Crown of Slaves

by David Weber

  Shrugging: "I could care less what happened to a pack of social deviants, who would have been arrested sooner or later anyway under a sane regime. As it happens, I do know what befell them. You—or the Ringstorff sociopath you've been working for—had them all murdered."

  He paused for a moment, giving them another quick inspection. "The moment I realized what was happening here, I saw a way I could advance my own project. Since I'd already managed to work my way into the good graces of the Erewhonese authorities—ha! talk about a pack of carrion-eaters trying to avoid responsibility—I was able to convince them to let me accompany the Princess and negotiate for them."

  What a lot of babble! A moron could spot the holes in the logic.

  But he let no signs of his uneasiness show. And, as he pressed on with his nonsensical prattle, consoled himself with the thought that Masadan religious fanatics—other than their real expertise at mayhem—were fairly hard to distinguish from morons, when you got right down to it.

  "I can get you out of here, Kubler. All of you. If you insist, I can probably get your two Scrags back also. But you'll have to agree to do it my way—and give up any plan of using the Manticoran princess for anything other than a hostage to ensure your safe passage."

  "Safe passage to where?"

  "The same place I imagine you were planning to take her in the first place—Congo." Victor scowled, looked around for a chair, and eased himself into a nearby control station. He didn't give the control panel itself so much as a glance, not wanting to make the Masadans nervous that he intended to meddle with the ship. He simply wanted to shift the discussion to one between seated people; which, in the nature of things, automatically defuses tension.

  Once seated, he ran fingers through his stiff, coarse hair. "I imagine Templeton's plan was to blackmail the Mesans there into providing him with shelter. Frankly, I'm highly skeptical that would have worked under the best of circumstances. This whole affair is going to have Mesa—especially Manpower—shrieking with fury. Not even Manpower is arrogant enough to want to infuriate the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Certainly not in a way which will make it very difficult for their normal Solarian protectors to provide them with much of a shield."

  Kubler, hesitantly, had taken a seat himself. Victor gave him a level gaze.

  "That's the reason I insisted—and will continue to insist—that the girl be handled delicately. Harm her in any way, Kubler, and you're likely to bring down the Eighth Fleet on Congo—possibly even on Mesa itself."

  One of the Masadans tried to sneer. "Be serious! No way—"

  "Really?" demanded Cachat. "Were you there when White Haven cut half the way through the Republic of Haven?" After a silent pause. "I thought not. Well, I was—attached as a commissioner to one of the Republic's superdreadnoughts before our fleets were routed. So I wouldn't be too sure White Haven couldn't cut his way through a goodly portion of Solarian space in order to turn Mesa into a slag heap if the whim struck Elizabeth the Third. The Solarian Navy is vastly overrated, in my opinion. But it hardly matters—because you can be sure and certain that the Mesans themselves will have no desire to run the risk."

  His expression became slightly derisive. "For what? You? What are the six of you—all that survive—to the Mesans, that they should accept that risk? Even if Templeton had survived, I doubt they would have agreed. With him dead . . ."

  He left the thought hanging. To his relief, he saw that all the Masadans were too preoccupied with their own extremely dire predicament to be spending much thought on the contradictions and just plain silliness in Victor's prattle.

  He glanced quickly at his watch. Five minutes down. One hundred and fifteen to go, assuming Thandi can do it in two hours. Glumly: Which I doubt.

  His thoughts grew less glum, hearing one of the other Masadans suddenly blurt out some words. Solomon Farrow, that was, the second of the Masadan pilots.

  "In the name of God, Hosea, he's right—and you know it. You've told me yourself, in private, you had doubts about Gideon's plan."

  Kubler glared at him briefly; but, Victor noted, didn't argue the point. Instead, after a moment, Kubler shifted his eyes back to him.

  "All right, Cachat. What's your proposal?"

  Hallelujah. Just keep prattling, Victor.

  Chapter 36

  Within ten minutes after entering the Felicia, Thandi was thanking whatever gods there might be for the fact that Ruth was with her. Without her, the stealthy attack would have turned almost instantly into a straight-up boarding assault—with no possible end except the destruction of the ship. Thandi was still quite sure she could have defeated Templeton's gang—even had she been alone, much less with the Amazons at her side. But so what? The religious maniacs would have simply blown up the Felicia once they realized they were overmatched.

  * * *

  The problem was simple, and one which Thandi should probably have foreseen. Lieutenant Commander Watanapongse had, after all. Granted, Watanapongse had a lot more experience dealing with slavers than Thandi did. Marines simply weren't called for when dealing with slavers, except under rare circumstances. Slaver crews were too small to put up any significant resistance, once they were overtaken by a military vessel. So, they usually surrendered outright.

