Warnecke"s eyes glittered, but then he forced his expression to smooth out.
"You"re cleverer than I thought, Captain," he observed in something like his normal smooth tones.
"You didn"t really think I"d forgotten the light-speed limit when I set this up, did you?" Honor countered. "We agreed to separate the shuttle ten minutes" flight time from the hyper limit . . . which would just happen to place you twelve light-minutes from my ships. But that won"t matter if the transmitter"s right here in the shuttle, will it?"
"But how can I be certain there"s not a weapon hidden inside it?" Warnecke inquired lightly. "There"s ample room in there for a small pulser, I believe."
"I"m sure you have a power sensor around somewhere. Run a check."
"An excellent suggestion. Harrison?"
The pilot glowered at Honor, then opened an equipment locker. He pulled out a hand scanner and ran it over the case when she held it out.
"Well?" Warnecke asked.
"Nothing," the pilot grunted. "I"m picking up a single ten-volt power source. That"s plenty for a short-range transmitter, but it"s too little juice for a pulser."
"Please excuse my suspicious nature, Captain," Warnecke murmured, nodding acceptance of the report. "I trust, however, that it"s the only weapon you brought aboard?"
"All I brought is what you see," Honor said with total honesty. "As for other weapons-" She handed her case to LaFollet, set Nimitz down in a seat, unsealed her tunic, shrugged it off, and turned in place in her white turtleneck blouse. "You see? Nothing up my sleeves."
"Would you mind removing your boots, as well?" Warnecke asked politely. "I"ve seen quite a few nasty surprises hidden in boot tops over the years."
"If you insist." Honor toed her boots off and handed them to the pilot, who examined them with surly competence, then threw them back to her with a glare.
"Clean," he grunted, and she returned his glare with a mocking smile as she sat beside Nimitz and pulled them back on. She slipped back into her tunic and sealed it, then gathered the "cat back up, reclaimed the case from her armsman, and moved to the extreme rear of the pa.s.senger compartment. She settled into one of the comfortable seats and laid the case in her lap, then pressed the top b.u.t.ton. One of the power lights blinked to life, glowing a steady amber, and the two bodyguards regarded her uneasily.
She waited while Candless and Mattingly followed her into the shuttle and submitted to the pilot"s search, then cleared her throat.
"One more thing, Mr. Warnecke. Before my cutter undocks and my Marines leave your boat bay, Commander Candless will take a look at the flight deck. We wouldn"t want anyone extra to be hiding up there, now would we?"
"Of course not," Warnecke said. "Allen, go with the Commander-and make sure he doesn"t touch anything."
The bodyguard jerked his head, and the two men disappeared into the nose of the shuttle while Honor and Warnecke regarded one another down the ten-meter length of the pa.s.senger compartment. They were back in seconds, and Candless nodded.
"Clear, Captain," he said in his best Sphinx accent, and Honor nodded.
"And now, I think we should all have seats right here where I can keep an eye on you," she said pleasantly. "I realize your little transmitter has ample power to send the detonation command from here, but once we get beyond its range, I wouldn"t want anyone having an accident with your com when I couldn"t see it happen."
"As you wish." Warnecke nodded to his henchmen, and they took seats alongside him. All of them were between Honor and her armsmen and the flight deck, and they turned their chairs to face her just as her case beeped and the second light began to flash red. All four of the privateers tensed, and Honor smiled.
"Excuse me," she murmured, and punched a nine-digit code into the number pad. The red light went out instantly, and she leaned back comfortably.
"Everything green, Captain?" the cutter"s flight engineer called through the open hatches.
"That"s affirmative, Chief. Instruct Commander Cardones and Major Hibson to proceed."
"Aye, aye, Ma"am."
The hatches slid shut, and the cutter undocked. It drifted away on a puff of thrusters and turned for Wayfarer. Five minutes-and another beep from Honor"s case-later, another trio of cutters left the boat bay carrying Susan Hibson and her Marines.
"Check to be certain they"re all off, Harrison," Warnecke ordered. The pilot activated his skinsuit"s com and murmured into it, then listened to his earbug for several seconds.
"Confirmed. They"re all off, and we"re breaking orbit now."
