In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V

by David Weber

  “I mean it, Al!” she said warningly, despite the telempathic treecat’s obvious amusement at whatever he was sensing from O’Neal. In fact, given Nimitz’s sense of humor, that amusement only made her even warier.

  “I know you do, Ma’am. And I’ll be good—promise.”

  Honor regarded him with a trace of lingering suspicion. Lieutenant Mahalia Rosenberg, Hawkwing’s engineering officer, was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and strong-nosed, with a thin, studious face. She was about Honor’s own age, and also, like Honor, from the planet Sphinx. In point of fact, she was from the city of Yawata Crossing, not that far from Honor’s birthplace in the Copper Wall Mountains, although she was one of the minority of the city’s citizens who weren’t even remotely related to the Harrington clan.

  For the most part, Honor approved of Lieutenant Rosenberg. She was good at her job, industrious, intelligent, an excellent chess player, and usually good company. But there was something about Aloysius O’Neal that simply rubbed her the wrong way. Despite the sailing master’s easy-going personality, he and Rosenberg seemed constantly on the brink of some sort of spat. They were like oil and water—or possibly more like flint and steel, given the effortless way they struck sparks off one another.

  She gave him one more moderately suspicious look, then transferred her attention to Nairobi.

  “In addition to whoever Al thinks he’s going to need to run the ship, we’ll have to leave at least a couple of squads of Everett’s Marines aboard as a security element, Taylor. That’s going to make some holes in your watch lists.”

  This time, the executive officer’s nod seemed a tad less cheerful. The Royal Manticoran Marine Corps was larger than similar services in a lot of star nations, but that was partly because its personnel were tasked not simply as the Navy’s ground combat component and boarding force but also as integral members of their ships’ crews. No one was going to mistake a Marine for a trained naval rating, but they served on weapons crews, in damage control parties, and in search and rescue duties aboard ship. Coupled with the naval personnel O’Neal was going to need, sending half of them to another ship was going to cost Nairobi over fifteen percent of his total warm bodies.

  “Be thinking about which squads we can give up with the least repercussions for our shipboard organization,” she told him. “And I’m thinking we’re going to want either Everett or KK over there to help Al keep an eye on things. In fact,” her eyes twinkled suddenly, “if we can find a tactful way to do it, it might not be a bad idea to leave both of them over there. That way KK could keep an eye on Everett, too.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Nairobi replied, and despite any problems he might foresee, there was a hint of the twinkle in his own eyes . . . and less unhappiness in his voice than she’d expected.

  “While the two of you work on that, I’ll get Aniella”—Honor twitched her head in the direction of Lieutenant Aniella Matsakis, Hawkwing’s astrogator—“started laying out our course to Saginaw.”

  Both Nairobi and O’Neal looked at her. The exec did a better job of hiding his reaction (probably because O’Neal didn’t seem to be trying especially hard to conceal his), but it was obvious neither had experienced any sudden thrill of delight when they heard her announcement. Which was fair enough; she wasn’t enthralled by it herself. Unfortunately, her orders left her little choice.

  As far as Honor was concerned, the Silesian Confederacy was more of a continual, ongoing meltdown into anarchy than anything she would have dignified with the title of “star nation.” The local elites had an absolute stranglehold on political and economic power and they were even more corrupt than most of the closed oligarchies one found all too often in the Verge—that vast, sprawling hodgepodge of independent star systems and tiny star nations spreading out beyond the Solarian League. Technically, the Star Kingdom was part of the Verge itself, although the Manticoran Wormhole Junction gave it a direct connection to the very heart of the League, despite its physical location. But Manticore was also a prosperous, well-educated, and politically stable society where upward mobility was the rule, not the exception, which made it a very different proposition from a typical Verge star nation.

  The Confederacy differed from most of those other star nations, too, if not in precisely the same ways. Or in anything like the same ways, when it came down to it. Silesia was far larger than Manticore, for example, with many times the systems and inhabited planets. It also had a large population, decent education (for the children of the oligarchs, at least), a fairly modern (if decidedly second-tier) tech base, and semi-decent healthcare. Given all of those factors, the Confederacy should have been a going concern, but it wasn’t.

