by David Weber
“I don’t know, Ma’am.” Boyd shook her head, blue eyes troubled. “It was encrypted.”
“They wouldn’t be sending it if they didn’t expect someone to hear it, Skip,” Taylor Nairobi pointed out from Honor’s command chair com display. With the ship closed up for action, he was stationed in Auxiliary Control with the backup command crew, but he was tapped in to everything that was happening on the bridge. At the moment, his expression was less worried than Boyd’s . . . but not a lot.
“Or unless it was a bluff,” Honor pointed out. The exec looked at her skeptically, and she shrugged. “I didn’t say it was a bluff; I only pointed out that it could be.”
“And if it isn’t one?”
“If it isn’t one, then it’s probably confirmation the Ballroom was right about Governor Obermeyer,” Honor said, still in that calm, almost serene tone. “Which wouldn’t come as an enormous surprise, now would it?”
“What do you think they’re telling her, Ma’am?” Nairobi asked in a quieter voice.
“I imagine they’re telling her they’re under attack by a Manticoran warship and that she should exercise her authority by ordering us to stand down and leave them alone.”
Nairobi looked more worried than before, and Honor gave him a smile.
“It’s not as if we didn’t see this as a possibility, Taylor,” she pointed out.
“Which doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better,” he replied grimly.
“Maybe not, but—”
“Skipper, the platform’s hailing us,” Boyd interrupted.
“Put it on the main display, Florence,” Honor said, and turned to face it as a chestnut-haired, brown-eyed woman appeared on it. She matched the Ballroom’s description of one Edytá Sokolowska.
“Have you made your decision?” Honor asked in a voice of icy calm.
“Damned straight we have!” the other woman—Sokolowska—snarled. “You can take your destroyer and your frigging Marines and shove them right up your ass, lady! The way I figure it, you’ve got about ninety minutes—max—before you get your marching orders from Governor Obermeyer. What are you going to do to us in an hour and a half with one damned destroyer’s worth of Marines?”
She sneered, and Honor wondered if she really believed what she was saying or if she only wanted to convince Honor that she did. Either way . . .
“Ms. Sokolowska—it is Ms. Sokolowska, isn’t it?” Honor smiled very slightly as the other woman failed to completely conceal a flinch of surprise. She let a moment of silence linger, then shrugged.
“Ms. Sokolowska, I trust you don’t think I’m stupid enough not to have realized that for you to be operating so brazenly here in Casimir, Governor Obermeyer has to be aware of your activities. Which, I have no doubt, means she’s as deeply in bed with you and Manpower as Sector Governor Charnowska.”
Sokolowska paled visibly, and this time Honor’s smile was a hexapuma’s hunting snarl.
“Of course I’m aware of your exalted patrons and protectors, Ms. Sokolowska,” she said coldly. “Unfortunately for you, none of them seem to be here at the moment . . . and I am. And it may surprise you to discover this, but neither of them is in my chain of command and I don’t really care very much what they may think of my current actions.”
“You’re bluffing!” Sokolowska snapped. “I don’t care who the hell you think you are, what do you think your own government is going to say if you provoke an incident on this kind of scale?!”
“You really think Charnowska and Obermeyer are going to admit after the fact that they were in Manpower’s pocket?” Honor gave her a half-pitying look. “They’ll kick you out the lock like yesterday’s garbage, Sokolowska, and you know it. Unless, of course, some of you would care to turn Queen’s evidence and testify against them.”
“They wouldn’t have to admit a thing to demand your head!” Sokolowska sounded a bit more desperate, Honor decided.
“Maybe not,” she replied, with another of those hexapuma smiles. “On the other hand, maybe I don’t really care about that, either. And whether I do or not, it’s not going to make one bit of difference to what happens out here, in this star system, in the next hour or so.”
“You try coming aboard this platform, and a hell of a lot of those ‘innocent personnel’ you’re so damned worried about are likely to get killed,” he Sokolowska told her flatly.
