In Enemy Hands hh-7

by David Weber

  He ran quickly, smoothly, head turning in metronome arcs to sweep the passage ahead of him. He carried the heavy flechette gun at his hip, the sling over his shoulder to steady it, and his finger stroked the trigger in elegant, precise bursts as astonished Peeps popped up before him, attracted by the clangor of battle exploding in their very midst. He was a wizard of death, dispatching his sorcery in the lethal patterns of his flechettes, for he was fighting for his Steadholder’s life and anyone who crossed his path was doomed.

  And then he rounded the last bend and shouted in triumph as he reached the lift doors at last.

  He spun back the way he'd come, waving Honor past him to enter the command code, and he and Marcia McGinley crouched on either side of the passage down which they'd come, pouring fire back up it. Heavier weapons were snarling back, now, and as Honor hammered the lift button, she heard the distinctive, ear-splitting devastation of a tribarrel slicing bulkheads like a bandsaw.

  The doors opened and she leapt through them, stabbing at the panel. Lights flickered on the display, then burned steadily, confirming that Harkness' control of the lift still held, and she turned back towards her friends. "Come on!" she shouted. "Come on!" McGinley heard her and wheeled, teeth bared in a huge smile of triumph as she ran for the lift... and then she seemed to trip in midair, and her torso exploded as the tribarrel sawed through the bulkhead, and Honor screamed in useless denial.

  "Go, My Lady!" LaFollet shouted, slamming his final magazine into the flechette gun. "Go now!"

  He went down on one knee, firing desperately, firing like Jamie had, like Robert and Venizelos and Marcia, and Honor couldn't leave him. She couldn't!

  "Come on, Andrew!" she screamed, but he ignored her, and then a grenade skittered around the bend and he hurled away his weapon and flung himself on it. Somehow he reached it before it exploded, and his frantic heave sent it back the way it had come, but not quite soon enough, for the blast picked him up and bounced him off the bulkhead like a rag doll. He slammed to the deck, motionless, and Honors heart died within her.

  She had to go. She knew she had to go. That this was what her armsmen, her friends, had died for. That only her escape would give their deaths meaning, and that it was her duty, her responsibility, to go.

  And she couldn't. It was too much, more than she had in her to give, and she dropped her own weapon and hurled herself from the lift. The grenade explosion seemed to have stunned the attackers, any who were still alive, and not a shot was fired as she flung herself down beside Andrew. She was weak and wasted, running on adrenaline and desperation alone, and it didn't matter. She snatched him up as if he were a child and flung him over her shoulders even as she turned back towards the lift.

  And that was when the Peeps seemed to snap back awake. Pulser darts whined and shrieked, ricocheting from the bulkheads. More grenades exploded. The tribarrel opened fire once more, flaying the bulkheads, and the entire universe was a seething, screaming tide of metal and hate ripping about her ears.

  She staggered as a flechette chewed into the outside of her right thigh, but she kept her feet and hurled herself into the lift. She spun on her toes, blood scalding her leg as the wound pumped, and somehow she hit the release button without dropping LaFollet.

  The car began to move, and relief rose in her, warring with her grief, but she was going to make it. She and Andrew were going to make...

  And that was when the tribarrel tore the lift doors apart.

  "The lift! Someone's coming down the lift!"

  McKeon whirled at the shout, and his heart leapt. If Harkness' lockout had held, that could only be the people who'd gone after Honor, and if it wasn't...

  He beckoned, and Sanko and Halburton turned their plasma rifle back to the undamaged lift while Anson Lethridge dashed across the deck towards it with a grenade launcher.

  But then the lift stopped, the doors opened, and Lethridge froze. He stared into it, ugly face blanching, and then he hurled away his launcher and charged into it. McKeon followed on his heels, and the captain gasped in horror at what he saw. The upper third of the lift car had been torn to bits, not so much shattered as sliced by what could only have been a heavy-caliber tribarrel, and bits and pieces of knife-edged alloy, some small as a fingernail paring, others the size of a man’s hand, had been spewed out of the lift wall like bullets. He knew they had, for Honor Harrington and Andrew LaFollet lay entangled on the lift floor, and the entire bottom of the car was coated in blood.

