“If it were a request,” she replied to his tight stare, “I wouldn’t be here.”
His mouth twisted. “Then perhaps the Enforcement Division director would condescend to tell us where we’re going. It does make a difference, you know—heading, velocity, all those troublesome little gap details.”
Now she did smile—a smile as humorless and bleak as an arctic wind. Instead of reacting to his sarcasm, she said simply, “The Com-Mine belt. Close to forbidden space.”
At once a new tension crackled across the bridge. The data officer breathed, “Oh, Jesus,” and the man on targ muttered, “Shit!” as if he thought Min wouldn’t be able to hear him.
A muscle at the corner of Captain Ubikwe’s mouth twitched like a flinch. “Now why in hell,” he asked Min, “would we want to do a thing like that?”
She didn’t snap at him. She also didn’t drop his gaze. She could have made Punisher obey her blind—she could require unquestioning compliance from any ship in the fleet—but she had no intention of doing so. For one thing, she owed this ship an explanation. And for another, she knew that Dolph Ubikwe would serve her better if she let him be himself.
“Because,” she answered, “there’s been a covert UMCP attack on Thanatos Minor’s bootleg shipyard. As I’m sure you remember, that planetoid is in forbidden space relatively near the Com-Mine belt. For the better part of a decade, illegals have been using the belt to cover them on their way to Thanatos Minor. The Amnion tolerate encroachment from that direction, if not from anywhere else.
“While we’re standing here, the shipyard is under attack, I’m not prepared to discuss the nature of the operation here, except to repeat that it’s covert. For now, the important point is this. There’s going to be fallout.
“I have no idea what kind of fallout. I can’t know. There may be survivors.” Morn Hyland may survive—“Our people, or illegals on the run. Or there may be a full-scale Amnion retaliation.”
Borrowing Warden’s conviction because she had so little to spare of her own, Min concluded, “Whatever it is, we’re going out there to deal with it.”
The bridge crew stared at her. They had all turned their stations toward her. From their g-seats—command and communications in front of her, engineering and data off to the sides, scan and helm and targ apparently hanging upside down over her head—they studied her in fear or anger or despair or plain numb weariness, as if she had just instructed them to commit suicide.
For a moment Dolph lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, they seemed oddly naked, as if he had set aside some of his defenses. “Permission to speak frankly.”
Just for an instant Min wondered whether she should refuse. Then she decided against it. By some standards, disagreements—not to mention hostility—between commanders was bad for discipline. On the other hand, Punisher was his ship: the tone which either inspired or dismayed his people was his to set, no matter what she did. She was willing to trust his instincts.
She nodded once. “Please.”
He shifted his posture as if to launch his voice at her from a more stable platform. “Then let me just ask you, Director Donner,” he said in a tone of raw outrage, “if you are out of your incorrigible mind. Don’t you read reports anymore? Haven’t you got a clue what we’ve just been through? Or maybe you think dodging matter cannon fire and asteroids alone for six months is some kind of holiday. You sent us out to Valdor to do a job which would have been too much for five cruisers. We’re lucky to get home limping instead of just plain dead.
“We’re shorthanded here. That was in the reports, too. Some of my people are drifting around Massif-5 in caskets. We’ve got holes and hydraulic leaks and a scan bank with no wiring. But never mind that. After what we’ve been through, we can stand a few minor inconveniences. We’ve got worse problems.”
His voice was harsh enough to hurt Min’s ears, but she knew from experience that he still had plenty of volume in reserve. For the sake of her personal comfort, she hoped that he didn’t use it.
“Have you listened to this ship yet, Director Donner? Or have you forgotten what internal spin displacement sounds like? Have you forgotten what that kind of displacement can do to a warship? In case you’ve been spending too much time behind your desk and not enough on the firing line, let me remind you. If the bearings go and internal spin freezes before we can shut it down, centrifugal inertia is transferred to the whole ship. The whole ship starts to spin—which is a nightmare for scan and helm, never mind targ. Punisher isn’t made for that kind of maneuver. And if we start to spin like that in the belt—or in combat—then you can kiss your hard ass good-bye along with all the rest of us.
“This is all crazy, Director Donner. How many warships have we got now? Fifty? Fifty cruisers, destroyers, gunboats, and full battlewagons? Do you expect me to believe they’re all unavailable for this job? That not one of them is in reach?
“If that’s true, let Com-Mine Station do it, whatever it turns out to be. Hell on ice, Director, they’ve got enough in-system firepower to slag three ships like this. Let them police their own goddamn belt for a few more hours.
“We are in no shape for this.”
For reasons which she had never tried to explain to herself, Min often liked her officers best when they were angry at her. Perhaps because she understood Captain Ubikwe’s indignation and approved of it, or perhaps because she was so angry herself that his ire formed a strange bond between them, she smiled back at his protest with something like affection.
“Are you done?”
“No.” Her reaction disconcerted him, but he obviously didn’t want to show it. “I’m going to say it all again, and this time I’m going to say it loud.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she drawled. “You’ve made your point.”
