Tester only knew how many things could have gone wrong if they'd had to do that, and Abigail would be just as happy if He never told her. As it was, they could probably disable the freighter's generator without tearing the ship apart outright. The problem would be that they couldn't be positive how much damage they'd done. It was possible they might do enough purely cosmetic damage to the ship's hull for it to look to their sensors as if they'd blown the generator completely apart, when they'd actually done only minor damage, or even-unlikely, but possible-missed it completely. In which case, as soon as the pinnaces and LACs had passed far enough by to lose the energy range, the pirates could simply bring the generator up and disappear into hyper.
By the same token, they might actually damage the generator, but not beyond the possibility of quick, jury-rigged repairs. In that case, the pirates might still be able to put the generator back on-line before anyone could decelerate and return to intercept them. So, ideally, Captain Einarsson's little force wanted to fire the instant they were certain of scoring the proper hit without blowing the ship apart, then decelerate at their maximum possible rate, so as to cut the pirates' available response time to a minimum. Since they were going to have to rely on the pinnaces for the shot, that meant closing to under a hundred thousand kilometers before even beginning to decelerate. Which meant, in turn, that even the pinnaces would be fifty minutes flight time and almost twenty-six and a half million kilometers down range from the freighter before they could decelerate to rest relative to its current position. And even then, it would take them another seventy minutes to actually return to it.
Two hours was a long time for the pirates to make repairs. Abigail was convinced the odds would be in their favor, not the pirates', but even if everything went perfectly from a timing perspective, Captain Terekhov was still running a grave risk. Even a pinnace's laser could fatally disembowel a merchantship if it hit just wrong. Even if it hit only the precisely desired target, there was still an excellent chance at least some of the freighter's original crew-assuming any were still alive aboard her-would be working in her impeller and hyper generator rooms under duress. In a worst-case scenario, they might do damage enough to kill a dozen innocent civilian spacers and still not enough to let them retake the ship before she vanished over the hyper wall.
Even in a best-case scenario, there was going to be bitter criticism of the Captain's plan from some quarters, because it didn't include any attempt to demand Bogey Three's surrender. Under the strict letter of interstellar law, a warship was always obligated to demand compliance with its instructions before firing into a merchantship, and a naval officer ignored that obligation at her peril. In this instance, however, there was no point making the effort. No doubt Bogey Three would happily have promised to stay exactly where it was if Abigal demanded that it do so. And it would have obeyed faithfully... just long enough for Abigail's velocity to take her safely out of weapons range.
No. In this case, the only real options were to cripple the -target without warning, so that it couldn't hyper out whenever it wanted to, or else not even to attempt to retake it. The Captain had accepted that unflinchingly, and the fact that Abigail agreed with him a hundred percent didn't make her any happier about knowing that even under the best possible outcome, she was about to kill people.
But worse, in many ways, was the possibility that she might never have the chance to kill them. The Captain had made it clear that, badly as he wanted Bogey Three taken, and despite the grave risks he was prepared to run to accomplish that, taking out the armed vessels took precedence over retaking the freighter. So Abigail and Einarsson were specifically prohibited from firing on the Dromedary at all unless Terekhov was confident of engaging the armed vessels before any light-speed warning from the freighter could reach them.
The good news was that Hexapuma had the latest generation of FTL grav-pulse communicator. The pinnaces didn't have proper receivers, but the recon drone did. Its datalink channels to its mothership were perfectly capable of receiving messages and relaying them to Abigail's pinnace via com laser or-in this case-optical cable.
The bad news was that even people who couldn't read grav-pulses could detect them, and it was general knowledge by now that the RMN had that technology. So Captain Terekhov couldn't risk transmitting the release to attack until-or if-he'd sucked his own intended victims in close enough to be sure of engaging them.
All of which meant it was entirely possible the pinnaces and LACs wouldn't be allowed to fire on the freighter as they went speeding past. Unless, of course, the freighter spotted them and began maneuvering to avoid them. In that case, there was no point in not firing, since her prize crew would certainly go ahead and warn its comrades. On the other hand, at their current velocity, the pinnaces would cross their engagement range of the freighter less than twelve seconds after entering it, so it would probably be impossible to tell whether or not the freighter had detected them until it was too late to act.
Well, she thought, Father Church always says the Test can take many forms. I suppose I should be grateful that at least I don't have to make the decisions facing the Captain.
Chapter Twenty-One
Winter wrapped a cold, gray fist around the city of Vermeer. Heavy mist drifted above the broad, slow-flowing Schelde River, and woebegone native longfrond trees drooped over the gray-green water in their humid shroud. The sky was the color of old slate, shedding a handful of fat, lazy snowflakes, and the raw chill hovered barely above the freezing point.
In short, a depressingly typical winter's day on sunny Rembrandt, Bernardus Van Dort thought sardonically as he stood, gazing out the familiar window, hands clasped behind him. Only a batch of loopy, Renaissance Revivalists like my esteemed over-educated, under-brained ancestors could pick a planet like this for their new home. Bunch of artistically obsessed nincompoops, the lot of them.