"Good." Warnecke leaned back in his seat. "And now, Captain, I suggest we all get comfortable. We still have several hours to spend in one another"s company, after all."
The next three hours pa.s.sed with glacial slowness. The seconds limped into eternity, and tension hung in the shuttle like smoke. Every five minutes, the audible alarm on the case in Honor"s lap beeped and the red light flashed, and every five minutes she input the code to still them both. Mattingly and LaFollet each sat at a view port, Mattingly watching the demolition charge while LaFollet made certain no skinsuited crewmen were creeping up on the shuttle hatch. Warnecke had laid his heavy little transmitter in the seat beside him, but his bodyguards watched Honor and her armsmen as intently as Mattingly and LaFollet watched the charge and the hatch. One of them kept his weapon at instant readiness at all times, but flechette guns are heavy, and they changed off every fifteen minutes so that one of them could put his down and rest his arms. One flechette gun was more than adequate, however. Manifestly, no one could possibly get to Warnecke or his henchmen alive.
There was no conversation. Warnecke was content to sit in silence, smiling slightly, and Honor had no desire to speak to him or his men. She could feel their stress through Nimitz, but she could also feel their growing triumph as the repair ship left her warships further and further astern. They were actually going to get away with it, and their gloating exhilaration was hard on the "cat. He curled in the seat beside Honor"s, kneading his claws in and out of the upholstery, and her hand caressed his spine slowly and comfortingly as the minutes dragged away.
Her case beeped once more, and she took her hand unhurriedly from the "cat and punched numbers into the keypad yet again. But this time it was a slightly different code. The red light went out, and she glanced casually at the bulkhead chrono.
Three hours and fifteen minutes. She and Fred Cousins had considered the maximum range of Warnecke"s hand-held transmitter carefully before she allowed the privateer to exchange it for the original. It was remotely possible, a.s.suming a sufficiently sensitive receiving array, that a unit that small might have a range of as much as two light-minutes. With that in mind, Honor had decided Warnecke had to be at least five light-minutes from the planet before she dared take any action against him, and that time had now come.
She waited another few seconds, then pressed the third b.u.t.ton on the case-the one the new number code had armed-and two things happened. First, the small but efficient jamming pod hidden in the demolition charge on the outside of the shuttle came to life, putting out a strong enough field to trash any radio signal. The shuttle"s com lasers could still get the detonation order through, but even as the jammer went into action, the end of the case opened and the familiar weight of a c.o.c.ked and locked .45 automatic slid out into her hand.
None of Warnecke"s men realized anything had happened, for the seat in front of Honor hid the case from them. Besides, they knew she was unarmed, for they"d checked the case without finding the giveaway power source of a pulser or any other modern hand weapon. The possibility of a something so primitive it used chemical explosives had never even occurred to them.
Honor"s expression didn"t even flicker as she brought the pistol up in a smooth, flowing motion, and its sudden, deafening roar filled the pa.s.senger compartment like the hammer of G.o.d. The bodyguard named Allen had his flechette gun ready, but he never even realized he was dead as fifteen grams of hollow-nosed lead exploded through his forehead, and the stunning, totally unexpected concussion shocked every one of the privateers into a fatal fractional second of absolute immobility. The second bodyguard was just as shocked as anyone else, and he hadn"t even begun to move when the gun roared again in the same sliver of time.
The bodyguard was hurled back out of his seat, spraying the bulkhead-and Andre Warnecke-with a gray-flecked bucket of red, and Honor was on her feet, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip.
"The party is over, Mr. Warnecke," she said, and her eyes were carved of frozen brown flint. She had to speak loudly to hear herself through the ringing in her ears, and she smiled as the privateer stared at her in numb disbelief. "Stand up and move away from the transmitter."
Warnecke swallowed, eyes wide as he realized he"d finally met a killer even more deadly than he, then nodded shakenly and started to push himself up. That was the instant the pilot made a dive for a fallen flechette gun, and the terrible, ear-shattering concussion of the .45 hammered the compartment twice more. The double tap wasn"t a head shot this time, and the pilot had over fifteen seconds to scream, writhing on the deck while aspirated blood gushed from his mouth, before he died. But Honor didn"t even blink, and the pistol was trained once more on Warnecke"s forehead before he could even think about going for his own sidearm..
