In Fire Forged

by David Weber

  “I’ve considered all of that,” Honor told both of them serenely. “And Al’s right, that’s exactly why I sent off that dispatch making it perfectly clear no one else in Hawkwing even knew what I was thinking, far less had any part in planning this. I can testify to that under oath with a clear conscience, and so can all of you. That’s important to me. But understand this, both of you—however wise or unwise this may be, we’re going to do it. The reason I asked the two of you to stay behind when the others left wasn’t to give you the chance to change my mind. It was because I want you to have the opportunity to formally state your opposition to my plans before we embark on the operation.”

  She paused, looking at each of them in turn, hard, before she continued.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, either of you. I’ve done everything I can to protect you, but the truth is that if this goes as badly as it has the potential to go—and I’m not talking just about the op, as you both realize perfectly well—that may not matter. You’re my two ranking officers. If you don’t make your reservations about this operation part of the official record before we carry it out, it’s entirely possible that when the smoke clears you’ll find yourselves beached right alongside me. I don’t want that to happen, especially when this was all my idea.”

  “Let me get this straight, Skipper,” Nairobi said after a moment. “Are you ordering us to object to your orders?”

  “No, I’m just saying that—”

  “Well, it’s a good thing that isn’t what you’re doing,” the XO interrupted her, “because it would be the silliest damned order anyone ever gave! I mean, ordering your subordinates to formally protest your lawful commands?” He shook his head. “Most nitwitted thing I ever heard of!”

  “Taylor, don’t take this lightly. I’m serious when I say—”

  “Skipper, do you think he doesn’t know—that we both don’t know—you’re serious?” O’Neal chuckled at her expression. “Of course we do. And of course we both think you’re nuts. And of course we both agree with you.”

  Honor had opened her mouth again. Now she closed it, slowly, and gazed at both of them in silence for several seconds.

  “I really wish you’d take my advice on this, both of you” she said quietly. “But the truth is, I’m glad you feel that way.”

  “Please don’t confuse our illustrious sailing master’s agreement—or mine, for that matter—with delirious joy and unqualified approval, Skipper,” Nairobi said. “In fact, delirious joy and unqualified approval are probably the last two terms I’d use to describe my own feelings at this particular moment. Despite which, I have to go along with him. Assuming these people are telling you the truth, then this really is something that needs doing. But I have to ask you this. Are you genuinely confident they are telling you the truth? Or, at least, that they’re telling you all the truth? God knows I can’t fault the Ballroom for how much it hates Manpower’s guts, but their own hands aren’t exactly spotless, and they’ve never been above…creatively misrepresenting circumstances, shall we say, to game third parties for the result they want. There was that business in Pelzer, for example, if you’ll recall.”

  “Point,” Honor agreed.

  There wasn’t any actual proof, but ONI’s analysts had concluded that the Ballroom—or its sympathizers, at least—had fed deliberately false information to an Andermani cruiser squadron several years ago in order to provoke a raid on the territory of one of the small, independent star systems just beyond the Empire’s borders. There wasn’t much doubt the government of the Pelzer System had, in fact, been deep in bed with various Mesan interests, quite possibly including Manpower, but the slave trading depot the Andermani had expected to find, catching the system authorities red-handed, had been a figment of someone’s imagination. The Andermani incursion, however, had destabilized the system government in question…at which point a “spontaneous” coup (launched, oddly enough, by heavily armed people who appeared quite sympathetic to the suppression of the genetic slave trade and seemed to have had some odd notion that some destabilizing event might be about to occur) had removed it from power. Most of the previous government’s leading members had found themselves tried and convicted for crimes ranging from outright treason to malfeasance, bribery, embezzlement, and participation in the slave trade. Three of them had been shot, two had been stripped of their citizenship and permanently deported, and most of the rest had gone to prison for lengthy periods.