Captain Ubikwe studied her hard. After a moment he asked more quietly, “Then why do I get the impression you’re not going to let us off the hook?”
“I’m not,” she replied. “You are the only ship available. You’re here. Sure, I could pull your replacement away from Valdor. I could signal a battlewagon from Betelgeuse Primary, or take a destroyer off frontier patrol. I could try Com-Mine and hope they do a good job.
“But none of them can get me out there.”
The bridge received this in surprise, dull shock, or dread. The man on scan let a thin whistle through his teeth like an effort to ward away spooks. From above Min, the targ officer muttered again, “Shit.”
Dolph flashed a look upward. “Glessen,” he rasped at targ, as throaty as a combustion engine, “if you say that again in front of Director Donner, I’m going to take you out in the woodshed and cane you.” None of his people laughed: they knew better. “In case you weren’t paying attention, the director of the entire UMCP Enforcement Division, which we so proudly serve, has just announced that she’s putting her life in our hands. She isn’t sending us out to the belt to see what we’re made of—she’s going with us. Where I came from, we called that ‘putting your money where your mouth is’ “—abruptly he pounded a fist on his board—“and we respected it.”
Suddenly everyone on the bridge seemed busy with one task or another. No one glanced at the Glessen as he murmured, “Aye, sir.”
Glowering excessively, Captain Ubikwe returned his gaze to Min. She suspected that he was swallowing a grin. His tone was grave, however, as he asked, “Are you telling me ED has a stake in this covert attack? I thought only DA did work like that.”
Min didn’t want to mention Morn Hyland. She wasn’t ready to open that door into her own heart. Instead she said what she thought Warden Dios would have wanted her to say.
“No. I’m telling you the UMCP has a stake in it. Humankind has a stake in it.”
The captain sighed. For a moment or two he peered at his hands while he considered the situation. Then he dropped his palms onto his thighs. “In that case—” With a heave, he rose from his g-seat and stepped aside. “As Enforcement Division director and the hig
hest-ranking UMCP officer aboard, the bridge is yours. Take the command station. I’ll evict targ—I can work from there until we’re ready to go into tach.”
Min made a quick gesture of refusal. “She’s your ship, Captain. We’re better off with you in command. And I need rest.” In fact, she hadn’t slept for two days; hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. “If you’ll detail someone to show me my quarters, I’ll get out of your way.”
A touch of gratitude softened Dolph’s face as he sat down again, but he didn’t thank her. Automatically he hit keys on his board, checked his readouts. “Bosun will take you.” The young man still stood by the aperture. “If you’ve got more orders for us, better spell them out. We were busy before you came aboard, but we’re a hell of a lot busier now.”
Min didn’t hesitate. “I want to be on the other side of the gap in two hours,” she answered promptly, “and in the belt in three. That means you’ll have to cut it fine.”
She knew the risks. If internal spin froze in the gap, Punisher might resume tard half a hundred or half a million kilometers off course, tossed askew by the interplay between inertia and hysteresis—almost certainly a fatal problem near an asteroid belt. And if spin froze while Punisher navigated the belt, some kind of collision would be inevitable. To protect herself the ship would be forced to do almost everything without g. And she hadn’t been designed for that. Her people weren’t used to it.
But whatever Angus Thermopyle did or failed to do was out of Min’s control, beyond her knowledge. Somewhere in the vicinity of Thanatos Minor, the chronometer was running on a deadline which she didn’t know how to meet. That fact gave her a greater sense of urgency than Warden’s actual orders did.
“As soon as we hit normal space,” she continued, “I want communications on maximum gain across all bandwidths. If it’s out there, I want us to hear it.
“Assuming we don’t encounter any surprises, take us into the belt over on the far side—say, ten thousand k from the border—and find some rock we can hide behind, anything with enough magnetic resonance to confuse opposing scan. Wake me up when something happens or when we’re in position, whichever comes first. I’ll go into more detail then.”
Captain Ubikwe lifted his head and bared his teeth, dismissing her. “Consider it done.”
Softly but distinctly, so that everyone could hear her, she pronounced, “I do. Otherwise I would have taken command.”
To spare him the distraction of answering her, she turned away and let the bosun guide her through the aperture back into the main body of the ship.
On the way to her assigned quarters, she made a mental note to consider transferring Dolph’s targ officer to her personal staff. She wanted people around her who were willing to raise objections.
If Warden had let Min raise enough objections, she might not be here now, dragging a damaged ship with a battered crew across the gap on a mission which would turn out to be either so useless or so critical that it should have been given to someone else.
HASHI
Hashi Lebwohl was not a dishonest man. It was more accurate to say that he was a-honest. He liked facts; but truth had no moral imperatives for him, no positive—or negative—valuation. It had its uses, just as facts had theirs: it was a tool, more subtle than some, cruder than others.
It was a fact of his position as the UMCP director of Data Acquisition that he was expected to satisfy certain requirements. Warden Dios himself liked—indeed demanded—facts. For that reason among others, Hashi respected his director. Warden Dios made no effort to play fast and loose with reality, as the late and unlamented Godsen Frik had done endemically; or as even Min Donner did, in ways which she characteristically failed to recognize. Warden lived in the world of the real. Under no circumstances would Hashi Lebwohl have hesitated to do his job by supplying Warden with facts. And he was seldom reluctant to share his understanding of the way in which facts linked with each other to form more complex, less tangible realities.