"Stand up," she repeated, and he obeyed. He moved away from the transmitter, and Honor nodded to LaFollet.
Her chief armsman wasn"t gentle. He moved up the starboard pa.s.senger aisle, staying well clear of his steadholder"s field of fire until he could reach Warnecke, then threw the privateer brutally to the deck. He drove a knee into his captive"s spine and twisted both arms so harshly up behind him that Warnecke cried out in pain.
Mattingly was there in a moment, scooping up both blood and brain-spattered flechette guns and tossing them to Candless before he and LaFollet jerked Warnecke to his feet once more. A hand removed the pulser from Warnecke"s holster and tucked it inside Mattingly"s tunic, and then the two armsmen frogmarched him to the rear of the compartment and shoved him into a seat. Mattingly sat three seats away, leveling the liberated pulser at Warnecke"s chest, and Honor carefully lowered the .45"s hammer and shoved the heavy weapon into her tunic pocket.
"I made you an offer which would have left you alive," she told her prisoner. "I would have honored that offer. Thanks to you, I no longer have to." Her smile could have frozen a star"s heart. "Thank you, Mr. Warnecke. I appreciate it."
She collected her case once more and punched a third combination into the number pad. The jamming pod shut down obediently, and the tractor pads holding the demolition charge to the shuttle disengaged. The device Warnecke had blithely a.s.sumed was only a demolition charge clanged to the repair ship"s hull, and the amber telltale flashed confirmation as a second set of pads locked it in place.
Honor scooped Nimitz up, feeling the "cat"s fierce exultation as she set him on her shoulder, and stepped over the bodies of the men she"d killed into the flight deck. The controls were standard, but she set the "cat in the copilot"s seat and took two full minutes to familiarize herself with them before she slipped the pilot"s headset on and flipped up the plastic shield over the belly tractor power switch. Separating from a vessel underway under impeller drive was tricky, but at least the repair ship had no sidewalls, and she lit the acceleration warning in the pa.s.senger cabin and keyed the intercom.
"Acceleration in thirty seconds," she announced. "Strap in; it"s going to be rough."
She waited, watching the chrono tick down, then killed the tractors holding the shuttle to the repair ship"s hull and drove the belly and main thruster levers clear to the stop.
They were conventional thrusters, but they were also powerful, and just over one hundred gravities of acceleration hurled the shuttle away from the ship. The small craft"s artificial gravity did its best, but its inertial compensator had no impeller wedge to work with. Twenty gravities got through, and Honor grunted as a giant"s fist slammed down. But the shuttle blasted straight for the perimeter of the repair ship"s wedge at an acceleration of one kilometer per second squared. It was more than enough to clear the wedge before its narrowing after aspect could destroy the tiny craft, and she gasped with relief as she hurtled free and killed the belly thrusters. She burned the main thrusters for another thirty seconds, using her att.i.tude thrusters to slew away from the repair ship at a more tolerable fifty gravities, then brought the shuttle"s transmitter on-line.
"Pirate vessel, this is Captain Honor Harrington," she said coldly. "Your leader is my prisoner. The charges on the planet are now inoperable, but you have a two hundred k-ton charge in skin contact with your hull, and I have the transmitter which controls it. Reverse course immediately, or I will detonate it. You have one minute to comply."
The shuttle was far enough out to bring up its own impellers now, and Honor engaged the wedge and shot ahead at four hundred gravities. She watched the big vessel falling away from her with one eye and the chrono with another and keyed her mike once more.
"You now have thirty seconds," she said flatly, circling back around to maintain visual observation on the repair ship. Still it continued to run for the hyper limit, and she wondered if its crew thought she was bluffing or simply figured they had nothing left to lose.
"Fifteen seconds," she said emotionlessly, hand hovering over the case. "Ten seconds"
Still the ship maintained its course, and she slewed the nose of the shuttle away, taking it out of her c.o.c.kpit"s line of sight even as she polarized the pa.s.senger compartment view ports.
"Five seconds," she told the ship, her voice an executioner"s as she watched it now on radar. "Four . . . three . . . two . . . one."
She pressed the second b.u.t.ton on her case once, and the repair ship and its entire crew disappeared in a terrible flash.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE.