  Like the even larger People’s Republic of Haven, although for very different reasons, Silesia’s self-inflicted wounds had turned what ought to have been a thriving, well-off star nation into a shambles. Many of its individual planets or star systems were at least reasonably stable (if not particularly prosperous, by Manticoran standards), and the Confederacy as a whole offered an enormously lucrative market to the Star Kingdom, given the fact that local industry was so hugely underdeveloped. But one of the main reasons for that lack of local development was the way the oligarchs siphoned every possible dollar out of the Silesian economy through graft, bribery, peculation, and outright theft. They were deeply embedded predators, concentrating a stupendous percentage of the Confederacy’s total wealth in a relative handful of pockets, and that suited them just fine. They weren’t suffering, after all.

  Even that would probably have been bearable, if they’d been willing to limit their depredations to the economy. Unfortunately, politics, personal power, and money were even more thoroughly intermixed—and far more bare-knuckled—in the Silesian Confederacy than they were most places. Political power was concentrated just as completely (and in the same hands) as economic power, and the kleptocracy which controlled both saw them only as tools its privileged members could use to improve their own positions vis-à-vis one another. Graft, corruption, and kickbacks would have been bad enough, but piracy was a thriving, long-standing tradition in Silesia . . . mainly because the First Families of Silesia had always been in bed with the aforesaid pirates. They were willing enough to prey on domestic shippers, but they were even happier to pillage the merchant ships of other star nations when they ventured into Silesian space.

  And, just to make the mess complete, someone in Silesia was always prepared to do what abused, pauperized, exploited people were always sooner or later driven to do: rebel. Honor doubted there’d been a single year in the last T-century or so in which at least one “independence” movement hadn’t been waging armed rebellion against the Confederacy’s central government. They seldom accomplished much, but that didn’t keep a lot of people from getting killed in the process. And, as Honor had discovered on her own middy cruise, one reason so many people got killed was because the very oligarchs they were rebelling against actually found ways to exploit the situation and make money off of it until the situation finally got bad enough the Confederacy Navy was called in to put down the rebels.

  Which always seemed to be accomplished with the maximum possible firmness (and bloodshed). Officially, that was to deter future rebellions. If it just happened to wipe out most of the people who could have fingered certain extremely wealthy oligarchs as their primary weapons providers, that was pure serendipity, no doubt.

  In Honor’s opinion, the best thing the Star Kingdom could have done for the people of Silesia would be to ship in several million free pulsers—or, better yet, several billion—and the ammunition for them.

  Unfortunately, the Foreign Office hadn’t been interested in Commander Harrington’s deep insights into the nature of Silesia’s internal dynamic before Hawkwing had departed on her current deployment. Which meant her orders were to support the Star Kingdom’s official foreign policy towards the Confederacy. And it had been made crystal clear to Commander Harrington that, as part of the Navy’s cheerful and willing support of the forei
gn policy of Her Majesty’s Government, she was to cooperate with the local authorities. In particular, she was to cooperate with the Honorable Leokadjá Charnowska, Governor of the Saginaw Sector, who was (according to the Foreign Office) a leading spokesperson for Silesian-Manticoran cooperation and happened to be closely related to the Confederacy’s current head of state. Charnowska, Commander Harrington had been informed in no uncertain terms, was a very important—and very large—fish who was making a significant difference in her sector. She was firmly committed to maintaining public order and supporting and protecting interstellar commerce and trade. As such, Commander Harrington was to do all in her power to support the sector governor’s reforms and to encourage and strengthen Charnowska’s pro-Manticore leanings.

  Honor intended to do her best to comply with her orders, but she’d been to Silesia before. Because of that, she’d made a point of finding and interviewing as many merchant factors and skippers who’d had firsthand familiarity with Saginaw as she could, and their accounts had painted rather a different picture from the Foreign Office’s rosy assessment.

