by David Weber
Duan Binyan wanted to whimper himself.
The money was always good for someone willing to serve on one of the Jessyk Combine's "special ships," and the risks weren't really all that great. Despite the best efforts of people like the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, no more than five percent of slave ships were ever apprehended. Most were stopped by people like the Solarian League, where, by and large, the worst a crewman had to worry about was a brief incarceration before the Combine or Manpower bribed him out of jail. No more than a handful were stopped by the Star Kingdom or the Republic in any given year. But the crews on that handful were seldom ever heard of again. Manticore and Haven, for all they hated one another, both took genetic slaving seriously, and the penalty under the law of either star nation was death.
But the odds against being one of those handful of ships were so high, and the money was so good, Jessyk could always find someone to take the chance. Someone like Duan Binyan, who suddenly realized all the money in the galaxy was no use at all to a dead man.
"What are we going to do, Binyan?" De Chabrol asked urgently, her voice lowered so only he could hear.
"I don't—" Duan broke off and wiped perspiration from his own face. "I don't think there's anything we can do, Annette," he admitted hoarsely. "That's a heavy cruiser. She can turn us into vapor anytime she feels like it. If we don't open the hatches, she may just decide to do it. Or, just as bad, she'll blow her way in, and her Marines will come in shooting. Do you want Marines in battle armor burning down that hatch?" he demanded, jerking a thumb at the bridge lift hatch.
"But they're Manties," she protested, her eyes desperate. It was all she had to say, and Duan's mouth tightened.
"What do you want me to say, Annette? If we let them in and they find out what we are, they may kill us—all right," he said quickly as she opened her mouth, "they probably will kill us! But if we try to stop them, there's no question what'll happen. At least if we open up, we'll live a little longer!"
"I say blow the fucking ship and take the motherless bastards with us!" Egervary said. Duan wheeled towards him, and the security officer bared his teeth in a rictuslike grin. His dark eyes were huge, and his nostrils flared. "Those holier-than-thou motherfuckers are all so hot to kill anyone who does anything they don't approve of! Who the hell died and made them God? I say we take as many to hell with us as we can!"
"That's the stupidest thing you've said yet!" Duan snapped. "You may want to die, but I sure don't!"
"Like what you want's going to make a difference!" Egervary jeered. "We're dead, Binyan. That's what happens when the Manties come on board. Well, if I've got to die, so do they!"
The security officer hovered on the brink of outright madness in his terror, Duan realized. And that terror, as all too often happened, was feeding his rage, fanning it like a furnace.
"No," the captain said flatly, forcing his voice to project a calm he was far from feeling. "We're going to do exactly what they tell us to, Zeno. Exactly."
"You think so?" Egervary's grin was wider and more maniacal than ever, and he whipped back around to his panel.
Duan Binyan had an instant to realize what that grin had meant, and he lunged towards the security officer screaming in protest.
* * *
"Stand by, Lieutenant Hedges," Ragnhild said. "We'll be coming up on her main personnel hatch in another five minutes."
"Right, Ragnhild," Michael Hedges acknowledged with a smile.
He was one of the very few people serving in Hexapuma who looked almost as young as Ragnhild did. It was unfortunate that he'd had the bad judgment to become a Marine rather than a Navy officer, but he was awfully cute anyway. Of course, he was considerably senior to her, but Regs only prohibited relationships between officers in the same chain of command. Technically, that included Marines aboard a ship, but it was a technicality that was winked at most of the time. So maybe it wasn't such a bad thing he was a Marine after all. . . .
She smiled back at him and returned her attention to her HUD, and one eyebrow rose as she saw half a dozen patches of plating blowing away from the freighter's hull. One of the sudden openings was almost directly in front of the pinnace, and she saw something in it. It was an indistinct, barely visible shape, but there was something naggingly familiar about that half-glimpsed form, and it seemed to be turning to point in her direction.
God, it's a—!
Ragnhild Pavletic never completed the thought.
* * *
The universe punched Helen Zilwicki in the belly. Nothing else could have explained the sudden, hoarse exhalation. The way her heart stopped and her lungs froze as Hawk-Papa-One exploded.