Ginger Lewis watched her work section help the crew of Rail Number Three maneuver the pod back into Cargo One. The pod was smaller than a LAC, but it was much larger than a pinnace, and its designers had been far less concerned with ease of handling than with combat effectiveness. Nor was the situation helped by the fact that Wayfarer, as one of the first four ships to be fitted with the new, rail-launched version, had been forced to work out handling procedures more or less as she went. But each pod cost over three million dollars, which put their reuse high on BuShip"s list of desirable achievements. And, Ginger admitted, having them available to shoot at another enemy made sense all on its own.
None of which made the task any less of a pain.
Commander Harmon"s LACs had tracked down all but three of the pods used in the short, savage destruction of Andre Warnecke"s cruisers, which was outstanding, given how difficult the system"s low signature features made finding them. Be a good idea to put a homing beacon on them, Ginger thought, making a mental note to suggest just that. Wonder why no one at BuWeaps thought of that?
In the meantime, all twenty-seven of the (beaconless) relocated pods had been towed to Wayfarer, where skinsuited Engineering and Tactical crews had worked their b.u.t.ts off recertifying their launch cells. Two had been down-checked-they were repairable, but not out of Wayfarer"s...o...b..ard resources-and the Captain had ordered them destroyed.
That left twenty-five, all of which had to have their cells reloaded. That could have been done on the launch rails, but Cargo One didn"t offer much s.p.a.ce for maneuvering capital missiles. Wayfarer was equipped with the latest Mark 27, Mod C, which weighed in at just over one hundred and twenty tons in one standard gravity. Even in free-fall, that was a lot of ma.s.s and inertia, and the d.a.m.ned things were the next best thing to fifteen meters long. All in all, Ginger had to agree that reloading them outside the ship, where there was plenty of room to work, and then remounting them on the rails made far more sense.
It was also backbreaking and exhausting, and the combined teams from Engineering and Tactical had been at it for eighteen hours straight. This was Ginger"s third shift, and she was starting to worry about personnel fatigue. Tired people could do dangerous things, and it was her job to be certain none of her people did.
She walked further up the side of Cargo One, standing straight out from the bulkhead to get a better view as the rail crew-wearing hardsuits and equipped with tractor-pressor cargo-handling units-babied the current pod into mating with the rail. The handling units looked like hand-held missile launchers, only bigger, and each end mounted a paired presser and tractor with a rated lift of one thousand tons. The rail crew was using the pressers like giant, invisible screw jacks to align the pod"s mag shoe precisely with the rail, and despite their fatigue, they moved with a certain bounce. Ginger smiled tiredly at that. Morale aboard Wayfarer had soared since Schiller. First they"d taken out two raider destroyers-well, all right, one destroyer-and a light cruiser and captured a Peep CL for good measure. Then they"d sailed straight into Marsh and zapped four heavy cruisers, and then they"d captured one of the most wanted ma.s.s-murders in Silesian history in a personal shoot-out with the Old Lady, blown a thousand more straight to h.e.l.l, and saved an entire planet from nuclear devastation. Not too shabby, she thought with another grin, remembering a long ago discussion with a bitterly disappointed Aubrey Wanderman. Not a ship of the wall, no, Wonder Boy. But somehow I doubt you"d have wanted to be anywhere but on the Old Lady"s command deck when this one went down!
As always, thoughts of Aubrey woke a reflexive pang of worry, but there was something going on there, as well. Ginger hadn"t managed to figure out exactly what it was. She was still new enough in her grade to be a bit slow tapping into the senior petty officer"s information net-one couldn"t call it gossip, after all-but she knew Horace Harkness and Gunny Hallowell were involved, and she had immense respect for both those gentlemen. Knowing they"d taken a hand was a huge relief, and so were the changes she was seeing in Aubrey. He was still wary, but he wasn"t scared to death anymore, and unless she was seriously mistaken, the kid was starting to fill out. One of the side effects of prolong was to slow the physical maturation process. At twenty, Aubrey looked a lot like a pre-prolong civilization"s sixteen or seventeen, yet he was turning into a solid, well-muscled seventeen-year-old, and his confidence was growing right in step. There was a new maturity there, too. The kid she"d teased-and taken un.o.btrusively under her wing-during training was growing up, and she liked the man he was turning into.