  After two and a half T-months on station, everything she’d seen suggested they’d been right. However pro-Manticore Sector Governor Charnowska might be, the Saginaw Sector still seemed to have just as many pirates—and just as much local corruption—as any of the Confederacy’s other sectors. None of which filled her with optimism where Charnowska herself was concerned. In the Navy, a ship’s captain was both morally and legally responsible for the performance of her command. Honor was well aware that civilian—and especially political—hierarchies were seldom run on quite such a black-and-white basis. Even granting that, however, she suspected that any disinterested observer would conclude that at least some responsibility for the sector’s condition had to be laid at the feet of Manticore’s good friend, the Sector governor.

  “You know, Ma’am,” Nairobi said in a carefully neutral tone, “we did catch them in the act.” He twitched his head at where the master plot showed the icon of the Andermani freighter Sywan Oberkirch, still close aboard. “We’ve got Oberkirch’s people’s testimony, as well as our own tac recordings. And then there are the prisoners Lieutenant Janacek found aboard the pirate. That’s pretty conclusive evidence Oberkirch isn’t the first ship they’ve attacked.”

  “I’m aware of that, Taylor,” Honor said just a bit more coolly than was her wont.

  “I think what Taylor’s trying to say, Ma’am,” O’Neal put in, “is that under interstellar law, there’s—”

  “Thank you, Al,” Honor interrupted. “I’m also aware of the relevant provisions of interstellar law. And we’re still going to Saginaw. So let’s be about it.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  O’Neal’s response could not have been more respectful, yet it was obvious he saw no good reason to make the four-day voyage from their present location in the Hyatt System all the way to the Saginaw System and the sector’s capital. He’d probably have been willing to at least shoot them first, but Honor didn’t doubt for a minute that he would also have been perfectly willing to see how well pirates did trying to breathe vacuum.

  Which was, after all, the traditional penalty for pirates who’d been—as Nairobi had pointed out—caught in the act.

  But it’s not what’s going to happen this time, she told herself. Not when the Admiralty was so clear about the need to stay on Charnowska’s good side.

  She tried very hard to tell herself that was the only reason she’d rejected O’Neal’s solution to the problem. That it had nothing at all to do with squeamishness, or any desire to pass the buck for the execution of almost two hundred human beings. She was almost sure she believed herself . . . but only almost.

  * * *

  “So over all, Ma’am,” Surgeon Lieutenant Mauricio Neukirch said, “I’m as satisfied with my patients’ condition as I probably have any right to be.”

  Which isn’t any too damned pleased, his tone and body language added.

  “Pretty bad, was it?” Honor asked gently, and the powerfully built doctor drew a deep breath, then nodded.

  “Yes, Ma’am. It was.” He grimaced, and his dark brown eyes glittered with unaccustomed anger. “There’s a couple of them—”

  He broke off and shook his head.

  “A couple of them are going to need lots of counseling, Ma’am,” he went on after a moment, his expression bleak. “One of them, especially. I haven’t had time to really sit down with her yet, but one of the others told me she was serving on a family-owned ship. One of her sisters and at least two of her brothers were crew members. She was the youngest—she’s only about twenty-three—but she was holding down the assistant engineer’s slot when these . . . people took their ship.”

  He closed his eyes, his broad shoulders sagging as he sat in the comfortable chair in Honor’s day cabin.

  “The brothers never made it off the ship. From what the woman who was telling me about it had to say, it would’ve been God’s own mercy if her sister hadn’t, either. And she got to watch it all, of course.”

  His jaw clamped, and Honor made herself sit back and inhale a deep draft of cleansing oxygen.

  Mauricio Neukirch, despite his last name, had been born and raised on the planet of San Martin. His mother was a physician, and his father had been a senior undersecretary in the Trevor’s Star system government before the Havenite conquest of San Martin, seventeen T-years ago. Dr. Neukirch had managed to refugee out to the Star Kingdom with four of her five children, of whom Mauricio—then in his second year of college—had been the eldest.