  Although . . . that depended on the identity of the arresting vessel. The navies of most civilized powers subscribed to the theory that the slave trade constituted an offense against humanity. The Solarian League had certainly taken that position for centuries, and had pursued an official policy directed toward its eventual eradication for just as long. The Solarian approach was based on an entire network of interlocking bilateral treaty agreements with its independent neighbors, coupled with bureaucratic fiat within its own territory or that under the jurisdiction of the OFS. Since it would have been extremely difficult to get a significant number of independent systems (especially those already keeping an uneasy eye on Frontier Security) to agree to allow the SLN to police their space on any pretext, the treaties in question were negotiated on a basis which granted the SLN authority to intercept slavers flagged to the independent systems only outside the smaller nations' territorial space. And although League law equated slavery with piracy for its own citizens, which made it theoretically punishable by death, the fact was that the Solarian League had never executed a single slaver whose ship had been seized under one of the treaties. Solarian nationals had—on rare occasions—been sent to prison, sometimes for quite lengthy sentences. But the League as a whole was too "enlightened" to actually impose the death penalty, even in relatively extreme cases.

  In the case of those who were not Solarian nationals, the options were even more limited. The ships themselves were impounded and destroyed, but since the other parties to many of the treaties didn't equate the two crimes in the same fashion (officially, at least), the most the League could often do was return "alleged" slavers to their systems of origin for trial.

  Over the years, however, slavers had discovered that there were some exceptions to that nice, safe arrangement. Specifically, there were the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven. Manticore's implacable hostility to the genetic slave trade had been a part of the Star Kingdom's foreign policy ever since the days of King Roger II, whose youthful infatuation with the Liberal Party of the day had left its mark in several ways even after he assumed the throne. The original Republic of Haven had been just as disgusted by the practice, and even the People's Republic, for all its myriad faults, had retained that disgust and a hostility which fully matched that of Manticore. In fact, the one solemn interstellar accord to which both star nations were signatories and which had remained in effect throughout all of the tension and even outright hostilities between them was the Cherwell Convention.

  The provisions of the Cherwell Convention were quite simple. All signatories to it endorsed the equation of slavery with piracy . . . and prescribed the same punishment for both. It was the most stringent of all of the League's anti-slavery treaties, and,
unlike any of the others, it was multilateral, not bilateral. All of its signatories agreed that the naval forces of any of its signatories had the right to stop, search, and confiscate merchant vessels transporting slaves while sailing under the protection of their flags. And, even more importantly, that they had the right to try the crews of those confiscated vessels for piracy.

  Despite the official provisions of the Cherwell Convention, the rigor with which it was enforced in practice varied widely from one star nation to the next, even among those who had officially signed onto it. Both the Manticorans and the Havenites were ruthless about it, and the death penalty was often applied immediately to slavers caught in the act. Even if the slavers were not executed, they were invariably sentenced to much longer prison terms than was the Solarian norm.

  By and large, the Andermani Empire tended to follow the same policies. On the other hand, the Silesian Confederacy's treatment of captured slavers and pirates was a sour joke in the starways. The Confederacy had signed the Cherwell Convention only under the threat of Manticoran military action during the reign of Queen Adrienne, and as often as not, the criminals were released almost immediately by a corrupt governor.

  The Solarian League's practice varied a great deal, depending primarily on the specific unit which made the arrest. More precisely, on the political connections which that unit had with one or another of the various power blocs in the League. Some captains, those who were effectively in Mesa's political pocket, were as notorious as Silesians for releasing captured slavers. Others—Rozsak being one of them, especially since his assignment to work with Governor Barregos in Maya Sector—enforced the available penalties with as much harshness as possible.

  At one time, the standard response of slavers about to be overhauled was to jettison their "cargo" into space and then try to use the absence of slaves as proof of their innocence. In order to put a stop to that practice, the star nations who had signed the Cherwell Convention had adopted the "equipment clause" first proposed by Roger II. In effect, the equipment clause stated that any ship equipped as a slaver was a slaver, whether she happened to have a "cargo" aboard at the moment or not.

  Many of the Cherwell Convention signatories, including the Andermani Empire, simply seized the ship and sent its crew to prison when exercising the equipment clause in the absence of actual slaves. The Star Kingdom and the Republic, however, had adopted the official position that a slaver crew found without a living cargo would be immediately tried for mass murder and, if convicted, executed by the same method: ejection from an airlock without benefit of space suit. Death by decompression was . . . pretty horrible.

  Nor was it possible to conceal the fact that a ship was a slaver. That was what the "equipment clause" was all about, because the nature of her "cargo" was such that any slaver had to be designed differently from a normal cargo hauler or legitimate passenger vessel. The old shackles and chains of the slave trade on Earth in pre-Diaspora days might no longer be needed, but the design of the ships themselves, with their multitude of security measures to forestall any slave revolt, was simply impossible to disguise.

  That was true even leaving aside the peculiar design whereby hundreds—sometimes thousands—of unwilling human beings could be ejected into space. It would be impossible for a small slaver crew to physically manhandle thousands of people into airlocks. So, the ships were designed to flood the slave living compartments with powerful (but not lethal) gases, forcing the slaves into large cargo holds where the big bays could be opened to space.

  That design was somewhat obsolete, now, at least anywhere near Manticoran or Havenite space. Too many Manticoran and Havenite captains had started the quiet practice of immediately executing any slavers found aboard a ship equipped for that kind of mass murder—whether the "cargo" was still alive or not. The official rules be damned. Even the occasional Solarian captain in those regions, barred from such direct and forceful action by his own government's policies, had adopted the policy of handing the crews of such ships over to the closest Manty or Havenite captain. After all, both the Star Kingdom and the Republic were treaty partners, weren't they? What happened to criminals after being duly delivered into the custody of one of the local governments was hardly the arresting captain's business, was it?

