In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V-ARC (33 page)

“Agreed,” Tone said.

“And next on the list of problems,” Honor went on, “is the fact that according to your information, these yahoos actually keep a guard ship on station.”

“That’s probably putting it a bit strongly,” Boadicea Matheson (who was indeed John Brown Matheson’s wife and Betsy Ross Matheson’s mother) put in. At the moment, Nimitz lay in her lap, not Honor’s, and her hands moved slowly, caressingly, over the ’cat’s fluffy pelt. It was obvious to Honor that the green-eyed, auburn-haired woman had been genetically designed as a “courtesan.” Honor knew at least a little (which was far more than she wished she knew) about the “training” Manpower inflicted on its pleasure slave lines, and from the way Nimitz had reacted to Boadicea, the abuse she’d survived before managing to escape had left plenty of internal scars. If so, however, they hadn’t affected her native wit…or courage.

“It’s not actually a
guard ship,
Commander,” Boadicea went on, her hands stroking, stroking down Nimitz’s back while the treecat purred. “That would imply they’re actually expecting trouble.”

“I see the distinction you’re trying to make, Ms. Matheson, and it’s probably a valid one,” Honor conceded. “At the same time, the fact that this…passel of outlaws have managed to agree that at least one of their armed vessels should have hot impeller nodes at all times—and be far enough from the platform to maneuver—shows a lot more forethought than most pirates or slavers ever display. And that, in turn, suggests this outfit is likely to be at least a bit more security conscious—and probably more alert—than we normally see out of them.”

“Agreed,” Tone said again. Honor looked back at him, and he shrugged slightly. “At the same time, Boadicea’s right about how prepared they’re really likely to be. They’re going through the motions, but it looks to us as if that doesn’t actually help a lot. It’s as if the fact that they
are
going through the motions makes them feel overconfident, like they’ve got all the bases covered. And we’re scarcely talking about any sort of regular warship. For all intents and purposes they’ve simply stuck a few missile launchers and some point defense onto merchant hulls, so everything you said about your ship’s vulnerability to damage would be true for them, too—in spades.”

“Maybe so,” Honor said. “It’s still going to present a significant problem, though. If nothing else, any ship being used as a pirate is probably going to have better long-range sensors than whatever was originally authorized for this habitat. It’d be close enough to impossible to sneak
Hawkwing
into weapons range of the platform under any circumstances, but giving them extra sensor reach is going to make it even harder.”

“We recognize that, Commander Harrington,” Matheson said.

“I’m glad, because that’s going to be our first serious problem. When they see us coming, their ‘guard ship’ is probably going to have the option of running for it instead of standing to fight. If they’ve got any other ships docked, they’ll almost certainly have cold nodes, which means
they
won’t be able to run. But if the platform has time to bring its weapons on line, I think we’re screwed. Not so much because of the damage they might do to
Hawkwing,
but because all of us know there are innocent bystanders aboard. I’m confident
Hawkwing
could
destroy
the entire platform if it refuses to surrender, but I’m not prepared to murder a thousand or so slaves and innocent technicians who were just unlucky enough to get their platform hijacked right out from under them. For that matter, I’d really rather not include the family dependents of the outlaws as ‘collateral damage,’ since I’ve got a hunch most of
them
didn’t exactly volunteer, either.

“But even assuming we could somehow deal with the guard ship, then take out or somehow neutralize the platform’s own weapons, there’s the little matter of how many
people
there are aboard the thing. Even leaving the question of innocent bystanders completely out of consideration, from what Mr. Tone’s been able to tell us, there’s going to be somewhere between eight hundred and two thousand actual pirates and smugglers aboard, given the permanent crew and whatever ships’ companies may be taking advantage of the platform-side facilities. Even at the minimum figure, that’s close to three times my ship’s total complement.
If
we can get
Hawkwing
into range, and
if
we can neutralize their weaponry, and
if
they’re willing to surrender without a fight once we’ve done those two things, there’s no problem. But if they’ve got the local civilian and naval authorities as deep into their pockets as you people are suggesting, all they really have to do is hold us off until some suitably outraged Confed cruiser comes along to kick my interfering ship out of sovereign Silesian territory. Which probably wouldn’t be all that difficult for them, given that sort of disparity in non-naval combat power. Even with my Marines in battle armor, they’d find it awful hard to hack that kind of odds, unless we wanted to use the kind of heavy weapons that would go right ahead and kill all of those innocent bystanders we’re trying to keep alive.”