The dreary scene was a far cry from the springtime warmth of Thimble. Then again, Rembrandt wasn't as nice a planet, in lots of ways, as Flax. He wondered sometimes if his homeworld's miserable climate helped explain the alacrity with which Rembrandters had abandoned the Founders' cultural pretensions. He didn't know about that, but he was quite certain it explained the emergence of the merchant marine-rare, for any system in the Verge-which had allowed Rembrandt to become a mercantile power.
A matter of anything that gets us off-world has to be a good idea, that's what it was. He smiled at the thought. I know I always luxuriated shamelessly on visits to planets which actually see the sun between summer and late spring.
The office door opened behind him, and he turned. The movement also brought him back to face the office's luxurious appointments. During the decades when it had been his office, the furnishings had been almost spartan, their only real ostentation the mementos and trophies of the grizzled Van Dort merchant skipper founders of the fortune he'd used to such telling effect. Their only color had been the mountain landscapes and rolling prairie scenes which had reminded his wife Suzanne of her own homeworld. They'd lurked among the grimmer, harsher Van Dort mementos like small, warm windows onto a slower, gentler life, and he felt a fresh pang of loss when he looked up and they were no longer there.
Now the office boasted expensive light sculptures, exquisite handcrafts from literally every world of the Cluster, exotically inlaid wood paneling from the rain forests of the Marian System, framed holos of its present occupant closing contract and trade treaty negotiations with magnates and heads of state. Its new, ankle-deep carpet, and polished display cabinets filled with glittering cut crystal, polished wood and beaten copper images, reeked of wealth and power, and he found the change... distasteful.
Fair enough, I suppose, he thought with a mental grimace, given how distasteful I find the present occupant, as well.
Ineka Vaandrager was a small, fair-haired woman, no more than a hundred and sixty centimeters tall, who moved with a sort of choreographed precision, like a machine programmed to get from one point to another by the shorte
st possible route. She was thirty T-years younger than Van Dort and, like him, a first-generation prolong recipient. But the therapy's sustained youthfulness made her hazel eyes no softer, and she had a mouth like a steel trap. She wasn't really unattractive in any physical sense, but there was a coldness-a hardness-about her which Van Dort had always found repellent.
Which didn't keep you from making use of her, did it, -Bernardus?
He faced that admission squarely, accepting that the problem she represented was as much of his making as of anyone else's, even as he made himself nod to her, with a smile whose welcome she must know as well as he did was false. She smiled back with matching sincerity but declined to offer him her hand as she crossed to the huge desk sitting with its back to the office's outer wall of windows.
"I'm sorry I'm late, Bernardus," she said. "It was unavoidable, I'm afraid. I hope Erica saw to your needs while you waited?"
"Yes, she did," Van Dort replied, but he let a trace of hardness, at odds with his affable tone, show in his own blue eyes. Vaandrager saw it, and her mouth tightened as he silently called her bluff on the "unavoidable" nature of her tardiness. She really was a remarkably petty woman in so many ways, he reflected.
"Good," she said shortly, and waved for him to take one of the chairs facing her desk as she sat behind it. "Well, I'm sorry you were kept waiting." She waited while he seated himself and her own chair adjusted to her body, then smiled brightly, as if determined to get their meeting off on a fresh foot after an inauspicious beginning. "But we're both here now! So, what can I do for you, Bernardus?"
"I'm a bit concerned about some things I've been hearing." He came to the point with characteristic brevity. "Specifically, about new negotiations with Scarlet. I was under the impression we already had quite a favorable agreement in place with them-we certainly did when I left for the Convention-so I fail to understand why it's necessary to 'renegotiate' at this point. And I've heard about certain threats of retaliation in which our representatives seem to have indulged when President Standley proved... unreceptive to our 'requests.'"
"Did you come all the way home from Spindle over something that routine?" she asked, and shook her head in amused exasperation.
"It's scarcely 'routine,'" he said, his own expression anything but amused. "And, as I say, I fail to see any pressing reason for new trade negotiations at a time when we ought to be concentrating on... other matters, shall we say? I thought we were in agreement about that, Ineka."
He held her eyes across the desk, and she made an impatient, throwing away gesture.
"It's just business, Bernardus," she said impatiently. "Your Convention was supposed to report out a Constitution long before this. It hasn't, and the Trade Union's affairs can't simply be placed on indefinite hold, you know. Surely you don't expect the rest of the universe to stop dead in its tracks while you're off playing statesman!"
"It's not 'just business,'" he said flatly. "It's an attempt to pound Standley into submitting to demands even more unfavorable to his star system than the last package. It's also, in case you've failed to notice, a poster example of why so many other planets in the Cluster don't trust us as far as they can spit. And right this minute, especially in light of what's happened on Kornati, we can't afford to give them any more justification for distrusting us."
