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"Hey, you!" The shout came from his left. He turned his head, and his heart seemed to stop, for a StateSec sergeant stood twenty meters away, glowering in his direction. "Just what the hell d'you think you're doing?" the sergeant demanded.
He sounded more irritated than alarmed, but the ensign felt a moment of total and absolute panic. But then, as suddenly as the panic had come, he felt something entirely different. It was if the universe's entire time scale had just shifted, and a cold, crystalline sense of purpose replaced his choking terror. He was still afraid, but now he was only afraid, and the fear was a distant thing, small and unimportant beside his absolute certainty of what he must do.
His finger depressed the function key Senior Chief Harkness had told him to press. The minicomp’s display flashed as the stored commands poured through the interface, but Clinkscales wasn't even looking. His attention was on the sergeant, his expression one of casual interest, and he strolled to meet the older man. Their mutual angles of approach turned his right side away from the sergeant, and his right hand fell naturally to his hip. It settled on the butt of his bolstered pulser, and he smiled, cocking his head as if to ask the sergeant what he could do for him while the singing, frozen tension in his brain wondered how the hell long it was going to take Harkness' programs to activate, and what would happen when they did, and, Sweet Tester, that sergeant was getting close now, and...
PNS Tepes shuddered violently as the first explosion reverberated through her iron bones.
Boat bays aren't normally considered especially dangerous places. True, they offer ample ways for someone to do himself in, but so do a great many areas aboard any starship, and the things that pose dangers to the ship, like the connections for things like hydrogen and emergency rocket propellant to fuel the ship's small craft, or the stores of ammunition and external ordnance kept in nearby magazines, are safeguarded in many ways. Proper training in operation and maintenance is the first defense, and so is physical separation, keeping one danger source as far from any other as the boat bay's servicing requirements permit. And in addition to all human safeguards, computers monitor the danger points continuously.
Unfortunately for Tepes, however, her computer net had been compromised. None of her crew knew it... and none of the computers cared. They existed only to carry out their human masters' orders, and the lines of code Horace Harkness had altered made just as much sense to them as the right instructions would have made.
The programs already buried and waiting in the main system began to activate as the execution commands flashed into the net from the minicomp plugged into Boat Bay Four's number five access slot, and all overTepes officers and ratings stared at their consoles, first in confusion, and then in alarm.
CIC went first, and the senior tracking officer swore as her holo display went suddenly blank. It was hardly a life-threatening disaster when the ship was safely in orbit around Hades, but it was irritating as hell, and there was no logical reason for it.
Except that there was one. The display had died for the simple reason that there was no longer any input to drive its imagers. For just an instant, the tracking officer felt relieved by the realization that the display's sudden shutdown hadn't been her people's fault, but then her forehead furrowed in fresh, and deeper, consternation. What in heaven's name could cause every sensor system to go down at once?
The program which had shut down Tepes' sensors finished the first part of its task and turned to the second. In the flicker of an eye, far too rapidly for any human operator to realize what was happening, it used CIC's computers as a launching pad to invade the Tactical Department's central processing system, established control... and ordered the system to reformat itself.
The tac officer of the watch gaped in disbelief as his panels started going down. It began with Tracking, but from there the failures leapt like wildfire, and display after display blinked and went dead. Radar One, Gravities One and Two, Lidar Three, Missile Defense, Main Fire Control... the nerve center of the ship's ability to fight, or defend herself, died even as he watched. Nor was the damage something which could be quickly fixed. The computers would have to be completely reprogrammed to put them back on-line, a nightmare task in a Navy with so few fully qualified technicians, and it all went so quickly the tac officer barely had time to realize it was happening before it was done.
Other programs capered and danced, exploding through the net like a plundering army. Internal alarms and central communication systems became so much useless junk as the software which ran them was reduced to meaningless gibberish. The ship's helm and drive rooms locked down. "The Morgue," in which every suit of battle armor was stored, suddenly sealed itself... and the subprocessers which monitored the ready suits of armor to be sure they were always prepared for instant use sent power surges down the monitoring leads to lobotomize their onboard computers and render them totally useless until teams of technicians spent the hours required to reprogram their software.
And while all that was going on, the computers responsible for monitoring the fueling needs of the ship's small craft received their own orders. Valves opened, and in Boat Bay One a technician who'd happened to be working on a minor glitch in Umbilical Two gaped in horror at what was happening. He leapt for the manual controls, trying to override, but there wasn't time... nor would it have mattered. For even if he'd been able to keep the emergency propellant from venting and mixing in Umbilical Two, it wouldn't have stopped precisely the same thing from happening in Umbilical Four.
The binary-based fuel was hypergolic, and even as the service tech screamed and turned to run, he knew it was pointless. The components mixing behind him were too... voracious for that, and Tepes bucked like a wounded horse as Boat Bay One blew apart. Twenty-six members of her crew and every small craft in the bay were ripped apart in the explosion, and alarms wailed as the blast blew back into the hull as well. Bulkheads shattered, and another forty-one men and women died as atmosphere belched out of the hideous wound in an almost perfect ring of fire.
Blast doors slammed, more alarms screamed, and officers and noncoms tried to shout orders over the com systems. But the com systems no longer functioned, and then the ship heaved again as Boat Bay Two blew up, exactly as Boat Bay One had done.