  Lethridge was already there, lifting LaFollet off his Steadholder and passing the limp armsman to McKeon. The captain took him and passed him out to other, ready hands, but his eyes never left Honor as Lethridge went to his knees in her blood.

  It was her arm. Her left arm was shattered just above the elbow, and Lethridge’s hands moved with desperate speed as he whipped his own belt around her upper arm, right at the armpit, and yanked the crude tourniquet tight. And then he and McKeon between them picked her horribly limp, blood-soaked body up and ran for the pinnace.

  "Bug Out One, this is Bug Two. Say status."

  Geraldine Metcalf started to sigh in relief as Captain McKeon's voice sounded in her earbug, but then his tone registered. It was harsh and jagged, with a fury, or a despair, Metcalf had never heard from him, and she turned to look at DuChene.

  "Status green," she said into her com after a moment. "I say again, status green."

  "Very well," McKeon's voice came back. "Stand by for Falling Leaf."

  Two stolen StateSec assault shuttles moved towards one another, hiding in Tepes' radar shadow as they used the lobotomized battlecruiser for cover. Some of the ship's systems were coming back on-line under manual control, but not many, and she was still blind, unaware of the two tiny motes gliding rapidly towards her stern on thrusters alone. Nor did any of Tepes' crew suspect that Horace Harkness' final, and most deadly, computer programs weren't in the main system at all. They were in the single assault shuttle and pinnace still in Boat Bay Four.

  Scotty Tremaine was at Bug Out Two's controls, with McKeon in the copilot's seat, and he watched the digital timer on the instrument panel count down and prayed that Harkness had gotten it right. It felt disloyal to doubt the senior chief, but surely it was too much to expect him to get everything right! And if he hadn't...

  The third shuttle came screaming out of Boat Bay Four under maximum reaction power. Its carefully programmed flight path brought it whipping up past Tepes' armored flank, then steadied down on a course away from Hades with Tepes directly between it and the planet. Its impeller wedge came up as soon as it was clear of the ship, and its acceleration leapt instantly to four hundred gravities.

  "Impeller signature!" Shannon Foraker barked.

  Count Tilly had killed her velocity relative to Hades and started back the way she'd come, but she remained far beyond any range at which she could have intervened in what was happening in Hades orbit. The drone she'd launched was still too far out for good detail resolution, but it was close enough to see the brilliant gravitic beacon of a pinnace streaking for the stars. For that matter, her shipboard sensors easily picked up its impeller wedge, and Foraker clenched her jaw as the small vessel raced for freedom.

  "Do they have it from Camp Charon?" Tourville asked urgently.

  "They must, Sir," she said grimly, and looked up to meet her admiral's eyes. Then she looked back at her display, already knowing what she would see.

  Most of the defenses around Hades were designed to kill starships, not something as small and agile as a shuttle. None of the energy platforms or hunter-killer missiles could target something that tiny, not efficiently, and Camp Charon was in no mood to try. Nor did it need to, for that was why the old-fashioned area-effect mines had been emplaced. And so the ground base waited calmly until the small craft passed almost directly between two hundred-megaton mines, then pressed a button.

  "Now!" McKeon said sharply, and Scotty Tremaine gave his thrusters one more nudge that sent Bug Out Two sliding rapidly away f
rom Tepes. The shuttles onboard sensors were temporarily useless, blinded by the enormous power of that explosion... but so, hopefully, were those of Camp Charon.

  "Should be activating just... about... now!" McKeon said, and looked through the view port at the battlecruiser shrinking against the stars.

  The small craft of all impeller-drive navies have at least one thing in common. They may be larger or smaller, armed or unarmed, fast or slow, but every single one of them is fitted with safety features to prevent it from bringing up its drive when any solid object large enough to endanger it, or to be endangered by it, lies within the perimeter of its impeller wedge. And above all, it is impossible to accidentally activate an impeller wedge while still within a boat bay.

