In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V

by David Weber

  She brushed that pleasurable thought aside and turned her attention to the master display.

  The information displayed above Rapunzel’s icon showed the ship was still about ten minutes from actual rendezvous with the depot. Her velocity was down to 1,176 KPS, and the range was barely 353,000 kilometers.

  “Anything more from them about those fifty specials?”

  “No.” Watanabe shook his head, then cocked it to one side. “It does sound interesting, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t even think about it, Julian.” She turned to give him a stern glance. “Management will put up with a lot, but if they say it’s so important to keep these separated from the rest, messing with them is a good way to end up with something a lot worse than burned fingers.”

  “Oh, I know,” he acknowledged with a slightly wistful expression. “Still, it does give one to think.”

  “As long as thinking is all you’re doing.” She shook her head. “It’s not like you don’t have plenty to pick and choose from right here on the depot.”

  He nodded, and Sokolowska turned back to the display, satisfied—or at least mostly so—that he really would keep his hands to himself. Still, she couldn’t pretend she was positive he would, and the front office would probably tolerate it even if he did . . . slip a little.

  Why he can’t just be content with the ones that aren’t off-limits is beyond me, she reflected. Maybe that’s part of the attraction for him? The fact that he’s flirting with danger himself when he crosses the line?

  Whatever it was, she wasn’t even tempted to emulate him. She’d just stick to the low-cost merchandise. Or, even better, do her hunting on the side. Most of the platform’s “official” personnel were family men and women, which made them much better suited to her own type of play. And this was the perfect opportunity to indulge herself with the sort of toys which were usually harder to “disappear” than mere slaves.

  After all, no depot could be left permanently in place, especially not when it was serving so many ends at once. Sooner or later, even as sweet a setup as they had here, with Charnowska and Obermeyer both on the pad, had to come to an end at last. And when the time finally came for Manpower to fold its tent here in Casimir and move on, they wouldn’t be leaving any witnesses behind.

  * * *

  “Coming up on ninety seconds, Skipper,” Fred Hutchinson announced. The fair-haired tactical officer’s blue eyes were narrow, focused on his own displays, and Honor nodded.

  “Thank you, Guns.” Her voice was even calmer than usual, but all of her officers had been with her long enough to know what that meant. “Stand by for separation, Helm.”

  “Standing by for separation, aye,” Aloysius O’Neal responded from where he stood with one hand on the seated helmsman’s shoulder and his own eyes on the maneuvering display.

  The sailing master’s taut voice was noticeably less calm than hers, but its tension was that of concentration, not fear, and Honor glanced at the single icon floating well clear of the platform on the main tactical plot. Under the strict letter of interstellar law, her next preparatory order should be to Florence Boyd, she reflected. Instead, she turned back to the com display by her knee.

  “Captain Samson?”

  “Standing by for separation,” Samson X confirmed over the com. He sounded quite a bit more nervous than O’Neal did, she noticed. Well, considering what even a slight helm error on Hawkwing’s part would do to his ship, he had a right to be nervous.

  “We will execute separation on my mark,” she continued. “Tactical, confirm Polka One.”

  “Polka One set and locked, Captain,” Hutchinson said formally.

  “Very well then, people,” Honor said, watching the digital display tick down the handful of seconds. “Let’s be about it.”

  There was complete silence on the destroyer’s bridge for another seven seconds. Then—

  “Execute separation!”

  * * *

  One moment, everything was perfectly normal aboard Casimir Depot, proceeding exactly according to plan. Rapunzel was less than eight thousand kilometers out, down to barely a hundred seventy-six kilometers per second, ninety seconds from her zero-zero rendezvous with the platform.

  The next moment, things changed . . . drastically.

  * * *

  It took a moment for Kgell Rønningen to realize what was happening. It wasn’t really his fault—Honor Harrington and her allies had gone to great lengths to ensure that no one would realize what was happening until it was too late. It had never occurred to anyone in Casimir that the “slave ship” plodding so sedately towards the depot might have a royal Manticoran warship tractored limpetlike to its side. That its approach vector might have been carefully chosen to keep that ship in its shadow, hidden from any of its enemies’ sensors even after the warship in question broke skin contact. That HMS Hawkwing might have carefully positioned herself one hundred kilometers clear of Reprisal, still hidden between the roof and floor of the big freighter’s impeller wedge, but far enough out to clear the threat perimeter of her own wedge when the time came.

  And it had come now.

  * * *

  “Kill the wedge!” Samson X barked, and his engineer hit the master switch.

  Reprisal’s wedge disappeared instantly, and a fraction of a second later, Hawkwing’s slammed up. The destroyer had cut her tractor connection to the freighter the instant Honor gave the separation order; now she rolled and went to her maximum acceleration—5.14 KPS2—and raced clear of her enormous companion, even as Reprisal rolled much more slowly on gyros and reaction thrusters alone.

