Chapter Forty-One

Caslet did his job to perfection. The incoming cruiser never suspected a thing, and there was no reason she should have. After all, what could possibly go wrong on StateSec's most secure prison and private base? The orbital defenses were intact, so clearly no outside enemy had attacked the system. Every com procedure was perfect, for it was carried out in accordance with the instructions logged in the SS's own computers and every message carried all the proper security codes. And the wreckage of Citizen Lieutenant Commander Proxmire's courier boat had long since dispersed.

And so PNS Krashnark followed Caslet's instructions without question, for they, too, were precisely what they should have been. The cruiser passed through the safe lane Honor's people cleared through the mines for her and assumed the parking orbit Honor's people assigned her. And then Krashnark stood by to receive the three shuttles Camp Charon sent up to take off the Alliance POWs she'd come to deliver.

Citizen Sergeant Maxwell Riogetti, State Security Ground Forces, stood in the boat bay gallery with his back to the personnel tubes, cradling his flechette gun in his arms and watching the Manty prisoners narrowly. They weren't really all Manticorans, of course. There were Zanzibarans, and some Alizonians—even twenty or thirty Graysons and a handful of Erewhonese who'd been unfortunate enough to be serving aboard picket ships assigned to Zanzibar— but Riogetti thought of them all as Manties. And he heartily hoped that every single one of them was sweating bullets at the thought of being sent to Hell.

They damned well ought to be, the Citizen Sergeant thought with bitter satisfaction. But it's okay with me if they aren't. Maybe it's even better that way. Citizen Brigadier Tresca will sort the bastards out soon enough!

He smiled thinly at the thought. The damned Manty plutocrats were not only greedy bastards who hoarded the enormous wealth they'd stolen from the People, they were also pains in the ass every step of the way. It was as if they were absolutely determined to prove they were every bit as much enemies of the People as Citizen Secretary Ransom had always insisted they were.

Riogetti's smile turned into a frown at the thought of Cordelia Ransom's death. Now there had been a true heroine of the People! And horribly though her loss had hurt, it was fitting that such a courageous and charismatic leader should have died in mortal combat with the People's enemies as she would have wished. Yet her death had left a tremendous hole on the Committee of Public Safety and in the People's hearts. The Citizen Sergeant had tried hard, but he couldn't bring himself to think very highly of Citizen Secretary Boardman. He'd done his best, no doubt, but no one could have filled Ransom's shoes after her tragic death. Still, Boardman's heart was in the right place, and he knew how dangerous scum like these prisoners were to the People. Why, the bastards weren't even grateful to Citizen Vice Admiral Tourville and Citizen Admiral Giscard for picking up their life pods! They seemed to think that had been no more than their due, the very minimum the Navy could have done for them, despite the way their kind had callously abandoned Republican life pods in battle after battle—when they weren't using the pods for point defense practice!

Riogetti felt rage trembling in his muscles and made himself take his finger out of the flechette gun's trigger guard. It was hard. What he really wanted to do was switch to full auto, drop the muzzle, and empty the magazine into the handcuffed garbage waiting for the shuttles. But he couldn't, however much they deserved it.

Not without orders, anyway, he thought longingly.

He should have been given those orders, too. Oh, sure. Some people—even some of his fellows in StateSec—actually believed the Manty propaganda claims that they always picked up Republican survivors. But Riogetti knew better than to be fooled by such clumsy lies. He'd heard the truth from Public Information often enough. Hell, PubIn had even broadcast actual Navy sensor recordings that showed the Manties shooting up life pods! It was going to take more than plutocratic lies to explain away that kind of hard evidence, and—

A chime sounded, and he glanced over his shoulder as the shuttles from Camp Charon settled into the docking buffers. The mechanical docking arms engaged, and a green light blinked as the personnel tubes pressurized.

Now that's the way a maneuver should be performed, the Citizen Sergeant thought. All three of them docked in less than a ten-second spread!

It never occurred to him to wonder why bored shuttle pilots from a prison planet should care enough to make their approach with such perfect coordination. Not until the first battle-armored border emerged simultaneously from each personnel tube.

The Citizen Sergeant gawked at the apparitions in confusion, wondering what the hell was going on. He didn't feel alarmed, precisely, despite the new arrivals' abrupt appearance, for their armor carried standard StateSec rank emblems and unit flashes and they'd arrived aboard StateSec shuttles cleared by Charon Central and Krashnark's own CIC. That meant there had to be a reasonable explanation, but hard as Riogetti might think, he could come up with no reason for prison guards to strap on the equivalent of old prespace main battle tanks just to go up and fetch a bunch of unarmed, handcuffed POWs!