“Let’s get something straight here, right now,” Honor said flatly. “I know all about Manpower’s usual operating procedures. I know as well as you do that every one of those people is dead the instant you leave that station and head off to set up shop somewhere else. That was going to happen no matter what. And if I back off now, you’re just going to go ahead and kill every single one of them before you blow up your ‘depot’ and try to disappear into the general system population. So don’t think threatening them is going to cause me to change my mind. On the other hand, perhaps you’d care to contemplate the fact that I’m telling you nothing but the truth about the boarders I’ve got aboard ‘Rapunzel.’ And I never said they were Marines.”
“What?” Sokolowska’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell are you talking about now?!”
“I’m talking about the Audubon Ballroom, Ms. Sokolowska.” Honor’s voice was flatter than ever, and a muscle began to tic at the corner of her mouth. “I’ve got the next best thing to a thousand of them aboard ‘Rapunzel,’ and, trust me, they’d really like to dance with you.”
She stared into Sokolowska’s eyes, and silence hovered between them. It stretched out for several seconds before the other woman shook herself and glared at her.
“You’re lying. You don’t actually expect me to believe that even a Manty would actually launch an attack on sovereign Silesian territory with a bunch of goddammed terrorists, do you?” Sokolowska barked a laugh. “Nice try, but that’s too much!”
“This Manty is also half-Beowulfan,” Honor told her very softly, “and if this is going to cost me my career, so be it. We’re coming aboard that platform, Sokolowska, and we’re taking every slave, and every innocent worker, off of it with us. And if you’re considering going ahead and killing some of them—or even all of them—in an effort to convince us to back off, you’d better think about all the stories you’ve ever heard about the Ballroom, too. Because the only thing standing between a thousand of them and you is me.”
“You wouldn’t dare.” Sokolowska glared at her, but there was a flicker of something very like panic in those brown eyes now. “Even if that freighter of yours is stuffed with those lunatics, you wouldn’t dare turn them loose on us. They wouldn’t just break you for that one—they’d frigging well crucify you!”
“I’m willing to take that chance, Ms. Sokolowska . . . are you?”
Two pairs of brown eyes locked, and then Sokolowska bared her teeth.
“Damn straight,” she said softly. “Damn straight. You come aboard this platform, Commander. Go ahead. I invite you, because, you know what? I don’t have a damned thing to lose. So, the instant the first one of your Marines—or one of those Ballroom lunatics—sets foot aboard this platform, I’ll—”
Suddenly, with absolutely no warning, Sokolowska’s head exploded in a grisly spray of red, gray, and fine, white splinters of bone. Honor heard the high, unmistakable whine of a pulser. Somebody screamed, and then more pulsers were firing.
It seemed to go on forever, although it couldn’t actually have been more than a very small handful of seconds. Then, abruptly, another face filled the display. A man’s face, with dark eyes and dark hair streaked with silver.
“I’m Kamil Mazur, the senior engineer!” he said hoarsely. “We’re not all like that lunatic bitch!”
“Good. Should I assume you intend to surrender, then?” Honor’s voice was calm, unshaken by the sudden violence.
“Yes! I mean—” The man shook himself. “I mean, I’m ready to surrender, and so are a lot of the others, I’m sure. But not all of them.” He grimaced. “Some of the rest are li
ke her—they’ll figure they’ve got nothing to lose. There’s no way I could control them, even if I tried.”
“Then, Mr. Mazur, I would recommend that you and anyone who agrees with you get down to wherever your prisoners are held and keep them alive,” Honor said coldly. “We’re coming aboard . . . and my ‘associates’ aren’t going to be very happy if they find a lot of dead slaves. Do you understand me?”
“I can’t—I mean, how am I supposed to—”
“That’s your problem.” Her voice could have frozen a star’s heart, and her eyes were pitiless. “Figure it out. And remember this. If you get killed trying to keep them alive, it will probably still be better than what would happen to you if the Ballroom gets its hands on you and they’re dead.”
She held his eyes for a moment, seeing the warring tides of panic and desperate hope in them, and felt no pity for him at all.
“Harrington, clear,” she said.
