The Service of the Sword

by David Weber

  "There is that," Lithgow agreed after a moment's consideration.

  "Damned straight there is," Ringstorff said. Then he snorted in amusement. "And I suppose I should also point out that whatever happens to the Four Yahoos, we should be just fine. After all, we're only an unarmed depot ship. Not even Morakis could expect us to get into shooting range of an enemy warship to support her. So if anything unfortunate happens to the cruisers, we'll just very quietly sneak away under stealth. And tell whatever idiot back home in Mesa thought this one up that his precious Silesian pirates couldn't cut the mustard when it came down to it."

  "The home office won't be especially pleased with you if that happens," Lithgow warned.

  "They'd be even less pleased if we wound up committing these idiots to action during the main operation and they blew it then," Ringstorff replied. "And if they do manage to screw the pooch this time, I guarantee I'll make that point in my report!"

  "What about that pinnace of theirs? According to the surveillance platforms, it's just left atmosphere headed after them, but it's never going to catch up before the shooting starts. So what do we do about it afterwards? For that matter, what about Refuge?"

  "Um." Ringstorff frowned. "The pinnace is going to have to go," he said. "We have to assume that the cruiser's captain's already passed his intentions and at least some general info on to the pinnace crew. I don't know about the rest of Refuge, though."

  He drummed lightly on the edge of his desk with both hands for several seconds.

  "I'd prefer to just leave them alone," he said finally. "They don't have any surveillance net of their own, so the only information they could have would have to come from the cruiser's transmissions. I doubt a regular navy captain would want to get them into the line of fire if he could help it, though, so he may not have transmitted to them at all. Of course, the safest solution would be to go ahead and take them out, as well. It's hardly like there are enough people down there to get the Sollies in an uproar over the Eridani Edict, after all! But it would piss off Pritchart—she's already irritated enough over what happened to her transport—and remember that she was a frigging Aprilist before the Pierre Coup. She wouldn't object to breaking however many eggs it took to deal with a problem like this, and it could get nasty if something we did convinced her government to begin actively cooperating with the Erewhonese."

  He pondered for a few more moments, then shrugged.

  "We'll have to play that one by ear," he decided. "If we can nail the pinnace and its crew, that's the main thing. If it looks like the other side did transmit to the Refugians, we'll just have to take out Zion, as well. We know their planetary com net sucks, so if we wipe out their main groundside com node, we should wipe out any information in it, as well. Hell, we can probably get away with sending in a couple of assault shuttles to take out just their com shack!" He chuckled suddenly. "Matter of fact, if we handled it that way, it might even get us some brownie points for our 'humanitarian restraint'!" Then he sobered. "But if it looks like the information's gotten beyond Zion, then we'll do whatever we have to do."

  " . . . so for right now, I want you t' head back t' Refuge. We'll return t' collect you and your people after we investigate this contact."

  Abigail watched Captain Oversteegen's face on the small com screen. He looked calm and confident, despite the fact that CIC had confirmed that both of the incoming impeller signatures belonged to something at least the size of heavy cruisers. That was big for a pirate vessel, yet far too small to be any sort of merchant ship. Of course, no pirate was going to be able to match either the technology or the training of the RMN. But still . . .

  "Understood, Sir," she told him, and waited out the light-speed communications delay until he nodded in satisfaction.

  "Keep an eye out," he said. "Right now, it looks like we're lookin' at only a pair of ships. And it's still possible we're goin' t' find out that they're regular warships here for a legitimate purpose, too. But whatever they are, they're maintainin' their course along the outer edge of the limit. That's . . . unusual enough t' make me suspicious, but it also means they're not immediately tryin' t' evade us. So if it turns out they're pirates, they're mighty gutsy ones. Either that, or they've got something t' hide that's important enough for them t' risk taking on a heavy cruiser. And if they do, they're not goin' t' hesitate t' go after a pinnace, as well. Exercise your discretion . . . and try not t' get the Refugians involved. Oversteegen, clear."