  The fact that every one of them had been guilty of the crimes for which they were accused, as far as anyone could tell, was all very well. And no fair-minded person could honestly argue that the Pelzer System wasn’t far better off—not to mention more honestly and efficiently run—than it had ever been before. But none of that changed the fact that the Andermani’s information had been…less than completely accurate.

  “Taylor, I appreciate your concern, and I understand exactly why you’re asking that,” she said, “but in answer to your question, yes. These people may be mistaken—for that matter, someone else may have lied to them—but they aren’t lying to me.” She unfolded her interlaced fingers and raised her right hand to touch Nimitz lightly on the head. “I took along my furry little henchman here. Trust me, if they’d been lying, Nimitz would have told me.”

  It would have been inaccurate to describe either of her subordinates as completely satisfied by her statement. On the other hand, both of them had known Nimitz for quite some time now. Whatever the general opinion of treecat intelligence might be, they had no doubt at all that he would have been able to tell his person if she’d been lied to.

  “Well, I guess that’s that, Taylor,” O’Neal said, grinning across at the executive officer. “She’s going to do it, whatever we think about it, so I don’t see any point in pretending we don’t think it’s a good idea, too. Do you?”

  “To be honest, I can see all kinds of reasons to pretend that,” Nairobi said in a considerably more sour tone. “Unfortunately, I’m not a very good liar. Hell, you know I can’t even bluff at poker! I’d just look like an idiot if I tried to convince Admiralty House she’d dragged me into this kicking and screaming all the way.”

  Honor smiled at both of them, then shook her head slowly.

  “I think you’re both idiots,” she told them. “But I’m not going to pretend I’m not relieved to hear you say that. I shouldn’t be, but I’m selfish enough to be glad, instead. Thank you both.”

  “I hope you still feel that way in a few years,” O’Neal said, “when you realize that if we’d only argued harder, we might actually have saved all of our naval careers.”

  * * *

  Honor had no idea what the ship whose icon floated in her display had once been named. And, she told herself honestly, she didn’t really want to know, either. All that mattered at the moment was that she was here, a concrete confirmation that her Ballroom “allies” could deliver on at least part of what they’d promised.

  She sat on Hawkwing’s bridge and felt the tension behind her bridge crew’s disciplined façade as the destroyer decelerated towards rendezvous with the waiting freighter. That ship was a confirmation for them, as well—confirmation that their CO truly was going to proceed with her entirely unauthorized operation.

  She’d come to the conclusion that at least some of her subordinates thoroughly disapproved of what she was doing. Lieutenant Boyd, for example, hadn’t been able to hide her repugnance at the thought of associating herself in any way with notorious terrorists. Nor was the com officer alone in that. Lieutenant Mason was obviously glad his position as Hawkwing’s logistics officer meant he was going to have very little to do with the murderous Ballroom fanatics. And although Mahalia Rosenberg’s deep satisfaction at the notion of destroying a depot like the one Honor had described was evident, her discomfort about the Ballroom was equally evident.

  It wasn’t that any of them felt any great sympathy for the Ballroom’s “victims.” Honor suspected there were very few Manticoran officers who felt an
ything but contempt and revulsion when they considered anyone who dealt in human misery on such an interstellar scale. She certainly hoped there weren’t, at any rate! For most of them, though, it went even deeper than that, into a corrosive hatred for all the genetic slave trade represented. Yet there was no denying that the Audubon Ballroom had alienated an enormous number of people who sympathized with its stated goal of destroying the slave trade once and for all. Even a great many who had no particular problem with armed resistance were sickened by the Ballroom’s unrepentant savagery.

