by David Weber
"Well, that's that, Sir." PO Harkness scrubbed sweat from his forehead with a grubby handkerchief, then returned it to his coveralls' forearm pocket.
"It is, indeed," Ensign Tremaine agreed. He kneaded his stiff back muscles with one hand and wondered if it would be beneath an officer's dignity to do a little brow-mopping of his own.
"Thanks, Mr. Tremaine." Gunny Jenkins—for some reason known only to Marines, the senior Marine noncom on any ship was always called "Gunny," even when, like Jenkins himself, he was a company sergeant-major—wasn't even sweating, Tremaine noticed with some resentment. Jenkins made one last eyeball check of the empty suits of battle armor webbed into the pinnace's cargo bay, made a notation on his memo board, and closed the bay hatch.
"You're welcome, Gunny," Tremaine replied. Harkness was silent, eyeing the Marine with an air of infinite superiority, and Jenkins replied by ignoring the burly petty officer entirely.
"That just leaves the ammo pallets for Pinnace Two," Jenkins went on cheerfully as the three of them headed down the access tube from the pinnace airlock, and Tremaine swallowed a moan. He'd been hoping to leave that till next watch, and the look on Harkness's face said he'd hoped the same thing. The ensign started to object, then bit his lip. No one could have called Jenkins's expression a smirk, exactly, but it certainly came close. Perhaps, Tremaine thought, PO Harkness had a point where Marines were concerned... not that he intended to give Jenkins the satisfaction of hearing him say so. Instead—
"Of course, Gunny," he said even more cheerfully. "If you'll step right this way? PO?"
"My pleasure, Mr. Tremaine," Harkness said sourly, and Jenkins waved for his work party to fall in astern as they headed across the boat bay towards the stacked pallets.
"—so the pinnaces are combat-loaded if we have to drop them."
McKeon finished his report and switched off his memo pad, and Honor nodded. It was late, by Fearless's clock. The remains of supper lay on the snowy tablecloth between them, and Nimitz was still busy with his own plate at the table's far end. She crossed her legs and watched his needle-sharp teeth remove the flesh from a Sphinxian tree-hopper drumstick with surgical precision as she toyed with a fork. It was remarkable, she thought for the thousandth time, how neat his table manners were where anything but celery was concerned.
"I think we're about as ready as we're going to get, then," she said finally.
"I only wish we knew what we're ready for," McKeon agreed a bit sourly, and she gave a faint smile.
"We've had the better part of two whole weeks since Hauptman's visit with no alarms and excursions at all," she pointed out.
"Which only makes me think something extra nasty is sneaking up on us." McKeon sighed, then produced a wry smile of his own and stood. "Well, whatever happens will happen, I suppose, Ma'am. Good night."
"Good night, Mr. McKeon."
He gave her a small nod, and she watched him leave. Quite a change there, she told herself with undeniable satisfaction. Quite a change.
She stood herself and reached for the sadly depleted bowl of salad. Nimitz's head came up instantly, his green eyes bright, and she smiled.
"Here, Greedy Guts," she told him. She handed over the celery stalk and turned towards her private head. She could already feel the luxury of a long, hot shower.
The raucous sound of a buzzer woke her.
Honor's eyes popped open as the buzzer snarled a second time. She was a heavy sleeper by nature, but her first tenure in command of a Queen's ship had changed that, and Nimitz complained sleepily as she sat up quickly. The 'cat half-slid and half-rolled down into her lap from his favorite sleeping perch on her chest, and she set him gently aside with one hand as she turned and punched the com key with the other.
The buzzer stopped snarling at her acknowledgment, and she ran her hands quickly through her short hair. That was one advantage of wearing it like a man. There was no point pretending she was a beauty, anyway, and at least this way she didn't have to waste time making it look pretty when someone woke her in the middle of the night. She snatched the kimono her mother had given her for her last birthday from the bedside chair and slipped into it, then hit the com key a second time, accepting the call with full vision.