Point defense cluster, an icy voice said in the back of her brain, clear and precise—a stranger's voice, surely not her own.
Shock at the sheer, suicidal stupidity of what they'd just seen gripped every officer on Hexapuma's bridge. Every officer but one.
"Laser clusters only—force neutralization!" Captain Aivars Aleksandrovich Terekhov snapped. "Fire!"
* * *
"You fucking idiot!" Duan howled.
His hands closed on Egervary's neck from behind. His shoulders and arms heaved ferociously, and the security officer flew up out of his seat. All Duan had really been thinking about was getting the maniac away from the tactical panel before he did something even stupider—as if there'd been anything stupider he could do! He succeeded in that, but the savage, panic-driven strength with which he tore Egervary away from the console also snapped the man's neck like a stick.
The corpse was still in midair when Hexapuma fired.
The range was less than four thousand kilometers.
At that range, point defense lasers capable of taking out incoming, wildly evading missiles at ranges of sixty or seventy thousand kilometers were more than enough to deal with any unarmored target not protected by a sidewall or an impeller wedge. It wasn't often that a warship had the opportunity to use its point defense against even hostile small craft, far less another starship, because nobody was insane enough not to surrender when a naval vessel got that close.
Usually, at any rate.
The good news for Marianne was that Hexapuma's laser clusters were far less powerful than her broadside energy mounts. One of the heavy cruiser's grasers would have blown entirely through the freighter's civilian hull, and probably broken her back in the process. The laser clusters wouldn't do that, but dozens of them studded each of Hexapuma's flanks, and the Royal Manticoran Navy believed in being prepared. Rare though the opportunity to use the normally defensive weapons offensively might have been, BuWeaps had considered how best to do so when the chance offered itself, and Naomi Kaplan's vengeful finger punched up a stored fire plan. The tactical computer considered the data coming back to it from the active sensors briefly—very briefly—then established its targets, assigned each of them a threat value, assigned them to specific point defense stations, and opened fire.
Stilettos of coherent light stabbed out from Hexapuma. Each of a cluster's eight lasers was capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That was one shot every two seconds from every cluster in Hexapuma's starboard broadside and Marianne's hull plating seemed to erupt outward. The strobing laser clusters tracked across her, precisely, carefully, almost literally unable to miss at such an absurdly short range, as Hexapuma savaged the ship which had killed her pinnace. They scourged her with whips of barbed energy, shattering and smashing, wiping away weapons, sensors, impeller nodes.
It took precisely twenty-three seconds from the instant Terekhov gave the command to fire to reduce the ship which had just murdered eighteen of his people to a shattered, broken wreck that would never move under its own power again.
* * *
Alarms screamed. The bridge quivered and jerked like a small boat in a gale as Marianne's four-million-ton hull shuddered in agony. Transfer energy hammered her as Hexapuma's fury flayed alloy flesh from her bones.
There were other s
creams, here and there throughout her hull. Human screams, not electronic ones, and—for the most part—very brief. Low-powered laser clusters might be, compared to regular broadside weapons, but atmosphere belched out of the holes smashed into her. Some of it came from cargo holds, but most came from the ship's compartments. From impeller rooms which were torn open by laser talons, spilling men and women in coveralls and shirt sleeves into the merciless vacuum. From passageways inboard from targeted laser clusters. From berthing quarters directly inboard from her broadside lasers. From messing compartments inboard from her main broadside sensor array.
There were fifty-seven men and women aboard Marianne before Hexapuma fired. That was an extraordinarily large crew for a merchantship, but then most merchantships never had to worry about cargoes of desperate slaves.
By the time Zeno Egervary's body hit the deck and stopped sliding, there were fourteen still-living men and women aboard the freighter's shredded wreck.
* * *
"Cease fire!" the terror-distorted voice screamed over the com. "For God's sake, cease fire! We surrender! We surrender!"
Aivars Terekhov's face was like hammered iron. His visual display showed the rapidly dispersing wreckage of Ragnhild Pavletic's pinnace. The pieces were very, very small.
