by David Weber
Yang-O’Grady’s fervor for punishing the traitors seemed to have ebbed a bit, he thought. Pprobably because she was a civilian. She’d thought all along in terms of the nice, clean destruction of deserted installations. Explosions that might do terrible damage to a star system’s economy and standard of living, but wouldn’t kill anyone. Now it looked as if quite a few “anyones” were about to be killed, and she didn’t like it.
I don’t like it, either, he thought. But I knew something like this could be in the cards from the instant I read the precis of Parthian Shot. It didn’t take a genius to read between the lines and know what that meant…and what’s likely to happen to anyone who fails to come through in the crunch. Besides, this is my responsibility. Making the point to Hypatia—and everyone else in the goddamned galaxy—just became my job. So I’ll do it, and these people had better by God believe I will. And so should the next system on the Buccaneer list. In fact, running up the death toll here just might help that “next system” see the error of its ways without having to kill anyone there.
The truth was that every life lost here might well save dozens of lives later. He didn’t like thinking in those terms—and recognized the sophistry of any comfort they might give him—but that didn’t make them untrue. And what that meant for extended time limits…
“Not necessarily, Ms. Yang-O’Grady,” he told her, his tone cold. “I’ll make that call when I get there. So I guess we’ll just have to see.”
Prásino Phúllo Habitat
Hypatia Planetary Orbit
Hypatia System
Corporal Helike Vasdekio was only twenty-nine T-years old, but she’d joined the Hypatia System Patrol when she was just seventeen, and she’d learned a lot in those twelve years. At 162.6 centimeters, and small-boned, she was no hulking giantess. Her mother had always insisted she was “no bigger than a minute” when she was a little girl, but she was a very muscular and solid “minute” these days. She was also a member of HSP’s Alpha Seven, its elite Search and Rescue team, as well as a highly skilled cargo inspector with no less than nine major smuggling busts to her credit. So there was ample reason for her to feel confident and competent to handle any duty that came her way.
But she’d never expected this one.
She stood almost in a position of parade rest, with her hands clasped behind her. A pulser nestled in a shoulder holster under her left armpit, a stun baton hung from her belt, and the visor of her skinsuit’s helmet was raised as her brown eyes watched the crowd. They were very still, those eyes, with something deep and dark lurking in their depths, yet she was unfailingly courteous. She smiled a lot, too. It wasn’t easy, but reassurance was something Alpha Seven’s teams learned to project early—people who needed rescuing were generally a little stressed, after all—and the last thing anyone needed was a panic in the evacuation queue.
Next month was her thirtieth birthday, and she wished she’d be there for the party her fiancé had planned. A lot of people weren’t going to be where they’d thought they would, though, and there were a lot worse things someone could be doing just now. A lot worse ways someone could—
“Look, Mommy! It’s Helike!”
Vasdekio’s head snapped around. It took her eyes a second or two to pick up the tiny, dark-haired girl child who’d just appeared out of the crowd. Then she went down on one knee and opened her arms wide.
“Petra!”
The girl flung herself into Vasdekio’s embrace, and the corporal hugged her back, careful of the way her lightly armored skinsuit could bruise. She looked up over Petra’s shoulder at her mother and saw the recognition—the happiness at seeing a familiar face—flicker through Kassandra’s expression. Then the relief disappeared, and Vasdekio sighed silently. Of course Kassandra was smart enough to realize why Vasdekio was here…and that she’d undoubtedly still be here, still be trying to save a few more lives, when the timer ran out.
“Kassie,” she said, standing and holding out her hand.
“I wish I were happier to see you, Helike.” Kassandra Tsoliao’s tone, even more than her words, confirmed that she’d guessed the truth.
Vasdekio smiled at her, briefly but with more genuine warmth than most of her other smiles had contained, and flicked an inquiry into her uni-link. Then she nodded.
“You and Petra are on the list, Priority Gamma,” she said. “That means you go to the head of the queue for the next shuttle, not this one.”