The screen was painfully bright in the dark cabin. It was also a split-image conference call, and Dame Estelle looked out of one side of it. Fearless had adjusted her shipboard day to match that of the Government Compound, and like Honor, Matsuko wore a robe over her nightclothes, but Barney Isvarian was in uniform in the other half of the image. Honor saw Surgeon Lieutenant Montoya, her own assistant physician, behind him and recognized the antiseptic cleanliness of one of the NPA's native clinics in the background.
"Sorry to wake you, Honor, but it's important." The commissioner sounded almost frightened, and Honor sat straighter as she finished belting her kimono.
"What is it, Dame Estelle?"
"Two pieces of information. One came in two days ago, but it was so vague I decided to sit on it a while before I passed it on to you. Barney just screened me with the second, and it changes the one I already had."
Honor nodded and cocked her head, inviting the commissioner to continue.
"I had a visit from Gheerinatu, one of the Medusan nomad clan chiefs, Wednesday," Matsuko said. "He doesn't like the Delta city-states any better than any other nomad, but we helped his clan out two years back. Given the weather here, the nomads tend to migrate from hemisphere to hemisphere—or at least to the equatorial zone and back—with the seasons, but Gheerinatu's clan got caught in an early storm while it was crossing the Delta. We pulled most of his clansmen and about half their herds out of a flash flood with NPA counter-grav just before they all drowned, and that makes us friends of his."
She paused, eyebrow quirked as if to ask if Honor was with her, and Honor nodded.
"All right. Gheerinatu's from the north—his clan's part of the Hyniarch ... well, I guess we'd call it a clan federation. Anyway, he's heading south for the winter, but he's got relatives all over the northern hemisphere, and he dropped by to tell me that one of those relatives from up near the Mossybacks sent him a message. It wasn't a very specific message, but Gheerinatu thought we should hear about it. Roughly translated, it was a warning that the Delta would be an unwise place for Gheerinatu and his herds to pass the winter."
Honor's face tightened, and Dame Estelle nodded.
"Exactly what I was thinking, but it's the first whisper we've heard from the native side, and, as I say, it was pretty darn unspecific. That's why I didn't pass it on to you—until this other thing came up." The commissioner nodded at her own pickup, her eyes turning to the side of her screen which held Isvarian's image. "You want to take it from here, Barney?"
"Yes, Ma'am." Isvarian shifted in his chair and looked straight at Honor. "I'm over in the clinic we run up by Dauguaar on the Three Forks, Captain," he said. Honor thought for a moment, summoning up a mental map of the Delta, then nodded. The Three Forks River was well up to the north, and Dauguaar was about the farthest north of all the city-states. Which meant it was also closest to the Mossybacks.
"We got a call late this morning," Isvarian went on, once she had the geography in mind. "A nomad had staggered up to the city gates and collapsed, and the city guard had dragged him to the clinic and turned him over to us. The duty medic recognized the symptoms immediately — mekoha poisoning, and a pretty advanced case, at that — but he also noticed that the nomad had an unusual-looking belt pouch. He opened it up while his native orderlies carted the nomad off." Isvarian reached for something beyond the field of the pickup, then showed Honor a leathery-looking pouch. He opened it, and her mouth tightened as she saw the dull gleam of bullet-shaped lead projectiles.
"He had a powder horn, too," Isvarian resumed grimly. "No one saw any sign of a rifle, but that was enough to sound all the alarms and get me out here as fast as I could move an aircar. Fritz here—" he gestured at Montoya, who gave his captain a tired smile "—wanted to com
e with me to see mekoha poisoning first-hand, so I brought him along. The two of us spent most of the time since sitting by his bedside, listening to him babble till he died about ten minutes ago."
The NPA man shrugged, and his eyes were unhappy.
"He was pretty far gone. Mekoha doesn't leave a lot of IQ when you get to such an advanced stage, and his motor control was shot, which made him even harder to understand, but I got enough to scare the hell out of me, Captain. He kept going on about new weapons—the rifles—and some nomad shaman whose `hands overflow with holy mekoha.' That's pretty near a direct translation."
