by David Weber
"Propellant leak!" it announced. "Multiple propellant leaks! Evacuate the bay immediately. Repeat, evacuate the bay immediately!"
It was neither a computer-generated voice nor a stored message, and as panic swept the bay, no one noticed that they didn't have the least idea just whose voice it was. It came from the intercom speakers, and it spoke with absolute authority. That was all they needed to know, and they stampeded for the lifts as red and amber danger lights began to flash. Tepes lurched yet again as Boat Bay Five blew up, and the fresh concussion lent desperation to their flight. They piled into the lifts, too frantic to escape even to notice the blood-soaked corporal kneeling beside a dead sergeant, and as Carson Clinkscales watched them go, he knew that for the first time in his life, he'd gotten everything exactly right.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Citizen Lieutenant Hanson Timmons was in a foul mood.
He stood ramrod straight in his dress uniform, gloved hands folded behind him, swagger stick clasped in his right armpit, and glowered at the lift doors. A double watch section stood with him, weapons slung, each man and woman as immaculately groomed and polished as he himself while they waited for the camera crews to come collect the single prisoner in their charge. His people had taken special pains with their appearance, and not just because of the impending cameras. Their detail commanders growing frustration had been apparent for weeks, and no one wanted to give him the slightest excuse to vent it on them. Timmons knew that, and knowing they recognized his wrath only made it worse, for in recognizing it, they'd obviously guessed what caused it.
Timmons had been posted to the command of Tepes' brig detachment only a few weeks before Cordelia Ransom sailed for Barnett, and considering his relatively junior rank, the assignment had been quite a plum for him. It had also been an indication of the favor in which his superiors held him... and of their faith in his abilities. In the course of his career with StateSec, he'd specialized in the management of politically sensitive prisoners, and he'd always delivered them in exactly the desired condition. Usually, that had meant breaking them to heel, reducing them to cringing compliance with whatever StateSec might demand of them, and Timmons was confident he could break anyone. After all, a man was usually good at his work when it was a job he loved.
That was, in fact, the reason he'd been assigned to Ransom’s personal transport, for the Secretary of Public Information had anticipated an occasional need for the services of such a specialist. But the citizen lieutenant was a frustrated man this time, for Honor Harrington had eluded his best efforts. Of course, he'd been handicapped by Committeewoman Ransom's demand that she be delivered to the executioner in shape to appreciate, and react to, all that happened to her. After all, the cameras would be recording her big moment for later broadcast. But knowing she would be going before those cameras had ruled out the application of much direct physical coercion, it wouldn't do to mark her badly enough to evoke sympathy from the viewers, and Ransom’s insistence that she react properly to her execution had ruled out the use of drugs.
Viewed objectively, Timmons couldn't really fault the restrictions. It wasn't as if they were trying to get information out of Harrington, and there was no real need to break her if they were only going to hang her. But that didn't change the fact that he'd wanted to crush her. He had his professional pride, after all. Besides, he enjoyed his work, and he'd been confident of his ability to break her as he'd broken everyone else... which only made the blow to his pride even more severe when he failed.
It should have been so simple! Even without the cruder forms of physical abuse or drugs, humiliation should have done the trick. He'd recognized the steel at her core, but that had only added to his anticipatory pleasure, for he hated the proud ones. The ones who looked down from the mountains of achievement to sneer at the lesser mortals at their feet. There was a special joy in hurling them down from the heights, and one thing he'd learned dealing with Legislaturalist prisoners was that humiliation's effectiveness as a means of breaking resistance was directly proportional to the power a prisoner had wielded before his fall. Someone accustomed to seeing his orders swiftly implemented, of having control of himself and his surroundings, was far more vulnerable to impotence than someone who had never been in a position of command. When it was borne in upon him that nothing he did could have any effect on what happened, that his authority had become total helplessness, the shock and shame struck with crippling power. Timmons had seen it again and again, in civilian and military prisoners alike, and because he had, he'd never doubted that Harrington would follow the same pattern.
But she hadn't, and he couldn't understand it. Other prisoners had tried to escape him by withdrawing into their own private worlds, but none had succeeded. There were too many ways to jerk them back, and they always worked. Except that they hadn't worked this time. There was a strange, elastic power to Harrington’s resistance, as if by refusing to resist the blows he rained upon her she somehow deprived them of their power, and in a way he couldn't quite define, that made her refusal to resist the most potent defiance he'd ever encountered. Most of his mind insisted that if he'd only had more time he could still have smashed that nondefiance, but deep inside, he knew better.
He'd calculated everything so carefully, metered the humiliation so precisely. He'd opted for the death of a thousand cuts, stripping away her defenses with her dignity and her self-confidence with her ability to control her fate, and for a time, he'd thought he was succeeding. But he hadn't been, and he'd slowly realized he wouldn't. What she'd done to Bergren three days earlier only confirmed what had already become obvious to him. This time, he wasn't going to succeed. He'd had her for a T-month, and if he hadn't broken her in that long, then he never would without turning to sterner measures.
