s way, and punched to accept the audio-only call.

  “MacNaughtan,” he said tersely.

  “Captain, it’s Cicely Tiilikainen,” a voice said, and he felt his shoulders stiffen.

  Tiilikainen had been stationed in Saltash longer than any of its previous governors or lieutenant governors. If Valentine MacNaughtan had been inclined trust any OFS bureaucrat, it would probably have been Tiilikainen. As it was, he at least mistrusted her less than any of her predecessors. To be honest, however, that wasn’t saying a great deal, and his eyes narrowed as he wondered why she was on his private circuit rather than one of the official com channels.

  “Yes?” he responded after a moment, some instinct prompting him to use no names or official titles any of his watch standers might overhear.

  “I’m on your private combination because I’m pretty sure this is a conversation neither of us would want to make part of the official record,” Tiilikainen said, as if she’d read his mind. “The Governor and I just had a…disagreement.”

  “And?” MacNaughtan said warily. Getting into the crossfire between Frontier Security bureaucrats was not something a prudent Saltashan did.

  “And I told him where he could put any further cooperation from me,” Tiilikainen told him flatly. “I never did like this brainstorm of his, and I wish to hell I’d argued harder when he first came up with it. But I didn’t, and now it’s come home to roost with a vengeance. You know what happened to Dubroskaya.”

  “Yes,” he said, although it hadn’t been a question.

  “Well, Dueñas still refuses to back down. He even refused to authorize Myau to evacuate her ships.”

  “What?” MacNaughtan’s brows knit, and he glanced at the plot showing the thick shower of life pods descending towards Cinnamon atmosphere. “But—”

  “Myau did that on her own…after I gave her a heads-up.” MacNaughtan could almost see Tiilikainen’s tart, sharp edged grimace even over the audio-only link. “I suggested to her that it would probably be best to initiate direct contact with this Zavala before our esteemed Governor got around to complicating things for her. She still may take it in the ear, but at least she didn’t have any orders not to abandon—yet—and she can make a pretty damned good case for having to make a quick decision without any guidance from her civilian superiors. Officially, at least.”

  “I see. And you’re comming me to do the same thing?”

  “More or less.” He heard the sound of an exasperated exhalation. “You’re not in the same position Myau was. You can’t just evacuate the station, and I’m damned sure he’s going to be ordering you and MacWilliams—and that jackass Pole—not to release the Manties. He’s got this notion Zavala won’t push it, won’t dare to take any action that could get civilians hurt.”

  “Which you think he will?” MacNaughtan kept his voice down, but his expression tightened.

  “My honest impression? I don’t think he wants to, but this is one genuine hard-ass, Val. I don’t know how typical he is of Manties in general, but this guy isn’t going to take any crap from anybody, and the fact is that we’re legally in the wrong on this one. Worse, Zavala knows we are, and I think he’s just demonstrated he isn’t likely to spend a lot of time dithering about his next move. I don’t know what he may have said to Dueñas after I left, but if I had to guess, it would be something along the lines of give me back my nationals, and nobody else needs to get hurt. Get in my way, and a lot of people will get hurt. And since the nationals in question happen to be aboard your space station…”

  Her voice trailed off in the verbal equivalent of a shrug, and MacNaughtan closed his eyes. Wonderful. This day just kept getting better and better.

  “Well, I appreciate the information, Sir,” he said briskly, raising his voice just enough for anyone standing close enough to him to hear the honorific’s gender. “Unfortunately, I’ve got to get back to work now. Things are a little lively here, you know, and I probably need to keep the link open for official calls.”

  “I do know, and…I’m sorry. Luck.”

  Tiilikainen disconnected, and MacNaughtan drew a deep breath, then strode back over to Rankeillor.

  “Get hold of Bridie,” he said softly. “I need her and MacGeechan in my briefing room ten minutes ago. And for God’s sake don’t put it on the PA!”

  “I’ll do that thing,” Rankeillor agreed, looking less surprised than he might have, and MacNaughtan nodded and headed for the briefing room just off Shona station’s command deck.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Commander Bridie MacWilliams, the commander of the SSS police forces aboard the station, and Lieutenant Eardsidh MacGeechan, her second-in-command, arrived in MacNaughtan’s briefing room in under three minutes. He wasn’t really surprised. MacWilliams was young, but he’d always known she was quick. She was also the sort who thought ahead, and she’d probably been waiting by her com with her track shoes already sealed, anticipating his call.

  “You called, Skipper?” she said as she and MacGeechan stepped through the door and it closed behind them.

