Crown of Slaves

by David Weber

  Then there were Manpower's LACs. By the standards of the Royal Manticoran Navy, they were hopelessly obsolete, but there were fifteen of them. Theoretically, they were simply Verdant Vista's "customs patrol," with a secondary legitimate function as additional pirate discouragers. They, too, could be used at need to suppress any insurrection by Congo's enslaved labor force, however. They could also have made mincemeat out of the Felicia if they'd chosen to do so. Of course, their commanders had also been informed of precisely what HMS Gauntlet would do to any LAC stupid enough to open fire on a merchant vessel whose passengers included a member of the House of Winton.

  All those factors had played their part in the planning for Operation Spartacus. While it was extremely unlikely that any of Manpower's forces currently in the star system would be foolish enough to challenge Gauntlet or attack Felicia directly with "Ruth Winton" on board, it was only too likely that they would attempt to beat off any attack craft Felicia launched, and they had more than sufficient firepower for that. At worst, that would result in a blood bath for the attackers. At best, it would create a standoff which would force the abandonment of the attack or else require Gauntlet to engage the defenders in an obvious act of aggression.

  That was the reason all of Thandi's personnel were assembled in the slaver's "cargo bays" as the big merchant ship crept slowly into her designated mooring position off Space Dock Eleven. Thandi watched the tiny holo display projected against the visor of her battle armor, the relayed imagery from Felicia's external visual pickups as the big ship maneuvered cautiously under reactor thrusters alone. It was impossible for any vessel to approach this closely to another one under impeller drive, and her lips thinned in a hungry smile as she saw the bright light shining through the docking bay gallery's transparent armorplast. She could actually make out a handful of moving figures on the far side of that armorplast, and her smile grew still hungrier as she contemplated the surprise they were about to receive.

  Felicia's tractors reached out and locked on to the space station as she killed the last of her relative movement and the boarding tube reached out to nuzzle against her main personnel hatch. Normally, the station would have supplied the necessary tractor lock, but "Templeton" had contemptuously dismissed Lassiter's offer to do so this time. Not that it really made any difference at this point, Thandi reminded herself, and reconfigured her visor's HUD. The imagery of the illuminated bay gallery vanished, replaced by her command and control schematic. The lieutenants commanding her platoons glowed as golden triangles in the schematic, with their platoon sergeants and squad leaders shown as golden and silver chevrons, respectively.

  "Tango-Lima-Alpha leaders, this is Kaja," she said, remotely surprised, as always, to hear how calm her voice sounded over her own com. "Prepare to execute Alpha One on my command. Acknowledge."

  Four gold triangles flashed brightly in obedient response, and she suppressed a grunt of satisfaction. Then—

  "Now, Thandi," Ruth's voice said quietly in her ear bug.

  "Tango-Lima-Foxtrot, execute now!" she said instantly. "I repeat, execute now, now, now!"

  * * *

  "Arnold wants to know what you want him to do," Takashi said over Lassiter's private com channel.

  "I already told him what to do!" the general manager snapped back, never taking his eyes from the mobile mountain of alloy as it eased to a stop relative to his space station. He'd come down to the dock gallery from his command center. Not because he wanted to, but because he already knew that whatever happened here, and however little choice he'd had but to agree to it, his career was about to take a major hit. Under the circumstances, it was imperative that he be able to present himself as having been hands-on at every stage of the disaster. It might not do much good, but it would certainly look better than cowering safely in Command Central.

  "I'm only telling you what he said," Takashi replied.

  "Goddamned idiot," Lassiter growled in a deliberately ambiguous tone which might equally well have applied to his senior assistant or to the commander of Verdant Vista's security force. Then he drew a deep breath.

  "Tell him," he said in a dangerously patient voice, "that he will do nothing—repeat, nothing—except stand by in the positions he and I already discussed unless and until I tell him differently. This situation is fucked up enough already without him deciding to play goddamned Preston of the Spaceways on his own!"