She twitched her head sideways at the line of passengers—many of them weeping, one or two on the edge of hysteria…or with the glassy, drugged smiles of someone who’d already been there—creeping down the boarding tube to the shuttle in Bay Eighteen Bravo’s Number Three docking buffers. It didn’t look as if all of them were going to get on board, but she pointed at a line on the deck to one side.
“Over there,” she said. “There are another couple of dozen Gamma Priority people already here. Go ahead and walk on over. We’re due to start forming the line in another couple of minutes, anyway; might as well get the two of you close to the head.”
“Thank you,” Kassandra said softly.
She gave the corporal’s hand one last squeeze, then twitched her head at Petra.
“You heard Helike, sweetheart. Let’s go get in line.”
* * *
“Man, I don’t like this,” Alexandros Karaxis said. “Don’t like it one bit, Apollo!”
“How about telling me something I don’t already know, Xander?” Apollo Dukakis shot back, rolling his eyes in exasperation. At twenty-seven, he was eight T-years older than Karaxis…and twelve T-years his senior in Prásino Phúllo Grúpes—the Green Leaf Griffins—one of the more vicious gangs which made some places in Prásino Phúllo Habitat’s bowels unsafe to visit.
“Man, they gonna put all these sheep onboard those shuttles and they ain’t gonna do shit for us. Hell, they probably be just as happy to get rid of us once and for all!”
Despite Alexandros’s less than stellar performance on the Hypatia Department of Education’s standardized tests, there were moments when he grasped the essence of a situation with commendable clarity, Apollo thought. This was one of them. No doubt burning a house to the ground was an expensive way to get rid of the cockroaches, but if the place was going to burn anyway, you might as well make sure as few roaches as possible made it out. And he had to admit that from the perspective of Hypatia’s law-abiding community, the Grúpes would make very nice cockroach briquettes. For that matter, he couldn’t even blame them.
That didn’t mean he had to go along with their plans in his own, personal case, however, and for his present purposes, Alexandros’s size—he stood 195.6 centimeters in his smelly sock feet and had massive, powerful shoulders—offset his sad lack of mental acuity.
“Just be frosty,” he said now, softly. “There’s not enough time to get into position for this shuttle. But be ready when the sheep start boarding the next one. You know what to do, right?”
“Oh, right!” Alexandros smiled and slid his hands into his trouser pockets to touch the waiting knuckledusters. He did so like hurting people, and this time it would be for a much better cause than usual.
* * *
The shuttle which had been loading when they arrived departed, and Kassandra watched the next one slide into the buffers and engage the umbilicals. The display lit with the flight number—179-PPE-6 and the name Asteria—and the window between its arrival and the previous shuttle’s departure was far shorter than standard operating procedure would ever have permitted under normal circumstances. No one was likely to complain today, though, and she watched the light above the boarding tube turn green, signifying a good seal. The exhausted-looking young man in the same Traffic Control uniform Sebastianos wore on formal occasions—the sight of it sent a fresh pang of worry through her—held his uni-link to his ear, listening to it through the not-so-muted crowd-mutter of the packed concourse. Then he nodded.
“Ready to board!” he called. “Have your uni-links ready for the scanner
, please! And remember, if you’re not scheduled for this flight, you won’t be allowed to board, but there are going to be plenty of additional flights!”
Kassandra checked her own uni-link, then gripped Petra firmly by the hand as the exhausted-looking young man stepped aside. He made a beckoning motion with his hand, and they started forward. It was going to—
“Mommy!”
She heard Petra scream at the same instant her daughter’s hand was snatched out of her own. She turned frantically, then cried out and went to both knees, holding a suddenly bloody face as the hulking tough’s knuckledusters smashed her to the deck with a brutal backhanded blow.
“All right!” the other ganger, the one who’d snatched Petra off the deck, shouted. He held the sobbing, terrified girl suspended by the neck of her coverall with one hand while the other closed upon the nape of her slender neck, and his face was hard. “We got no boarding passes,” he snarled, “but we ain’t staying on this fucking deathtrap, either! So you’re letting us on the shuttle. And if you don’t, this little girl? She’s gonna need a new neck, ’cause I swear to God, I’ll break it in a heartbeat.”