  Thanks in no small part to her mother’s side of her family, Honor knew a great deal more about the anti-slavery movement in general than the majority of Manticorans ever learned. Her Uncle Jacques was a senior director of the Beowulf-based Anti-Slavery League, the political arm of the abolitionist movement, and she knew that even within the ranks of the escaped and liberated slaves there was a lively, often bitter internal debate between those who endorsed the Ballroom’s methods and those who believed such “terrorist excesses” actually strengthened Manpower’s hand. The atrocities the Ballroom left scattered in its wake were undoubtedly exactly what the Ballroom claimed—counter-atrocities, provoked and driven by all the centuries in which slaves had been routinely, casually slaughtered, tortured, and simply thrown away. But even many who fully recognized that all of those terrible things had happened to slaves were unprepared to accept the Ballroom’s counter-terror as justice. Indeed, as the more moderate members of the ASL argued passionately, for the public at large, the Ballroom’s operations too often blurred the moral distinctions between Manpower and Manpower’s victims.

  If Honor was going to be completely honest, she would be forced to admit she shared more than a trace of the moderates’ opposition. Despite her relative youth, she’d seen too much human misery—especially here in Silesia—to be in favor of inflicting still more of it, however deservedly, if it could be avoided. But she was also enough of a historian to know excesses like those of the Ballroom were inevitable. That when human beings, whatever their genetic makeup, were treated as expendable, disposable things long enough, when they were denied not just freedom but even the vestiges of human dignity, when they were no more than toys to be played with and those they allowed themselves to love could be stripped away from them and disposed of like any other commodity at someone else’s whim, then those responsible for abusing them stored up the whirlwind, and no power in the universe could prevent that whirlwind from striking when the opportunity came. It wasn’t simply impossible to stop the Ballroom’s bitter, impassioned, hating avengers from slaughtering their tormentors, it was unreasonable even to think anyone could.

  She’d seen the cold hatred burning in “Opener” Toussaint’s dark eyes, and she’d seen its reflection in Boadicea Matheson’s green gaze, and she knew nothing short of death itself could stop people who’d endured what they had from exacting the last terrible gram of their vengeance. And deep down inside, she didn’t blame them in the least.

  Which wasn’t to say she approved of the Ballroom’s extremism, because she didn’t. From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, the moderates had a point about the way in which the abolition movement’s opponents could use the Ballroom to blur the distinctions between them and their enemies. Even more than that, though, there was the price people paid for their vengeance, however deserved that vengeance might be. Retribution might taste sweet, and she was prepared to admit that sometimes the victims of evil required avengers more than they did simple justice, but that sweet taste was also a deadly poison. A corrosive brew which truly could—and all too often did—eat away the moral distinctions between the avenger and those she punished.

  She remembered something her father had told her once, many years ago, when she was only a child. There were times, he’d said, when a man or a woman confronted evil which had to be stopped. When the only way it could be stopped was by violence. She’d known even then that he was speaking from personal knowledge, and she’d listened silently, sitting beside him, his strong and loving arm wrapped around her. It was only later that she’d realized he’d already recognized her own hunger for a naval career. That he was deliberately sharing with her something of incalculable value, something he himself had won through terrible and bitter experience.

  “When that happens,” he said, “when there’s no choice but to kill evil, then kill it. It’s your responsibility, your duty, and if you flinch, you fail—not just yourself, but everything important in your life. But if it must be done, if there truly is no choice, then do it because you must, not because you want to, and never, ever exult in the doing. That’s the price of your soul, Honor—the ability to do what has to be done without turning yourself into the very thing it is that you’re fighting against.”

  I’ll remember, Daddy, she thought now, watching the light code on the display coming closer and closer. I’ll remember, I promise.

  * * *

  “Well, Commander Harrington?”

  Honor turned her head to look at Samson X, the commander of the ship the Ballroom had renamed Reprisal, and raised one eyebrow.

  “Well, what, Captain?” she asked mildly.

  “Well,” he waved one hand at the mass of men and women filtering out of the outsized messing compartment, “do they pass your muster?”