  The screen blanked. Abigail sat and gazed at it for a moment, then shook herself, stood, and stepped forward from the flight engineer's cramped cubbyhole of a compartment to the flight deck.

  "You heard, PO?" she asked the pilot.

  "Yes, Ma'am," Petty Officer First Class Hoskins replied. She gestured at her maneuvering plot, which was currently configured to display the entire system. The small display was too tiny to show much detail on such a large scale, but it was more than enough to show Gauntlet's friendly green icon speeding rapidly away from the pinnace towards the two unknowns. "'Bout to get kind of lonely, Ma'am," she observed.

  "I think I feel sorrier for whoever that is, assuming they're bad guys, than I do for the Captain," Abigail said, and realized she wasn't just preserving a confident front for Hoskins' benefit. "But in the meantime, I suppose we should do what we were told. Let's turn it around, PO."

  "Yes, Ma'am. Should I head for Zion, or just for planetary orbit?"

  "I think we'll want to stay away from Zion, whatever happens," Abigail said slowly. "For right now, plan on sliding us back into orbit when we reach the planet. We can always change our minds later, if we have to."

  "Aye, aye, Ma'am," Hoskins said, and Abigail nodded and turned to make her way back to the passenger compartment.

  Sergeant Gutierrez looked up alertly, and she parked herself back in her own chair, across the aisle from the Marine.

  "Gauntlet has picked up a couple of unknown hyper footprints," she told him. "She's moving to investigate them now."

  "I see, Ma'am." Gutierrez considered her with neutral eyes. "And what about us, if I can ask?"

  "The Captain wants us to head back towards Refuge. We can't match Gauntlet's acceleration rate, and he doesn't want to delay to pick us up."

  "I see," Gutierrez repeated.

  "He doesn't want us to involve the Refugians if anything . . . unexpected happens," Abigail continued.

  "Do we have some reason to expect that something will happen, Ma'am?"

  "Not that I'm aware of, Sergeant," Abigail replied. "On the other hand, there are two of them. That we know of," she added, and Gutierrez looked at her for a moment.

  "Do you really think there could be more of them hiding out there, somewhere, Ma'am?" The sergeant's tone was respectful enough, but that didn't keep him from sounding just a little incredulous.

  "I think that, as far as we know, the Alliance has the best sensor technology in space, Sergeant," Abigail told him, keeping her own voice serene. "I also think a star system represents a very large volume of very empty space, and we don't have a system-wide surveillance net in place. So while I don't necessarily think it's likely there are more of them around, I also don't think it's impossible. Which is why I'd like to be prepared for the possibility."

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  It was plain to Abigail that Gutierrez was humoring her, however respectfully he was doing it. Obviously, he was of the opinion that a midshipwoman who left her Marine bodyguards behind while she wandered off into the middle of an unknown settlement without a qualm and then worried about invisible bogeymen ambushing a Queen's ship had certain problems rationally ordering threat hierarchies. Not that he would ever dream of saying so, of course.

  "What sort of preparations did you have in mind, Ma'am?" he asked after a brief pause.

  "Well," Abigail said in a thoughtfully serious tone, moved by a sudden visitation from the imp of the perverse, "as I said, the Captain doesn't want us to involve the Refugians. So that seems to me to rule out a return to
Zion. In fact, it would probably be a good idea for us to stay as far away from any of the Refugians' settlements as possible. After all, if there are other pirates in the system, they might decide to send one of their other ships after us, as well."

  Gutierrez didn't say a word, but Abigail found it difficult not to giggle at his expression. Clearly, he was becoming even more convinced the midshipwoman with whom he'd been saddled was a dip. Now she thought pirates confronted by a Royal Manticoran Navy heavy cruiser would worry about chasing down a single pinnace? It must have been all he could do to not shake his head in disbelief, she reflected, but she kept her own expression completely serious.