  “I did indeed.” He smiled bleakly. “I think it’s entirely possible things are about to get really ugly.”

  “Ugly as in right here aboard the station? Or as in getting even uglier in general?” MacWilliams asked.

  “Maybe both, but I’m more concerned about Shona than anything else. I’ve just been informed by a reliable source that Governor Dueñas has no intention of meeting the Manties’ demand that their personnel be released to them.”

  “Jesus,” MacGeechan muttered, then blushed and shook himself. “Sorry, Sir.”

  “You’re not thinking anything I’m not, Lieutenant,” MacNaughtan assured him.

  “Should I take it, Sir, that ‘a reliable source’
wasn’t Governor Dueñas?” MacWilliams asked, her eyes shrewd.

  “I think we should just move along quickly without getting into that particular point,” MacNaughtan told her with a tight smile. “What matters right this minute is that the Manties are going to insist we hand their people over and Dueñas is going to order us not to hand their people over. Under the circumstances, I could live with telling our esteemed Governor to suck vacuum, but I strongly suspect Major Pole would be disinclined to support us in that.”

  MacWilliams’ blue eyes hardened. She and Major John Pole, the CO of the Solarian Gendarmerie intervention battalion OFS had stationed here aboard Shona Station, loathed one another. Pole’s people hadn’t enforced the kind of brutal reign of terror Frontier Security had imposed—or supported, at any rate—in all too many protectorate systems, but that didn’t make him a knight in shining armor. MacWilliams and her predecessor had been forced to deal with several complaints about Pole, most from women who hadn’t responded favorably enough to his advances. Any Saltashan would have been hammered hard over the same sort of accusations. At the very least, he would have been dragged in while they were thoroughly investigated. But local police forces didn’t go around investigating the commanders of intervention battalions. That was one of the facts of life in the Verge, and it stuck in Bridie MacWilliams’ craw sideways.

  Worse, as the Gendarmes’ CO, Pole set the standard. Two or three of his troopers had gotten far enough out of line that the previous OFS governor had actually authorized their prosecution, and one of them had even been broken out of the Gendarmerie and sent away for ten T-years of hard time on the gas-extraction platforms orbiting Himalaya. Dueñas had promptly turned the clock back, however…which was how MacWilliams came to hold her present position, since one of the governor’s first actions had been to sack her predecessor precisely because of those prosecutions.

  “Skipper,” she said now, “I think we have limited options here. I’ve got around five hundred cops for the entire Station, most with nothing heavier than side arms, and even after detachments, Pole’s got the better part of two companies of gendarmes on-station. I don’t have an up-to-the-minute count, but he’s got to have close to three hundred people up here, and they’ve got a lot heavier equipment than mine do.”

  “Two hundred and seventy-three as of this morning, Ma’am,” MacGeechan put in. “Not counting three on sick call in the infirmary.” MacNaughtan and MacWilliams both looked at him with raised eyebrows, and he shrugged. “I just thought it was something I should be checking on, given the situation. Just so we could have a better feel for how we might…integrate our own people with his if we had to, you understand.”

  “I believe I do, Eardsidh,” MacWilliams told him with an off-center smile. “I believe I do.”

  Then her smile faded and she turned back to MacNaughtan.

  “Sir, I think Major Pole will obey his orders—his legal orders, of course—from Governor Dueñas. And I can’t see anything aboard Shona Station which could reasonably be expected to prevent him from doing so.”

  She’d chosen her words carefully, MacNaughtan noted. All of them could honestly testify that no one had even so much as suggested that they might attempt to resist the governor’s instructions.

  “I don’t either,” he told her. “On the other hand, as you’ve pointed out, your people are much more lightly equipped than Major Pole’s gendarmes. Under the circumstances, I feel you and Lieutenant MacGeechan would be best employed using your personnel for crowd control, public safety, and to back up Commander MacVey’s damage control crews, in case they should be needed. My feeling is that we also ought to immediately begin evacuating civilian personnel from Victor Seven in order to facilitate any movements Major Pole may feel it’s appropriate for him to make.”

  “Yes, Sir.” MacWilliams nodded.

  Victor Seven was the station habitat module which had been assigned to the gendarmes ever since their original dispatch to Saltash. Actually, they’d assigned it to themselves, since it had originally been intended as the station’s VIP habitat and was still the largest, most luxuriously appointed module Shona Station boasted. It had also been refitted to contain the Gendarmerie’s brig facilities, which were separate from those of the Saltash Space Service’s police forces. No one had been especially happy about the notion of confining the Manticoran merchant spacers in Victor Seven; the general feeling had been that Saltash was already on thin ice, and the Gendarmerie was not famous for the consideration with which it treated individuals in its custody. Under the circumstances, however, MacNaughtan couldn’t pretend he was unhappy to have them in Victor Seven, because aside from a few dozen service personnel with duty stations in the area, the only people in Victor Seven were going to be gendarmes and the Manties.