* * *
“Down!”
Honor grunted in surprise as someone slammed into her, tackling her and driving her to the deck plates. She hit hard on her shoulder and grunted again—this time in anguish. Whoever had tackled her sprawled across her, and the external mike on her skinsuit brought her the hissing shriek of the heavy tribarrel’s darts and the staccato thunder as they struck the bulkhead above her and the hurricane of explosions ripped it apart. The weight across her legs shifted, a pulser whined, someone screamed, and the tribarrel abruptly stopped firing.
The man who’d tackled her—one of the Ballroom fighters assigned to Henri Christophe’s command group—rolled aside and came up on his knees, grinning down at her through his helmet visor as she pushed herself up cautiously on one elbow.
“You want to keep an eye out for that kind of thing, Commander,” he told her over the com. “Be awful embarrassing to the Ballroom if we go and lose the only regular Navy officer who’s ever actually cooperated with us!”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” she told him.
“Good, because—”
He broke off, lunging to one side, as Honor’s right hand suddenly snapped up and her pulser fired through the space his helmeted head had occupied a moment before. The Manpower holdout behind him collapsed backward through the door Honor and her companion had just fought their way through, and the grenade he’d been about to throw exploded on the other side of the bulkhead. It was an antipersonnel grenade, and half a dozen of the lethal little flechettes came whining through the open door—none of them, fortunately, on a trajectory that intersected Honor or the Ballroom fighter.
“You want to keep an eye out for that kind of thing,” she told him dryly, and heard his half-breathless laugh over the com.
“Sure thing,” he said.
He squirmed around to look back through the doorway, then stood and reached a hand down to her.
“Looks like there were—operative word being ‘were’—three of ’em,” he observed. “Terrible what a grenade like that will do in close quarters.”
“The same thought had occurred to me,” Honor admitted, letting him boost her back to her feet.
“Yeah, that kind of thing happens.”
He shrugged, then his eyes went slightly unfocused as he glanced at the heads-up display projected on the inside of his Beowulfan skinsuit’s visor. It wasn’t quite as good as the HUD built into a Manticoran Marine’s battle armor, but it was a lot better than nothing, and Honor found herself wishing—again—that she had one. Unfortunately, her skinsuit was Navy-issue, and it wasn’t supposed to need the sort of tactical display to keep track of this kind of fight. Since, of course, the Navy recognized the self-evident fact that no naval officer, and especially not the commander of a Queen’s starship, had any business at all doing something like this.
That was a point which Taylor Nairobi, Aloysius O’Neal, Mahalia Rosenberg, and Fred Hutchinson had all drawn rather emphatically to her attention, and she’d known they were right. She didn’t have any business in this madhouse. It wasn’t the sort of fight she’d trained for, she had zero expertise in this kind of combat environment, and the last thing anyone would have needed was her trying to give orders to people who did know what they were doing.
None of which changed the fact that she had to be here, anyway.
“We go that way,” her companion said, pointing, and she nodded.
“Lead the way. I’ll just tag along and try to cover your back.”
“So far, you’re doing pretty well,” he told her with a harsh chuckle. “Come on.”
She followed him out of the compartment and down a passageway littered with bodies, its blood-splashed bulkheads scarred by pulser darts, grenade fragments, and the deadly, multi-sided needles of flechette guns. They moved quickly but cautiously, and the thunder of combat roared up again ahead of them as they turned a bend in the passage and caught up with the rest of Christophe’s command group.
Another clutch of Manpower holdouts was dug in, covering the approach to one of the main lift banks. However ultimately hopeless their situation might be, for the moment, they had good defensive positions. They’d obviously had time to prepare for this moment, and they’d parked a batch of heavy-duty repair servo mechs across the passage to form a solid breastwork. Now they were pouring out a heavy fire from behind its cover, and Honor saw one of the skinsuited figures in front of her go down in a geyser of blood.
“Shit!” her companion snarled, and Honor’s jaw clenched.