The sergeant walking towards Clinkscales staggered as the first explosion shuddered through the ship's hull. He threw his arms out for balance, lurching through a dance to stay on his feet which would have looked ludicrous under other circumstances. But there was nothing humorous about these circumstances, and as Clinkscales threw out his own left arm, bracing himself against the bulkhead, he saw the sergeants eyes dart past him to the minicomp still plugged into the access slot. There was no logical reason for it, but it didn't matter. The sergeant didn't know how it had been done, or why, but in that instant of intuitive insight, he knew who had caused it. It was as if his mind were somehow linked to the ensign's, for even as the sergeant guessed Clinkscales had somehow caused whatever was happening, Clinkscales knew he had.
There was no sign of the clumsy youngster who'd boarded GNS Jason Alvarez with Lady Harrington in the tall young man whose left hand thrust him suddenly away from the bulkhead. His push propelled him towards the sergeant, who was still fighting for balance while he opened his mouth to shout an alarm. But he never got it out, for even as he started to yell, Carson Clinkscales' left fist caught the front of his tunic and jerked him close. The two men went down, with Clinkscales on the bottom, and the sergeant felt something hard dig into his chest. He looked down into Clinkscales' eyes, confusion giving way to hate, but he still hadn't figured out what was pressing into his chest when Clinkscales squeezed the trigger and a burst of pulser fire ripped his heart apart.
The body convulsed atop Clinkscales, drenching him in a scalding rush of blood. He thrust it aside and rolled up on one knee just as the ship lurched to the explosion of Boat Bay Three and Horace Harkness' amplified voice blared through the galley of Boat Bay Four.
"Propellant leak!" it announced. "Multiple propellant leaks! Evacuate the bay immediately. Repeat, evacuate the bay immediately!"
It was neither a computer-generated voice nor a stored message, and as panic swept the bay, no one noticed that they didn't have the least idea just whose voice it was. It came from the intercom speakers, and it spoke with absolute authority. That was all they needed to know, and they stampeded for the lifts as red and amber danger lights began to flash. Tepes lurched yet again as Boat Bay Five blew up, and the fresh concussion lent desperation to their flight. They piled into the lifts, too frantic to escape even to notice the blood-soaked corporal kneeling beside a dead sergeant, and as Carson Clinkscales watched them go, he knew that for the first time in his life, he'd gotten everything exactly right.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He sounded more irritated than alarmed, but the ensign felt a moment of total and absolute panic. But then, as suddenly as the panic had come, he felt something entirely different. It was if the universe's entire time scale had just shifted, and a cold, crystalline sense of purpose replaced his choking terror. He was still afraid, but now he was only afraid, and the fear was a distant thing, small and unimportant beside his absolute certainty of what he must do.
His finger depressed the function key Senior Chief Harkness had told him to press. The minicomp’s display flashed as the stored commands poured through the interface, but Clinkscales wasn't even looking. His attention was on the sergeant, his expression one of casual interest, and he strolled to meet the older man. Their mutual angles of approach turned his right side away from the sergeant, and his right hand fell naturally to his hip. It settled on the butt of his bolstered pulser, and he smiled, cocking his head as if to ask the sergeant what he could do for him while the singing, frozen tension in his brain wondered how the hell long it was going to take Harkness' programs to activate, and what would happen when they did, and, Sweet Tester, that sergeant was getting close now, and...
PNS Tepes shuddered violently as the first explosion reverberated through her iron bones.
Boat bays aren't normally considered especially dangerous places. True, they offer ample ways for someone to do himself in, but so do a great many areas aboard any starship, and the things that pose dangers to the ship, like the connections for things like hydrogen and emergency rocket propellant to fuel the ship's small craft, or the stores of ammunition and external ordnance kept in nearby magazines, are safeguarded in many ways. Proper training in operation and maintenance is the first defense, and so is physical separation, keeping one danger source as far from any other as the boat bay's servicing requirements permit. And in addition to all human safeguards, computers monitor the danger points continuously.
Unfortunately for Tepes, however, her computer net had been compromised. None of her crew knew it... and none of the computers cared. They existed only to carry out their human masters' orders, and the lines of code Horace Harkness had altered made just as much sense to them as the right instructions would have made.
The programs already buried and waiting in the main system began to activate as the execution commands flashed into the net from the minicomp plugged into Boat Bay Four's number five access slot, and all overTepes officers and ratings stared at their consoles, first in confusion, and then in alarm.
CIC went first, and the senior tracking officer swore as her holo display went suddenly blank. It was hardly a life-threatening disaster when the ship was safely in orbit around Hades, but it was irritating as hell, and there was no logical reason for it.
Except that there was one. The display had died for the simple reason that there was no longer any input to drive its imagers. For just an instant, the tracking officer felt relieved by the realization that the display's sudden shutdown hadn't been her people's fault, but then her forehead furrowed in fresh, and deeper, consternation. What in heaven's name could cause every sensor system to go down at once?
The program which had shut down Tepes' sensors finished the first part of its task and turned to the second. In the flicker of an eye, far too rapidly for any human operator to realize what was happening, it used CIC's computers as a launching pad to invade the Tactical Department's central processing system, established control... and ordered the system to reformat itself.