"All right!" Chief Weintraub"s exclamation of triumph came over the com as the pod finally mated properly. The work crew stood back, clearing the rail safety perimeter, while Weintraub signaled Lieutenant Wolcott to run the pod in, and Ginger heard a chorus of tired cheers as it cycled smoothly back to its place in the launch queue.
"Only eight more to go, troops, and only two of "em are ours." Weintraub used his suit thrusters to turn himself until he faced Ginger and waved a manipulator arm at her. "We"ve got our next baby coming along in about five minutes, Ging. Leave your people here to take a breather and go see how they"re coming on the loading for Number Twenty-Four, would you?"
"No sweat, Chief." Ginger was technically senior to Weintraub, but he was the missile specialist BuWeaps had trained specifically to straw boss Rail Three, and this was his show. Besides, it gave her a chance to play with her SUT pack for the first time this shift. She waved back, walked to the lip of the cargo doors, and consulted the HUD projected on the inside of her helmet. Ah! There Number Twenty-Four was. Nine klicks out at zero-three-niner.
Ginger disengaged her boots from the hull and floated free for a moment, gazing down at the huge, blue-and-white marble of Sidemore. It sure is a pretty planet. Glad we could get it back for the people it belongs to. Then she looked out at the stars, and a familiar sense of awe filled her. Unlike some people, Ginger loved EVAs. The immensity of the universe didn"t bother her; she found it cleansing and oddly soothing-a special feeling of privacy mixed with a wondering joy that G.o.d would allow her to glimpse His creation from His own magnificent vantage point.
But she wasn"t here to admire the view. She centered the HUD reticle on Pod Twenty-Four"s beacon, locking her vector into the automated guidance systems of the outsized Sustained Use Thruster pack strapped over her skinsuit. The SUT packs were designed for extended EVA use, with much greater endurance and power than the standard skinsuit thrusters, and Ginger loved her rare opportunities to play with them. Now she double-checked her vector, grinned in antic.i.p.ation, and tapped the go b.u.t.ton.
That was when it happened.
The second she enabled the thrusters, the entire system went mad. Instead of the gentle pressure she"d expected, the SUT went instantly to maximum power. It slammed her away from the ship under an acceleration intended only for emergency use, and she grunted in anguish, unable to cry out properly under the ma.s.sive thrust. Her thumb reached frantically for the manual override, finding the b.u.t.ton with the blind, unerring speed of relentless training, and jabbed sharply . . . and nothing happened at all.
Nor was that the worst of it. Her att.i.tude thrusters were equally berserk, whipsawing her wildly and sending her pinwheeling insanely off into s.p.a.ce. She lost all spatial reference in the first two seconds, and her inner ear went mad as she whirled crazily away from the ship. It was only G.o.d"s good grace that she was headed away from the ship; her malfunctioning SUT could just as easily have turned her straight into the hull, with instantly lethal consequences.
But the consequences she had were bad enough. For the first time in her life, Ginger Lewis was hammered by the motion sickness which had always evoked amused sympathy when she saw it in others. She vomited helplessly, coughing and choking as the instinct-level responses her instructors had beaten into her fought to keep her airways clear. She"d never expected to need that training-she wasn"t the sort to whoop her cookies over a little vacuum work!-but only the legacy of her merciless DIs kept her alive long enough to hit the vomit-slimed chin switch that dropped her com into Flight Ops" EVA guard frequency.
"Mayday! Mayday! Suit malfunction!" she gasped while her thrusters continued to bellow like maddened animals. "This-" She retched again, choking as dry heaves wracked her. "This is Blue Sixteen! I"m-G.o.d, I don"t know where I am!" She heard the panic in her own voice, but she couldn"t even see. The contents of her stomach coated the inside of her helmet, wiping away the stars, compounding her disorientation, and still the thrusters thundered without rhyme or reason! "Mayday!" she screamed into the com.
And no one answered at all.
"What the-?" Scotty Tremaine had just relieved Lieutenant Justice, LAC Two"s ops officer, and settled into his chair in Flight Ops when he noticed the radar trace spearing away from the ship on an impossible vector.
