by David Weber
If Everett Janacek had been twice as old, or if he’d had twice as many Marines, or if he’d had to be in half as many places at once with the ones he had, she would have been willing to stay aboard ship. But it had been absolutely imperative for them to smash their way through to Engineering and to the slaves and imprisoned civilians as quickly as possible. Because of that, she’d known going in that her Marines—especially the ones in battle armor—were going to be too spread out across the station to simultaneously take their own objectives and ride herd on their “allies.” And despite the deep confidence she’d come to feel in Janacek, she’d also known that to too many of the Ballroom fighters, he was “that snot-nosed kid.” She had no doubt he would have done his duty, whatever it required of him, but she’d also known things were far more likely to come apart if she left him to cope with what, after all, was her responsibility.
She’d never know whether or not her presence had actually been necessary, but there’d been a time or two when Christophe had glanced her way and she’d felt the hunger quivering around her in the members of his command group. Yet nothing had come of it, and those moments had all been near the beginning of this long, exhausting running fight. Before they’d seen Hawkwing’s captain’s skinsuit splashed with blood—their enemies’ and their own—and seen her holding up her own end in a fight they knew as well as she did that she’d never been trained for.
Now she glanced at the display again, then looked back up at Christophe.
“Assuming any of them do want to surrender, we’ll give them one last chance,” she told him levelly. “After that, if they choose not to, well . . .”
She shrugged, and Christophe nodded slowly.
“No atrocities,” he promised.
“That’s good enough for me,” Honor Stephanie Harrington told him, then looked into his eyes. “So we’ll give them their chance, and then . . . we’ll dance,” she finished softly.
* * *
“God, what a mess, Ma’am.”
Surgeon Lieutenant Mauricio Neukirch stood with Honor in what had once been the wardroom of Casimir Depot. At the moment, it had been turned into a dressing station for several dozen casualties, and Neukirch shook his head wearily. He and his sick-bay attendants—ably assisted by a team of Ballroom corpsmen—were haggard with exhaustion, and not just because of the combat casualties.
“I know, Mauricio,” Honor said quietly. “I know.”
She turned to survey the wounded lying about her. Most of them were Ballroom fighters, but two were her own Marines, and she was conscious once more of the dried blood which had splashed her own skinsuit and of the ache of weariness deep in her bones.
“How bad is the bill?” she asked him finally.
“So far, it looks like three of our people and about thirty of the Ballroom’s people, dead,” Neukirch said harshly. “We’ve got two more wounded here, and another half-dozen or so—mostly minor stuff—back aboard ship. The Ballroom’s got about twenty seriously wounded—I think most of them are going to make it—and another fifteen or twenty walking wounded. I don’t know for sure how many minor injuries their own people patched up.”
Honor squeezed the bridge of her nose for a moment, then nodded. It was a steep price, but not as bad as the one she’d feared might have to be paid.
“And the station’s legitimate personnel?”
“As far as I know, we didn’t lose any of them,” Neukirch told her, his expression lightening . . . slightly, and shook his head in semi-disbelief. “I didn’t hear what you said to that Mazur asshole, but it seems to’ve been effective!”
Honor nodded again. Clearly, the Manpower engineering officer had taken her seriously. She still didn’t know exactly how he’d pulled it off—and, to be perfectly honest, she didn’t care—but he’d managed to convince at least a dozen others that protecting the Silesian civilians and slaves being held aboard the platform represented their own sole chance for survival. It was fortunate for everyone concerned that the civilians had been confined in the same section of the station as the slaves whenever they weren’t actually on duty, and that the “new management” had sealed off all but one of the passages into that section as one of their own security measures. Mazur and his fellows had been able to get into the confinement area virtually unopposed, and they’d only had to hold that single entryway until Nat Turner Jurgenson’s fighters and one of Janacek’s two squads of armored Marines smashed their way through to them.