"Who's speaking?" Frozen helium was warmer than that voice.
"This is . . . this is Duan Binyan," the other voice gasped, jagged and shrill with panic. "I'm . . . I was the captain, but I swear to God I never ordered that! I swear it!"
"Whether you ordered it or not, it was your responsibility, Captain," Terekhov said with a flat, terrible emphasis. "I will be sending a second pinnace. This one will contain a full platoon of battle-armored Marines. At the first sign of resistance, they will employ lethal force. Is that understood, Captain?"
"Yes. Yes!"
"Then understand this, as well. You've just murdered men and women of the armed forces of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. As such you are guilty, at the very least, of piracy, for which the sentence is death. I suggest, Captain, that you spend the next few minutes trying to think of some reason I might consider letting you continue to live."
Aivars Terekhov smiled. It was a terrifying expression.
"Think hard, Captain," he advised almost gently. "Think very hard."
Chapter Forty-Eight
Helen knelt on the decksole and slowly, carefully dialed the locker's combination. Aikawa was on duty—the Captain was keeping him there, she knew, because he blamed himself. If he hadn't identified the freighter, none of this would have happened. It was foolish to condemn himself for it, but he did, and the Skipper was too wise to let him sit and brood.
But someone had to do this, and it was Helen's job.
Her hands shook as she gently lifted the lid, and she blinked hard, trying to clear her eyes of the sudden tears. She couldn't. They came too hard, too fast, and she covered her mouth with her hands, rocking on her knees as she wept silently. She couldn't do this. She couldn't. But she had to. It was the last thing she would ever be able to do for her friend . . . and she couldn't.
She didn't hear the hatch open behind her. She was too lost in her grief. But she felt the hand on her shoulder, and she looked up quickly.
Paulo d'Arezzo looked down at her, his handsome face tight with grief of its own. She stared up into his gray eyes through tear-spangled vision, and he went down into a crouch beside her.
"I can't," she whispered almost inaudibly. "I can't do this, Paulo."
"I'm sorry," he said softly, and her sobs broke free at last. He went fully to his knees, and before she knew what was happening, his arms were around her, holding her. She started to pull away—not from the embrace, but from the humiliation of her weakness. But she couldn't do that, either. The arms around her tightened, holding her with gently implacable strength, and a hand touched the back of her head.
"She was your friend," Paulo said softly into her ear. "You loved her. Go ahead. Cry for her . . . and then I'll help you do this."
It was too much. It broke her control, and with it her resistance, and she pressed her face into his shoulder and wept for her dead.
* * *
Aivars Terekhov walked into the bridge briefing room with a face of battle steel. His blue eyes were hard and cold, and grief-fired rage slept only uneasily behind that azure ice.
Captain Tadislaw Kaczmarczyk followed him into the compartment. The Marine peeled off to take a seat beside Guthrie Bagwell, but Terekhov crossed to the head of the table and took his place, then let his eyes range over the officers gathered around it.
Abigail Hearns looked as if she'd wept, yet there was a calmness, almost a serenity, about her at odds with everyone else in the compartment. There was steel under the serenity, the unyielding and inflexible steel of Grayson, but there was acceptance, too. Not forgiveness for the people who'd murdered her midshipwoman, but the acceptance that to care—to love—was to surrender one's self to the pain of loss . . . and that to refuse to love was to refuse to live.
Naomi Kaplan showed no acceptance. Not yet. The fury still smoked in her dark brown eyes, hot from hatred's forge. There wasn't enough vengeance in the universe to slake Kaplan's ferocious rage, but enough time hadn't yet passed for her to realize that.
Ansten FitzGerald, Guthrie Bagwell, Ginger Lewis, Tadislaw Kaczmarczyk, and Amal Nagchaudhuri were all, to greater or lesser extent, mirrors of Kaplan.