"Oh, crap," Honor whispered before she could stop herself, and Isvarian nodded.
"It gets worse, Ma'am," he warned. "That was enough to confirm this shaman—whoever the hell he is—has some direct link both to the people who built the lab and whoever introduced the rifles, assuming they're not the same people. I think we can abandon any hope that they aren't, though. According to our dying nomad, the shaman's had a direct vision from the gods. It's time for the natives to drive the accursed off-worlders from the sacred soil of Medusa, and the gods have given him these magical weapons to do the job with. Worse, the gods have told him that not all off-worlders are evil. Some are servants of the gods and revere them with proper awe, and these godly off-worlders are the source of his `holy mekoha.' It sounds like he's been putting together some kind of nomad army, and he's been promising them that when the evil off-worlders have been driven away or given to the gods as proper sacrifices, these good off-worlders will come to the nomads and give them even more wonderful weapons and all the mekoha they can ever want."
The major fell silent, his face tight with strain and worry, and Honor bit her lip hard. Silence dragged out, broken at last by the Resident Commissioner.
"So there it is, Honor. It's not some kind of criminal operation. It's a deliberate attempt by someone to engineer a major native uprising and push the Kingdom right off the planet."
"Haven," Honor and Isvarian said simultaneously, and blinked at one another.
"That was my first thought, too," Matsuko said quietly. "But because it's the first possibility to occur to all of us, I think we'd better work on keeping an open mind about it. On the other hand, I can't think of anyone else it might be, and Haven has certainly been the most persistent in insisting that we don't have real sovereignty down here."
"True," Honor said. She rubbed the tip of her nose and frowned at the com screen. "I suppose it might be the Andermani," she said at last. "Gustav XI wouldn't mind getting a firm toehold in Basilisk, and he could figure we'd automatically jump to the conclusion that it was the Peeps. I can't quite see it, though, however hard I try. His attention is focused on Silesia right now, and he'd be worrying more about the Midgard Federation than us. Any jump this way could only antagonize us, and he doesn't need that if he's thinking about taking on the Silesians and their allies."
"What about somebody else? One of the single-system nations in the area?"
"I doubt it, Dame Estelle. Everybody out here is too busy keeping her head down and trying not to attract Haven's attention. Besides, what good would Medusa do any of them?"
"But what good would Medusa do Haven?" Isvarian asked doubtfully.
"I'm not sure." Honor rubbed her nose harder. "Haven's ultimate objective would have to be the terminus, and I can't quite see how getting us off Medusa would help them there, even if it got them onto the planet in our place. But just because you and I can't see how it would help them doesn't mean they can't."
"I'm afraid I'll have to go along with that." Matsuko sighed. "But the fact that we can't see any logical reason for them to be doing this means that I've got to have absolute proof that they are before I start leveling any sort of official complaints or charges."
"Agreed." Honor leaned back and crossed her arms under her breasts. "We need more information." She looked at Isvarian. "Do we know where this dying nomad came from, Barney?"
"Not specifically. Judging by the style of his personal gear and his dialect, he was a long way from home for someone traveling on foot or jehrn back. I'd guess he's probably from somewhere in the Mossyback Plateau area, maybe a little south of there. Call it seven or eight hundred klicks north of the Delta."
"Could he have made it that far in his condition?"
Isvarian glanced at Montoya, and the lieutenant shook his head. "I don't believe so, Ma'am. I'm no expert on Medusans, but I spoke with the clinic doctor, and given the patient's condition and how quickly he faded after we got here, I'd be surprised if he stayed on his feet more than twenty to thirty hours after his last pipe."
"How far could he have come in thirty hours, Barney?"
"Not seven hundred kilometers, Captain, that's for sure. Medusans move faster on foot than we do, but even with a jehrn, he couldn't have made more than two, three hundred klicks, max, in his condition."
"All right. That gives us a rough idea of where to start looking for anyone he might have been with."
"Right." Matsuko nodded firmly. "Barney, I want a patrol sent up that way soonest."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Better send them in some force," Honor warned. "Just to be on the safe side."