The tac officer of the watch gaped in disbelief as his panels started going down. It began with Tracking, but from there the failures leapt like wildfire, and display after display blinked and went dead. Radar One, Gravities One and Two, Lidar Three, Missile Defense, Main Fire Control... the nerve center of the ship's ability to fight, or defend herself, died even as he watched. Nor was the damage something which could be quickly fixed. The computers would have to be completely reprogrammed to put them back on-line, a nightmare task in a Navy with so few fully qualified technicians, and it all went so quickly the tac officer barely had time to realize it was happening before it was done.
Other programs capered and danced, exploding through the net like a plundering army. Internal alarms and central communication systems became so much useless junk as the software which ran them was reduced to meaningless gibberish. The ship's helm and drive rooms locked down. "The Morgue," in which every suit of battle armor was stored, suddenly sealed itself... and the subprocessers which monitored the ready suits of armor to be sure they were always prepared for instant use sent power surges down the monitoring leads to lobotomize their onboard computers and render them totally useless until teams of technicians spent the hours required to reprogram their software.
And while all that was going on, the computers responsible for monitoring the fueling needs of the ship's small craft received their own orders. Valves opened, and in Boat Bay One a technician who'd happened to be working on a minor glitch in Umbilical Two gaped in horror at what was happening. He leapt for the manual controls, trying to override, but there wasn't time... nor would it have mattered. For even if he'd been able to keep the emergency propellant from venting and mixing in Umbilical Two, it wouldn't have stopped precisely the same thing from happening in Umbilical Four.
The binary-based fuel was hypergolic, and even as the service tech screamed and turned to run, he knew it was pointless. The components mixing behind him were too... voracious for that, and Tepes bucked like a wounded horse as Boat Bay One blew apart. Twenty-six members of her crew and every small craft in the bay were ripped apart in the explosion, and alarms wailed as the blast blew back into the hull as well. Bulkheads shattered, and another forty-one men and women died as atmosphere belched out of the hideous wound in an almost perfect ring of fire.
Blast doors slammed, more alarms screamed, and officers and noncoms tried to shout orders over the com systems. But the com systems no longer functioned, and then the ship heaved again as Boat Bay Two blew up, exactly as Boat Bay One had done.
The sergeant walking towards Clinkscales staggered as the first explosion shuddered through the ship's hull. He threw his arms out for balance, lurching through a dance to stay on his feet which would have looked ludicrous under other circumstances. But there was nothing humorous about these circumstances, and as Clinkscales threw out his own left arm, bracing himself against the bulkhead, he saw the sergeants eyes dart past him to the minicomp still plugged into the access slot. There was no logical reason for it, but it didn't matter. The sergeant didn't know how it had been done, or why, but in that instant of intuitive insight, he knew who had caused it. It was as if his mind were somehow linked to the ensign's, for even as the sergeant guessed Clinkscales had somehow caused whatever was happening, Clinkscales knew he had.
There was no sign of the clumsy youngster who'd boarded GNS Jason Alvarez with Lady Harrington in the tall young man whose left hand thrust him suddenly away from the bulkhead. His push propelled him towards the sergeant, who was still fighting for balance while he opened his mouth to shout an alarm. But he never got it out, for even as he started to yell, Carson Clinkscales' left fist caught the front of his tunic and jerked him close. The two men went down, with Clinkscales on the bottom, and the sergeant felt something hard dig into his chest. He looked down into Clinkscales' eyes, confusion giving way to hate, but he still hadn't figured out what was pressing into his chest when Clinkscales squeezed the trigger and a burst of pulser fire ripped his heart apart.
The body convulsed atop Clinkscales, drenching him in a scalding rush of blood. He thrust it aside and rolled up on one knee just as the ship lurched to the explosion of Boat Bay Three and Horace Harkness' amplified voice blared through the galley of Boat Bay Four.
"Propellant leak!" it announced. "Multiple propellant leaks! Evacuate the bay immediately. Repeat, evacuate the bay immediately!"
It was neither a computer-generated voice nor a stored message, and as panic swept the bay, no one noticed that they didn't have the least idea just whose voice it was. It came from the intercom speakers, and it spoke with absolute authority. That was all they needed to know, and they stampeded for the lifts as red and amber danger lights began to flash. Tepes lurched yet again as Boat Bay Five blew up, and the fresh concussion lent desperation to their flight. They piled into the lifts, too frantic to escape even to notice the blood-soaked corporal kneeling beside a dead sergeant, and as Carson Clinkscales watched them go, he knew that for the first time in his life, he'd gotten everything exactly right.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Citizen Lieutenant Hanson Timmons was in a foul mood.
He stood ramrod straight in his dress uniform, gloved hands folded behind him, swagger stick clasped in his right armpit, and glowered at the lift doors. A double watch section stood with him, weapons slung, each man and woman as immaculately groomed and polished as he himself while they waited for the camera crews to come collect the single prisoner in their charge. His people had taken special pains with their appearance, and not just because of the impending cameras. Their detail commanders growing frustration had been apparent for weeks, and no one wanted to give him the slightest excuse to vent it on them. Timmons knew that, and knowing they recognized his wrath only made it worse, for in recognizing it, they'd obviously guessed what caused it.