  But those safeguards, while as near to infallible as they can be made, are designed to prevent accidents, and what happened in PNS Tepes' Boat Bay Four was no accident. The only vessel left in it was the pinnace upon which Scotty Tremaine had labored, and now Horace Harkness' last program brought its systems on-line. But Scotty had made one small alteration: he had physically cut the links between the pinnace's sensors and its autopilot. The flight computers could no longer "see" the boat bay about them. As far as they could tell, they could have been in deepest, darkest interstellar space, and so they felt no concern at all when they were commanded to bring the pinnace's wedge up while it still lay in its docking buffers.

  "My God."

  Shannon Foraker’s hushed whisper seemed to echo and re-echo across Count Tilly's flag deck as PNS Tepes blew apart.

  No, Lester Tourville thought shakenly. No, she didn't blow apart; she simply came apart. She... disintegrated.

  And that, he realized, was precisely the right word. The battlecruiser’s fusion plants blew as their mag bottles failed, spewing white-hot fury amid the wreckage, but it didn't really matter. Nothing could have survived that dreadful, wrenching blow from inside her hull. All the fusion plants did was vaporize a few score tons of wreckage and silhouette the rest of it against a star-bright fury, like snowflakes in a ground car's headlights.

  He stared in awe at the visual images of the carnage transmitted from their RD to the main view screen, and he knew how it had happened. He'd never actually seen it before, but there was only one thing the Manties could possibly have done to produce that effect, and a corner of his mind wondered distantly how they'd gotten past the fail-safes that were supposed to make it impossible.

  Everard Honeker stood before him, even more stunned than any officer on the flag bridge, and Tourville drew a deep breath as he looked at the People's commissioners back. He glanced around at the rest of his staff and their yeomen, every one of them as hypnotized as Honeker. All except Shannon Foraker, still bent over her display, seemed unable to think beyond the stunning shock of what had happened, but Tourville could, and a strange, vaulting exuberance warred with his horror at so many deaths. He knew he should be as numb as the others, as incapable of thought, but he couldn't help himself, couldn't keep a single thought from tolling through his brain.

  Cordelia Ransom was dead. And so was Henry Vladovich and all the other people aboard that ship who'd known what Ransom had planned for Lester Tourville and his staff. No one else knew, for they'd stopped nowhere between Barnett and here, and Ransom had taken too much pleasure out of keeping them dangling in suspense to tell anyone what she intended. But now she was gone, and all her files and her entire personal staff were gone with her, and if it was wrong to rejoice when so many people had died, he was sorry, but he just couldn't help it.

  And then he saw Shannon Foraker's right hand come out of her lap and move slowly, almost stealthily, towards her panel. Something about its movement caught at his attention, and he crossed quietly to stand behind her. She heard him and looked up, and her hand moved away from the "ERASE" key even more slowly, and far more reluctantly, than it had come.

  Tourville gazed down over her shoulder at the tactical recording she'd been replaying, and his jaw clenched as he saw what she'd seen: two pieces of wreckage, larger than most of the others, and on a vector which had clearly taken them away from the murdered battlecruiser before she exploded. A vector which just happened to look very much like an unpowered reentry course.

  He looked at them for another long moment, rubbing his fierce mustache with one finger. Shannon’s drone had seen them, but it was highly unlikely Hades' EMP-blinded sensors had picked them up in time, and with the destruction of the "fleeing" pinnace, no one would even think to look for them. He felt a deep flicker of admiration for whoever had thought this one up, but he knew what his duty required of him.

  Yes, I know what "duty" requires, he thought, and reached down past Shannon’s shoulder to press his own finger firmly on the "ERASE" key. He heard Shannon inhale sharply, saw her head twitch, but she didn't say a word, and he turned away from her panel. He walked across to where Honeker and Bogdanovich stood, both still staring in awe at the visual imagery of the spreading pattern of wreckage relayed by Shannon's drone, and cleared his throat.

  "Too bad," he said gravely, and the sound of his voice startled Honeker into turning to look at him. "There can't be any survivors," Tourville told his commissioner, and shook his head regretfully. "Too bad... Lady Harrington deserved better than that."