  "PO Hoskins is a very good pilot," she continued, "but there's no way a pinnace could avoid a regular warship in space. So if someone does come after us, I'm going to have her set us down somewhere on the planet—preferably clear on the other side of it from the closest Refugian settlement. Of course, if they track us in, they'll be able to find the pinnace without too much difficulty, whatever we might do to conceal it. So, in a worst-case scenario like that, we'll have to abandon the pinnace and seek to evade any pursuers groundside until Gauntlet can return to pick us up."

  Gutierrez's eyes were almost bulging by now, and Abigail smiled at him with an expression of becoming earnestness.

  "Bearing all of that in mind, Sergeant," she told him, "I think it would be a good idea for you to make a complete survey of the survival gear we have on board. Decide what would be useful to us and get it organized into man-portable packs in case we do have to abandon."

  Gutierrez hovered on the brink of protest, but he was a Marine. He couldn't quite bring himself to explain to Abigail that she was a lunatic, so instead he swallowed all of the many arguments which must have presented themselves to him and simply nodded.

  "Aye, aye, Ma'am. I'll . . . get right on it."

  "You know, Captain," Commander Blumenthal said thoughtfully, "these guys seem to have really good EW."

  "What d'you mean, Guns?" Captain Oversteegen asked, turning his command chair to gaze in Blumenthal's direction.

  "It's really more of a feeling than anything else at this point," Blumenthal said slowly. "But I'm having a lot more trouble getting a lock on their emissions signatures than I ought to be." He gestured at his display. "The recon platforms are less than two million klicks out, and they still aren't getting as much as they ought to. If they were still under stealth, that would be one thing, but they aren't. Instead, they seem to be doing some sort of weird jingle-jangle on our drones' passives. I haven't seen anything quite like it before."

  Oversteegen frowned thoughtfully. The possibility that the newcomers might have a legitimate reason for visiting Tiberian had become increasingly less likely. Without the RMN's FTL com capability, there'd been an inevitable light-speed transmission delay of just over thirty-two minutes built into any challenge/response com loop. But they'd passed that point some time ago, and the fact that the unknowns had completely ignored all of Gauntlet's challenges and efforts to establish communications was certainly a bad sign. Unfortunately, neither the current RMN rules of engagement nor interstellar law gave him the right to preemptively attack someone simply because they refused to talk to him.

  Normally, Oversteegen had no particular problem with that restriction. In this instance, however, he had quite a large problem with it. Although Gauntlet was only a heavy cruiser, without the magazine space or the launch tubes for the all-up multi-drive missiles which had given the Manticoran Alliance such a decisive advantage over the People's Navy during the final phases of the war, the missiles she did have were significantly longer ranged than those any other cruiser-sized vessel was likely to carry. But the unknowns were already inside his own theoretical envelope for a maximum-range engagement, and they were continuing to close. At the present rate of closure, in fact, he'd be inside their engagement range within less than another twelve minutes.

  Which meant this was not a moment at which he wanted to discover that whoever they were had better hardware than they ought to have.

  "We still don't have even a national ID, Sir," the tactical officer continued, "and I'm not happy about that."

  "It's not just a class we haven't seen before?" Oversteegen's voice was more that of a man thinking aloud than that of someone actually asking a question, but Blumenthal replied anyway.

  "Definitely not, Sir. I cross-checked what we do have against everything in the database. Whoever these people are, we don't know them. Not, at least, based on the emissions we've been able to pick up so far, even with the Ghost Rider platforms. That's what worries me. We ought to be able to make some stab at IDing them, and we can't."

  Oversteegen nodded. The RMN's long-range, real-time reconnaissance drones gave it an enormous tactical advantage. At the moment, Blumenthal undoubtedly had a far better look at the unknowns than they could possibly have at Gauntlet. But that didn't help a lot if Gauntlet couldn't identify what she was seeing.

  "Can you maneuver one of the platforms for a visual ID?" he asked after considering possibilities.

  "I think so, Sir. But it'll take a while. And it'll have to be a down-the-throat look, and at that range, even Peeps could probably nail the platform, stealth or no stealth."

  "Go for it anyway," Oversteegen decided.

  "You know," Ringstorff said, "I don't think I've had an operation get this fucked up in the last ten T-years. A Manty. A frigging Manty!"