Timmons had been posted to the command of Tepes' brig detachment only a few weeks before Cordelia Ransom sailed for Barnett, and considering his relatively junior rank, the assignment had been quite a plum for him. It had also been an indication of the favor in which his superiors held him... and of their faith in his abilities. In the course of his career with StateSec, he'd specialized in the management of politically sensitive prisoners, and he'd always delivered them in exactly the desired condition. Usually, that had meant breaking them to heel, reducing them to cringing compliance with whatever StateSec might demand of them, and Timmons was confident he could break anyone. After all, a man was usually good at his work when it was a job he loved.
That was, in fact, the reason he'd been assigned to Ransom’s personal transport, for the Secretary of Public Information had anticipated an occasional need for the services of such a specialist. But the citizen lieutenant was a frustrated man this time, for Honor Harrington had eluded his best efforts. Of course, he'd been handicapped by Committeewoman Ransom's demand that she be delivered to the executioner in shape to appreciate, and react to, all that happened to her. After all, the cameras would be recording her big moment for later broadcast. But knowing she would be going before those cameras had ruled out the application of much direct physical coercion, it wouldn't do to mark her badly enough to evoke sympathy from the viewers, and Ransom’s insistence that she react properly to her execution had ruled out the use of drugs.
Viewed objectively, Timmons couldn't really fault the restrictions. It wasn't as if they were trying to get information out of Harrington, and there was no real need to break her if they were only going to hang her. But that didn't change the fact that he'd wanted to crush her. He had his professional pride, after all. Besides, he enjoyed his work, and he'd been confident of his ability to break her as he'd broken everyone else... which only made the blow to his pride even more severe when he failed.
It should have been so simple! Even without the cruder forms of physical abuse or drugs, humiliation should have done the trick. He'd recognized the steel at her core, but that had only added to his anticipatory pleasure, for he hated the proud ones. The ones who looked down from the mountains of achievement to sneer at the lesser mortals at their feet. There was a special joy in hurling them down from the heights, and one thing he'd learned dealing with Legislaturalist prisoners was that humiliation's effectiveness as a means of breaking resistance was directly proportional to the power a prisoner had wielded before his fall. Someone accustomed to seeing his orders swiftly implemented, of having control of himself and his surroundings, was far more vulnerable to impotence than someone who had never been in a position of command. When it was borne in upon him that nothing he did could have any effect on what happened, that his authority had become total helplessness, the shock and shame struck with crippling power. Timmons had seen it again and again, in civilian and military prisoners alike, and because he had, he'd never doubted that Harrington would follow the same pattern.
But she hadn't, and he couldn't understand it. Other prisoners had tried to escape him by withdrawing into their own private worlds, but none had succeeded. There were too many ways to jerk them back, and they always worked. Except that they hadn't worked this time. There was a strange, elastic power to Harrington’s resistance, as if by refusing to resist the blows he rained upon her she somehow deprived them of their power, and in a way he couldn't quite define, that made her refusal to resist the most potent defiance he'd ever encountered. Most of his mind insisted that if he'd only had more time he could still have smashed that nondefiance, but deep inside, he knew better.
He'd calculated everything so carefully, metered the humiliation so precisely. He'd opted for the death of a thousand cuts, stripping away her defenses with her dignity and her self-confidence with her ability to control her fate, and for a time, he'd thought he was succeeding. But he hadn't been, and he'd slowly realized he wouldn't. What she'd done to Bergren three days earlier only confirmed what had already become obvious to him. This time, he wasn't going to succeed. He'd had her for a T-month, and if he hadn't broken her in that long, then he never would without turning to sterner measures.
And those measures were denied him. What he wanted to do was storm into her cell with a neural whip and see how she liked direct stimulation of her pain centers for an hour or two. Or there were other, older-fashioned techniques, cruder, but perhaps even more effective because they were crude, which he'd learned from the ex-InSec personnel who'd trained him. But Ransoms orders not to damage her prevented him from doing any such thing. In fact, he was more than a little afraid of how the Committeewoman was going to react anyway when she set eyes on her prize once more.
Regulations had demanded the deactivation of Harrington's implants, but he hadn't counted on what that would do to her face. Nor had he expected the tech who deactivated them to actually burn them out, leaving no way to reverse the process. He didn't expect Ransom to be pleased to have her prisoner looking like a pre-space stroke victim, nor did he expect her to be happy at how gaunt and starved looking Harrington had become. But that wasn't his fault, damn it! He'd fed her regularly! In fact, he'd...
The ship lurched. It was more of a tremor, actually, but even that was enough to make him stiffen. The battlecruiser massed the next best thing to a million tons. Only something frighteningly violent could send a shock through something that huge, and Timmons turned towards the security console... just as a second shockwave lashed through the ship.
The second one was more pronounced than the first, and Timmons moved faster. Citizen Private Hayman jumped out of his way as he stepped behind the console, but the lieutenant hardly noticed. He stabbed the com key just as the ship trembled for a third time, but nothing happened.
Timmons frowned and punched another key, but still nothing happened. He felt ripples of panic beginning to spread through his subordinates as yet another concussion echoed through the ship, and his own panic rose with theirs as he entered still a third com code and got no response at all.
People aboard starships rely absolutely upon their technology, and nothing is more terrifying than to have that technology fail, especially for no apparent reason. Timmons was no exception to that rule, and he snarled at the communicator's dead display, then reached a decision and thrust a hand into his tunic pocket for his personal com.