Somebody on the other side of those servo mechs had a tribarrel. The good news was that the depot’s inhabitants appeared to have had very few heavy weapons. The bad news was that every single one of the ones they did have seemed to have found its way into the hands of one of the “no surrender” fanatics. And while the armored skinsuits most of the Ballroom fighters had brought along offered fairly good protection against standard pulsers, they weren’t battle armor, which meant they weren’t designed to stop that kind of fire.
“Fire in the hole!”
She recognized Henri Christophe’s voice and flung herself instantly back onto the deck. A moment later, half a dozen somethings arced up and sailed across the barricade. The boarding grenades were offensive weapons, designed to stun and disorient even skinsuited enemies, but not so powerful that the people who’d thrown them couldn’t follow the explosion up quickly. She’d learned that much getting this far, and—
“Let’s dance!” Christophe screamed, and as the rest of the command group leapt to its feet and charged the barricade, Honor found herself right in the middle of them.
The next few instants were all mad, bloody confusion—screaming pulser darts, flechettes, even combat knives and vibro blades. Christophe lost three more people on the way in—one dead, two wounded—but fortified position or not, the Manpower thugs were no match in close combat for the Ballroom.
There were no Manpower survivors, and Christophe looked at Honor.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“About what?” She smiled grimly at him. “I didn’t hear anybody trying to surrender.”
“No, I guess you didn’t.” He smiled back at her, then checked his own HUD.
“According to the master display, Nat and your Platoon Sergeant Keegan are almost through to the slaves. And your Lieutenant Janacek is punching straight through to Engineering, too,” he said, and shook his head in something like admiration. “You don’t suppose he’d care to sign up with the Ballroom, do you, Commander?”
“No,” Honor said rather repressively.
“I was afraid you’d feel that way.”
His com beeped and he looked away from her, focusing on his HUD again, then inhaled in obvious relief.
“Nat and Keegan’ve gotten through to the slave quarters!” he said, and grinned at Honor. “Sounds like you managed to inject at least a little backbone into that asshole Mazur. Leastways, he and three or four others were down there personally making sure none of their buddies got to the people we’re here to rescue.”
“Good.” Honor managed to keep her vast relief out of her voice, but Christophe obviously heard it anyway, and he flashed her another smile.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, extending a handheld display board for her to see, “most of the rest of the holdouts seemed to be concentrated over here, in Delta Sector.” He tapped the indicated area of the station with an index finger and grimaced. “Don’t suppose they actually think they can get a cargo shuttle or a scoop ship past your ship, do you?”
“Not likely.”
Honor studied the display. As he’d said, it showed the heaviest concentration of remaining resistance on the side of the platform’s core hull where the scoop ships were berthed.
“I doubt anyone was doing anything as clear as actually ‘thinking’ about anything,” she told Christophe after a moment. “More likely, it was as much instinct as anything else.”
“Well, whatever it was, it’s convenient as hell for us,” Christophe said grimly. “We know where they are, and there’s no place for them to go . . . except Hell, of course.”
Honor looked at him levelly, and he glared back for a moment. Then he drew a deep breath and shook his head.
“I know—I know!” He shook his head again. “We promised, and I’ll try. But at this point, given where they are, and given that they know where we have to come from to get to them, I can’t make any guarantees about taking any of them alive. Especially since I kind of doubt any of these people are especially interested in surrendering in the first place.”
“Fair enough,” Honor said, after a moment, and she meant it.
The entire reason she’d overruled Nairobi, O’Neal, and the others who’d wanted her to do the sane thing and stay aboard Hawkwing, where she belonged, was to glue herself to Christophe. She knew, thanks to Nimitz, that he and Nat Jurgensen had meant it when they promised to avoid atrocities, but there were limits to what could be expected out of flesh and blood. Much as Honor hated Manpower and the genetic slave trade, she knew she couldn’t truly appreciate the hatred of someone like the Ballroom’s fighters, however hard she tried. And when the stress of combat, and the fresh losses they were going to take among their friends, were mixed into that hatred, Christophe’s people would have had to be more than human not to be tempted.