  He scowled down at his plot. The information it displayed was over nineteen minutes old, given the distance between the depot ship and the cruiser they'd identified as "Erewhonese" on the basis of the sensor emissions their stealthed inner-system platforms had picked up. But they'd forgotten that the Erewhonese weren't the only ones with Manticoran Alliance hardware, and the relayed challenge this HMS Gauntlet had transmitted to Tyler left no doubt about her nationality. His scowl deepened as he considered the implications, but Lithgow, on the other hand, only shrugged.

  "No way you could have known until they challenged Tyler," he said. "Who would have expected to see a single Manty cruiser this far from home now?" He grimaced. "They've been pulling their horns in steadily ever since Saint-Just mousetrapped them into that cease-fire."

  "Well, pulling in or not, they're here," Ringstorff grumbled.

  "Doesn't really change anything, though, does it?" Lithgow asked, and Ringstorff looked at him. "What I mean is, they're obviously working with the Erewhonese, or they wouldn't be here. In that case, all of the arguments in favor of keeping them from passing on any scan data about us still apply, don't they?"

  "Sure they do, but you heard Tyler's voice as well as I did. He's scared shitless by the very thought of crossing swords with a Manty!"

  "So what?" Lithgow chuckled nastily. "He's already inside their missile range, so it's not like he has any choice about engaging them, anyway. And whatever the Peeps may think, I don't believe Manties are supermen. The Yahoos have state-of-the-art Solarian missiles and EW, and there are four of them. Two of whom the Manties don't even know are there yet!"

  "I know." Ringstorff inhaled deeply and nodded, but despite that, he was far more anxious about the possible outcome than Lithgow was. Unlike Ringstorff, Lithgow was a Solarian himself, recruited by Ringstorff's superiors for the job. This was his first trip to what the League still referred to as the Haven Sector, and it had been obvious to Ringstorff for some time that Lithgow resented the enormous respect—one might almost say terror—which Manticoran technological superiority generated in the minds of the locals.

  Part of that was the simple fact that Lithgow hadn't been here while the Manties' Eighth Fleet had been busy smashing every Peep fleet or task force in its way into rubble. But an even bigger part of it, Ringstorff was convinced, was the unshakable confidence in their own unassailable technological supremacy which seemed to be a part of the intellectual baggage of every Solly he'd ever worked with.

  Still, he told himself, it was always possible Lithgow's view was at lea
st as accurate as his own. He, after all, was an Andermani, and the Andermani—like their neighbors in the Silesian Confederacy, although to a lesser extent—were accustomed to the notion that the Royal Manticoran Navy was the region's premier fleet. No one in his right mind pissed off the Manties. That was a fundamental rule of survival for the various pirates and rogue regimes of Silesia.

  Which was the real reason for his concern. Lithgow was certainly correct that Tyler and Lamar couldn't evade action at this point whatever they did, and he was also right that the Yahoos' capabilities were almost certain to come as a nasty surprise to the Manty. Not to mention the fact that the Manty seemed totally oblivious to the other two cruisers creeping up behind him. So by every objective standard, it ought to be the Manty who was in trouble.

  Except that the Four Yahoos were all Silesians, which meant they were unlikely to see it that way.

  "Who the hell are these people?" Commander Blumenthal demanded rhetorically as he glared at the visual image frozen on his display.

  As he'd more than half-feared, the cruiser he was looking at had picked up the recon drone as it came sidling in for an optical pass. The target's forward missile defenses had promptly blown it out of space. In fact, they'd done it considerably more quickly than he'd anticipated, and he didn't like the acceleration numbers on the counter-missile they'd used. Nor did he care for the increasing evidence that their EW capabilities were much, much better than those of any "pirates" he'd ever heard of. For that matter, they were at least twenty or thirty percent better than anything Gauntlet had on file for first-line Peep systems!

  "That, Guns," Captain Oversteegen murmured from where he stood at Blumenthal's shoulder, "is an excellent question."