“Unfortunately,” Neukirch’s face tightened again, “I think a lot of them had already been killed before we got here, Ma’am. And most of the ones we’re getting out have been through Hell.” He shook his head. “I’ve been too busy patching up people to really examine them yet, but I think a lot of the regular crew—and their families, damn it!—actually had it even worse than the slaves did.” His jaw muscles clenched. “Bad enough for the adults, but the kids.” His nostrils flared. “These bastards used them up like cheap toys!”
“Of course they did, Mauricio,” Honor said wearily. He looked at her, and she shrugged. “Slaves are a commodity,” her voice was flat, ugly. “They represent cash value. But the people who just got in Manpower’s way?” She shrugged again, the motion quick and angry. “They were freebies, Mauricio. Nobody in Accounting was going to complain if some of them got killed. After all, these people were going to kill them all when they left, weren’t they? So why not go ahead and enjoy themselves first?”
She hadn’t even raised her voice, but Mauricio Neukirch had never heard so much soul-deep anger in his CO’s voice . . . nor seen so much grief and so much hatred in those calm almond eyes. He started to say something to her, then closed his mouth, looked away, and simply shook his head in silence.
“It’s all right, Mauricio.”
Honor’s voice was suddenly gentle, almost compassionate, and he looked back at her as he felt her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s all right,” she said again, softly. “At least we got some of them out. On the grand scale of the universe, maybe it doesn’t matter at all. But it matters to these people. And it matters to us, Mauricio. It matters to us.”
* * *
The sound of the bedside com’s attention signal pulled Honor up out of uneasy dreams. She woke as she always did, with the instant awareness of her surroundings her years of naval service had drilled into her, yet the ghosts of those dreams—of the things she’d seen aboard the platform, of the shattered faces and the all too often savagely scarred bodies of the captives they’d liberated—floated in her eyes as Nimitz rolled off his customary sleeping position on her chest. He made a disgruntled, sleepy sound, and she quirked a semi-apologetic smile in his direction and caressed his ears with her left hand even as her right reached for the com’s acceptance key.
“Yes?” The single word came out crisp and clear.
“Skipper,” Taylor Nairobi’s voice said from behind the audio-only display’s wallpaper, “I think you’d better get dressed and come up here.”
“Why?” Honor’s tone had sharpened, and her eyes narrowed. It wasn’t like Nairobi to play games of the middle of the night, but—
“We’ve just picked up a hyper footprint at just over fifty-four million klicks. It’s a single ship, headed our way at four hundred gravities.” Nairobi paused for a moment, then cleared his throat. “It looks a hell of a lot like a Confed heavy cruiser, Ma’am.”
“I’ll be up directly,” she said, and swung her long legs over the side of her bunk.
* * *
Honor walked onto Hawkwing’s bridge less than seven minutes later. Her uniform was immaculate, perfectly arranged, and her short, feathery hair was neatly brushed under her white beret. Nimitz rode high and straight on her shoulder, and her expression was focused but calm.
“Captain is on the bridge!” the quartermaster of the watch snapped. People started to rise, but Honor waved briskly.
“As you were,” she said, and crossed to Nairobi as the exec climbed out of the com
mand chair at the center of the bridge.
“I have the ship,” she told him, settling into the chair he’d just vacated.
“Aye, Ma’am. You have the ship,” he confirmed, and she nodded her head in the direction of the master plot and the icon crawling across it toward them.
“Anything more on our visitor?”
Her voice was considerably calmer than she actually felt. Five days had passed since the savage battle aboard Casimir Depot, and so far, Governor Obermeyer wasn’t even willing to talk to them. Well, that wasn’t entirely correct. She hadn’t even acknowledged receipt of Honor’s factual and complete (mostly) reports or the massive stack of supportive evidence Hawkwing had turned up aboard the platform (except to reject them out of hand as “unacceptable”), but she’d been more than willing to express her opinion—at some length—of Hawkwing’s high-handed, arrogant, and totally unacceptable violation of the solemn sovereignty of the Silesian Confederacy’s territory. Whatever might have been transpiring aboard Casimir Depot, it couldn’t possibly justify the Star Kingdom’s flagrant, unilateral intrusion into the Confederacy’s internal affairs and territory. The Confederacy was not some neobarb single-system little flyspeck on a chart somewhere, she had informed Honor icily, and she intended to demand apologies—and undoubtedly reparations—at the very highest level.
