by David Weber
“Exactly,” Michael agreed. “I remember Mom—your grandmother—saying that the very best thing we could do as a family and as future monarchs was to put as much grit into the system as we could because, more than anything else, it was going to be our job to maintain stability. Having said that, though, we probably do need to start looking into current expert opinion on it.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Elizabeth said. “Because I’m not going to marry again. Not yet. Absolutely not simply because someone else tells me to.”
“Understood, Eli—” Burgundy glanced at the guards at the door. “Your Majesty,” he corrected himself.
Elizabeth felt her throat tighten. Even a man old enough to be her grandfather, a man who’d watched her grow up, and who’d held her hand through this whole horrific crisis, now couldn’t bend enough to be her friend instead of her subject.
Edward had sometimes talked about how lonely the Monarch could be. Elizabeth had usually dismissed such comments as over-dramatic grumbling. Little had she known.
“More concerning to me,” Michael said, “is the question he didn’t bring up. Namely, what happens with the line of succession?”
Elizabeth stared at him. She’d been so preoccupied with Breakwater’s marriage thing that the succession hadn’t even occurred to her.
“Your father’s right,” Burgundy agreed soberly. “Your three stepchildren aren’t eligible—they’re not your biological offspring and the Constitution definitely does specify that the crown can pass only to the heirs of your great-grandfather King Roger. With Richard, Sophie, and Edward gone—” He shook his head. “We may be on the edge of more than just a constitutional crisis here, Your Majesty. We could conceivably lose the whole Winton line.” He lifted his hands, palms upward. “And then what?”
“Unless I remarry,” Elizabeth murmured.
“Unless you remarry.”
“Or find another solution,” Michael said.
Abruptly, Elizabeth noticed that she and Burgundy were both still standing.
“We need to discuss this further,” she said, gesturing the Prime Minister back to his chair. “Do you have time now?
“I always have time for my Queen, Your Majesty,” he said.
“I think my schedule’s clear, too,” Michael added dryly.
Unbidden, a smile touched Elizabeth’s lips. Even unnaturally aged with grief, her father had the ability to lighten her mood.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you both.” She walked over to her father’s couch and sat down beside him. “Let’s start by pulling up a copy of the Constitution. After that, we’ll want a sampling of relevant commentary for the past sixty T-years.”
“And perhaps speak—privately—with the handful of writers, like Davis, who are still around,” Michael said.
“Yes, excellent point,” Elizabeth agreed. “We need to know what the document says, what the writers meant it to say—” She smiled briefly at the two men, but the smile faded quickly “—and what the experts think it says.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
General Haus hadn’t been happy that neither Llyn nor any of the others of his team would be going to Barca with them. But he’d accepted the second payment with mostly good grace and headed back to the Grand Duke with the goodies.
Now it was time to head over to Telmach and see how many of Gensonne’s people were still breathing.
Of course, given the number of battlecruisers the damned Manticorans still had, the entire Volsung force could still be alive. If Gensonne had realized his pre-battle intelligence was off and run for it without firing a single shot, none of them would have gotten so much as a scratch.
But if there had been a fight, especially given the Manticorans’ obviously minimal losses, he could have gotten hammered pretty damned badly. And if that had happened, it was unlikely he’d blame anything but his faulty intelligence for it. Given that, and given Gensonne’s reputation and temper, a slower, more careful approach was called for.
“Sir, we’ve received a transmission from Posnan Customs,” Katura reported. “A stock-sounding welcome to their system and a list of the services they offer.”
“Along with the associated prices, I see,” Llyn said dryly, running an eye down the list. In his limited experience with the Silesian Confederacy, the main sport was attempting to gouge everyone in sight, on every good and service imaginable.
Not that there was much of either in a backwoods place like this. Still, what was available was definitely being overcharged for.
Unfortunately, they had a monopoly. If you didn’t want to pay their prices, you had to go elsewhere…assuming you had the range to do that.
“Nice to see Silesia maintaining its new-frontier charm,” he continued. “Go ahead and transmit our greetings and compliments, Captain, and put in an order for a complete refueling when we reach the station.
“Sir, we don’t have to do this,” Katura protested. “We have more than enough fuel.”
“I know,” Llyn said. “But if the Manticorans pounded hard enough on Gensonne, he might have stopped on his way back to Telmach, or to wherever his real shipyard is. Posnan, Silesia, and Saginaw are his three most likely choices and we just happen to have an asset on the Obrączka refueling station.”
“Really?” Katura asked, clearly surprised. “I didn’t know we had anyone here.”
“He’s mostly an independent stringer, but he’s always been reliable. He gets a cut on purchases we make at his station, and whenever he refuels one of our ships we let him add five percent to the invoice without squawking.”
“I assume no one in Accounting ever sees that five percent?”
“Exactly,” Llyn said. “We don’t have the same arrangement in Silesia and Saginaw, which is why I sent Vaagen and Rhamas to poke around there. Banshee and Shrike are better equipped for poking around on their own than we are.”
“I see, Sir,” Katura said. He seemed a bit surprised by the depth of the explanation—Axelrod operatives weren’t in the habit of sharing need-to-know information. But he’d been so clearly unhappy with the decision to detach Banshee and Shrike that Llyn had decided he deserved a bit more background.