Eight or nine armored troopers had disembarked from each shuttle by the time Citizen Lieutenant Ericson, the boat bay officer, got over his own shock enough to react.

"Just a minute—just a minute!" he shouted over the bay intercom. "What the hell is going on here? Nobody said anything about this to me! Who's in command of you people, anyway?"

"I am," an amplified voice replied over a suit speaker, and someone stepped to the front of the newcomers. It was a man's voice, deep but very young, Riogetti thought, and there was something about its soft accent...

"And who the hell are you?" Ericson demanded, storming out of his control cubicle to glare at the newcomer. The very tall newcomer, Riogetti realized. Battle armor made anyone look tall, but this fellow must have been a giant in his bare feet. And he and most of his fellows were armed with flechette guns, not pulse rifles. Well, that made more sense than most of what was happening. The flechette guns were much more effective than pulse rifles for prisoner control—and much less likely to blow holes in shuttle hulls or other important equipment.

The giant turned, gazing thoughtfully at the boat bay officer through his armorplast visor while still more armored troopers emerged from the shuttles. There must have been forty-five or fifty of them in the bay gallery by now, and then the giant smiled thinly, and somehow his flechette gun was in his armored hands and the safety was off.

"In answer to your question," he told Ericson flatly, "my name is Clinkscales. Carson Clinkscales, Ensign, Grayson Space Navy, and this ship is no longer under StateSec command."

The citizen lieutenant gaped at him, and so did Riogetti and every other guard in the boat bay. The words were clear enough, but they made no sense. They couldn't make sense, because they were manifestly impossible. But then, suddenly, one of the guards shook herself and reacted. She wheeled with her flechette gun, reacting out of pure instinct, not reason, and hosed a vicious stream of flechettes at the nearest boarder.

The razor-edged projectiles whined uselessly off her target's armor, ricocheting wildly, and another SS guard screamed as three of them chewed into his back. One of the boarders jerked up his own weapon and triggered a single shot back at the guard who'd opened fire, killing her instantly, and a StateSec officer shouted something frantically. Perhaps it was an offer to surrender, or an order for the boat bay guards to lay down their weapons. But whatever it was, it came too late. Other guards were following the dead woman's example while prisoners flung themselves desperately to the deck to get out of the line of fire, and the rest of the borders responded with lethal efficiency.

Citizen Sergeant Riogetti saw Citizen Lieutenant Ericson reach for his holstered pulser, saw him jerk it free, saw the giant's gun come up, and saw the citizen lieutenant's mangled body fly backward under a blast of flechettes. And then the citizen sergeant saw the same flechette gun swinging towards him, and another muzzle flash.

And then he never saw anything at all again.

"I should have called on them to surrender before the shuttles docked," Honor said with quiet bitterness. She, McKeon, Ramirez, and Benson sat in the small briefing room off the main control center, viewing Solomon Marchant and Geraldine Metcalf's report from Krashnark. Marchant was safely in command of the ship, and there had been remarkably little fighting after the initial outbreak in the boat bay. Or perhaps not so remarkably, given that Krashnark's skipper had been given his options by Charon Central just about the time that idiot guard opened fire. With the equivalent firepower of three or four squadrons of the wall locked onto his ship, Citizen Captain Pangborn had recognized the better part of valor when he saw it.

Unfortunately, twenty-nine members of his crew—and eight POWs—had been killed in the boat bay bloodbath first.

"Anyone can be wise after the fact, Honor," Jesus Ramirez said almost gently.

"But if they'd waited to board until Pangborn had agreed to surrender, none of this would have happened," Honor replied, jabbing her index finger at the casualty figures on the terminal before her.

"Maybe, and maybe not," McKeon said before Ramirez could respond. "Don't forget that Pangborn was up against a two-pronged threat—boarders inside and weapons platforms outside—and we really don't know which was the decisive factor for him. Without the boarders, he might have tried to bluff or threatened to kill the prisoners. Hell, he might have figured you wouldn't dare push the button, since you couldn't kill him without killing the POWs as well!"

"But—"

"Don't second-guess yourself!" Ramirez rumbled more forcefully. "Alistair is right. It wasn't your fault, and it wasn't young Clinkscales' fault, either. It was that idiot Black Leg. Once the first shot was fired—"

He shrugged, and Honor sighed. He and Alistair were right, and she and Nimitz could both feel Benson's firm agreement with her superiors. But still...

She sighed again, then made herself nod unhappily. Yet despite Ramirez's firmness, she knew she was going to go right on second guessing herself, and knowing he was right wouldn't change a thing. She'd made the call hoping the double threat would minimize any temptation to resist, and it should have worked—had worked, once the initial firefight (if you could call such a one-sided massacre that) was over. But she was the CO. It was her job to get things right, and she hadn't, and whether it was reasonable or not, she blamed herself for it.