  And, besides, the method of execution was such poetic justice.

  * * *

  As it happened, the Felicia did have the design which enabled the crew to jettison its cargo. That much was obvious to Thandi within five minutes. There could be no other explanation for the number of large cargo holds they passed through after entering the ship. Empty cargo holds, with very wide bays—and with no passageways connecting to them wide enough to move large items of cargo.

  Clearly enough, Princess Ruth understood the purpose of the peculiar design. Her thin face was tight with anger.

  "We'll fix that," she muttered. A moment later, moving with the sureness of an expert, she had the panel removed from the nearest instrument console and had her own mini-computer plugged into it. Ignoring Thandi's hiss of warning, Ruth's fingers started working the keyboard.

  Shortly thereafter, the princess unplugged her unit. She didn't bother replacing the panel.

  "Those won't work any longer. The bastards can't jettison anybody. And I disconnected the controls to the gas units, while I was at it." She glanced at Thandi's skinsuit. "The gas wouldn't bother us, of course, but if the slavers released it—"

  She didn't need to finish the thought. Wincing, Thandi nodded. The gases used to drive slaves into the jettison holds were only technically "nonlethal." More precisely, they were nonlethal so long as the victim could move away into cleaner air. Trapped in compartments with no way to escape, most of the victims would die eventually. And die horribly, too, in an even worse manner than being jettisoned into space. Slavers themselves wouldn't voluntarily kill anyone that way, because they'd have to clean up the multitude of corpses—not to mention vomit and other excreta left behind. But in these circumstances, if Templeton's gang got desperate enough, they might do it as part of their suicide pact.

  "Can you disconnect whatever setup they've got to blow the ship?"

  Ruth shook her head. "Not from here. I'm willing to bet that they've jury-rigged their own, independent system to do the job. Most slavers aren't real big on suicide, you know, so I doubt Felicia came equipped with a scuttling charge. If Templeton's thugs did rig their own system, it's certainly a stand-alone I can't access. And even if Felicia did have one already in place, getting to it from the outside would be virtually impossible. In a number of ways, slavers are built more like warships than cargo ships. That's especially true with their electronics. The ship control, security, and environmental systems are kept separate, instead of all being connected to a central computer. It's less efficient—much less—but it also gives you a lot more in the way of safety and internal security."

  One of the Amazons shook her head. "Why here? On a slaver, I mean. They don't have large crews—it'd cut into their profits. It must be awkward as hell having to operate that way."

  "You're forgetting the nature of the 'cargo,' " Thandi said with a frown. "Material objects don't resist their handlers with anything more than inertia. Livestock, not much more than that. But when you're trying to haul unwilling human beings somewhere, you've got the added problem of a 'cargo' that might revolt."

  The Amazon still seemed a little puzzled, and the princess smiled crookedly at her.

  "You're making a common mistake. Yana, isn't it? Most people think of Manpower slaves in terms of the types which are most notorious—sex objects, or heavy labor and combat types. But the truth is that modern slavery has to fit a modern economy. Even on a hellhole like Congo, most of the labor is highly mechanized. And computerized. Sure, the slaves designed for that work have been given a minimal education, and one which carefully steers clear of training them in any of the underlying principles. Still and all . . ."

  Ruth pursed her lips. "You've all met Web Du Have
l, I think—or know who he is, at least. He's a J-line, which is Manpower's most popular, uh, 'product.' Low-level technical workers, what you might call 'sub-engineers.' " The princess nodded at the panel she'd just been working on. "You think a man like that—some of them, anyway—would have any real problem figuring out how to crack into a ship's central control unit? Sure, they'd probably set off alarms doing it—that's really where all my extra training pays off—but so what? When people are desperate, they're not going to worry about the fine points. If nothing else, once they gained access to the central computer they could probably make sure the slaver crew went to Hell with them."

  Yana's frown had been deepening as Ruth talked. "Damnation, Princess. If that's how it's set up, how do we disconnect the charge without taking the bridge, first?"

  "We don't," Ruth said grimly. "And now that I've seen the setup, I'm pretty sure that is how they've done it. So." She gave Thandi an uncertain look. "Can we still manage it, Lieutenant?"

  The Solarian officer gazed at her for a moment, then gave her a grin. Well, a widening of teeth, anyway. It was more like a shark's grin than a human's. That was all the answer she gave. All she needed to, really.

  A moment later, Thandi and Ruth were moving down yet another passage, the Amazons in their wake.

  * * *

  Less than five minutes after leaving the bridge, Berry found herself ushered through a heavy—and heavily locked—entry hatch. "Ushered," in the sense that Ezekiel and the slaver crewman stepped back once the hatch was unlocked and slightly opened, and urgently motioned her to pass through it. Both of them seemed very nervous, and both of them had pulsers in their hands pointed in the direction of the hatch. To all intents and purposes, they looked like men ordering a sacrificial victim into a chamber full of demons.