Honor looked around at the silent, watching faces, and shrugged unhappily.

“Which is why I said I think we’re screwed,” she said quietly. “I don’t like saying that, either. At the same time, though, I’m not going to commit to attacking something like this when all indications are that we won’t be able to get in clean enough, or have remotely close to the boarding strength we’d need, to pull it off. I won’t risk getting that many noncombatants killed if there’s so little chance of success.”

All of them looked back at her for several moments. Then they looked at each other, and Matheson raised an eyebrow at one of the others—a tall, massively built and extremely ugly man, with a face which looked as if it had been hacked out of a boulder with a blunt object and a complexion darker than Honor’s friend Michelle Henke’s. He sat straddling one of the chairs, sitting backwards in it with his folded forearms across the top of the chair back and his chin resting on their cushion. He also hadn’t been formally introduced yet, however, and Honor wondered what that raised eyebrow was asking him about.

He didn’t say anything, only looked back at Matheson for a second or two. Then he shrugged and raised his head far enough to nod, and Matheson turned back to Honor.

“I’m not sure we have any fast and easy answers about how to get close enough, Commander,” he said, speaking very, very carefully. “We might, however, be able to find a few more people to fill out your boarding parties.”

“More people?” Honor sat for a moment, eyes narrowed in speculation. “What sort of ‘more people’ did you have in mind?” she asked then, in a tone which was even more careful than his had been.

“Well, that’s really more Opener’s bailiwick than mine,” Matheson said, twitching his head in the direction of the man who’d just nodded. He looked over his shoulder at his companion again. “You want to handle this bit, Opener?”

Honor looked thoughtfully at the man he’d called “Opener.” So far, Opener hadn’t said a single word, and if she’d known a bit less about genetic slaves, Honor might have been inclined to write him off as someone who was all brawn and very little brain. She recognized the basic genotype—one of Manpower’s heavy labor models—and she knew some of those lines really had been designed to be as slow-witted as they might look, just as almost all of them had been designed for limited “service lives.” Nobody was going to waste prolong on a slave under any circumstances, but a lot of the heavy labor slaves were deliberately genegineered for maximum strength and toughness at the expense of overloaded metabolisms which burned themselves out in as little as twenty-five or thirty T-years. Yet some heavy labor required well developed technical skills and the intelligence to support them, and Manpower produced slaves for that sort of requirement, as well. Her mother and her Uncle Jacques had always said that only the pleasure slaves were more dangerous—to their owners, at least—than the heavy labor/technician crosses, and unless Honor was sadly mistaken, this “Opener” was a case in point. She’d recognized both the intelligence and the bitter experience—and steely purpose—in the dark-brown, almost black eyes under those craggy brows, and Matheson’s obvious deference to him at this point only reinforced her original impression.

“All right,” he replied to Matheson now, sitting up straighter and looking across at Honor.
 

“I’m François-Dominique Toussaint,” he told her in a deep, rumbling voice perfectly suited to his powerful physique and deep chest. He watched her for a moment, waiting to see if she’d make the connection between his nickname and the name he’d chosen as a free person, and what looked like satisfaction flickered in his eyes when she pursed her lips and nodded slowly.

“The reason John said this was my bailiwick, Commander,” Toussaint continued, “is that I’m the local Ballroom’s dance instructor.”

