by David Weber
As far as Sokolowska knew, neither of the tankers’ crews were aware that anything untoward was happening out here, either. She knew their schedules, and whenever they were due to collect a cargo, any “visitors” headed off to the other side of Elsbietá-3, the largest of the planet’s moons, and hid there until the tankers had turned back in-system. Of course, the local system governor most certainly did know (and was doing very well for herself out of the knowledge; Sokolowska knew she was, because she personally handled the monthly payoff), so she supposed it was possible the tanker crews knew all about it and had simply been ordered to keep their mouths shut.
The operative point, however, was that Elsbietá was in a hell of an out-of-the-way spot. So, logically, any ship which made her translation into normal-space this far out had to be here expressly to visit the depot. Which fitted with the transponder code Watanabe had reported.
So far, so good. But Edytá Sokolowska hadn’t been chosen to run Casimir Depot because she was inclined to take anything for granted, and she didn’t like the fact that they didn’t have this ship in their database, Jessyk transponder or not. On the other hand . . .
“Have they said anything to us yet?”
“Not yet. But they just got here.”
“Sure they have. And how far out are they?”
“About three light-minutes.”
“And they’ve been back in normal-space, what? Five minutes, maybe?”
“Oh.” Watanabe frowned, and Sokolowska snorted.
“Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I think we should go ahead and contact them,” she said. “I know they’re squawking the right kind of transponder, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re who they say they are.”
“Yeah. I’ll get right on that.”
“And while you’re doing that, make sure the ready-duty ship knows what’s going on. Who is it right now? Lawson or Tsien?”
Watanabe punched a button, looking at something outside the com’s field of view, then looked back up.
“Lawson,” he said.
“Great.”
Sokolowska rolled her eyes. Emmet Lawson was never going to be confused with anyone’s concept of a regular navy officer. He’d been successful at what he did for a long time, but he seemed to be slipping a bit, of late, and he’d never been at the apex of his profession to start with. All of which meant Sokolowska didn’t have the liveliest confidence in how he was likely to react if a real emergency turned up.
“Go ahead and inform him we’ve got an unscheduled arrival,” she said. “Do me a favor and stress the word ‘unscheduled’ when you talk to him, too. You might even want to add ‘unidentified,’ if you can get his attention.”
“I’ll do that,” Watanabe promised with a lopsided grin. He and Sokolowska had their differences, but their opinions of Emmet Lawson were very similar. Sokolowska snorted at the thought, then glanced back over her shoulder at the man still waiting obediently in her bed.
That was another thing she and Watanabe had in common, she thought.
“How long for them to reach us?” she asked.
“They only carried about twelve hundred KPS across the wall with them, and they’re only showing about two hundred gravities. Call it . . . two hours and forty-five minutes, give or take a couple of seconds.”
“Then we’ve got some time, don’t we?” She smiled hungrily. “Go ahead and talk to them. Find out who the hell they are. If anything sounds out of line, screen me back ASAP. Otherwise, I’ll be up to the command deck in . . . oh, thirty minutes or so.”
“Got it.” Watanabe smirked on the display. “Have fun.”
* * *
“The platform is hailing us, Ma’am.”
Lieutenant Boyd’s voice sounded much more like its normal, crisp self, Honor noticed. She’d expected the communications officer to settle down once things actually started happening, but she was still glad to hear it.
“Are they accepting our transponder code so far?” she asked.
“Yes, Ma’am. Or at least they’re hailing us as Rapunzel.”
“Then I suppose we ought to see just how good our friends’ intel really is,” Honor said calmly. “Throw it to my display, please.”
“Aye, aye, Ma’am.”
A moment later, Honor’s display lit with the face a youngish looking man with brown hair and green eyes. He appeared to be a pleasant enough fellow, but looks could be deceiving, and he matched the description the Ballroom had given her for one Julian Watanabe. As Wolfe Tone had told her, “He looks like a choirboy, but he’s one sick, sadistic piece of work. We’ve been wanting to meet up with him for a long time.”