  "I'll tell him," Takashi acknowledged, and Lassiter half-growled and half-snorted in satisfaction. Or as close to satisfaction as he could reasonably expect to feel at a moment like this. He'd allowed Arnold to issue weapons and put his heavy combat teams into their battle armor, but not without some severe misgivings. Major Jonathan Arnold was basically competent, if not particularly imaginative. Not all of his personnel were, however. In fact, in Lassiter's considered opinion, at least half of them would have been incapable of organizing a bottle party in a brewery without direction. They were a blunt instrument in Manpower's hands—adequate when it came to keeping an iron boot planted on the necks of Congo's slave laborers, but not much more than that. Indeed, Manpower hadn't wanted them to be much more, and that was why the current situation was far enough beyond the parameters of their capabilities to give Lassiter nightmares every time he thought about the potentially dire consequences of a single itchy trigger finger.

  Unfortunately, it was a case of damned if he did, and damned if he didn't. If one of his security people screwed the pooch, he'd be blamed. But if he ordered Arnold to stand his people down and something went wrong anyway, someone on the Council was absolutely certain to suggest that it was all Lassiter's fault for not having made proper use of his resources. As if anything he did at this point—

  That was odd. Why were they opening the—?

  * * *

  The docking tube had just touched Felicia's main personnel hatch when the huge doors of her specially designed "cargo bays" snapped open. Kamal Lassiter's eyes widened, but consternation turned almost instantly into panic as human beings began to spill through the gaping openings. Not the unprotected bodies of slaves, but armed and armored figures shooting across the gap between them and the gallery with bulletlike speed.

  Surprise was total. Despite all the tension and anxious precautions Felicia's arrival had engendered, no one aboard the space station had even contemplated the possibility of an actual attack. Not after the way Victor Cachat's strategy had misdirected everyone's attention to the "terrorist Templeton's" demands. Lassiter's brain was still fumbling with the new data, trying to force it into some sort of coherency, when the first Marine breaching teams hit the gallery's armorplast.

  The operations manager stumbled back a step or two as the Marines touched down on tractor-soled boots. They landed and clung as naturally as so many houseflies, and Kamal Lassiter's face went paper-white as he finally realized what he was seeing. He spun away from the sight, dashing madly for the gallery lifts, but it was far too late for that.

  Six three-man teams of Marines slapped breaching rings on to the armorplast. Each of those rings was approximately three-meters in diameter. They adhered almost instantly, and the Marines stepped back and hit their detonators. Precisely shaped and directed jets of plasma sliced six perfect circles through the tough, refractory armorplast as easily if it had been no tougher than old-fashioned glass.

  The consequences for the personnel inside the gallery, none of whom were in spacesuits, were as ghastly as they were predictable.

  * * *

  Thandi watched the hurricanes of atmosphere explode out of the breaches her teams had blasted. Computer chips, loose furniture, sheets of paper, and human beings came with them, sucked out by the hungry vacuum before interior blast doors and emergency hatches slammed shut, sealing off the air-gushing wounds.

  "All Tango-Lima-Alpha units, this is Kaja. Phase One accomplished. Move to Phase Two."

  The golden triangles on her display blinked fresh acknowledgment, and her assault teams began swarming through the openin
gs as the space station's emergency procedures conveniently shut down the torrents of atmosphere pouring out of them.

  Thandi, obedient to Berry's admonishment (and Lieutenant Colonel Huang's silent but pointed example), was in the third wave, not the first. But she was the first person to reach the control console at the center of the gallery. She studied the console for a dozen blazingly intense seconds, then grunted in satisfaction. Ruth and Colonel Huang had been correct during the planning sessions; it was a standard Solarian design. She looked back up, waiting impatiently as the last of her Audubon Ballroom personnel came through the breaches, then stabbed a button.

