Shadow of Freedom-eARC (29 page)

“Of course, My Lady.”

Chapter Sixteen

“—want him to wonder why he’s being kicked out an airlock without a skinsuit.”

Anger smoked through Major John Pole like sea smoke as he listened to the playback of Kristoffersen’s conversation with the Manty lieutenant. Through an oversight (which Pole planned to correct as soon as this current business was resolved), he had no access to the surveillance systems outside Victor Seven when the Shona Station went to emergency com conditions, which meant he’d been unable to watch or listen to Kristoffersen’s conversation with the Manties until the captain had returned with his recording of the entire incident.

“Oversight’ my ass!
Pole thought furiously now, remembering that bitch MacWilliams’ expression as she “apologized” so profusely for her “inability” to tap him into her systems. It was a purely technical problem, she’d assured him, and one Commander MacVey’s tech people would rectify the instant the current emergency let them stand down from their damage control duties.

Pole felt his teeth grate together in memory, yet there was nothing he could do about it at the moment. Besides, he had other things to be worrying about.

“She’s fucking crazy, Sir!” Kristoffersen said harshly. “She
wanted
me to go for my pulser and give that big son-of-a-bitch an excuse to blow me away!”

Pole’s grunt of agreement might have contained a modicum of sympathy for his subordinate’s frayed nerves, although, if pressed, he would have had to admit the universe would have survived quite handily if the Manties
had
taken Kristoffersen out. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean the captain’s estimate of this Hearns’ sanity was in error.

“Excuse me, Sir,” Captain Leonie Ascher, Charlie Company’s CO said respectfully, “but shouldn’t we consider the possibility that these people mean what they’re saying?”

“What? That they’ll come in here after us? Actually launch some kind of
assault
on a facility whose security is guaranteed by the Solarian Gendarmerie?”

Pole glared at her, and she shrugged ever so slightly.

“Sir, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should simply roll over for the first neobarb to start throwing his or her weight around. But she had a point; this Zavala
has
already taken out four battlecruisers. It may be that he’s out of control, as well as out of his mind—that he’s way outside what his superiors expected when they gave him his orders. All that could be true. Hell, it probably
is
true! But he’s still committed an outright act of war already, and I think we have to seriously consider the possibility that he’ll keep right on going. Let’s face it, Sir—at this point he’s
got
to get his spacers back.”

“You’re saying he’s painted himself so far into a corner he doesn’t have any choice but to keep going? He’s got to get what he came for if he’s going to have a prayer of covering his ass when his superiors find out he’s created this kind of incident with the League?”

“Something like that, Sir.” Ascher nodded.

Pole considered what she’d said. With Captain Myers and Captain Truchinski off commanding detachments elsewhere, she and Kristoffersen were the only company commanders currently aboard Shona Station. Although Ascher was junior to Kristoffersen and two of her company’s platoons were off-station at the moment, she was far and away the more valuable asset. She’d always been smarter—a
lot
smarter, actually—than the other captain, which was why Pole had sent Kristoffersen out to meet the Manties. If they really were as out of control as the destruction of Dubroskaya’s warships suggested, and if something went wrong and he had to lose one of them, he’d preferred for it to be Kristoffersen. All of which suggested he really should consider the possibility that Ascher had a point…and probably a damned good one.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Governor Dueñas had given him his orders in person in a com conversation he’d carefully recorded as part of the official record, and that left Pole very little wiggle room. If he surrendered the interned Manties, he’d be disobeying a direct order from his legal superior. The Gendarmerie would be furious enough with him for yielding to some neobarb navy’s threats, however hopeless his situation, given the disastrous precedent that would set. If he not only rolled over but did so in defiance of direct orders
not
to, he’d simply hand the inevitable board of inquiry—and the court-martial which would no doubt follow—an even bigger hammer with which to reduce him and his career to very tiny, well pulverized pieces. And he could be damned sure Dueñas would do his level best (and use every favor he was owed) to blame the disaster here in Saltash on anyone except himself.