Honor wished Obermeyer’s attitude could have come as a surprise. But given the fact that the system governor had been on Manpower’s payroll for better than two T-years—a fact which had been amply confirmed by the records they’d captured in Sokolowska’s private files—Obermeyer didn’t really have any other viable response. She couldn’t possibly admit the validity of that evidence, so she was concentrating on so thoroughly attacking and vilifying the evidence’s originators that no one would be looking at the facts themselves. While it was always possible her own patrons—starting, no doubt, with Sector Governor Charnowska—were powerful enough to protect her from any investigation which might ensue, she’d clearly decided the best defense was a powerful offense. It was obvious she intended for her own creatively inventive version of events near Elsbietá to be the official one, and she’d been careful to heap scorn on everything Honor had reported to her. She’d treated those reports as no more than the self-serving lies to be expected out of a rogue officer who’d so brazenly violated Silesian sovereignty and, undoubtedly, killed hundreds of Silesian citizens in the course of her lunatic attack on a peaceful industrial platform. She hadn’t even taken official cognizance of the liberated slaves and freed Silesian citizens Honor and her allies had found aboard the platform.
All of which makes me wonder if she’d cheerfully “disappear” all of them if we’d just pull out and let her, Honor thought grimly from behind her serene eyes. It would certainly be more convenient for her if there were no one around to confirm our version of what happened out here, and given that she was willing to climb into bed with Manpower in the first place . . .
“Actually, Skipper,” Nairobi replied to her question in an odd tone, “we do have a little more. In fact, CIC’s identified her.”
Honor quirked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged.
“According to CIC, Ma’am, that’s the Confederacy Navy’s heavy cruiser Feliksá.”
Both of Honor’s eyebrows rose this time, and the XO shook his head.
“She hasn’t said a word yet, Ma’am, but CIC’s confident they’re reading her fingerprint accurately.”
“I see.”
Honor leaned back in her command chair, elbows on its armrests, fingers steepled together in front of her, and her mind raced. Feliksá was the last thing she would have expected to see here in Casimir. Given the fact that Commodore Teschendorff was assigned to Hillman, his flagship was at least twenty light-years outside his jurisdiction, and intruding into someone else’s private preserve without an invitation simply wasn’t done in the Confederacy Navy.
“How long for her to reach us?” she asked.
“She only brought about nine hundred KPS across the wall with her, Ma’am.” Lieutenant JG Wallace Markham, Aniella Matsakis’s assistant astrogator, had the watch. The brown-haired, hazel-eyed Markham was from Gryphon, with a burr that almost matched Aloysius O’Neal’s, and he was only a couple of years older than Everett Janacek. “She’s accelerating at roughly two-point-niner KPS squared, so assuming she’s headed for a zero-zero with us here, she’ll make turnover in about fifty-three minutes, and she should reach us in another hour and ten minutes. Current range is five-three-point-niner million kilometers.”
“Thank you, Wallace.”
“You’re welcome, Ma’am.”
Honor thought some more. Should she go ahead and hail Feliksá?