  “It’s a pity,” MacNaughtan continued, “that our own lack of personnel and equipment means your available manpower’s going to be fully employed maintaining security throughout the rest of the station. But while we won’t be able to reinforce or support the Major, I want every effort made to at least guarantee the integrity of the station in general and to ensure that he and his people are relieved of any responsibility which might distract them from Governor Dueñas’ orders. I trust that’s clear, Commander MacWilliams.”

  “Yes, Sir.” MacWilliams smiled thinly at him. “Lieutenant MacGeechan and I will get right on that.”

  * * *

  “Let’s raise the station, Abhijat.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Lieutenant Wilson replied, and Jacob Zavala sat back, watching the tactical plot while he waited.

  DesRon 301 had settled into orbit around the planet Cinnamon. Traffic control hadn’t assigned them a parking orbit, for some reason, but HMS Kay’s astrogator had managed to find one. It wasn’t as if there was an enormous amount of orbital traffic to pick a way around, after all.

  Captain Myau’s destroyers remained in orbit around Cinnamon’s moon, and Zavala was perfectly content to leave them there. A handful of civilian vessels had moved nervously away from the planet as the squadron entered orbit, but aside from that things seemed reasonably calm. Maybe that was because the majority of the star system’s shipping was out rescuing the survivors of Oxana Dubroskaya’s squadron.

  Zavala’s lips tightened again at that thought, but it wasn’t one he was prepared to dwell upon. Right now, he had to concentrate on other things, and he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t grateful for the distraction. On the other hand, the “other things” had the potential to turn into an even more horrendous mess than the massacre of Dubroskaya’s battlecruisers. After all, there’d been only eight thousand or so human beings on those warships; there were a quarter million human beings on Shona Station.

  Which is the reason—as that pain in the ass Dueñas clearly understands—we can’t use Mark 16s as door knockers this time around, he thought grimly. And if there really is an intervention battalion in there, it’s going to be one hell of a trick to pry our people loose without getting a lot of other people a lot more personally killed. Unless the station CO’s another Myau, at any rate. And what’re the odds of that if he’s got a stack of gendarmes breathing down his neck?

  “I’ve got the station commander for you, Sir,” Lieutenant Wilson said, and Zavala looked up from the plot.

  “Thanks,” he said, and turned to his com.

  * * *

  “I’m Captain Jacob Zavala, Royal Manticoran Navy,” the smallish, dark-skinned man on the com display said. He was quite unlike the dominant genotype here in Saltash, but despite his diminutive stature and polite tone, no one was likely to take any liberties with him once they got a good look at his eyes, MacNaughtan thought.

  “Am I addressing the commanding officer of Shona Station?” the Manticoran continued in that same courteous yet unyielding voice.

  “I’m Captain Valentine MacNaughtan,” MacNaughtan replied. “I’m the senior Saltash Space Service officer aboard.”

  That weasel-worded evasion of responsibility shamed
him, but there was no point pretending otherwise, and this Zavala no doubt understood that. For purposes of shifting blame, Governor Dueñas would be delighted to embrace the legal fiction that MacNaughtan genuinely commanded Shona Station. If MacNaughtan had ever been foolish enough to forget he simply reigned over the station administratively while OFS actually ruled everything in the star system, he would have been replaced with dizzying speed.

  Zavala’s eyes flickered, and MacNaughtan felt his face try to heat at the other man’s obvious awareness of that reality. But the Manticoran simply nodded.

  “I believe I understand your position, Captain MacNaughtan,” he said. “Unfortunately, you and I are in something of a difficult situation at the moment. There are illegally detained Manticoran nationals aboard your station. I fully realize they were detained—I’m sorry, ‘quarantined’—on the orders of Governor Dueñas, not those of the Saltash Space Service. The problem is that I’ve been ordered to retrieve them, and Governor Dueñas has been…less than cooperative, shall we say? In fact, he’s flatly refused to release them. And the reason this is unfortunate is that I’m going to have to insist on recovering them. In fact, my orders are to do precisely that…by whatever means may be necessary. I’m afraid Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s squadron has already discovered what that means.”

  If those blue eyes had flickered before, they were rock-steady and laser-sharp now, MacNaughtan observed with a sinking sensation.