“You realize,” a single voice replied quietly into the sudden, ringing silence his threat had produced, “that if any of that happens the authorities will be waiting for you dirt-side? The instant you step off that shuttle, a dozen SWAT guys will bust your arse like a soft-boiled egg. And they’ll enjoy it, too.”
Dukakis, who was all of five centimeters shorter than Karaxis, turned toward the speaker, holding the sobbing little girl between them, and his lip curled. The HSP corporal was a good thirty centimeters shorter than he was and looked like she couldn’t have weighed a whole lot more, without the skinsuit and the equipment belt, than the little girl in his hands. She stood eight or nine meters away from him, and she hadn’t even drawn her stun baton. She simply stood there, arms folded across her chest, and cocked her head as she gazed up at him.
“Listen, mouní,” he sneered, “nothing worse they can do to me down there than what’s gonna happen if I don’t get my arse off this hab. Me and my bud here? We be just as happy to surrender all sweet and gentle the instant we hit the ground. Can’t hardly do anything like you’re talking about to us ’thout violating our civil rights, if we don’t resist arrest, now can they?”
Helike Vasdekio considered him with a calm, thoughtful expression that masked the fury raging inside her as she saw Kassandra kneeling on the deck, clutching her broken face while the second ganger twisted one fist in her hair and brandished the other one in promise of still more violence if anyone was stupid enough to approach him. Most of that fury was directed at the gangers, but a lot of it was directed at herself, as well. She should have spotted the tattoos on the younger thug’s forehead and right cheek. And she certainly should have recognized the sinuous green griffin that covered the entire right side of the older one’s face. She was exhausted, she was scared, and she knew she was going to die, but that was no damned excuse for not doing her job and sparing her friends at least this much of the nightmare.
“That’s your last word on the subject?” she asked. “You figure you’ll get your ride down, then get taken into custody, spend a little time in Eval, and then do—what? Five T-years? Ten?—for assault and kidnapping. Got it all worked out. Trade a few years in the slam for getting off the habitat before something nasty happens to it. Right?”
“For a mouní, you ain’t so stupid after all,” Dukakis told her. “Yep, that’s ’bout the way it’s gonna work. And if it don’t?” He shrugged. “Well, in that case, I guess my arse gets locked up up here, instead, and somebody else gets this little bitch’s seat, ’cause she won’t be needing it.” He shrugged. “Way I see it, I’m no worse off that way.”
“Well, if that’s the way you see it, then I guess the only thing for me to do is to spare you the cell time,” she said, and he grinned in triumph.
Then her right hand moved. It had been tucked into the bend of her left elbow as she stood with her arms crossed. No one had been able to see it until it moved, and even then its movement was so smooth, so casual, so manifestly unthreatening, that it took Dukakis a moment to realize what he was seeing. Indeed, it was unlikely he ever did realize, because he was too busy dying to work it out as the pulser whined and his head exploded.
Petra screamed in fresh terror as the hurtful hands relaxed instantly. She tumbled to the deck. An instant later, Dukakis’s corpse fell over her, crushing her with its weight. Somebody—a man—started to shout something. But then she heard the high, shrill whining sound a second time. He stopped shouting in mid-word, and she heard another voice, one she knew.
“Petra! Petra, it’s okay, honey!” that voice said urgently. “Some of you help me get this bastard off her!” it snapped to someone else, and the weight crushing her was suddenly lifted away. She wailed in panic, then sobbed in relief as Helike Vasdekio’s arms enveloped her.
“It’s okay,” Helike murmured in her ear again and again. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. It’s okay.”
“Mommy! Mommy-Mommy-Mommy!”
“Your Mom’s hurt, honey,” Helike told her. “But she’s going to be all right, I promise. And the man who hurt her, he’ll never hurt anyone again. I promise you that, too. Do you believe me, Petra?”
Petra pushed back from Helike, bracing her hands on the corporal’s shoulders and staring into her eyes through the curtain of her own tears. She stayed that way for several, eternal heartbeats. Then she nodded once, convulsively, and collapsed back against the side of her parents’ friend’s neck, sobbing.