  Honor regarded him thoughtfully for several seconds. She knew a bit more about him than he might suspect, courtesy of Wolfe Tone’s briefing. She’d insisted on that before she agreed to commit herself to working with Samson, which was why she knew he’d already been a young adult before he was liberated from a Manpower slave ship very like Reprisal by one of the unfortunately few Solarian League Navy officers who made it a point to go after slavers aggressively. That officer (not surprisingly) had come from Beowulf, and the freed slave had been relocated to that world. He’d been just young enough to receive the first-generation prolong therapies Manpower never wasted on its property, and he’d taken the surname of the SLN captain who’d liberatred him for his own first name—possibly because of its implications as a warrior for his people. But whatever the reason he’d chosen “Samson” for his first name, the choice of the single letter “X” for his own surname had been an unflinching declaration of how he intended to spend his own life. It was probably the most common single “last name” among the Ballroom’s hard-core fighters.

  That had told Honor quite a bit, all by itself; Nimitz’s reaction to him had told her even more. Samson wasn’t quite as dark as Toussaint, and his brown hair had auburn highlights, but under the skin, they were very much alike. Samson was one of those people who’d been intended by nature as a basically nice guy…and who really was the sort of total psychopath (where Manpower was concerned, at least) which the Ballroom’s critics argued that all of its members were. Even without Nimitz’s empathic abilities, Honor could almost literally taste the electric tension, the hunger, crackling through him, and she hadn’t missed the edge of challenge in his question.

  “I didn’t come here because they had to pass my ‘muster,’ Captain,” she told him after a moment. “I came here to meet them, and you and your officers, and, frankly, to be sure they actually existed.” She smiled slightly. “I’m a naturally trusting soul, but before I commit my ship to an operation like this, I really do feel a certain slight responsibility to be positive my allies are as numerous—and as well equipped—as I’ve been assured they are.” She shrugged. “I haven’t done an actual headcount yet, mind you, but at first glance, it looks to me as if Mr. Toussaint’s strength estimate was accurate.”

  Samson looked at her as if he was trying to figure out some way to take offense at what she’d just said, and she made herself return his hot gaze coolly, calmly, as if she were totally unaware of the passionate currents deep inside him.

  “Sorry,” he said finally, and gave himself a shake. “Sorry, Commander,” he repeated in a more normal voice, and managed an almost sheepish grin. “Didn’t mean to sound like I was trying to pick a fight. It�
�s just—”

  He broke off and shrugged, and Honor nodded.

  “I didn’t think you were,” she said, not quite entirely accurately. “Trying to pick a fight, I mean.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I think part of it’s how long I have been trying to pick this particular fight. To go after Casimir. We’ve known about it for better than sixteen T-months now, and we haven’t been able to do a thing about it.” His jaw clenched. “I don’t like to think about how many of our people have passed through that…place while we knew what was going on and couldn’t stop it.”

  “I understand, or at least I come as close to understanding as someone who’s never been a slave can,” Honor told him quietly.

  “I think maybe you do.” Samson’s voice was calmer than it had been, and his nostrils flared as he inhaled deeply. “It eats at a man,” he said simply.

  “I’m sure it does.”

  Honor reached out and laid one hand lightly on his shoulder, feeling the tension in the muscles under her fingers, and looked him squarely in the eye.

  “I’m sure it does,” she repeated. “But now, I think we should probably meet with your officers. I seem to have a dance card that needs filling, so let’s see what we can do about letting someone else feel some teeth eating at them for a change.”

  * * *

  Honor, Taylor Nairobi, and Lieutenant Janacek sat across the dining table in Reprisal’s wardroom from Samson X and the two men he’d introduced as Henri Christophe and Nat Turner Jurgensen. Christophe was the senior action team commander aboard Reprisal, which made him the commanding officer of the combined Ballroom strike force, and Jurgensen was his second in command. It was obvious from Nairobi and Janacek’s reactions that they hadn’t caught the significance of the two men’s chosen names, but Honor had, and she stroked Nimitz’s ears with gentle fingers as she considered them thoughtfully.