If she did, it would take only three minutes for a message from her to reach the cruiser, as opposed to the forty-plus minutes it would take any message from Obermeyer to reach her, even assuming Obermeyer realized who and what she was. It was far from certain that a Silesian system, especially one as poverty-stricken as Casimir, had the sensor ability to identify a target this far out. For that matter, they might not even have detected Feliksá’s hyper footprint! And even if they had, Obermeyer almost certainly couldn’t know what Feliksá was. In fact, her most reasonable assumption would be that it was another slaver or pirate headed in to avail itself of Casimir Depot’s hospitality. Which would present her with an interesting quandary of her own. Did she contact the newcomer and warn it to stay away from the platform? Or did she contact the newcomer and encourage it—assuming it was armed—to attack the platform and its new tenants? And what happened if she sent a personal message to what she thought was an outlaw vessel . . . and it got received, instead, by a Confederacy Navy cruiser? Now, there was an entertaining thought.
Either way, Honor could get a message to the cruiser a lot faster than anything from the inner system could reach her, and opening the conversation on her terms had a lot to recommend it. If nothing else, she could get her version of events in front of Teschendorff before Obermeyer’s version could possibly reach him.
The flip side to that was that it was evident Feliksá was already headed for the platform. She’d shaped her course for it from the moment she made her alpha translation, so she clearly hadn’t come to Casimir to conduct any official business in the inner system. That suggested several possibilities, especially if one wanted to assume certain devious and underhanded motivations were in play, and given the way Honor had “coincidentally” met John Browne Matheson in the first place . . .
“Well,” she said almost whimsically, “I imagine we’ll find out what she’s doing here in about two hours, then.”
* * *
In actual fact, it was only a little over ninety minutes later, when Feliksá had closed to fifteen light-seconds, that Florence Boyd turned to Honor.
“Ma’am,” she said very formally, “we have a com request from Feliksá. Commodore Teschendorff asks to speak directly to you.”
“Well, it would appear the good commodore knows we’re in the neighborhood,” Honor murmured, then nodded to the com officer. “Put it on the main display, Florence.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Commander Harrington,” Commodore Mieczyslaw Teschendorff’s image said from the main display a few seconds later, “I trust you have at least some explanation for this flagrant violation of Silesian sovereignty.” He frowned, eyebrows lowered above his gray eyes, and shook his head. “I was shocked—shocked!—when I communicated with Governor Obermeyer on my arrival in the system and she informed me of your high-handed actions! Frankly, I would never have believed a Manticoran officer of your experience could possibly have been guilty of such an unwarranted intrusion into the Confederacy’s internal affairs!”
It seemed to Honor that more than one of the people on Hawkwing’s bridge cringed. For herself, she only tipped back in her chair, lips slightly pursed.
“I will do you the courtesy,” Teschendorff continued in that same grimly outraged tone, “of ass
uming you at least believed it was essential to move quickly in a case such as this one. That, however, is far too weak a justification to be stretched to cover this sort of high-handed action! Governor Obermeyer has made it clear to me that if, in fact, the incredible things you’ve claimed about the situation onboard that platform are accurate, no one in Casimir had the least idea any of it was occurring. Surely an officer in Manticoran service, aware of how critical good relations between our star nations are, should have realized that the appropriate course of action, should this information have come into your hands, was to bring it to Governor Obermeyer’s attention so she could deal with it. She has assured me that had you—as every canon of interstellar law clearly required—informed her of your suspicions, she would have acted promptly and forcefully to investigate your claims. As it is, you have handed all of us the potential for a grievous interstellar incident—one, I fear, which could very well lead to sufficiently severe consequences to more than negate whatever positive results your unilateral actions in this system may have achieved.”
Honor cocked her head to one side, and it appeared to more than one of her bridge personnel that her lips were twitching.
“I suppose,” Teschendorff continued heavily, “that all of us are fortunate happenstance has brought my flagship to Casimir at this particular moment.” He shook his head again, his expression hard. “Under the circumstances, my decision to stop off in Casimir in order to allow my personal steward to take sick leave with his family here on his homeworld would appear to have been fortuitous, to say the very least.” He allowed himself a harsh snort of amusement. “Frivolous of me, I suppose, in some ways, but he’s been with me for the better part of thirty T-years. After that long, he deserves a little extra consideration, I think.”
He paused, glowering out of the display, then drew a deep breath.