I think you may just have a bit of a problem surrendering to my “allies” intact, assuming you’re who I think you are, she thought. Pity about that.
“Rapunzel, this is Casimir Station,” the face on her display said. “We read your transponder, but we weren’t expecting you. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
Honor smiled into her com pickup. Samson X and Christophe had both been emphatic about who had to handle this particular conversation, and she’d found herself in agreement with their reasoning. Reprisal’s electronics were a lot less sophisticated than she would have wanted if she’d been engaged in an illegal trade which was (depending upon who captured one, of course) punishable by death. They didn’t include the ability to play games with outgoing com signals, and anyone associated with Manpower would recognize someone like Samson or Christophe—or, at least, recognize what they were—on sight.
Hawkwing’s electronics, on the other hand, were far more sophisticated than one would normally have expected out of a destroyer growing so long in the tooth. Partly, that reflected standard Manticoran refit policies, but it also reflected the fact that she was intended for service in Silesia, where the ability to pretend to be someone else was often essential when it came to sucking a potential pirate into range.
Or vice versa.
And even if that weren’t true, a corner of her brain reflected, Samson and his people are too psyched up. I don’t care how professional they are, it’d be awful hard for any of them to keep that from showing if they actually had to talk to one of these . . . people.
“Casimir Station,” she said levelly while Hawkwing’s computers replaced her naval skinsuit with the uniform of the Jessyk Combine, “this is Rapunzel, Daniela Magill, commanding. We know you weren’t expecting us, but we got orders to divert to you from Caldwell. According to the word we got, there’s a Manty cruiser sitting on top of our people there.” She shrugged. “We’ve got places we’ve got to be, so they told us to drop our cargo off with you, so you could hold them until the Manties clear out of Caldwell and someone else can run them in.”
So far as anyone aboard Reprisal or Hawkwing knew, there was no Jessyk Combine captain named Daniela Magill, nor was there a ship named Rapunzel in Jessyk’s service. They’d debated trying to pass themselves off as one of the ships the Ballroom had identified as one of Casimir’s at least semi-regular visitors. There’d been some arguments in favor of that approach, assuming they could guarantee they had an accurate reading on the transponder code—and emissions signature—of the ship in question. There’d been some downsides, as well, however . . . including the high probability that someone on the platform would have a personal acquaintance with somebody aboard the ship and want to talk to her.
Which was why they’d decided against trying it. To be sure, there were risks associated with fabricating an ID out of whole cloth, as well. On the other hand, nobody could possibly know everyone who worked for something the size of Jessyk. Besides, the Caldwell System was far enough away from Casimir to be outside the Casimir depot’s operational area, and Manpower’s normal procedure was to avoid putting any unnecessary information into its depot databases as a means of limiting damage if those databases should fall into unfriendly hands. It seemed probable the Jessyk Combine, which had worked so closely with Manpower for so long, would follow the same policy, so i
t was unlikely the station’s crew would expect to recognize a ship which had been diverted to them at the last minute from so far away. All of which had suggested to Honor that it would be wiser to create an entirely fictitious vessel and a CO to go with it than to try to pretend she was someone they might actually know.
The transponder code Reprisal was squawking, on the other hand, was mostly genuine. Lieutenant Hutchinson and Lieutenant Boyd had spent several hours carefully altering the ship’s number attached to the Jessyk house code, and Honor was confident it would stand up to any scrutiny it was likely to receive—except, of course, in the highly improbable event of that particular number belonging to one of the ships which was supposed to be operating in Casimir’s vicinity.
Six minutes ticked away while the light-speed signal crossed to the platform and its response returned to Hawkwing.
“Aren’t we a little bit far out of your way from Caldwell, Captain Magill?” Watanabe asked then.