And those measures were denied him. What he wanted to do was storm into her cell with a neural whip and see how she liked direct stimulation of her pain centers for an hour or two. Or there were other, older-fashioned techniques, cruder, but perhaps even more effective because they were crude, which he'd learned from the ex-InSec personnel who'd trained him. But Ransoms orders not to damage her prevented him from doing any such thing. In fact, he was more than a little afraid of how the Committeewoman was going to react anyway when she set eyes on her prize once more.
Regulations had demanded the deactivation of Harrington's implants, but he hadn't counted on what that would do to her face. Nor had he expected the tech who deactivated them to actually burn them out, leaving no way to reverse the process. He didn't expect Ransom to be pleased to have her prisoner looking like a pre-space stroke victim, nor did he expect her to be happy at how gaunt and starved looking Harrington had become. But that wasn't his fault, damn it! He'd fed her regularly! In fact, he'd...
The ship lurched. It was more of a tremor, actually, but even that was enough to make him stiffen. The battlecruiser massed the next best thing to a million tons. Only something frighteningly violent could send a shock through something that huge, and Timmons turned towards the security console... just as a second shockwave lashed through the ship.
The second one was more pronounced than the first, and Timmons moved faster. Citizen Private Hayman jumped out of his way as he stepped behind the console, but the lieutenant hardly noticed. He stabbed the com key just as the ship trembled for a third time, but nothing happened.
Timmons frowned and punched another key, but still nothing happened. He felt ripples of panic beginning to spread through his subordinates as yet another concussion echoed through the ship, and his own panic rose with theirs as he entered still a third com code and got no response at all.
People aboard starships rely absolutely upon their technology, and nothing is more terrifying than to have that technology fail, especially for no apparent reason. Timmons was no exception to that rule, and he snarled at the communicator's dead display, then reached a decision and thrust a hand into his tunic pocket for his personal com.
As the commander of the brig secu
rity detail, he'd been issued a personal communicator, to be used only in the direst of emergencies. Outwardly indistinguishable from any other, it had one important difference: it didn't go through the main com net. Instead, it was a secure link to Citizen Colonel Livermore, CO of Tepes' ground force and security detachments, via a stand-alone system which had absolute priority.
"Yes?"
The single word, without any identification, was hardly correct com procedure, and Timmons recognized the confusion and fear within it. Yet simply hearing it was still a vast relief.
"Timmons, Brig Detail," he said crisply, drawing the comfort of proper protocol about himself. "Our communications are out down here. What's happening?"
"How the hell do I know?" the unidentified voice snarled back. "The whole frigging ship is coming apart, and..."
Hanson Timmons never learned what else the voice might have said, for at that moment, the lift doors slid open. His head snapped up, and he wheeled towards them in confusion, for the tone to signal an approaching lift car hadn't sounded. His confusion deepened as he looked into the darkness of the shaft and realized the tone hadn't sounded because there was no car... and then the first flechette gun coughed.
The brig passageway opening off the lift formed a dogleg to the right on its way to the cells. LaFollet didn't know if that was a deliberate security feature, but it certainly had the effect of one.
He and Candless had been ready when the rest of the rescue party opened the lift doors manually... which was more than could be said for the half-dozen people standing there in their black-and-red dress uniforms. Each had a flechette gun slung over his or her shoulder, and a pulser rode at each right hip, but most of them had been looking away from the lifts, at the officer behind the security console at the bend in the corridor. Their heads started to turn as the doors slid apart, and one of them actually shouted something and clawed frantically at his slung weapon, but he was too late. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless had debts to pay, one to their Steadholder, and a very different one to her enemies, and their eyes were merciless as they squeezed their triggers.
Flechette guns were designed for shipboard combat. The modern descendants of pre-space shotguns, their grav drivers punched out masses of knife-edged flechettes. With much lower velocities than pulser darts, they were less prone to dangerous ricochets or punching holes in important pieces of equipment, but they were lethal against any unarmored target. Their projectiles dispersed into deadly patterns, controllable by the "choke" setting on their pistol grips. They could be set to cover a cone over a full meter wide at a range of five meters from the muzzle, or as little as fifteen centimeters across at a range of fifty meters, and flesh and bone meant very little to the razor-cruel flechettes.
LaFollet and Candless had set their weapons to maximum dispersion and full automatic. The cycle time on a flechette gun was much slower than that of a pulser, but that hardly mattered given their wide area of effect. The guns coughed rhythmically, belching death and destruction, and the waiting SS guards exploded in a bloody mist.
"We're under attack! We're under attack!" Timmons screamed into his com even as he flung himself down behind the security console. Flechettes slammed into it like deadly sleet, and he scuttled down the passage on his elbows and belly. A single flechette, licking through the gap between the console and bulkhead, caught him just as he rounded the bend, and he screamed as it chewed into his thigh. Slower than a pulser dart or not, it was still traveling at three hundred meters per second, and it sliced the back of his leg like a high-velocity axe. The lieutenant dropped his com involuntarily to clutch at the bloody wound with both hands, and the communicator slithered away across the deck. He heard the shouted questions from the other end even through his own sobs of anguish, but he had no time to worry about answering them. Most of his people were down already, but the two he'd posted as formal guards outside Harrington’s cell had been shielded by the bend in the corridor. That pair had been intended as window-dressing for the formal transfer of the prisoner, but stationing them here had had the effect of giving him a reserve, and he bared his teeth in a pain-stretched snarl. "Get ready!" he gasped at them, and took his right hand from his gashed leg. His fingers were slimy with his own blood, but he drew his pulser and covered the bend as he shoved himself along the deck on the seat of his trousers and his wounded thigh left a bright red blood trail behind him.