  Epilogue

  She woke slowly, and that was very unlike her. Thirty-five years of naval service had trained her to awaken quickly and cleanly, ready to face any emergency, but this time was different. It was hard to wake, and she didn't want to do it. There was too much pain and despair waiting for her, too much loss, and her sleeping brain cringed away from facing it.

  But then something changed. A warm weight draped itself across her chest, vibrating with the strength of a deep, buzzing purr, gentle with love, that seemed to pluck at the very core of her.

  "N-Nimitz?"

  She scarcely recognized the wondering voice. It was cracked and hoarse, its enunciation slurred, yet it was hers, and her eyes fluttered open as a strong, wiry true-hand touched the right side of her face with infinite tenderness.

  Her eyes widened, and she sucked in a shuddering breath as Nimitz leaned closer to touch his nose to hers. She stared at him with her one working eye, raising her right hand to caress his ears as if the simple act of touching him was the most precious gift in the universe. Her hand trembled, with weakness as much as emotion, and the 'cat folded down on her chest to rest his cheek against hers while the depth of his love rumbled into her bones with his purr.

  "Oh, Nimitz!" she whispered into his soft fur, and all the remembered anguish, all the fear and despair she would have died before admitting to an enemy was in that whisper, for this was the other half of her own being, the beloved she had known she would never see again. Tears spilled over her gaunt cheeks, and she reached up to hug him close... and froze.

  Her right arm moved naturally to clasp him tight, but her left...

  Her head snapped over, her working eye wide, and her nostrils flared as shock punched her in the belly, for she had no left arm.

  She stared at the bandaged stump, and disbelief was a strange sort of anesthesia. There was no pain, and her mind insisted she could feel the fingers on the hand she no longer had, that they still obeyed her, clenching into a fist when she willed them to. But those sensations were lies, and she lay frozen in that moment of stunned awareness while Nimitz pressed still harder against her and his purr burned still deeper and stronger.

  "I'm sorry, Ma'am." Her head turned the other way, and she looked up into Fritz Montoya’s face. The surgeons eyes were shadowed, and she felt his mingled regret and sense of guilt as he sat beside her. "There was nothing else I could do," he told her. "There was too much damage, too much..." He stopped and inhaled, then looked her squarely in the eyes. "I didn't have the tools to save it, Ma'am, and if I hadn't amputated, we'd have lost you."

  She stared at him, trapped between too many emotions for rational thought. Joy at her reunion with Nimitz, astonishment that she was alive at
all, the shock of her mutilation, and behind all that the waking memories of friends who had died, who would never wake, as she, to find they had somehow survived after all, crushed down upon her, and she couldn't speak. She could only stare up into Montoya’s careworn face while her right arm held Nimitz tight and her soul clung even more tightly to his.

  She didn't know how long it lasted, but finally the right corner of her mouth trembled in a fragile, almost-smile, and she freed her hand from Nimitz to hold it out to Montoya.

  "Fritz," she said softly, wonderingly. He took her hand and squeezed it fiercely, and her too-thin fingers returned his clasp.

  "I'm sorry," he repeated, and she shook her head on the pillow.

  "Why?" she asked gently. "For saving my life, again?"

  "He did that, My Lady," another voice said, and Honor gasped. She tried to sit up, but her right hand still held Montoya’s, and she hissed in sudden pain as she tried to rise on the left hand she no longer had and the bandaged stump pressed into the firm softness on which she lay.

  Montoya started to stand, his face distressed, but someone else's arms reached out to support her. Nimitz spilled from her chest, lying beside her, and she pulled her right hand from Montoya’s. Her arm went out, and the pain still rippling through her meant nothing at all as she hugged Andrew LaFollet with all the fierce strength in her wasted frame.

  Her armsman returned her embrace, and she felt the terrible power of his own emotions echo and reecho deep within her. She tasted his own relief at having survived, his grief for those who had not, and his fierce pride in them. But over and above everything else, she felt his devotion, his love, for her and his joy that she was alive, and she clung to him as she had to Nimitz.