It was the suddenness of it, Terekhov thought. The stupidity. These people—all of them, even, or especially, Abigail—had seen combat. Had seen people killed. Lost friends. But the incredible, casual speed with which a young midshipwoman, the crew of Hawk-Papa-One, and fifteen Marines had been wiped away before their eyes . . . That was something else. And all of it had been for absolutely nothing. The man who'd apparently killed them out of panic and terror-induced vengefulness was dead. So were the vast majority of his crew mates.
All for nothing, he thought, remembering Ragnhild's face, all the times she'd piloted his pinnace. Remembering how she'd tried to hide her frustration at the youthfulness of her appearance, her joy when the pinnace gave her wings. Remembering all the incredible promise of the life which had been wiped away as if it had never existed.
No, he told himself, angry with his own thoughts. No, not as if she'd never existed. She did exist. That's why this hurts so much.
"Before I say anything else," he said quietly, "there will be no self-recrimination. If anyone in this ship is to blame for what happened to our people on that pinnace, that person is me. I sent them across, knowing that ship was armed."
People stirred around the table. Most of them looked away. But Abigail Hearns looked straight into his eyes, and shook her head. She said nothing, yet she didn't need to, and somehow Terekhov found himself looking back into her eyes. And then, to his own surprise, he nodded once, accepting her gentle correction.
"Skipper," FitzGerald began, "you couldn't have—"
"I didn't say I made the wrong decision, based on the information we had, Ansten," Terekhov interrupted. "We're Queen's officers. Queen's officers die in the line of duty. And Queen's officers send other people places where they die. Someone had to take that pinnace across, and as I said at the time, only a lunatic would've tried to stop it. One did." He inhaled deeply. "But it was still their job to go, and my job to send them. I did. No one else in this ship did. I will not have any officer—or midshipman—under my command blaming himself for not possessing the godlike power of clairvoyance to predict what was going to happen."
He let his eyes circle the table one more time, and this time all of them looked back at him. He nodded in satisfaction, then flipped his right hand and turned his attention to Kaczmarczyk.
"Tadislaw, suppose you brief everyone on what we've learned so far."
"Yes, Sir." Kaczmarczyk drew his memo pad from the case at his belt and keyed the display alive.
"This vessel belonged to the Jessyk Combine," he began. "Given its construction and outfitt
ing, it clearly falls under the equipment clause of the Cherwell Convention. As such, all members of its crew are legally liable to the death sentence, even without reference to what happened to Hawk-Papa-One. They realize this, and the surviving personnel are falling all over themselves trying to provide sufficient information to buy their lives.
"What we've learned so far—"
* * *
Stephen Westman watched the air car settle beside the tent once again.
Maybe I should just leave it permanently set up here, he thought wryly. It'd be a lot less work than constantly putting it up and taking it down again.
The hatches opened and the familiar "guests" climbed out once more. But this time, the midshipwoman wasn't present, and he felt a flicker of surprise.
Greetings were exchanged, and then he, Terekhov, Van Dort, and Trevor Bannister were once again seated around the camp table.
"I have to say this is a surprise," he said. "I sort of figured you'd leave me to stew a mite longer."
"We planned to," Van Dort said. "But something's come up. Something you should know about before you make any decisions."
"Like what?" Westman recognized the hardness that crept into his voice whenever he addressed Bernardus Van Dort. He did his best to restrain it, but a lifetime of hostility couldn't be that readily overcome even by someone who was positive he wanted to overcome it. And Westman remained far from certain he did.
"You may have noticed Ms. Zilwicki isn't with us," Terekhov said, pulling the Montanan's eyes to him. "I've relieved her of all other duties to allow her to deal with the effects of Midshipwoman Pavletic."
Westman stiffened in his chair. He remembered the other midshipwoman. He hadn't met her, the way he had Zilwicki, but some of his . . . friends in Brewster had managed to get pictures of her when they photographed Terekhov's planeted pinnace, and he remembered the way they'd joked about how young she looked.
"Effects?" he repeated.
"Yes. Ms. Pavletic, the flight crew of her pinnace, and fifteen of my Marines were killed five hours before the Chief Marshal contacted you. Their pinnace was destroyed by an armed merchantship in orbit around Montana."
