by David Weber
He made himself shake that thought off and closed the bay hatch. He stood up in the pinnace's passenger compartment and nodded to Chief Barstow.
"This bird's ready," he said. "Now let's go see about ours."
"Base, I have Tepes on visual."
Geraldine Metcalf cupped her palm over her earbug as if that could help her hear better. Not that she really needed to; the voice from the lead cargo shuttle was clear and crisp, and she watched the three crimson dots creep closer on her targeting display and wished the assault shuttle's controls felt a bit more familiar. For that matter, she would have traded three fingers from her left hand for the ability to bring her active sensors on-line. The assault shuttle was well concealed, more than half hidden in the visual and radar shadow of Tepes' flared bow, and its passive systems seemed to have a good lock on the cargo shuttles, but that sense of being in someone else’s bird, of not quite having everything under perfect control, continued to jab at her like a sharp stick.
She'd logged thousands of hours in small craft, and if she wasn't as hot a natural pilot as Scotty Tremaine, she was immensely experienced. That was one reason she'd drawn this assignment, and intellectually she felt confident of her ability to carry it out. But that didn't keep her from wishing she'd had a month or two to familiarize herself with this big brute of a boat. She felt heavy and clumsy, which was purely an illusion but felt no less real because of it. And the truth was that she and DuChene would have been hopelessly outclassed in any sort of maneuvering dogfight. Their lack of experience with their craft would have shown quickly under those circumstances... but, then, the entire point of this operation was to keep it from ever turning into a dogfight, now wasn't it? Besides, those trash haulers over there weren't even armed.
"Any sign of external damage, One?" another voice asked over her earbug.
"Negative at this time, Base. I have some debris scatter, but no sign of hull ruptures. I'm assuming they must have blown a boat bay, maybe more than one, but I don't see any indication of anything worse than that. They're certainly not leaking any more air, and I don't have any life pod beacons. It's gotta be some sort of internal electronics failure."
"Yeah?" Charon Base sounded dubious. "I never heard of an electronics failure taking out a ship's whole com net and causing her boat bays to blow up, have you?"
"No, but what the hell else can it be? If they were in any kind of serious trouble, we'd have life pods and small craft evacuating all over the place up here!"
Metcalf smothered a chuckle at the Peep's exasperated tones. She couldn't fault the logic on either side, but that was only because neither of them had ever heard of an "electronics failure" named Horace Harkness.
"Can't argue with that, One," Charon Base admitted after a moment. "What's your ETA for rendezvous?"
"I make it just under fifteen minutes, Base. Maybe a little longer. I want to do a low pass and get a look at her bays before we try to dock at one of the external points."
"Your call, One. Let us know if you see anything interesting."
"Will do, Base. One, clear."
The voices died, and Metcalf watched the shuttles drift slowly closer. A soft, musical tone sounded, and she turned to look at DuChene.
"Acquired and locked," her weaponeer said, and looked up to meet her eyes. It no longer really matter how good the shuttle's passives were, because the seekers in the missiles themselves had the Peeps now. They were locked on and ready to track, and the smile Geraldine Metcalf shared with Sarah DuChene could have frozen a star.
"Still nothing from Tepes?" Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville demanded.
"No, Citizen Admiral," Fraiser replied so patiently that Tourville blushed. He let one hand rest lightly on the com officer shoulder for a moment by way of apology, then crossed back over to Shannon Foraker's station to glare down at the tac panel.
Count Tilly had reduced her velocity relative to Hades to 10,750 KPS, but she would need another thirty-five minutes to reduce it to zero, and by then she would be over seven light-minutes from the planet. To achieve even that much Citizen Captain Hewitt was running his ship flat out, with zero margin for error on her compensator. Tourville supposed many people would question the wisdom of doing that when there was a planetary base available to investigate, but no professional spacer could ignore a ship he suspected was in trouble. And as the minutes ticked away, each of them left him more and more confident that something was wrong, probably seriously. Too many systems must have failed simultaneously to produce this total silence, and he smothered another curse at the dilatoriness of Camp Charon's efforts. Damn it to hell, that was one of their ships up there! What the hell did those StateSec idiots think they were doing?