On the other hand, he felt no obligation whatsoever to tell Warden Dios—or anyone else—the truth.
He received his first hints of what had happened on Thanatos Minor long before anyone else; quite some time before any other information reached UMCPHQ. Yet he withheld the facts for nearly an hour. And he kept the truth entirely to himself.
The hints went to him, first, because they were coded exclusively for his use, and second, because no one in UMCPHQ Communications knew that they had anything to do with Billingate or Joshua. They were nothing more or less than flares from DA operatives, and such messages were always routed straight to the DA director the moment they came in.
The earlier of these two signals was a cryptic transmission from Nick Succorso aboard Captain’s Fancy. Initially Hashi didn’t mention it because it contained no useful information. Later, however, he suppressed its contents because they disturbed him.
If you can get her, you bastard, Nick had sent, you can have her. I don’t care what happens to you. You need me, but you blew it. You deserve her. Then, for no apparent reason, Nick had added, Kazes are such fun, don’t you think?
A pox upon him, Hashi thought in bemusement. Curse his black soul. Her? Who? You can have her. Was he talking about Morn Hyland? Was he deranged enough to think that Joshua had been sent to Billingate to rescue her?
No. His reference to kazes contradicted that inference. Clearly he meant to warn or threaten Hashi concerning some woman who was involved with kazes. Yet that, too, made no sense. What could Nick possibly know about events here? How could he be aware that UMCPHQ and the GCES had suffered terrorist attacks?
Perhaps the “her” he referred to was Captain’s Fancy herself? Perhaps he meant to suggest that if Hashi or the UMCP made any attempt to interfere with Captain’s fancy the frigate would become a kaze aimed at UMCPHQ?
You deserve her.
“Deserve” her?
You need me, but you blew it.
Apparently Nick Succorso had lost his mind.
At last Hashi put that flare aside. He found himself unable to divine Nick’s intentions. And that troubled him. He disliked his sense of incomprehension.
The later signal was another matter.
No one outside his domain, and perhaps no more than three people within it, knew that Angus Thermopyle, Milos Taverner, and Nick Succorso were not the only men he’d helped send to Thanatos Minor; or that the fourth had been dispatched for precisely this reason, to observe events and report on them.
The transmission was from a purportedly legal merchanter called Free Lunch; “purportedly” because Hashi had equipped her with false id and records so that she could travel freely in human space while she nurtured her private reputation—also more putative than real—as an illegal. According to her captain, Darrin Scroyle, he and his ship had escaped the vicinity of Thanatos Minor just ahead of the shock wave of the planetoid’s destruction.
So Joshua had succeeded. That was good, as far as it went. But Captain Scroyle’s message conveyed other facts as well, the implications of which inspired Hashi’s decision not to pass his information along to Warden Dios immediately. He needed time to consider the situation in the light shed by Captain Scroyle’s revelations.
Under Hashi Lebwohl’s absolute supervision, Data Acquisition employed agents and operatives of all kinds. Some were freelance rogues, like Nick Succorso. Others were spies in the more traditional sense, hunting secrets under deep cover among the tenuous spiderweb societies of humankind’s illegals.
And others were pure mercenaries. Unlike the rogues, they were men and women of peculiar honor, who gave their loyalty and their blood to anyone who paid their price. They could be trusted to do a specific job for a specific price, to question nothing, to complain about nothing—and to say nothing about what they’d done when the job was finished.
The only disadvantage to such an arrangement, from Hashi’s point of view, was that the next job any given mercenary accepted might well be for some other employer; perhaps for one
of humankind’s enemies. As much as he could, he avoided this embarrassment by keeping his mercenaries busy—and by outbidding other employers.
Darrin Scroyle was a mercenary. He and Free Lunch were among the best of the breed: daring, heavily armed, and fast; capable of both recklessness and caution, as occasion warranted; willing for violence on almost any scale, and yet able to act with subtlety and discretion.
When Free Lunch reached human space and passed her message through a listening post by means of a gap courier drone to UMCPHQ, Hashi gave Captain Scroyle’s report his full credence.
The gist was this. Free Lunch had left Billingate as soon as Captain Scroyle had become convinced that events were near their crisis. That was as Hashi had ordered: he didn’t want Free Lunch caught up in whatever explosion resulted from Joshua’s mission. But during her departure from Billingate’s control space, Free Lunch had scanned the planetoid and its embattled ships with every instrument she had, and had observed several significant developments.
A team in EVA suits had emerged from docked Trumpet in order to sabotage Billingate communications. After that they had broken into the Amnion sector—and then escaped.
Captain’s Fancy had destroyed Tranquil Hegemony, not by matter cannon or lasers, but by ramming—apparently to prevent the Amnion warship from killing the EVA team.
A shuttle had left the Amnion sector to be picked up by Soar.