Major Pole didn’t doubt the governor was already scheming to come up with an official explanation which would make the destruction of Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s squadron entirely her fault. The idea was ridiculous, but in the competition between a dead Frontier Fleet admiral and a live Frontier Security governor, the one who was still breathing was almost certain to come out on top, regardless of any inconvenient little things like facts. Under the circumstances, the last thing Pole could afford would be to simultaneously disappoint Dueñas and give the governor an excuse to hang the League’s humiliating surrender on
him
. In the end,
someone
was going to be scapegoated for what had happened here, and whoever it was would be fortunate if all that happened was that his career came to an abrupt and ignominious end. More likely, the powers that were would decide an example had to be made, and John Pole had no intention of providing the example. The survival rate for ex-gendarmes who found themselves guests of the penal system was far too low for that.

The problem was that Ascher might well be right about whether or not Zavala was willing to push things. He truly might send in those boarders to reclaim the Manties by force. For that matter, he truly might be so crazy he really would treat Solarian gendarmes as common pirates if they fell into his hands!

“We can’t just play dead for him,” he said finally. “That’s completely unacceptable.”

Kristoffersen and Ascher glanced at each other, then back at him, and he bared his teeth.

“They may think it’s going to be easy to get into this module,” he said. “If they do, it’s up to us to demonstrate their error. We’ve probably got more troopers in here than they have boarders out there, there are only so many ways they can come at us, we know the station a hell of a lot better than they do, and we’ve also got the advantage of the defensive position. We’ve got a lot more heavy weapons than we saw in this, too.” He jabbed an angry finger at the recording they’d all just viewed. “If they try to fight their way in, we’ll massacre them!”

“And if they use their cruisers’ point defense to blow a way in from the outside, Sir?” Ascher asked.

“There’s no way even a maniac would do that.” Pole waved his hand dismissively. “You think they’re going to risk explosively depressurizing the entire module when they’re so anxious to get their people back unharmed?” He shook his head. “No, if they try to fight their way in here, they’re going to have to come to us on our terms. And when they do, we’ll
bleed
them.”

Ascher’s eyes looked doubtful, and the major glared at her.

“I’m not going to just hand over their spacers against direct orders without at least trying to hang onto them,” he said flatly. “And I think they may be more amenable to reason once they figure out how much trying to take them back by force is going to cost.”

Ascher still looked unconvinced, but Pole didn’t really care. He didn’t believe for a moment that he could hang onto the interned Manties indefinitely, but he
was
confident he could inflict heavy casualties on any Manty attempt to fight their way into Victor Seven, and when he did, they’d pull back to rethink. At that point, if
he
were this Zavala, he’d find a way to tighten the screws on Dueñas. There was no doubt in Pole’s mind that anyone with the only operable warships in a star system could find a way to convince that system’s governor to see reason sooner or later, especially when the governor in question was stuck out in the open where the Manties could get at him without killing the people they wanted to rescue themselves. And if Zavala convinced Dueñas to
order
Pole to hand the internees over, even it was obviously only under duress, the monkey was off the major’s back.

And if he
can’t
convince Dueñas to play ball, I’m no worse off than I was before,
he thought.
In fact, if I lose a couple of dozen gendarmes and then hand over the Manties “to prevent further bloodshed,” I may even be able to make a case for its being
Dueñas’
fault for ordering me not to cough them up in the first place. If I phrase my report right, make it clear I was prepared to go all the way and only backed down to save Solarian lives from a homicidal neobarb once it became obvious my civilian superior had misread the situation disastrously, the Gendarmerie will be in a hell of a lot better position to hammer Frontier Security over this instead of
our
carrying the can
.

* * *

“Well, time’s up, My Lady,” Gutierrez said.

“Indeed it is,” Abigail agreed. “So I suppose we should go ahead and get this ship off the field. If you’d be so good, Mateo?”

“Of course, My Lady.”