But there was no answer... and he was still an hour and twenty minutes away.
"I don't like it," Honor said flatly, crouching to look at the memo board with the others. "It's too exposed."
"I'm not denying that it's exposed, Ma'am," Venizelos replied in an equally flat voice, "but we're running out of time."
"What about detouring through these service ways?" Honor demanded, tapping one edge of the display.
"I don't think it'll work, Ma'am," McGinley replied before Venizelos could. "At least someone knows some of us are crawling around in the lift shafts and ducting. If they've managed to pass the word, the bad guys would expect us to go that way from our last point of contact with them. Besides, Andy's right; we're running out of time. We're going to have to make a dash for it, and this offers us the shortest total exposure."
Honor frowned, kneading the dead side of her face with her fingertips and wishing she could feel it. She was closer to Nimitz now, and the 'cat's emotions crackled in their link. The dark shadows of his physical pain were stronger, but so was his excitement. She could get no clear picture of what was happening, but certainly Nimitz seemed to feel things were going according to plan, and she clung to that hope.
But whatever was happening in the boat bay, Venizelos and McGinley were right; they still had to get there somehow, and their options were narrowing. It was just that the route Venizelos had picked ran straight for the nearest lift connecting to Boat Bay Four, and if the Peeps did know there were stragglers trying to link up with the rest of the escapees...
"Andrew?" she asked, looking at her armsman, and LaFollet shrugged.
"I think they're right, My Lady. Certainly it's a risk, but not as big a one as going the long way 'round. If we take too long, Captain McKeon will either have to leave us behind... or, worse, wait for us until the Peeps get all of us."
"All right," she sighed, and the right side of her mouth managed a wry smile. "Who am I to argue with the lunatics who planned this whole thing?"
"Here they come..." DuChene murmured, and Metcalf nodded. The Peep cargo shuttles were getting so close they'd have to spot the assault shuttle shortly, hiding spot or not. Besides, they were beginning to split up, and she couldn't have that.
She watched for another five seconds, then punched the button.
The range was less than sixty kilometers to the furthest shuttle as her impeller drive missiles kicked free of the racks and brought up their wedges. They couldn't match the eighty or ninety thousand gravities of acceleration all-up shipboard weapons could crank, but they could accelerate at forty thousand gravities. The longest missile flight lasted barely .576 seconds, and that was much too short a time for anyone to get a transmission off or even realize what was happening.
"What the...?"
Shannon Foraker jerked upright in her chair, staring at her display, then turned to call for her admiral. But Tourville had seen her jump, and he was already halfway across Flag Deck to her.
"What?" he demanded.
"Those three shuttles from Charon just blew the hell up, Sir," she said quietly.
"What do you mean?" Bogdanovich demanded from behind Tourville.
"I mean they're gone, Sir. Their drive strengths peaked, and then they blew."
"What the hell is going on over t
here?" Bogdanovich fumed.
"Well, Sir, if I had to make a guess, I'd say each of those shuttles just ate itself an impeller head missile," Foraker told him. "And they must've been fairly small birds, or I'd have seen their impeller signatures from here, and I didn't."
The chief of staff stared at her, as if unable or unwilling to believe what she'd just said, then wheeled to Tourville.
If he'd expected the citizen rear admiral to reject the ops officer's diagnosis, he was disappointed. Instead, Tourville simply nodded and walked slowly back to his command chair. He parked himself in it, and spoke very calmly.
"Shannon, I want you to launch an RD. It can get there a hell of a lot quicker than we can, and I want a closer look at what's going on. Got it?"
"Aye, Citizen Admiral," Foraker replied, and Tourville looked up as Bogdanovich and Honeker arrived on either side of his chair.
"It would seem," he said in a quiet voice accompanied by a tight smile, "that Committeewoman Ransom is being hoist by her own petard."
"Meaning what?" Honeker asked flatly.