"Go!" LaFollet snapped, and Robert Whitman vaulted from the lift shaft into the brig passage. "At least one got around the turn!" LaFollet warned him.
The other armsman nodded, but he never slowed in his dash for the security console. He went down on one knee, weapon ready, and stiffened as he heard a voice.
"Timmons! Timmons! What the fuck is going on down there?"
He realized instantly what he was hearing, and that whoever was on the other end of that com link would be sending help as quickly as he could. Time had just become an even more deadly foe, and he looked back over his shoulder at LaFollet and Candless, just starting to climb out of the shaft.
"Open com link!" he shouted, and then, before anyone could stop him, rolled out of his cover with the flechette gun on full automatic.
Timmons heard the shout and grinned viciously. The bastards knew someone would be coming up their backsides any minute now. All he and his remaining men had to do was hold out, and he suddenly realized how he could do just that. These idiots had to be here to rescue Harrington, so all he had to do was open her cell and drag her out into the middle of the firefight, and...
His thoughts broke off as someone rolled out into the very middle of the passage. His sudden appearance took Timmons totally by surprise, and he gaped at the apparition in shock, unable to believe anyone would deliberately throw himself into what he knew had to be a deathtrap. But that was because he'd never encountered a Grayson armsman whose Steadholder was in danger. Robert Whitman had only one purpose in life, and his very first shot tore Citizen Lieutenant Timmons to bloody rags.
The two men further up the passage poured fire back, but the bare bulkheads and deck offered no cover... for anyone. Deadly clouds of flechettes shrieked past one another, intermingling and then separating, all of them set for maximum dispersion, and there was no place to hide.
"Citizen Admiral?" Lester Tourville looked up quickly, for there was something very odd about Shannon Foraker’s tone.
"What?" he asked, and the ops officer frowned.
"I think you'd better look at this, Sir," she said. "Tepes' active sensors just went down."
"What?" Tourville said again, in a very different tone, and Foraker nodded.
"Every one of them, Sir." Foraker had gotten even more careless, or deliberate, about her "elitist" vocabulary over the last month, but this time Tourville was certain she'd used "Sir" without even thinking about it. "They shouldn't have done that," she went on. "They're through the main minefields and into orbit, but nobody in her right mind would shut down her radar."
Tourville nodded and walked quickly across the deck towards her station, for she was right. Tepes might be in her designated parking orbit, but with so many mines floating around the possibility of one having strayed into her orbital path could never be completely ruled out.
"Anything from her at all, Harrison?" he demanded.
"Negative, Citizen Admiral," the com officer replied. "I don't, Just a second, Citizen Admiral." Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser listened to his earbug intently, then turned to Tourville. "Citizen Captain Hewitt reports that he was receiving a message from Citizen Captain Vladovich, Citizen Admiral. Apparently the transmission was interrupted in the middle of a sentence."
Tourville and Bogdanovich looked at one another, then turned as one to Everard Honeker. The People's commissioner looked back at them, as confused as either of the naval officers but not as immediately concerned. Unlike them, he didn't fully understand just how massive an interruption Tepes' systems had just apparently suffered.
Tourville saw Honeker’s incomprehensio
n and started to speak, then stopped himself and looked back down at Foraker. The tac officer was bent over her display with focused intensity, and he glanced at it himself rather than disturb her.
The relative orbital positions of Hades and Cerberus-B-3 were such that Count Titty had passed within less than two light-minutes of the former on her vector for the latter. Hades now lay almost exactly three and a half light-minutes off her starboard bow, moving away from her at a little over 26,000 KPS as she continued to decelerate towards Cerberus-B-3, and he glanced back up at Citizen Commander Lowe.
"Assume we go to maximum military power. How soon could we reach Tepes?"
Lowe punched numbers into her panel quickly, then looked back up.
"We'll need a little over eighty-three minutes to decelerate to rest relative to Hades, Citizen Admiral. If we go for a least-time flight from that point, we can reach the planet in another hundred and seventeen minutes, call it three hours and twenty minutes total, but our relative velocity would be over thirty-six thousand KPS. If we go for a zero-velocity intercept, it'll add almost another hour to the flight profile."
Tourville grunted and turned back to Foraker's panel. He drew a cigar from his pocket and unwrapped it slowly, never taking his eyes from the data on the display. He had the cigar half-way to his mouth when Foraker sucked in an audible breath and his own hand froze.
"Citiz..."
"I see it, Shannon," he said quietly, and his hand moved the cigar the rest of the way to his mouth. "How bad is it?" he asked almost absently.
"I can't say, Citizen Admiral. But look here and here." She tapped a secondary display at her elbow, and Tourville nodded slowly as he scanned the readouts.