Still, Llyn couldn’t argue the point that splitting an already small force was never a good idea.
“I still don’t know why Gensonne would bother to stop off here,” Katura said. His tone was less unhappy than it had been, but he clearly remained far from completely mollified by Llyn’s explanation. “If he made it this far, he could certainly make it the rest of the way to Telmach.”
“Unless he expected the Manticorans to be on his tail,” Llyn pointed out. “In that case, he might stop by one of these other systems to make a few large purchases and try to throw off any pursuit.”
“You think he’s that clever?”
“Not really,” Llyn conceded. “But he could have gotten himself killed in the battle and left someone smarter in charge. Regardless, it’s worth checking out.”
There was a barely-heard sigh.
“Yes, Sir.”
Llyn smiled. Katura was a good pilot, and a highly competent associate. It had been totally the luck of the draw that he’d been available when Llyn needed a crew after stealing that courier ship on Casca.
But then, luck had always been one of Lynn’s best assets.
Some black ops agents, Llyn new, believed themselves to be infallible and had no patience for anyone else’s ideas or suggestions. But Llyn had seen that kind of hubris backfire too many times. Encouraging Katura’s questions and input meant another set of eyes and an additional brain on tap, and that was almost always a good thing.
At least until the operation commenced. At that point, Llyn required instant, unquestioning obedience.
He hadn’t had a chance yet to test Katura and his crew under fire. But that moment would come.
“Sir?” Katura’s voice came again, breaking into his thoughts. “Take a look at the tactical.”
Llyn swiveled around
to that display. It took him a moment to spot the flashing icon the captain had highlighted, just over three light-minutes distant from Pacemaker.
“I see it,” he said. “What about it?”
“It just changed vector, Sir,” Katura said. “It was headed for Piec. Now, it’s not.”
Llyn frowned as he considered the data codes beside the icon. The transponder beacon identified it as an Andermani freighter, the Hamman, and its current acceleration was a comfortably conservative eighty gravities. Three light-minutes was closer proximity than one might normally expect here in Posnan, but that was only because traffic was so sparse. It wasn’t so much a matter of their finding themselves in close physical proximity as it was the oddity of two ships arriving at such a backwater system so close to simultaneously.
The Posnan System was unusual among inhabited star systems in several ways. The most striking was that it contained not one but two gas giants inside its 18.92-light-minute hyper-limit. The outer of the two was Obrączka, Pacemaker’s destination. Piec, the inner giant, was just outside the relatively cool G7 primary’s habitable zone, but the planet itself was hot enough—the name meant “Furnace”—to bring the surface temperatures of its moons up to near-terrestrial levels. Two of them, Kuźna and Palenisko—“Forge” and “Hearth”—were both massive enough to generate atmospheres, hydrospheres, and respectable gravities and warm enough to support life. Both were tied-locked to Piec, though, and their short day-night cycles took some getting used to. They were the only habitable real estate in the system, so it wasn’t surprising that the ship Katura had highlighted had been headed there.
Obviously, the other vessel’s hyper astrogation hadn’t been perfect. It seldom was, really, especially over lengthy distances. Astrogators tried to hit as close as possible to a least-time course to destinations inside a star’s hyper-limit, but it wasn’t uncommon to emerge from hyper as much as two or even three light-minutes from one’s intended alpha translation. Katura was one of the better astrogators Llyn had worked with, and even so, Pacemaker had emerged from hyper a good twenty light-seconds from his intended locus. At the moment, Piec and Obrączka were approaching conjunction, both on the same side of the primary with Piec’s smaller orbital radius catching up on Obrączka from behind. It would be some months yet before they aligned perfectly, but it wasn’t too surprising that ships heading for either of them should emerge from hyper in fairly close proximity.
Except that if Katura was right, the Andermani had just changed course.
“She not only changed heading, Sir, but she also just brought up her wedge to do it,” Katura continued. “I ran back the record, and it turns out she shut down her impellers for about thirty-nine minutes before she brought her wedge back up and changed course.”
Llyn looked at the time cut on Hamman’s vector change. The freighter’s impeller signature had indeed disappeared from Pacemaker’s tracking systems at the time Katura had specified.
Perhaps more ominously, that had been just over two and a half minutes after Hamman could have detected and read Pacemaker’s transponder.
“Maybe it’s a technical problem,” he suggested. “Obrączka is closer than Piec if she’s got problems.”
“I don’t think so, Sir,” Katura said. “To reach her current point, assuming she’s held constant acceleration since crossing the limit, she would have been in-system for over an hour before we arrived, and she was only about six and a half hours from Piec. She can cut about three hours off that by making for Obrączka, but if she had some sort of engineering problem and it was severe enough to make it necessary for her to change course to save that short an amount of time, she ought to be broadcasting a distress signal. Only she isn’t.”
Llyn gazed at the display, an unpleasant feeling creeping up his back. The timing here was suspicious, to say the least. Of course, there were always two or three possible explanations for anything.