“Actually, you’re a hell of a lot out of the way from Caldwell,” Honor agreed in an exasperated tone. “They didn’t tell me exactly why I was supposed to dump this cargo on you, either. According to the routing instructions I’ve seen, though, at least half of it was going to be split off in Caldwell and sent your way.” She shrugged. “Maybe they’re just figuring they might as well get that part of it closer to delivered. And, to be fair, you were pretty close to our base least-time course to where it is we’re supposed to be from where we were when they told us not to go to Caldwell. If you follow me.”
Six minutes later, Watanabe grinned at her.
“Actually, I do follow you. Scary, isn’t it? How big is this cargo of yours, Captain? How much life support are we going to need?”
“It’s not huge,” Honor told him. “Only a bit over seven hundred. But we’ve got fifty specials for a pleasure resort. They need to be kept segregated from the others, and they’re shipping under pretty high trank levels, so somebody will need to keep an eye on the med levels, too.”
“Understood. We can handle all that. I make your turnover in fifty-nine minutes, and arrival here at the station in about another hour and a half.”
“That matches our numbers.” Honor nodded. “If it’s all right with you, though, we’ll lighter them across instead of actually docking. We’re running behind schedule, and I’d rather not take the time to rig personnel tubes.”
“Not a problem from our end,” Watanabe assured her. “Do you have enough shuttles, or do we need to send some out to help?”
“We’re covered, I think, but thanks. We’ve already got them pretty well tranked on happy gas; by the time we start packing them into the shuttles, they’ll be like sleepy little mice.”
Honor allowed herself a nasty smile, and Watanabe smirked back at her.
“Understood,” he said. “We’ll see you then, Captain.”
* * *
“What a pain in the ass,” Emmet Lawson growled as he grimaced at his executive officer.
Lawson, who practically never thought of himself as Ezzo Damasco these days, was built on the small side. He had a wiry, weasel-like quickness, black hair, a dark complexion, and dark brown eyes which looked as if they’d died years ago. He and his XO made an interesting contrast, since Kgell Rønningen was twenty centimeters taller than him, with fair hair, blue eyes, a powerful physique, and an air of gentle good humor.
That seeming good humor was deceptive, however. Like Lawson, Rønningen couldn’t have begun to count how many men and women he’d killed over the last two or three decades. As far as he knew, there weren’t any actual interstellar murder warrants out for him . . . which there certainly were for the man who’d been born Ezzo Damasco back on Old Earth herself sixty T-years before. On the other hand, most of his murders had occurred in deep space, far from any officious, watching eyes.
“Well,” he said now, shrugging massive shoulders, “it’s not really a surprise, is it?”
“I just don’t like all this Mickey Mouse bullshit,” Lawson grumbled. “Bastards act like they’re frigging admirals and I’m some goddammed brand-new ensign!”
Rønningen only grunted. Actually, he was beginning to have his doubts about Lawson. They’d only gotten off with their skins intact last time around by a fluke, as far as Rønningen could see, and that hadn’t been the first time Lawson had walked into something. The number of times they could do that and walk away again had to be finite. Besides, the whole point in throwing in with the people here in Casimir in the first place had been to ensure a safe place to dispose of their loot and a safe haven for routine maintenance and R&R, and unlike Lawson, Rønningen had no problem pulling his weight in the cooperative effort to keep it a safe place.
And, he reflected (not for the first time), it wasn’t unusual for a pirate vessel’s executive officer to suddenly find himself its commanding officer following the mysterious disappearance of the previous CO. Especially when the rest of the ship’s officers agreed with the XO in question that the previous captain’s . . . questionable decisions had become a liability.
“All right!” Lawson waved one hand. “Tell them we’ve received their damned message and we’re keeping an eye on things.”
“And should I go ahead and bring the weapons up?” Rønningen, who doubled as the ship’s tactical officer, inquired.
“Go ahead,” Lawson said resignedly.
* * *
“I’ve got something you should take a look at, Skipper,” Lieutenant Hutchinson said, and Honor turned her command chair to face the tactical section.