Still, she couldn't afford to brood on it, either, and she opened her mouth to speak, then looked up as the briefing room door opened to admit Geraldine Metcalf and a stranger in an orange jumpsuit. Honor felt a spasm of confused emotion—distaste, anger, and an undeniable stab of fear—as she saw the jumpsuit, for she had worn one just like it in PNS Tepes brig, but the jumpsuit hardly registered, for it was buried in her surprise at seeing Metcalf. The situation aboard Krashnark had only just started settling down, and she'd expected Metcalf to remain aboard the cruiser as Marchant's XO until they had everything buttoned up. But she hadn't... and Honor stiffened in her chair as Metcalf's emotions hit her like a hammer.

"Gerry?" she asked, half-raising a hand to reach out to the other woman before she could stop herself.

"Excuse me, Ma'am," Metcalf said, her voice curiously flat and almost stunned sounding. She didn't even seem to see Honor's hand, and she clasped her own hands behind herself, coming to a sort of parade rest and straightening her spine. "I realize I shouldn't have burst in on you like this, Milady," she went on in that same flat voice, "but this is Commander Victor Ainspan. He was the senior Manticoran POW aboard Krashnark, and Solomon and I thought you should hear his news as quickly as possible."

"What news would that be?" Honor's voice sounded almost calm, but that was solely because decades of command experience had control of her vocal cords. Underneath her apparent composure the jagged spikes of stress and shock radiating from Metcalf twisted her nerves like taut cables, and she kept herself in her chair only by sheer force of will.

"The prisoners aboard Krashnark, Ma'am," Metcalf told her. "They're all military POWs, not politicals, and fifteen of them are from the Zanzibaran Navy."

"Zanzibaran?" Honor's eyebrows furrowed. The Caliphate's navy didn't have anything bigger than a heavy cruiser, and its units were assigned almost exclusively to the defense of their own home system, so how—

"Zanzibaran," Metcalf confirmed harshly, and her nostrils flared. "Milady, according to the prisoners, the Peeps hit Zanzibar hard two T-months ago." Alistair McKeon muttered a disbelieving imprecation behind Honor, but she couldn't look away from Metcalf's face. "They rolled right over it—sucked the picket into a head-on pass, blew it out with missile pods, and then went on and took out every industrial platform in the system."

Ramirez and Benson looked perplexed. They'd been on Hell too long, and they were too unfamiliar with the members and dynamics—not to mention the astrography—of the Manticoran Alliance to realize how far into the Allies' rear the Peeps had gone to strike at Zanzibar. But Honor and McKeon knew.

"My God, Gerry," the commodore said. "Are you sure?"

"Whether I am nor not, the prisoners are, Skipper," Metcalf told him, her expression grim. "But that's not the worst of it. Commander Ainspan?"

The dark-faced, whippet-thin commander stepped forward, and Honor shook herself.

"Excuse me, Commander," she said. "It was rude of us to ignore you."

"Don't worry about that, Milady," Ainspan said, and Honor's eyebrows flipped back up as she truly concentrated on him for the first time and the boiling confusion of his emotions reached out to her. His eyes were fixed on her ravaged face, and they positively glowed with some deep reaction she couldn't even begin to sort out. Whatever it was, it wasn't the same as Metcalf's—which was reasonable enough. Gerry's news was no surprise to him, after all. But even so, he radiated a sense of shock almost as great as the lieutenant commander's. It was just a different kind of shock. One that was almost... reverent, and he seemed unable to go on after his first short sentence.

"Are you all right, Commander?" Honor asked after a few seconds of silence, and the liberated prisoner flushed darkly.

"I— Yes, Milady. I'm fine," he said. "It's just that... well, we all thought you were dead."

"Dead?" Honor frowned for a moment, then nodded. "So they admitted what happened to Tepes? I didn't think they would."

"Tepes?" Ainspan blinked at her. "No, Milady. They never said anything about anyone named Tepes."

"It wasn't an 'anyone,'" Honor explained. "It was a ship—Cordelia Ransom's ship." This was insane, she thought. The fact that the Peeps had hit Zanzibar was incomparably more important than discussing the names of blown up StateSec battlecruisers, yet Ainspan seemed almost more concerned about her than he was about the fact that he himself had just been rescued from Peep custody!

"It was—?" the commander began, then stopped and shook himself. "INS didn't give the name of her ship, Milady. But how did you know it? It only happened nine months ago."

"What?" It was Honor's turn to feel confused. "I don't know what happened nine months ago, Commander, but we've been on Hell for a T-year and a half, and Commodore McKeon and his people blew Tepes up before we ever landed!"