  Her new heading was the exact reciprocal of Reprisal’s. As the two ships continued to roll, they moved the threat perimeters of their wedges away from one another. It took barely nine seconds for Reprisal to clear her wedge perimeter, and the big freighter’s wedge flicked back up. She turned away, simultaneously continuing her roll, and presented the belly of that wedge to Casimir Depot. All of Hawkwing’s highly stealthy recon drones had confirmed that none of the platform’s internal weapons were online. Neither of the two ships moored to the platform had any offensive or defensive weapons online, either. Which was fine . . . but neither Honor nor Samson X intended to take any chances, anyway.

  The smaller, far more responsive and maneuverable destroyer went scooting away from her vast consort, and the drones she had deployed on the way in drove CIC’s plot even when her own wedge blocked her shipboard sensors. She knew exactly where the depot’s “guard ship” was, and she snap-rolled back down to bring her broadside to bear.

  While the fact that Honor had positively confirmed that Evita was a known pirate vessel might not technically excuse her from the requirement to challenge her before opening fire, she wasn’t particularly concerned about that, either. Especially since Evita must have come directly here, which meant it was virtually certain she’d had no time to capture fresh “technical support personnel” to replace the ones Hawkwing had liberated from her.

  There were only pirates aboard her . . . and that was what Polka One was all about.

  “Target solution!” Fred Hutchinson announced—quite unnecessarily, except that regulations required him to inform Honor—and stabbed the master key on his console.

  Hawkwing was no ship-of-the-wall. Nor was she a cruiser. In fact, she wasn’t even a particularly modern destroyer. But she still had three missile tubes, four Mark 31 sixty-centimeter lasers, and four Mark 16 point defense clusters in each broadside, and—“ready-duty ship” or not—Evita was totally unprepared when the Manticoran demon abruptly materialized, literally out of nowhere, at a range of under six thousand kilometers.

  At that range, there was no need for missiles. Hawkwing’s port broadside lasers knew exactly where she was, and it would have been extraordinarily difficult for her to miss.

  * * *

  “Shit!” Kgell Rønningen gasped as his numbed brain raced to catch up with the information suddenly inundating it. “It’s a godd
ammed des—”

  Hawkwing’s number two laser scored a direct hit on Evita’s command deck. Not that it would have mattered one way or the other. Not a single member of the pirate vessel’s crew was in a skinsuit. Not one of them had suspected even for a moment that they might suddenly find themselves under attack. Most of them were in their quarters, many in their bunks, and every single one of them was totally unprepared when Honor Harrington’s ship ripped their vessel apart around them.

  Evita’s hull didn’t shatter under Hawkwing’s fire—it disintegrated. The terrible beams of coherent energy punched clear through the vast, vulnerable, unarmored bubble of alloy and life-support. Atmosphere belched from the terrible wounds, and bodies and pieces of bodies were borne out of the ship on the escaping tornado. And then, without warning, her fusion plant blew, and the entire ship vanished in an expanding boil of brilliance.

  * * *

  Edytá Sokolowska and Julian Watanabe were just as stunned as Rønningen had been. Unlike Evita’s executive officer, however, they at least lived long enough to realize what was happening.

  “Goddamn!” Watanabe blurted.

  He wheeled to his own command console and the heel of his hand slammed down on the general quarters button. Alarms began to howl throughout the platform, and men and women looked up in stark disbelief. They were criminals, not military personnel, and they lacked the spinal-reflex training to respond instantly. Shock and sheer, stunned surprise paralyzed all of them, at least briefly.

  Not that it mattered.

  Hawkwing rolled back down, presenting her broadside to the platform. Honor had never even considered using her ship’s main armament against the station. There were far too many innocent noncombatants aboard it for that. But the weapons modules had been boom-mounted in order to get them far enough from the bulbous, asymmetrical hull of the platform to have decent fields of fire. That meant they were far enough from all of those innocent noncombatants for her to target them.

  Even so, this was no job for her main energy weapons. Besides, the point defense clusters had a vastly higher rate of fire. Now they opened up, spitting out chained lightning, and Casimir Depot’s weapons were blotted away with dreadful, effortless precision.

  “Attention, Casimir Depot!” a frozen-helium soprano voice said sharply and crisply over the general emergency frequency. “This is Commander Honor Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy. Your base’s weapons have been destroyed. If either of the ships moored to the station attempts to move in any way, or attempts to activate any weapons system, I will destroy it immediately. There will be no additional warning. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to try.”

  The main com display flickered, and the woman who had introduced herself as Daniela Magill looked out of it at them. Her ship’s computers were no longer manipulating the signal, and Edytá Sokolowska’s blood ran cold as she recognized the insignia on the skinsuit she wore. It wasn’t one any employee of Manpower, Incorporated, was likely to mistake.

  “I am fully aware that the original crew of the platform you’ve seized is still aboard,” the almond-eyed woman on the display said coldly. “Be informed that I have sufficient personnel aboard ‘Rapunzel’ to take that habitat away from you, one dead body at a time. Be further informed that if it becomes necessary to do that, I will. And that if anything should happen to the innocent personnel aboard that platform, I personally guarantee there will be quite a lot of dead bodies by the time my people are finished.”