He was still watching her expression, even more carefully now, and she understood exactly why. He’d just informed her that she was sitting beside a swimming pool with the man who was the commander of the Audubon Ballroom’s local “direct action” organization. The Ballroom’s battle cry—“Let’s dance!”—might have struck some people as humorous, but Honor knew too much about the way those dances normally worked out. And “Opener” had just identified himself as the man directly responsible for every bombing, act of arson, murder, and other atrocity committed by the Ballroom in the vicinity of Saginaw. If there was a single human being in the entire Confederacy who a Queen’s officer had less business talking to, Honor couldn’t imagine who it might be. She could no longer pretend, even to herself, that she didn’t know exactly who she was meeting with, and she knew with total certainty that what she really ought to do was call this insanity off, get up, and leave—quickly.

“That’s an interesting admission, Mr. Toussaint,” she heard herself say instead. “Does it have some direct bearing on this discussion, though?”

“It might,” he replied, his tone as calm as hers. “You see, the Ballroom happens to have come into possession of a transport vessel. A slaver.” His voice was still calm, yet lava seemed to churn with slow, deadly patience in its depths. “It masses a bit over two megatons, and up until about five T-months ago, it belonged to the Jessyk Combine. Now it belongs to us.”

Honor wasn’t even tempted to ask what had happened to the previous crew.

“We’ve managed to come up with the people we need to man its critical systems,” Toussaint continued. “I won’t pretend we have anything a naval officer would even remotely consider an
adequate
crew, or the bridge officers we really need, but we’re capable of basic astrogation and we’ve managed to keep propulsion and life support on line. In that regard, it’s probably just as well it’s got so few bells and whistles; there are less things for us to break.”

Honor gave a small nod of understanding, and he shrugged.

“For obvious reasons, we’re not keeping it here in Saginaw. In fact, we’ve got it in…another star system, let’s say. One with no real estate worth developing, where we’ve managed to cobble together a habitat of our own. Now, this ship is totally unarmed, so even if we had something like a trained crew, there’s no way we could use it against Casimir like some sort of Q-ship. But”—he looked very levelly into her eyes—“in that same unnamed star system, aboard that habitat, we’ve managed to assemble almost twelve hundred experienced fighters. Fighters who all have skinsuits…and weapons. We’re not Marines, Commander, but one thing we
damned
well are is as motivated as it gets when it comes time to dance.”

Honor inhaled deeply and settled back in her chair. She was so far into deep, dark water now that it wasn’t even remotely funny. It was one thing to gather information from someone like the Ballroom. It was another to propose to act upon that information in the Star Kingdom’s name. Yet bad as both those actions undoubtedly would have been from her superiors’ viewpoint, they could be at least arguably justified. It would be quite another thing for an officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy to actually cooperate operationally in what would undoubtedly be denounced as “an unprovoked terrorist attack” by the very sector governor with whom she’d been ordered to coordinate her activities here in Silesia. In fact, it would be the sort of “quite another thing” which led to interstellar incidents, heated diplomacy, demands for reparations, and the catastrophic end of the officer in question’s career.

But without Toussaint’s “dancers,” she didn’t begin to have the manpower to do anything about that depot.

It was that simple. If she staged a raid on Casimir with the Ballroom’s support, her career would almost certainly be over. She might be permitted to resign her commission, but it was far more likely to lead to an extraordinarily messy court-martial. Probably even to prison time, given the Ballroom’s official—and, frankly, well deserved—“terrorist” label. She never doubted that the majority of the Navy would understand, even approve, but that approval would be cold comfort after the ax fell.

She knew that. And for two or three heartbeats, she quailed from the vista of the future she saw opening before her. Yet she was who she was, and as she’d told Matheson in Chez Fiammetta’s, she was her mother’s daughter. She knew precisely what Allison Harrington would do in her place, if she had the training, the capability, and the resources. And she knew even more clearly than that what her father would do in her position, because once upon a time, he’d been there.

But in the end, what it came down to was less about what her parents would have thought or felt—less what
they
might have done—than it was about what
she
might do. About the maelstrom where her love for the Navy, the deep, satisfying joy she’d found in her career, met her sense of duty to her Queen and the bedrock of her own principles. She looked cold-eyed at the agonizing loss of that career, at the certainty that men and women she respected would condemn her for deliberately setting out on a course she knew would be devastating to the foreign policy she’d been ordered to support, and remembered something Raoul Courvoisier had told her so many years ago at the Academy.