"And with somebody who keeps his head in command," Matsuko agreed, and Isvarian nodded again.
"I can have an armed ten-man skimmer on its way just after local first light," he said. "Call it eight hours from now."
"Good. In the meantime," Honor said with a wry, taut grin, "since you two have ruined my night's sleep, I might as well ruin a few people's nights up here. I don't know if we'll come up with any bright new insights, but it can't hurt to ask. And I'll pass the word to Papadapolous, too. He'll probably want to talk directly with you, Barney."
"No problem. Dame Estelle has my personal com code. Government House can relay to me over a secure channel wherever I am."
"Fine. In that case, Dame Estelle, if you and Barney will excuse me, I think I'd better get dressed. I'll screen you back in a couple of hours to let you know what we come up with—or let you know if we don't come up with anything at all."
"Thank you, Honor." The relief in Dame Estelle's voice was unmistakable, and Honor smiled at her as she cut the connection.
It was a smile that died instantly into a worried frown when the screen went blank. She stood abruptly and started looking for her uniform.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Honor looked around the briefing room table at her officers. Aside from Cardones, who had the watch, every department head and acting department head was present. Ensign Tremaine sat in, as well, for Honor had wanted his input from his own experiences planet-side. Each face was tight and worried as she finished briefing them on Dame Estelle's call.
"So that's the situation," she said quietly. "For the first time, we have a clear indication that what we're up against is an off-world government's covert operation of some sort, not a domestic criminal enterprise. We don't know its ultimate objectives, nor do we know when or how it's supposed to kick off, but we know that much."
McKeon nodded, pushing a stylus around in aimless circles on the table before him while he thought. Then he raised his head.
"One thing I think we ought to consider, Ma'am, is just how reliable this dying nomad's information is. Could this mekoha have made him see and hear things that weren't there? Or misunderstand things that were?"
"A point," Honor agreed. She looked down the table at Lois Suchon. "Doctor? What's your opinion?"
"My opinion, Captain?" Suchon's voice held a note almost of petulance, and her shoulders twitched a quick, sulky shrug. "I'm a Navy doctor. I don't know anything about abo physiology."
Honor pressed her lips firmly together and gave the physician a long, level glance. Suchon's dark face flushed, but she looked back with stubborn, petty defiance. She knew she was covered, Honor thought in disgust. She'd been kept abreast of the situation and knew how important information on mekoha's effects on Medusans might become, but no one had
specifically asked her to check the literature available from the NPA. Someone, Honor thought, should have. Someone like Commander Honor Harrington, who knew perfectly well that nothing short of a direct order could have gotten Suchon out of her comfortable chair to do so.
"Very well. I'll raise that point with Dame Estelle—and Lieutenant Montoya—after our conference, Mr. McKeon." Honor tapped a note into her own memo board and smiled faintly as Suchon's mouth twisted at the offhand reference to her absent junior. She met the doctor's burning gaze, and her own eyes were cool and brown, holding Suchon's until the surgeon commander looked away angrily.
"I think it's a good question," Honor went on after a moment, "but for the present, let's proceed on the assumption that the information is accurate."
McKeon nodded, and Papadapolous raised his hand.
"Yes, Major?"
"There may be some good news mixed in with the bad, Ma'am," the Marine offered. "Major Isvarian's people should be able to develop at least a little new intelligence on the Stilties' capabilities out of this. At best, they may be able to pinpoint a target outside the Delta for us. If the major can find this shaman, we might be able to stage a quick raid in battle armor and snap up his weapons—maybe even grab him—before he ever gets close enough to the enclaves to be a threat."
"Agreed," Honor said. "On the other hand, we're going to have to be very careful about any moves we make in that direction. Dame Estelle is specifically barred from using the NPA to interfere with native religious matters, and I can't act unilaterally on the planet without her approval. If we can't demonstrate direct off-world interference, her hands—which means our hands, as well—are tied unless and until the shaman's followers actually start using their weapons."