As the commander of the brig security detail, he'd been issued a personal communicator, to be used only in the direst of emergencies. Outwardly indistinguishable from any other, it had one important difference: it didn't go through the main com net. Instead, it was a secure link to Citizen Colonel Livermore, CO of Tepes' ground force and security detachments, via a stand-alone system which had absolute priority.
"Yes?"
The single word, without any identification, was hardly correct com procedure, and Timmons recognized the confusion and fear within it. Yet simply hearing it was still a vast relief.
"Timmons, Brig Detail," he said crisply, drawing the comfort of proper protocol about himself. "Our communications are out down here. What's happening?"
"How the hell do I know?" the unidentified voice snarled back. "The whole frigging ship is coming apart, and..."
Hanson Timmons never learned what else the voice might have said, for at that moment, the lift doors slid open. His head snapped up, and he wheeled towards them in confusion, for the tone to signal an approaching lift car hadn't sounded. His confusion deepened as he looked into the darkness of the shaft and realized the tone hadn't sounded because there was no car... and then the first flechette gun coughed.
The brig passageway opening off the lift formed a dogleg to the right on its way to the cells. LaFollet didn't know if that was a deliberate security feature, but it certainly had the effect of one.
He and Candless had been ready when the rest of the rescue party opened the lift doors manually... which was more than could be said for the half-dozen people standing there in their black-and-red dress uniforms. Each had a flechette gun slung over his or her shoulder, and a pulser rode at each right hip, but most of them had been looking away from the lifts, at the officer behind the security console at the bend in the corridor. Their heads started to turn as the doors slid apart, and one of them actually shouted something and clawed frantically at his slung weapon, but he was too late. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless had debts to pay, one to their Steadholder, and a very different one to her enemies, and their eyes were merciless as they squeezed their triggers.
Flechette guns were designed for shipboard combat. The modern descendants of pre-space shotguns, their grav drivers punched out masses of knife-edged flechettes. With much lower velocities than pulser darts, they were less prone to dangerous ricochets or punching holes in important pieces of equipment, but they were lethal against any unarmored target. Their projectiles dispersed into deadly patterns, controllable by the "choke" setting on their pistol grips. They could be set to cover a cone over a full meter wide at a range of five meters from the muzzle, or as little as fifteen centimeters across at a range of fifty meters, and flesh and bone meant very little to the razor-cruel flechettes.
LaFollet and Candless had set their weapons to maximum dispersion and full automatic. The cycle time on a flechette gun was much slower than that of a pulser, but that hardly mattered given their wide area of effect. The guns coughed rhythmically, belching death and destruction, and the waiting SS guards exploded in a bloody mist.
"We're under attack! We're under attack!" Timmons screamed into his com even as he flung himself down behind the security console. Flechettes slammed into it like deadly sleet, and he scuttled down the passage on his elbows and belly. A single flechette, licking through the gap between the console and bulkhead, caught him just as he rounded the bend, and he screamed as it chewed into his thigh. Slower than a pulser dart or not, it was still traveling at three hundred meters per second, and it sliced the back of his leg like a high-velocity axe. The lieutenant dropped his com involuntarily to clutch at the bloody wound with both hands, and the communicator slithered away across the deck. He heard the shouted questions from the other end even through his own sobs of anguish, but he had no time to worry about answering them. Most of his people were down already, but the two he'd posted as formal guards outside Harrington’s cell had been shielded by the bend in the corridor. That pair had been intended as window-dressing for the formal transfer of the prisoner, but stationing them here had had the effect of giving him a reserve, and he bared his teeth in a pain-stretched snarl. "Get ready!" he gasped at them, and took his right hand from his gashed leg. His fingers were slimy with his own blood, but he drew his pulser and covered the bend as he shoved himself along the deck on the seat of his trousers and his wounded thigh left a bright red blood trail behind him.
"Go!" LaFollet snapped, and Robert Whitman vaulted from the lift shaft into the brig passage. "At least one got around the turn!" LaFollet warned him.
The other armsman nodded, but he never slowed in his dash for the security console. He went down on one knee, weapon ready, and stiffened as he heard a voice.
"Timmons! Timmons! What the fuck is going on down there?"
He realized instantly what he was hearing, and that whoever was on the other end of that com link would be sending help as quickly as he could. Time had just become an even more deadly foe, and he looked back over his shoulder at LaFollet and Candless, just starting to climb out of the shaft.
"Open com link!" he shouted, and then, before anyone could stop him, rolled out of his cover with the flechette gun on full automatic.
Timmons heard the shout and grinned viciously. The bastards knew someone would be coming up their backsides any minute now. All he and his remaining men had to do was hold out, and he suddenly realized how he could do just that. These idiots had to be here to rescue Harrington, so all he had to do was open her cell and drag her out into the middle of the firefight, and...
His thoughts broke off as someone rolled out into the very middle of the passage. His sudden appearance took Timmons totally by surprise, and he gaped at the apparition in shock, unable to believe anyone would deliberately throw himself into what he knew had to be a deathtrap. But that was because he'd never encountered a Grayson armsman whose Steadholder was in danger. Robert Whitman had only one purpose in life, and his very first shot tore Citizen Lieutenant Timmons to bloody rags.