"Meaning that the only thing I can think of to explain what's going on over there is that her prisoners are up to something."
"But that's even crazier than any other explanation!" Bogdanovich protested, less, Tourville suspected, because he truly disagreed than because he felt someone had to do it. "There are only thirty of them, and Vladovich has over two thousand people!"
"Sometimes quantity means less than quality," Tourville observed. "And whatever they're doing, they seem to have completely paralyzed that ship. I wonder how they got to her computers...?"
He frowned, in thought, then shrugged. At the moment, how they'd done it was less important than the fact that they had, and he sighed unhappily as he realized what he had to do. He suspected he would spend a lot of time avoiding mirrors for the next several weeks, or months, but his duty left him no choice.
"Harrison, com Warden Tresca." He looked up and met Honeker's eyes. "Tell him I think the prisoners aboard Tepes are trying to take the ship... or destroy it."
"Here they come again!"
McKeon wasn't certain who'd shouted the warning this time, but it came not a moment too soon. The Peeps had finally gotten reorganized, and they came storming down the crippled lift shaft behind a curtain of grenades. Pulsers snarled and ripped and flechette guns coughed from the shaft, and McKeon swore bitterly as Enrico Walker took a pulser dart that blew his head apart. The surgeon lieutenant’s body went down with the bonelessness of the dead, and he saw Jasper Mayhew thrown backward as a burst of flechettes slammed into his chest. But like all of them, Mayhew had found time to climb into unpowered body armor from one of the assault shuttles, and he dragged himself back up to his knees and his launcher hurled grenades down the Peeps' throats. Another of McKeon's petty officers went down, dead, he was grimly certain, as a Peep grenade bounced out of the open lift doors and exploded directly behind her, but then Sanko and Halburton got their plasma rifle turned around, and a packet of white hot energy went roaring up the shaft. Anyone who got in its way never had time to realize he was dead, but those on the fringe of its area of effect were less fortunate. Shrieks of agony and secondary explosions as ammunition cooked off rolled from the lift shaft like the voices of the damned, and then Sanko fired a second round and the screams cut off instantly.
No more shots were fired from the shaft, and McKeon heaved a sigh of relief. But he knew the respite would be brief. There were limits on the weapons the Peeps would willingly use against them as long as they held the boat bay, the explosions in the other bays had been a pointed reminder that there were things in here which didn't take kindly to combustion, but there were a lot more of them than there were of his people. And there were fewer of his than there had been, he thought, looking at Walkers body.
He pushed up and walked over to Harkness. The senior chiefs face was drawn and soaked with sweat, but his hands were no longer busy on the keyboard, and he looked up at McKeon’s approach.
"Looks like they finally kicked my butt out, Sir," he said, and bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. "But by the time they did, just about everything but life support got slagged right down to glass. Even if we don't make it, they're gonna be a long time trying to put this bucket of bolts back on-line."
"So they've got complete control of whatever’s left?" McKeon asked.
"Just about, Sir. I don't think they can break my lock on that lift..." he pointed to the intact lift doors through which no attack had yet come "...and there's no software left down here in the bay itself. But give 'em another forty, fifty minutes, and they're gonna start getting some sensors and weapons back under manual control. And when they do..."
He broke off with a shrug, and McKeon nodded grimly.
"Now remember, Ma'am," Venizelos said, his voice low and urgent as they crouched just inside a ventilation grate, "if Harkness pulled it off, that lift'll be waiting when we get there."
Honor nodded. Their journey through the bowels of the ship had been too rushed for Venizelos to give her many details on Harkness' achievements, but he'd managed to hit the high points, and she was astounded by how thoroughly the senior chief had worked this all out. The fact that StateSec had seen fit to maintain outdated files where the brig area was concerned had thrown a monkey wrench into a part of his plans, but that was hardly his fault. And if the rest of them hadn't been working, so far, at least, the Peeps would already have reasserted control of their computers... in which case it would all be over by now.