  The eldest to survive, that was. His older sister had been an engineering officer in San Martino’s navy; her ship had been destroyed with all hands during the San Martinos’ desperate fighting retreat to cover the Trevor’s Star terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction long enough for the refugee ships to break free. Mauricio’s father had been shot by the Peeps’ occupation force a few T-months later, after they broke his cell of the San Martin resistance.

  Yet despite all that had happened to him and to his family, Mauricio was one of the gentlest, most compassionate people Honor had ever met. Which was why he hated pirates even more than she did, if that were possible.

  “At any rate, Ma’am,” the surgeon lieutenant continued in a determinedly more normal voice, “I don’t think we’re in any danger of losing any of them because of their injuries. That’s better than it could be. Thomas and I are going to be keeping a pretty close eye on them until we’re positive of that, though.”

  “Good, Mauricio. Good.”

  What he really meant, Honor reflected, was that he and his senior sickbay attendant, Chief SBA Thomas Dwyer, were going to be keeping an especially close eye on one particular patient. One Neukirch didn’t want to officially designate as a “suicide watch” situation.

  “In that case,” she went on after a moment, “I’ll let you be about whatever it is you need to be doing. Keep me informed, please. Especially if the young woman you mentioned needs to talk. Nimitz can help a lot, sometimes, in situations like that.”

  “Yes, Ma’am, he can,” Neukirch agreed, climbing out of his chair and producing his first smile since entering her cabin. He looked affectionately at the treecat napping on his bulkhead perch. “If that little bugger could only talk, Skipper, he’d make one hell of a counselor or therapist!”

  “Speaking from personal experience,” Honor told him with a somewhat lopsided smile of her own, “he manages pretty darned well without being able to talk.”

  * * *

  “Captain, we have a communications request for you from the Confed cruiser Feliksá. It’s from a Commodore Teschendorff,” Lieutenant Florence Boyd said.

  Honor looked across the bridge at her attractive, platinum-haired, sapphire-eyed com officer. Boyd was three or four T-years younger than Honor, but she was also a second-generation prolong recipient, which meant she actually looked older than her commanding officer.

  And on her, it lo
oks pretty darned good, too, Honor thought with more than a touch of envy, remembering the way her own third-generation prolong had stretched out her gawky, overgrown horse adolescence. Was still stretching it out, really, as far as she was concerned, she thought, running a hand over her close-cropped hair. Boyd, she’d noticed, never seemed particularly lacking in male companionship.

  Nimitz made a small sound of amusement from the back of her command chair as he followed the familiar thought through his person’s emotions. She smiled and reached up to rub his ears, but her almond eyes simultaneously narrowed thoughtfully. Hawkwing had crossed the Saginaw System’s hyper limit just under forty-one minutes earlier with a normal-space velocity of eight hundred kilometers per second. She’d been accelerating steadily towards Jasper, the system’s single inhabited planet at just under four hundred and nineteen KPS2 for that entire time, and her velocity relative to the planet had increased to 10,905 KPS. She was still almost an hour from her scheduled turnover point, and over an hour and a half from Jasper.

  More to the point, she’d announced her presence to the system traffic control authorities immediately after crossing the limit. It had taken almost nine minutes for her transmission to reach planetary orbit, and another nine minutes for Saginaw Traffic Control’s acknowledgment to get back to her, but she’d been cleared for a standard approach without any unusual questions.

  And no one at STC had mentioned anyone named “Teschendorff” to her. Which was particularly interesting because the senior officer here in Saginaw was supposed to be one Rear Admiral Gianfranco Zadawski.

  She glanced at the master plot and found the caret which indicated the transmission’s source, blinking steadily under the tactical icon of a heavy cruiser at a range of two light-minutes. The icon’s appended vector information indicated that the Feliksá was headed out-system at a leisurely two KPS2 on an almost reciprocal course, and she and Hawkwing were closing at a combined rate of just over sixteen thousand kilometers per second.