Gutierrez nodded and glanced around to be sure all his people were where he’d told them to be before he stepped cautiously to the edge of the corridor down which Kristoffersen had departed in such high dudgeon. He extended a sensor wand into the corridor’s mouth, and the multi-spectrum pickup projected a detailed heads-up view of the passageway onto the inside of his skinsuit helmet. He cycled through the visible spectrum into infrared and then into ultraviolet and grunted in unsurprised satisfaction as he spotted the web of tripwire lasers covering the last third or so of the forty-meter corridor. The blast doors at the far end, where the spoke-like axial passage actually entered Victor Seven, were closed, but someone had cut what looked suspiciously like firing loopholes through the heavy-duty panels.

A little closer inspection showed that the tripwires he’d picked up were connected to anti-personnel mines which had been attached to the bulkheads and deckhead. The mines were covered with nanotech chameleon skin designed to blend into the alloy to which they’d been affixed, but the people who’d emplaced them were gendarmes, more skilled in thuggery than any sort of actual military training. They hadn’t even bothered to detach the laser sensors from the mines; they’d left them mounted on the mine housings, and with that for a starting point, it wasn’t hard for his sensor wand to locate the mines by their internal powerpacks.

“You know, My Lady,” he said absently, still cataloging threats, “if we were willing to get in line and march straight down the middle of the passageway here—and maybe go ahead and paint big bulls-eyes on our chests, too—they probably
could
get a lot of us.”

“I know how good you are, Mateo,” Abigail replied soothingly. “There’s no need to be nasty to them just because they aren’t. I’m sure they’re doing the very best they can.”

“The scary thing is you’re probably right about that.”

He studied his HUD for a few more moments, then nodded.

“’Bout what we expected, My Lady. Not much finesse, but let’s be fair. It’s a straight corridor into the first blast door. How much room for finesse
is
there?”

“I suppose that depends on a lot of factors,” she said with a crooked smile. “Go ahead and get their attention, Mateo.”

“Aye, aye, My Lady.”

* * *

The gendarmerie squad on the far side of those blast doors had failed to notice Gutierrez’ sensor wand, but Sergeant Clinton Abernathy, the squad’s leader, had grown increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked by. This wasn’t the kind of crap he’d signed up for, and the rumors about what this particular batch of neobarbs had already done only made bad a lot worse.

He didn’t like any part of this, and he failed to share Major Pole’s confidence that these people would back down in the face of a demonstration of manly determination. Perhaps that was because he and his squad had been chosen to do the initial demonstrating.

There were three access routes to Victor Seven from the rest of Shona Station. This one, following the main axial from the lift shafts, was the most direct and the broadest, which made it the logical path for a full-fledged assault. The second route ran through the materials-handling conduit, through which consumables and refuse were transported into and out of the habitat module. It hadn’t been planned for humans to use, however, and it would have been a cramped and tortuous way to get at the module’s garrison. At the moment, all of its blast doors had been closed and remote sensors had been set to alert the defenders if those doors were disturbed. It seemed unlikely anyone would try coming that way, but if they did, there’d be plenty of warning in time to get blocking forces into position.

The third possible way in was really designed as an emergency evacuation route, and it was less liberally supplied with blast doors, since it was supposed to stay open and accessible for people trying to get out of Victor Seven in the face of disaster. The good news was that it had a lot more bends and was rather narrower than the axial passageway, even if it was more accessible than the materials tube. They’d had to position more people to cover it, but they had good fields of fire and the Manties would have to come out in the open around the turns in the corridor wall to get at them.

But still—

“Movement!” Corporal Marjorie Pareja snapped suddenly.

“What? Where?!” Abernathy demanded, peering at the handheld display feeding from the fixed pickup on the far side of the blast doors.

“Zebra-Tango!” Pareja replied.

* * *

Gutierrez watched as the sensor remote he’d bounced up the passageway rolled to a stop just short of the first line of mines. He didn’t really need it, but seeing how quickly the other side reacted to it should be informative.