The two men further up the passage poured fire back, but the bare bulkheads and deck offered no cover... for anyone. Deadly clouds of flechettes shrieked past one another, intermingling and then separating, all of them set for maximum dispersion, and there was no place to hide.
"Citizen Admiral?" Lester Tourville looked up quickly, for there was something very odd about Shannon Foraker’s tone.
"What?" he asked, and the ops officer frowned.
"I think you'd better look at this, Sir," she said. "Tepes' active sensors just went down."
"What?" Tourville said again, in a very different tone, and Foraker nodded.
"Every one of them, Sir." Foraker had gotten even more careless, or deliberate, about her "elitist" vocabulary over the last month, but this time Tourville was certain she'd used "Sir" without even thinking about it. "They shouldn't have done that," she went on. "They're through the main minefields and into orbit, but nobody in her right mind would shut down her radar."
Tourville nodded and walked quickly across the deck towards her station, for she was right. Tepes might be in her designated parking orbit, but with so many mines floating around the possibility of one having strayed into her orbital path could never be completely ruled out.
"Anything from her at all, Harrison?" he demanded.
"Negative, Citizen Admiral," the com officer replied. "I don't, Just a second, Citizen Admiral." Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser listened to his earbug intently, then turned to Tourville. "Citizen Captain Hewitt reports that he was receiving a message from Citizen Captain Vladovich, Citizen Admiral. Apparently the transmission was interrupted in the middle of a sentence."
Tourville and Bogdanovich looked at one another, then turned as one to Everard Honeker. The People's commissioner looked back at them, as confused as either of the naval officers but not as immediately concerned. Unlike them, he didn't fully understand just how massive an interruption Tepes' systems had just apparently suffered.
Tourville saw Honeker’s incomprehension and started to speak, then stopped himself and looked back down at Foraker. The tac officer was bent over her display with focused intensity, and he glanced at it himself rather than disturb her.
The relative orbital positions of Hades and Cerberus-B-3 were such that Count Titty had passed within less than two light-minutes of the former on her vector for the latter. Hades now lay almost exactly three and a half light-minutes off her starboard bow, moving away from her at a little over 26,000 KPS as she continued to decelerate towards Cerberus-B-3, and he glanced back up at Citizen Commander Lowe.
"Assume we go to maximum military power. How soon could we reach Tepes?"
Lowe punched numbers into her panel quickly, then looked back up.
"We'll need a little over eighty-three minutes to decelerate to rest relative to Hades, Citizen Admiral. If we go for a least-time flight from that point, we can reach the planet in another hundred and seventeen minutes, call it three hours and twenty minutes total, but our relative velocity would be over thirty-six thousand KPS. If we go for a zero-velocity intercept, it'll add almost another hour to the flight profile."
Tourville grunted and turned back to Foraker's panel. He drew a cigar from his pocket and unwrapped it slowly, never taking his eyes from the data on the display. He had the cigar half-way to his mouth when Foraker sucked in an audible breath and his own hand froze.
"Citiz..."
"I see it, Shannon," he said quietly, and his hand moved the cigar the rest of the way to his mouth. "How bad is it?" he asked almost absently.
"I can't say, Citizen Admiral. But look here and here." She tapped a secondary display at her elbow, and Tourville nodded slowly as he scanned the readouts.
"Stay on it," he told her, then beckoned for Honeker and Bogdanovich to join him.
"I don't know what's happening, but something sure as hell just went wrong aboard Tepes," he told them in a flat, lowered voice.
"What do you mean, 'wrong'?" Honeker asked tautly.
"Citizen Commissioner, warships don't just suddenly go off the air unless something very unusual happens to them. And Citizen Commander Foraker just picked up debris and atmosphere loss. I'd say she's suffered at least one major hull breach."
"A hull breach?" Honeker stared at him in disbelief, and Tourville nodded grimly.
"I don't know what caused it, and the air loss is low enough, for now, at least, to indicate that they managed to seal off the damaged areas. But whatever’s going on over there is serious, Citizen Commissioner. Very serious."
"I see." Honeker rubbed sweaty palms together and made himself take a deep breath. "What do you propose to do about it, Citizen Admiral?" he asked quietly.
"What we're seeing now happened at least four minutes ago," Tourville told him, still in that flat tone. "By now, she could already have blown up, and we wouldn't know it. But if she's in serious trouble, she's going to need help."
"And you propose taking Tilly to render it," Honeker said.
"Yes. Sir. The only problem is that we don't know what she may have already told Camp Charon... or how they may react if we suddenly head for the planet when they told us to stay the hell away from it."
"Understood." Honeker stood another moment, still rubbing his hands together, then looked at Fraiser. "Contact Camp Charon, Citizen Lieutenant. Inform them that we are going to the assistance of Tepes on my authority at our best acceleration and request that they confirm the minefields have been safed for our passage."
Honor Harrington rose and faced the door of her cell as it opened, and the right side of her face was almost as expressionless as the dead left side.
It wasn't easy to keep it that way. Timmons had taken great pleasure in informing her that the next time her cell was opened would be for her trip to the hangman. That would have been enough to make maintaining her composure difficult even without the flashes of emotion she'd begun receiving from Nimitz. They were too far apart, their link stretched too thin, for her to tell exactly what the 'cat was feeling, but there was a sense of... movement, and sharper flashes of pain, as if the movement hurt him. At first she'd been certain he was being transported to the planet to die with her as Ransom had promised, yet she'd become steadily less positive, for a flush of excitement and a strange, fierce determination seemed to have wrapped itself about all of his other emotions. She had no idea what might have caused it. For that matter, it might all be nothing more than a delusion on her part, inspired by her own fear and half-starved weakness. But whatever else was happening, she would meet Timmons and his ghouls without flinching.