  She paused, letting them see the iron-hard sincerity in those agatelike brown eyes.

  “If you surrender, I will guarantee that you will be taken into custody and offered fair trials,” she continued after a moment, “but that’s the only guarantee I’m prepared to make you. You have five minutes to decide what you’re going to do. Personally, I advise you to surrender without further resistance. Otherwise, believe me, you will regret it.”

  * * *

  “What the fuck do we do now?” Watanabe demanded, wheeling to stare at Sokolowska. “We’re screwed—screwed! We don’t—”

  “Shut up!” Sokolowska snapped. He blinked, and she caught the front of his shipsuit and shook him with a snarl. “That’s the goddamned Manty navy out there, you idiot!”

  Watanabe licked his lips, his face pale. The Star Kingdom of Manticore had made its position on the genetic slave trade abundantly clear: slaving and piracy were legally the same thing as far as the Royal Navy was concerned. Which meant every single Manpower employee aboard the platform was subject to the death penalty . . . and that “fair trials” or no, this Harrington had all the authorization she needed to convict them on her own authority and execute sentence here and now.

  That was true for all of them, but if it should happen that Manticore knew about the specific activities of one Edytá Sokolowska and Julian Watanabe, it would almost certainly be even more true for them.

  Which completely ignored what the Manties would discover about their actions right here in Casimir if any of the original platform’s personnel ever had the opportunity to testify.

  “So what?” Watanabe demanded after a moment. “So it’s the fucking Manties! What’re we going to do about it? We don’t even have a damned popgun left, and if they really send in frigging Marines—!”

  “Shut up!” she snapped again, then tossed him away from her with a grimace.

  “You—Baker!” she barked at a white-faced, paralyzed com tech. “Send a message in clear to Governor Obermeyer. Tell her we’re under attack by a Manticoran destroyer, and she’d better whistle this bitch the hell off of us if she doesn’t want to go down with us!”

  “But—”

  The technician stared at her for a moment, then shook himself like a dog flinging off water.

  “But Beatá’s practically on the other side of the primary from us! I’ll have to bounce off one of the relays in the Belt, and if I send in clear, everybody who sees it is gonna know what we’re saying! And the transmission lag’s going to be better than forty minutes, each way!”

  “So code the damned thing!” Sokolowska snarled.

  “But the lag—”

  “Screw the goddamned ‘lag’!” If she’d had a sidearm, she would have shot him where he stood, she thought viciously. “Send . . . the . . . damned . . . message,” she ground out, one word at a time. “And make sure that frigging destroyer knows you sent it!”

  For a moment, she thought the idiot was going to run his mouth some more, but then he closed it with a click, nodded, and wheeled back around to his own console.

  “He’s got a point,” Watanabe said. His voice was calmer and quieter than it had been, although she didn’t much like the look in his green eyes. “There’s no way in hell Obermeyer’s going to be able to ‘whistle off’ something like this. And even if she could, we’re looking at an hour and a half before anything from her could even get back to us!”

  “I know that, you idiot.” She glared at him. “But you know as well as I do what’s going to happen if the damned Manties get their hands on us. On us, Julian, whatever happens to anybody else!”

  “And this is supposed to stop that from happening exactly how?” he demanded.

  “If that bitch out there—that Harrington—knows we’ve sent the message, she’s also going to know we’ve got all kinds of contacts with the Sillies. Maybe she doesn’t realize yet just how badly she could burn her fingers over this one, so it won’t hurt a damned thing if we tell her, now will it? And in the meantime, I’ll be damned if I roll over and play dead for her! She can’t crack this platform open without killing those precious ‘innocent personnel’ of hers, and that’s only a frigging destroyer over there.”

  “What about all those Marines she says she’s got aboard ‘Rapunzel’?” he challenged.

  “It’s probably a bluff! I don’t care what she says—I’ll bet you that’s just a merchie she’s picked up somewhere to use for cover to get close enough to us,” Sokolowska shot back, and as she did, she realized she actu
ally meant what she was saying. “If they’d had time to put together a real assault force, they wouldn’t’ve sent it in with nothing but a destroyer to side it, Julian! That entire damned freighter’s probably running the next best thing to empty! So all they’ve probably got over there—at most—is a single platoon of Marines, and we’ve got close to twelve hundred people aboard this orbiting can!”

  “None of whom have battle armor,” Watanabe pointed out.

  “So? Even with battle armor there’s still only going to be thirty or forty of them—and that’s assuming they’ve got armor for all of them, which they damned well won’t have. And even if she really thinks she’s got enough Marines over there to take us hand-to-hand, she’s going to know some of those people she’s so frigging worried about are likely to get caught in the crossfire. So let’s see if she’s so damned willing to come in here after us if we tell her there’s no way in hell we’re surrendering and she knows I’ve already put in a call to the local system government!”

  * * *

  “The platform’s just transmitted a message, Skipper,” Florence Boyd reported. The com officer’s reservations seemed to have abated—or receded from the forefront of her thoughts, at least—but her expression was anxious.

  “What kind of message?” Honor asked calmly.