But if it wasn't going to be over, anyway, they had to get to the boat bay, quickly. Andy and Marcia were right about that, and she leaned back against the wall of the duct, panting for breath and hoping none of the others realized how exhausted she was. The weight and muscle tone she'd lost during her confinement dragged at her like an anchor, and she forced her eyes open and gave her people, her friends, one of her half-smiles.
"At least I shouldn't have any trouble remembering the code," she said, and Venizelos surprised her with a genuine chuckle, for Harkness had used her birthday. She had no idea how he'd happened to remember it, but the senior chief was turning out to be full of surprises.
"All right," Venizelos said, and looked at LaFollet. "Andrew?"
"We go down the passage in single file," the armsman said. "I take point, then Lady Harrington, Commander McGinley, and you. Here, My Lady." He handed the memo board to Honor to take his flechette gun in a two-handed grip.
"You're sure of the route?" she asked.
"Positive." LaFollet took one hand from the gun long enough to tap his temple. "And I want you to have the map if something..."
He shrugged, and she nodded, heart aching for the risks these people, and Jamie Candless and Bob Whitman, had taken for her. She wanted to say something, to thank them, but there was no time and she didn't have the words, anyway. And so she only smiled at her armsman and put an arm around each of her staff officers, hugging them briefly.
"All right," she said then, gathering her own weapon back up. "Let's be about it."
"Warden Tresca thanks you for your warning, Citizen Admiral," Harrison Fraiser reported. "However, he thinks you may be overly alarmed, and he's confident Tepes' crew will soon regain control of their vessel. In the meantime, he's ready to deal with any small craft which may attempt to launch."
"Oh, that's just wonderful!" This time the mutter came from Shannon Foraker, not Bogdanovich. Tourville glanced at Honeker, and then, to their mutual astonishment, both of them grinned matching helpless what-the-hell-do-we-do-now? grins at one another.
"How so, Shannon?" Honeker asked after a moment, and Tourville wondered if Shannon even noticed that the Peoples commissioner had used her first name.
"Well, I was just thinking, Sir," the ops officer replied. "He says he can deal with any small craft that try to launch, right?" The People's commissioner nodded, and Foraker shrugged. "I'd be more reassured by that if they didn't already have at least one small craft, and an arm
ed one, at that, in space." Honeker quirked an eyebrow, and Foraker sighed. "Sir," she said gently, "where else could the missiles that killed Charon's shuttle flight have come from?"
"Go!"
LaFollet kicked the grate loose and charged out after it, and his flechette gun coughed twice before Honor was out on his heels. Only one of his victims had the chance to scream, and then the armsman was running down the passage with Honor on his heels.
It was hard for her to keep up with him, despite her longer legs. Her heart pounded and her working eye blurred with strain as she fought to match his pace, but it took everything she had, and she cursed her long imprisonment and poor diet. She heard McGinley on her heels, and Venizelos after her, and then her blood ran cold as someone shouted behind all of them. Pulsers whined and flechette guns coughed, and despite herself, she turned her head to see Venizelos peel off as he rounded a bend. Her feet tried to stop, fighting to go back to him, but McGinley charged into her from behind.
"Go!" the ops officer screamed, and Honor knew she was right, and her legs obeyed her staffer, but oh how her mind cried out against it, and then Venizelos was down on one knee, and the last thing she ever saw of him he was firing steadily, calmly, like a man picking off targets in a gallery, covering her retreat while she ran and left him to die.
More fire echoed, from ahead this time, and she half-stumbled over a body. For a terrifying instant she thought it was LaFollet, but then she saw the StateSec uniform and knew her armsman had killed whoever it was on the run. As he was killing more people.
LaFollet had saved her life once before, from assassins, he and Jamie Candless and Eddy Howard, but Honor had been too stunned by events to truly realize what was happening then. Today was different, perhaps because Jamie and Eddy were dead and her heart of hearts knew LaFollet was damned to die for her as well. She didn't know. She only knew that this time she blinked her eye clear of the filmy blur of strain, and for the first time she saw what a lethal force he truly was.