  Alloy panels slid slowly downward, locking across the armorplast. The system was designed to protect against collision with minor debris, but it served a secondary function by sealing off the holes her Marines had blown. She waited, wishing she could tap her toe impatiently (not exactly practical for someone in battle armor), until the panels locked down. Then she punched another series of commands into the console and bared her teeth in truly wolfish delight as the gallery began to repressurize.

  * * *

  Homer Takashi wasn't cursing, but only because he didn't have the time.

  He also didn't have any better idea what was happening than the late, unlamented Lassiter had had, but he did know that it wasn't what the entire galaxy had been led to expect. Whoever those people were, they weren't Templeton's Masadan terrorists. There were far too many of them, and they were moving with a trained precision and ferocity possible only for elite combat troops. Worse, before the interior visual pickups in the space dock gallery went out, they'd given him an excellent view of the attackers' equipment.

  Which appeared to be first-line Solarian Marine issue.

  "Who the fuck are these people?!" Jonathan Arnold's voice sounded on the brink of hysteria over Takashi's earbug.

  "How the hell do I know?" Takashi shot back.

  "Those are goddamned Solly Marine plasma and pulse rifles they're carrying!"

  "Oh, really?" Takashi's response dripped vitriolic irony. He started to add something even more bitingly sarcastic, then made himself draw a deep breath, instead.

  "Yes, they've got Marine-issue equipment," he said. "It doesn't make them Marines. Hell, you've got Marine pulse rifles and tribarrels! Besides, what would Solly Marines be doing attacking us?"

  "What the hell is anyone else doing attacking us?" Arnold demanded. Which, Takashi admitted to himself, was a perfectly reasonable question. Unfortunately, it was one he had no answer for.

  "Who they are doesn't matter," he said instead. "What matters is that you and your people get your asses in gear and stop whatever it is they think they're doing!"

  Arnold grunted something which might have been an affirmative, and then Takashi heard him begin giving his first coherent orders to his own personnel. The security man's voice still didn't sound anything remotely like calm, but at least he sounded as if he was beginning to think, not simply dither, and that had to be an improvement.

  Didn't it?

  * * *

  "Okay, Thandi," Ruth Winton's voice said in Thandi's ear. "Their military commander—his name's Arnold, if it matters—is starting to get his act together. Do you want a direct feed from his com link?"

  Thandi managed not to roll her eyes. Anything less like proper military procedure than Ruth's idea of communications protocol would have been impossible to imagine. On the other hand, how often did a tactical commander have the opportunity to actually listen in on her opponent's instructions to her troops? Still . . .

  "Not a raw feed," she decided. "I don't know enough about the station's internal layout to be able to interpret movement orders. It'd only confuse me if I tried. Captain Zilwicki?"

  "Here, Lieutenant," a deep voice rumbled.

  "Please monitor the op force communications. Don't worry about the details. Just keep me informed of anything you think I should know."

  "Check," Zilwicki acknowledged, but then he continued. "Ruth's done a little better than you know, Lieutenant. She's not just into their communications net now. She's managed to tap into the visual pickups of their internal security systems." Thandi could almost hear the savage smile in his voice. "We can actually see their troops moving into position."

  "Can we, now?" Thandi murmured, and she had no doubt at all what Zilwicki heard in her voice.

  "Indeed we can," Zilwicki assured her. "In fact, Ruth is still pulling in information, and it looks like she's just found the master schematic for the entire station. We're integrating now against the visual input from their security cameras. Give us another couple of minutes, and we ought to be able to begin giving you the other side's positions and movements."

  "Like fish in a barrel," Thandi heard Lieutenant Colonel Huang murmur over the command net, and she nodded, not that anyone could tell from outside her armor.

  "Yeah," Zilwicki agreed. "Pity, isn't it?"

  * * *

  Major Arnold, unlike Thandi Palane, didn't believe in leading his troops from the front. To be fair, it wasn't out of any particular cowardice. He simply saw no reason to leave his own command post. All of the space station's security systems reported to him there, which meant it was the best place from which to monitor the battle. And it wasn't as if his troops were the sort to inspire a commanding officer with the kind of mutual loyalty which led to nonsense like commanding by example.