Still, he’d learned over the years to trust his instincts, and Katura seemed to have excellent instincts of his own. If the captain didn’t like this…
“Sir, she’s changing vector again,” Katura said.
“I see it,” Llyn said, feeling his eyes narrow. The freighter had executed a slight yaw turn, adding another small sideways component to its original Piec-bound vector. “Get me a new projection.”
“Working on it, Sir, but that yaw was so slight…here we go…hell.”
“Indeed,” Llyn agreed, the unpleasant creeping feeling on his back breaking into a full gallop.
Two vectors extended themselves across the display. One was Pacemaker’s, headed for orbital insertion around Obrączka. The other was Hamman’s, which was now headed toward Obrączka but not directly to Obrączka. Instead, its new course would intersect Pacemaker’s just over seven million kilometers short of the planet.
And if both ships maintained current profiles, their velocities toward the planet would match almost exactly when Hamman crossed Pacemaker’s track at a range of less than half a million kilometers. Hamman would be on a heading slightly away from Obrączka at a fairly shallow angle, but her crossing velocity when she intersected Pacemaker’s course would be less than two hundred kilometers per second.
The freighter was hunting Pacemaker.
She was being subtle about it, with a small enough deviation from a direct course to Obrączka that System Patrol probably wouldn’t notice and wonder what she was up to. Or, for that matter, small enough to be plausibly explained if System Patrol did ask what she was doing.
But she was hunting Pacemaker.
Llyn shifted his eyes to the status board. Pacemaker was still running the Barcan beacon they’d used back at Manticore, mainly because they had it and there was no reason to put together a new throwaway ID.
So who the hell out here would want to bother a nondescript Barcan courier ship?
And then, abruptly, he got it.
“You think it’s a pirate?” Katura suggested.
“It’s not a pirate, Captain,” Llyn said grimly. “I wish to hell it was.
“It’s Gensonne.”
* * *
“Gensonne?” Katura repeated disbelievingly. “What’s he doing on a freighter?”
“I seriously doubt that’s just a freighter,” Llyn ground out, thinking hard.
“But why would he be running an Andermani ID?”
“You know anyone around here who’d mess with an Andermani?” Llyn countered. “Makes for great camouflage. Especially since the conventional wisdom is that Andermani freighters are routinely armed.”
Katura grunted. “Terrific.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Llyn said, more confidently than he actually felt. “By the time they cross our course, they’ll be too close to Obrączka for them to try anything blatant.”
“Unless System Patrol doesn’t want to mess with them, either.”
“System Patrol knows its job better than that,” Llyn said, frowning at the tactical display while he tried to get inside Gensonne’s head.
As he’d pointed out to Katura, they’d be within little more than half a light-minute of Obrączka—basically shouting range—by the time their courses intersected. Unfortunately, shouting range wasn’t remotely the same as shooting range. Given their new vectors, the freighter would pass within seven million kilometers of the planet before her current heading took her back out across the hyper-limit at a fairly shallow angle, so even if there were System Patrol units in Obrączka orbit, they’d be millions of kilometers outside missile range of the intercept point. Even if they were inclined to intervene, they wouldn’t be able to unless they got underway in the next forty-five minutes or so.
Worse, to get to that range in time to do anything about it they’d have to pile up so much delta-V that they’d go right past Pacemaker and Hamman on opposing vectors with a closing rate of over eleven thousand KPS, which would take them through their entire engagement envelope in barely forty-five seconds. Unless they had enough cause t
o simply blow the freighter out of space as they passed, there was no way they could stay in engagement range long enough to do any good or, for that matter, even overtake Hamman before her vector took her back across the hyper-limit and safely out of both their range and their jurisdiction.
Pacemaker, on the other hand, was headed directly into the system, and she’d built too much velocity to simply stop and go back the way she’d come. She was still forty minutes short of her own turnover point for a zero-zero orbital insertion at her destination, but if Hamman was serious about intercepting her—and willing to be more obvious about it—she could change course enough to catch Pacemaker closer to the courier boat’s turnover point, before she was able to generate much velocity back towards the limit. The crossing rate would be higher, but Hamman could do it.
And if she had any appreciable acceleration left in reserve, she could do it even sooner…or at a lower crossing rate, which would leave her within theoretical missile range longer.
“All right,” Llyn said slowly. “If we maintain profile and he holds his current acceleration, he’ll get within four hundred and fifty thousand kilometers of us at closest approach. Correct?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“So what happens if we don’t make turnover? If we just keep accelerating straight in-system past him?”
“Depends on whether or not he really is a freighter,” Katura said. “If eighty gravities is his maximum safe acceleration, then his maximum acceleration with a zero margin on his compensator is only a hundred. But from his wedge strength and his current acceleration, it looks like he’s probably somewhere around a million to one-point-five million tons. If he is, and if he’s got a military-grade compensator, he could conceivably hit twice that. He could come within twenty or thirty gravities of us, anyway.”
“And that means?”
“That means he could add velocity a lot faster than a freighter could, and at the moment, he’s got the base velocity advantage. He’ll still have it when we hit our turnover point, too. If he can hit within…call it twenty-eight gravities of our acceleration, he can still catch us by simply delaying his own turnover point.”