The door lock clacked, and she braced herself as it swung open. And then...
"My Lady! Lady Harrington!"
Honor staggered, her good eye flaring wide, as Andrew LaFollet shouted her name. Her personal armsman stood in the open doorway, face haggard and his normally immaculate uniform ragged, and he cradled a flechette gun in his arms.
Not possible, her brain told her calmly. This is not possible. It has to be a hallucination.
But it wasn't, and she stumbled forward as he freed one hand from the gun and held it out to her. Her working eye misted, making it hard to see, but his hand was warm and firm as it closed on her too-thin fingers. He squeezed hard, and Honor dragged in a deep, shuddery breath and put her arms around him, hugging him fiercely.
"We're here to get you out, My Lady," he said into her shoulder, and she nodded and made herself release him. She stood back, blinking to clear her vision, and saw his face change as he took in her own appearance. The brightly colored jumpsuit seemed two sizes too big for her wasted body, and his gray eyes went harder than steel as he took in the dead side of her face. He opened his mouth, but she shook her head.
"No time, Andrew," she told him huskily. "No time. Later."
He gazed at her for a fraction of a second longer, and then shook himself like a dog shedding water from its coat.
"Yes, My Lady," he said, and nodded to someone else. Whoever it was was to her left, and Honor turned quickly, then inhaled in fresh surprise as Andreas Venizelos stepped to her side and fastened a gun belt around her waist. He looked up from his work to meet her eyes with a tense, strained smile, and she touched his shoulder for a moment, then drew the pulser and checked it quickly.
"This way, My Lady," LaFollet said urgently, and she turned to follow him... then stopped. Four bodies lay on the deck, all oozing blood from multiple flechette hits. She recognized two guards whose names she'd never bothered to learn, and Timmons... and Robert Whitman.
"Bob," she whispered. She started to go to her knees beside him, but LaFollet gripped her upper arm and shook his head fiercely.
"There's no time, My Lady!" If Honor had known him even a little less well, she would have hated him in that moment, for the words came out brusque and harsh, devoid of any emotion. But she did know him, and she recognized the matching anguish behind that mask of nonfeeling as he tugged on her arm again. "We've got to get moving, My Lady. They got the alarm out before Bob killed them."
Honor nodded and tried to clear her mind as Candless appeared on her other side and he and LaFollet half-lifted her down into the lift shaft. Marcia McGinley was waiting to help, and Honor clung to her for a moment while her armsmen jumped down beside her. She tried to speak, but her ops officer only gave her a short, fierce hug, picked up a flechette gun of her own, and vanished into the shafts dimness on Candless' heels while Venizelos joined Honor and LaFollet.
"At least we've got plenty of guns," the commander told Honor grimly, handing her a flechette gun to go with her pulser. "I stocked up on spare magazines, too."
"Come on, My Lady," LaFollet said urgently, and he and Venizelos urged her into motion.
"They're trying the lift again!" Alistair McKeon heard someone shout, and a grenade launcher coughed in rapid fire.
Three grenades sizzled past him and dropped neatly through the doors the first assault attempt had left jammed half open, and there was a moment of silence. Then the screams began a half heartbeat before the grenades exploded in rapid succession. Their effect in the enclosed lift shaft must have been indescribable, but Jasper Mayhew sent two more after them.
McKeon grunted in satisfaction, but he also looked at Solomon Marchant.
"We need somebody in position to actually see who's coming down that shaft," he said urgently. "The one thing we don't want is to accidentally kill our own people if they come that way with Lady Harrington!"
"I'll take care of it," the Grayson assured him, and waved for Clinkscales to join him as he loped over to the jammed lift. The lift at the other end of the bay gallery appeared undamaged so far, but Russ Sanko and Senior Chief Halburton were camped right outside its doors with a plasma rifle dug in behind a barricade of shattered machinery and equipment pallets.
Another of Harkness' programs had locked all the lifts to Boat Bay Four, a fact the Peeps obviously had already discovered. So far, they were restricting themselves to the forward lift only, and since they couldn't use the lift car itself, they'd come down the shaft and tried to blow the doors into the gallery. They'd partially succeeded, and the explosion when they blew the doors had killed Chief Reilly, but the rest of McKeon's people had massacred the entire assault team before it could clear the shaft. The undamaged rear lift remained a threat, but McKeon had decided against blowing it himself. Honor might need it, and Sanko and Halburton made a pretty effective security measure. Anyone who tried to use it to attack the boat bay might get as far as opening the doors; he certainly wouldn't get any further.
McKeon turned where he stood, watching the rest of his people scurry about their tasks, and even as he barked orders, a corner of his mind continued to marvel at Horace Harkness. The senior chiefs "defection" had fooled even McKeon, and the captain fully intended to sit on him, if that was what it took, to get the entire story out of him. But that would have to wait. Just now, all that mattered was that Harkness' crazy plan actually seemed to be succeeding.