  "—sorry ass up to Level Twelve," he said, glaring at the anxious face on his com screen. "I've got Maguire's team covering the lifts on Ten and Eleven. But so far, it looks like these bastards have a pretty damned good idea where they're going and how to get there. So if you don't get up there in time to block Axial Three, the sorry sons of bitches are going to march straight past you into Command Central. Now move, dammit!"

  The woman on his screen gave a nod somewhere between curt and spastic, and Arnold punched for a fresh connection to another of his team commanders.

  * * *

  Captain Zenas Maguire decided he'd been an idiot to ever sign up with Manpower, however good the money had been. Of course, it was beginning to look as if it were a bit late for second thoughts, but still—

  He took one last look at the schematic of his units' positions and nodded to himself. It was the best he could do, and at least his teams of plasma gunners were positioned to make it suicidal for the attackers to approach along any of the main passageways. He hadn't actually seen any of the imagery of the initial break-in into the dock gallery, but he hadn't had to see it to realize that whoever was coming after him was a hell of a lot better trained than his people were. But at least the defenders were intimately familiar with the vast, labyrinthine maze of the space station's confusing internal passageways.

  "What d' you think's going on?"

  Maguire turned to look at Lieutenant Annette Kawana, his second-in-command. Kawana had once been a Solarian Marine sergeant, herself, although she hadn't exactly left the Corps on the best of terms.

  "I think Manpower is about to get buggered," he said flatly. "And unfortunately, it looks like we're going to get the same, only harder."

  "What the fuck do they want?" Kawana demanded, and Maguire managed not to throttle her by telling himself that the question was obviously rhetorical.

  "I don't know," he told her with massive restraint. "On the other hand, I think it might be good idea for someone to ask them that question. Don't you?"

  * * *

  "All right, Lieutenant. They're in position and settling down." Anton Zilwicki's voice was a rumbling murmur, almost as if he were afraid the Manpower security goons might overhear him, Thandi thought with a flicker of amusement.

  Of course, he's busy listening to them, so maybe it isn't quite as silly as it seems. Not that keeping his voice down is going to make any difference!

  "Acknowledged," she said, keeping any trace of humor out of her reply. "Wait one."

  She checked her tactical display. Colonel Huang had been right about the fish and the barrel, she
thought. Of course, it helped that the other side obviously couldn't have poured piss out of a boot without printed instructions on the heel. Thandi's Marines had been systematically knocking out the security scanners as they advanced, but by now it should have occurred to at least one of the Manpower morons that certain of her people had been dropping steadily out of sight.

  Ruth Winton's penetration of the space station's surveillance net allowed her to do more than simply spy on the enemy. She'd also managed to compare the master schematic for the station to the surveillance coverage, and she'd discovered that the central ventilation system wasn't monitored at all. The access points were, but once the cameras in any given section of corridor had been knocked out, there was no way for anyone on the other side to know who—or what—might be slipping quietly into the ventilation shafts.

  Seems like I end up crawling around the guts of every space station I go aboard, she thought sardonically. Maybe my lunatic ancestors included a little rodent DNA in the mix? She snorted. Not that I'm about to complain.

  "Decoy One," she said.

  "Yes, Kaja?" It was Donald, in charge of the Ballroom gunmen who continued ostentatiously, if slowly, advancing down the direct route towards the Manpower blocking position. She'd left a half dozen Marines to keep an eye on things, but it was Donald's command.

  "We're just about ready," she told him, "but Lara's team is about four minutes behind, and you're only two hatches from contact. Slow down just a bit. We want them looking your way, not spooked, and she needs to catch up."

  "Understood, Kaja."

  "Kaja, clear."

  Surely by now someone on the other side should have noticed that over three-quarters of her battle-armored personnel had disappeared. She certainly would have. But maybe she was being a bit harder on them than was fair. They were getting only glimpses of the front of Donald's column before their visual sensors were knocked out, after all.