He punched a query into the computers, but they didn"t know what it was either, and he frowned. The guard frequency was silent, so it couldn"t be somebody in trouble, but he couldn"t begin think of what else it might be, either. He tapped a stylus to his display, painting the trace and dropping it onto the master plot in CIC, and then hit the all-hands transmit key.
"Flight Ops," he said crisply into his boom mike. "I have an unidentified bogey heading out at-" he checked the numbers "-thirty-five gees. All section leaders, check your sections. I want a headcount soonest!"
He sat back in his chair, gnawing his lip as reports started coming in. They rattled from the com with rea.s.suring speed, and he checked each section leader off on his master list as he or she reported in. But then they stopped, and there was one section still unchecked.
"Blue Sixteen, Blue Sixteen!" he said into the mike. "Blue Sixteen, I need your count!" Only silence came back, and then someone else spoke.
"Flight, this is Yellow Three. I sent Blue Sixteen to check out Pod Two-Four three or four minutes ago."
Tremaine"s blood froze, and he shifted instantly to his link to Boat Bay One.
"Dutchman! Dutchman!" he barked. "Flight Ops is declaring a Dutchman! Get the ready pinnace out now!"
A startled acknowledgment came back, and he plugged into CIC.
"Ullerman, CIC," a voice said.
"Tremaine, Flight Ops," Scotty said urgently. "Listen up! I"ve got a Dutchman headed away from the ship at thirty-five gees. I painted the trace on your plot three minutes ago. Tie into the ready pinnace and guide them in on it-and for G.o.d"s sake don"t lose it!"
"Acknowledged," the voice snapped, and Tremaine turned back to his own radar. It was short-ranged and much less powerful than the main arrays, and the trace was already fading from his display. He saw the much larger radar signature of the ready pinnace, driving hard on reaction thrusters to clear the ship, and his lips moved as he whispered a silent prayer for whoever that disappearing trace was.
If the pinnace didn"t get to him before Tracking lost him, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d would become a Flying Dutchman in truth.
"Are you positive, Harry?" Honor asked quietly.
"Absolutely," Lieutenant Commander Tschu grated. "Some sick son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h rigged her SUT, Skipper. He tried to make it look like a general system failure, but he got too cute when he set her com up to "fail." The com"s not part of the SUT, and he had to interface her SUT computers with her skinny. That"s not hard, but it doesn"t happen by accident; someone has to make it, and someone d.a.m.ned well did. The SUT computer"s totally fried, and all his execution files were supposed to crash and burn with the rest of the system, but my data recovery people found a single line of code directing output to her com buried in the garbage. It"s only a fragment, but it"s also completely outside normal programming parameters, because there"s not supposed to be a link from the SUT to her com. This wasn"t a hardware failure, and it wasn"t corrupted files. It took specifically planted files to make it all happen."
Honor locked her hands behind her. She didn"t say a word for at least one full minute, but her eyes blazed. Morale-and performance-aboard Wayfarer had gone up by leaps and bounds. Her people had come together, fused into a single living, breathing whole by their shared accomplishments. They"d only had to look around to see how well they"d done, and she"d made certain they knew she was proud of them, as well. Even Sally MacBride and Master at Arms Thomas had commented to her on it, and Tschu"s Engineering department had shown the greatest improvements of all.
Now someone had attempted to murder one of her crew, and the way whoever it was had done it was almost worse than the attempt itself. Few s.p.a.cers would admit it, but the terror of being lost, of drifting helplessly in s.p.a.ce until your suit air and heat ran out, was one of the darkest nightmares of their profession.
That was what someone had done to Ginger Lewis, and Honor"s rage burned even hotter because it was her fault. She never doubted who was responsible for this, and she was responsible for the fact that Steilman was still at large. She should have forgotten about Tatsumi"s career and Wanderman"s sense of self-respect and smashed Steilman the first time he stepped out of line. She"d let herself be distracted-let herself actually look forward to Wanderman"s giving Steilman his comeuppance-and forgotten that he might have marked Lewis down for a victim.
The right corner of her mouth began to tic, and Rafe Cardones, who knew the signs of old, felt himself tighten at the telltale sign of fury. Then he realized she was even more enraged than he"d thought, for her voice was calm, almost conversational when she spoke to him at last.