"Don't be absurd!" she scoffed. "Nothing we can do is going to make people who resent us suddenly start trusting us instead. Or do you think giving away all the trade advantages we've built up over the past fifty T-years is going to convince someone like that butcher Nordbrandt to make nice with us?"
"Did you actually bother to view the reports from Kornati at all?" Van Dort demanded. "Or has your brain just gone into total shutdown?"
"Yes, I viewed them," she said sharply. "And I don't care for your tone!"
"Well, that's too damned bad. I don't care for your stupidity."
Their eyes locked, mutual hostility like a palpable force between them.
"You're not Chairman of the Board any longer. I am," she gritted. Then she made her jaws relax, but her hard eyes never wavered as she went on in a flat, biting tone as flexible as hammered steel. "And as Chairwoman, I don't intend to let a group of insane, bloodthirsty malcontents dictate our trade policies! You can go back to Spindle and kowtow to them if you want-we have no intention of following suit."
"You know," he said in a far more conversational tone, leaning back and crossing his legs, "I never realized, back when I first tapped you for Negotiations, just how blunt an instrument you actually are. It may surprise you to discover this, Ineka, but not all problems are nails you can pound flat or boulders you can smash by simply reaching for a bigger hammer. I suppose it's my own fault for not recognizing your limitations at the time, but I thought we needed someone like you. I was in a hurry, more worried about results than any hostility we might generate, and there were... other things on my mind."
His eyes darkened briefly in memory of old, unhealed pain, but he shook it aside, and his eyes narrowed with hard, focused purpose.
"Truth to tell, I still believe we did need those results-then. But I've come to suspect I was wrong to think a hammer was the best way to get them. Especially a hammer as fundamentally stupid as you are."
Vaandrager's face darkened as his tone flayed her sense of self-importance. She opened her mouth to snap back, but he continued.
"That, however, is an error I intend to correct."
His voice was harder now, flatter, and she closed her own mouth as wariness flickered in her own eyes. Bernardus Van Dort might not be as abrasively confrontational by nature as she was. Indeed, he was essentially a collegial sort, who believed in negotiation and compromise, however ruthless his public image might be. But there was a will of iron under that normally affable exterior, and the Trade Union's corporate offices were littered with the corpses of careers whose once promising owners had provoked his ire.
"Look, Bernardus," she said after a moment, schooling her voice into something closer to normal, "I suppose I apologize for that last statement. Or, at least, its tone. But that doesn't make it untrue. And the fact that you're no longer Chairman-and that I am Chairwoman-means our viewpoints are bound to diverge. I have a responsibility to our stockholders and to everyone else who depends on the umbrella of the Union. It's always been our policy to press for progressively reduced import and export duties for our shipping and industries, because we depend on the removal of trade barriers for our goods and shipping, and you know it. I'm not going to abdicate that responsibility just because some mass murderers on a planet so poor it doesn't have a pot to piss in don't like us. And, I remind you, when you were Chairman, your own policies were rather more... aggressive than the ones you seem to be attempting to insist upon now."
"Yes, they were," he agreed in the patient tone of one addressing a small, spoiled child. "On the other hand, the plebiscite completely transformed the entire political and economic equation, and when the environment changes that radically, policies have to be adjusted."
"Business is business," she said flatly, "and politics are politics. Don't expect me-or our investors-to confuse them, or to abandon core policies and sacrifice hard-won gains for some quixotic quest of yours. There was a time when you understood that."
"There was a time when my options and tools were more circumscribed... as you ought to understand perfectly well. Or were you absent the day your corporate mentor explained exactly what it was the Trade Union was intended to to accomplish?"
"Please!" She rolled her eyes. "Do you really think anyone else ever believed that pious, moralistic 'mission statement'? Propaganda's all very well, and it obviously has its place, but don't make the mistake of believing anyone else ever took it seriously."
"I don't really care about 'anyone else.' I took it seriously when I drafted it. And I still do."
She started to laugh, then stopped as she finally recognized the true depth of the incandescent rage hidden behind the cold self-control in his
icy blue eyes. The scornful amusement drained out of her expression, and he watched it go with grim satisfaction.
"You really don't want to cross swords with me, Ineka," he told her softly. "I created the Trade Union. It was my idea. I found the initial capital-most of it out of my own family's pockets. I talked a gaggle of other independent shipowners into associating themselves with me, and I sold the notion to old President Verstappen and Parliament. I talked San Miguel, Redoubt, and Prairie into joining as equal partners. And yes, I wrote our mission statement. And whatever you may think, I didn't do all of that just to put money in your credit accounts or cater to your own over-inflated ego."
"I-" she began hotly, but his voice rolled right over hers, still soft, but inexorable as Juggernaut.
"I did it because it was the only possible option I saw to avoid what Frontier Security's done to every other Verge system that attracted its attention. Because the only way I could think of to protect our citizens from the kind of debt peonage the Solly multistellars impose was to become a fat enough goose, with enough potential golden eggs, to be able to buy better treatment, like the Maya Sector did.
David Weber - Honor17 - Shadow of Saganami Page 35