“It’s okay, Petra,” Helike Vasdekio told the weeping child in her arms as she stepped across the bodies of the men she’d just killed. A couple of other evacuees and one of the habitat EMTs had helped Kassandra back to her feet. Now they steadied her, walking her down the boarding tube to the shuttle, and Helike paused at the entrance.
“You’ve got to go now, Honey,” she said, handing Petra off to one of the shuttle flight crew. The girl tried frantically to cling to her, but she shook her head and disengaged the clutching hands as gently as she could.
“I’ve got her, Helike,” a voice said gruffly, and she looked up in recognition.
“Take care of her for me, John,” she said, feeling her eyes burn. “Her dad’s a friend. And he’s running Flight Control for this entire station quadrant.”
Sergeant John Debnam met her gaze and nodded in understanding as he gathered the little girl who was about to lose her father into his arms.
“I’ve got her,” he promised again, his weary voice softer. “I’ll look after her and her mom. My word.”
“Thanks,” Vasdekio said even more softly, then looked down at Petra, frightened and tearful as she found herself in a stranger’s arms.
“You go on with John now, Petra,” she said. “He’s a good friend of mine. He’ll take good care of you and your mom. And you be brave, hear me?! Your mom needs you, and she’s going to need you even more in the next little bit. So you be there for her. Can you do that? Can you be brave for me?”
Petra sniffed, scrubbing her eyes with her fists, then nodded. Her lips trembled, but she actually managed a shaky smile.
“Good!” Vasdekio said. “I knew I could count on you! Now go on, because I’ve got to get back to work.”
HMS Angrim
and
HMS Cinqueda
Hypatia System
“I don’t like this, Jayson. I don’t like it at all,” Commander Megan Petersen said. “If they’re serious about something like this in Hypatia, what are they going to be willing to do somewhere else?” She shook her head, brown eyes worried. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about where this is going to end up.”
It wasn’t something she would have admitted to anyone under most circumstances. And as the captain of a Queen’s ship, it was something she couldn’t have admitted to any of her crew. A captain’s job was to project the confidence, or at least the determination, her peo
ple needed from her. It was not to let those same people see the inner frailties any human being possessed. They knew they were there, but just as the rules of the game required her to pretend they weren’t, those same rules required her crew to pretend she’d fooled them.
Her father had tried to warn her how lonely command was, and she’d believed him. She just hadn’t realized how deep that loneliness could cut. Especially when the man she loved was so close at hand…and so far away.
“Can’t say I’m too crazy about it, myself,” Commander Jayson Stob told her from his cabin aboard HMS Cinqueda. “I’d like to think the bastards were only running some kind of elaborate bluff—or that this Hajdu’s timetable was just designed to get the Hypatians to evacuate as quickly as humanly possible. The only problem is, I don’t.”
“It’s just…I’ve already seen this before. I don’t want to see it again. Not here, not anywhere,” Megan said, and Jayson nodded.
Megan’s previous ship, HMS Nomad, had made her hyper translation just outside the Manticore Binary System’s hyper-limit less than forty-five minutes before the Yawata Strike had turned her elation and eager anticipation into nightmare.
She’d been Nomad’s XO, completing her final deployment before assuming command of a brand, shiny new destroyer. HMS Arngrim’s originally designated CO had been reassigned to the command of a Saganami-C completing at Hephaestus, and Nomad had been ordered to expedite her return to Manticore so Megan could replace him.
That’s what she’d been looking forward to—seeing her new ship, meeting her new crew, assuming the hard-earned responsibilities of command. And instead, she’d spent the next ninety-six hours straight pulling scores of bodies and a tiny handful of survivors out of mangled wreckage. Jason had been out-system at the time, spared the first-hand horror she’d confronted, but he knew others who’d been there, and it had left a mark on all of them.
That and an iron determination that something like the Yawata Strike would never happen again. A determination which had to be making the situation here in Hypatia enormously worse for her, he thought, wishing, not for the first time, that they weren’t on separate ships.