“What is it, Fred?”
“We’re getting good telemetry back from the recon drones,” Hawkwing’s tac officer said. “Most of it’s not too surprising—the Ballroom guys did a good job digging out the original stats and authorization order for the platform’s weapons outfit, and it doesn’t look like there’ve been too many changes from the file copies. But their intel about these people’s keeping a ship at readiness looks to have been right on the money, too.”
Honor nodded patiently. She’d noticed the icon of the single ship standing fifteen hundred kilometers clear of the platform with her impeller nodes online over a quarter-hour ago.
“Well, Skipper, the interesting thing about it is that we know that ship.”
“We do?” Honor’s eyes narrowed.
“Yes, Ma’am. According to her transponder, that’s the Andermani-registry ship Christiane Kirsch, but she’s got all her active sensors online. We’re getting good, solid reads off of them, and according to CIC’s records, her emissions signature belongs to our old friend Evita.”
Honor suppressed the almost automatic reflex of asking Hutchinson if he was sure about that. Frederick Hutchinson was very young—only about four T-years older than Everett Janacek—but he’d been Hawkwing’s tactical officer for over ten T-months now. He’d demonstrated his competence over those months, and he wouldn’t have said what he’d just said if he hadn’t double and triple-checked CIC’s evaluation first.
That was her first thought. Her second was considerably more bloodthirsty.
“Well,” she said aloud, “I suppose we might consider her presence here additional evidence of Governor Charnowska’s involvement. If we had naturally suspicious minds, of course.” She smiled thinly. “I’m confident the governor could come up with all sorts of perfectly reasonable explanations for how it all could have happened without her knowledge.”
“I’m sure she could, Ma’am,” Hutchinson replied with a treecatlike smile.
“On the other hand, it does give us a certain additional . . . freedom of action,” Honor continued. Her tone was almost whimsical, but her almond eyes were as cold as the vacuum outside Hawkwing’s hull. “Good work, Guns. I think we’ll go with Polka One.”
“Polka One, aye, Ma’am,” Hutchinson acknowledged, and his smile turned even more predatory as he added, “It works for me, Skip.”
* * *
“I thought you said thirty minutes,” Julian Watanabe
observed as Edytá Sokolowska finally arrived on the command deck.
“I did.” She gave him the smile of a temporarily—very temporarily—satisfied predator. “But I’m discovering that with the proper . . . incentive his endurance can be pretty amazing.”
Watanabe returned her smile. Both of them had come into Manpower’s employ for primarily financial reasons, but there’d been other attractions, as well. Attractions which had a lot to do with why—before their Manpower days, at least—both of them had made it a point to avoid professions which would have required basic psych evaluations.
Watanabe had been reprimanded twice for “excessive wastage of product,” which took some doing, given Manpower’s usual attitudes. It hadn’t come close to disqualifying him from sensitive positions—in fact, Manpower actually preferred people like him in a lot of ways; their appetites gave their employers an extra handle on them—but his pay had been docked for the full price of the slaves—all the slaves—on both occasions.
Sokolowska knew all about those reprimands, and she couldn’t have cared less, although her own tastes ran to rather more . . . subtle forms of entertainment. Watanabe was reputed to be inventive, but he used his toys up quickly. Sokolowska, on the other hand, had a lot more of the sharp-clawed cat in her makeup, including the need to savor her play for as long as she could. Physical cruelty was all very well, and no doubt satisfying in its own way, but it palled too quickly for her taste. She found it much more delicious to compel her playthings—male or female—to lavish pleasure upon her. Fear of pain could do that, and inflicting it as she went along added a certain savor of its own to the moment, but she found psychological terror an even more satisfying vintage. Which actually made her and Watanabe partners upon occasion. After all, what could drive a man to thoroughly satisfy her libido better than the knowledge that if he failed—if she should happen to be . . . dissatisfied with his efforts in any slightest way—his preadolescent son or daughter would be sent to entertain Watanabe?