The fact that Tepes was a State Security ship worked in their favor at the moment. Each of the assault shuttles in the boat bay was configured to drop one of StateSec's outsized infantry companies, approximately seventy-five percent bigger than a Royal Manticoran Marine company, at minimum notice. That meant their onboard guns and external ordnance racks were left permanently armed... and that the weapons in their small arms racks were kept charged, with ammunition ready to hand. His people had many times more firepower than they could possibly use, all courtesy of StateSec, and they were employing everything they had the manpower to fire with savage satisfaction.
But not all of them could be spared to shoot bad guys. Harkness had moved his precious minicomp from the access slot Clinkscales had used to the cockpit of one of the shuttles and put it into straight terminal mode to wage war against the Peep computer techs who had belatedly realized what was going on. The senior chief had two enormous advantages: he was a better programmer than any of them, and, unlike them, he knew exactly what he'd done in the first place. But he had two matching disadvantages, for there were more of the Peeps and, unlike him, they had physical access to all the ships systems. After twenty minutes of trying to take control back from him, they'd begun shutting computers down, or ripping them out, and going to manual control.
Fortunately for the escaped prisoners, Harkness had planned his original sabotage carefully. Wherever possible, he'd used the computers to inflict major damage on systems rather than simply locking them down, and Tepes was going to require months of repairs before she could possibly return to service. Her crew, unfortunately, seemed to have grasped that, and they appeared to be perfectly willing to inflict massive additional damage on their own ship if that was the only way to get at their enemies.
"Ready to launch, Sir!"
McKeon turned at Geraldine Metcalf's shout. She stood just outside the docking tube to the bay's number two assault shuttle, and he waved acknowledgment. His tac officer swam down the tube while Anson Lethridge unlocked the docking arms. Then the shuttle's thrusters flared as Metcalf sent it drifting out of the bay, and McKeon took a moment to breathe a silent prayer that Harkness really had gotten the Peeps' weapons shut down.
Geraldine Metcalf took the shuttle up the side of the battlecruiser on reaction thrusters alone. The big assault boat felt logy and clumsy, and a part of her screamed to kick up the wedge and get more acceleration, but that was out of the question. She had a very specific job to do, and any betraying emissions would keep her from doing it.
She settled into position above the ship, passive sensors searching down past its hammerhead bow. If anything came up from Camp Charon, it was almost certain to come in from ahead, and she glanced sideways at Sarah DuChene as her copilot ran her fingers down the weapons panel and green standby lights began to burn an ominous scarlet.
"Message from Camp Charon, Citizen Admiral," Harrison Fraiser announced, and Tourville gestured for him to continue. "Your intention to render aid to Tepes, if required, is approved, but Brigadier Tresca says he has no confirmation that it is required. He's sending up some shuttles to check, and he'll advise us of their findings. In the meantime, we are not to cross the outer mine perimeter without express permission."
"Wonderful," Bogdanovich growled. "The bastards still don't want us anywhere in their sky, do they?"
"Now, now, Yuri," Tourville said mildly, watching Honeker's eyes for any flash of condemnation. He didn't see one, and he filed that away for future consideration...
"Down!"
Andrew LaFollet tackled Honor as gunfire suddenly broke out ahead of them. The fall drove the breath from her, and she coughed, fighting for air as the whine of pulsers and the heavier coughing of flechette guns filled the shaft. There were shouts and screams, and LaFollet released her and went crawling up the shaft. She started to follow, but a hand closed on her ankle and she jerked her head around.
"You stay here," Andreas Venizelos told her flatly. She opened her mouth, and he shook his head. "You're a commodore. More to the point, you're that man's Steadholder, and he didn't come all this way to get you just to have you killed now."
Pulser darts shrieked as they ricocheted from some projection in a shower of sparks, and LaFollet ducked involuntarily. But he never stopped moving, and he quickly caught up with Candless and McGinley. They were bellied down behind a flange supporting one of the shafts pressers, with an excellent field of fire. Unfortunately, the Peeps further up the shaft had an equally excellent field of fire, which meant the escapees' best covert route to Boat Bay Four was blocked.
More pulser darts screamed down the shaft, and Candless moved to the side to hose the enemy with flechettes in response. He had the dispersion pattern set for medium coverage, and he tracked his fire across the entire width of the shaft. A horrible, gurgling shriek answered, and he drew back into cover just as more darts whined past.
"How many?" LaFollet asked.
"I don't know," Candless replied, eyes sweeping the dimness ahead. "It was pure luck we saw them in time to take cover. I'd guess there're at least fifteen or twenty. No heavy weapons, yet, or they'd already have taken us out, but that's going to change."
"If they can coordinate well enough," McGinley put in. She sounded much tenser than Candless, but then, this wasn't exactly her kind of fight. "If Harkness' sabotage worked, their communications're probably at least as screwed up as ours are."
LaFollet nodded absently. Their own stolen communicators were getting only gibberish, which probably meant Harkness' efforts to cripple the Peeps' central communications net had worked. But the presence of those people up ahead was proof it hadn't worked completely... and that somebody on the other side had figured out at least part of what was going on. If they hadn't guessed what was happening, they wouldn't have known to block the lift shaft between the brig and Boat Bay Four, and if they hadn't had at least some communications ability, they couldn't have gotten these people here to do the blocking. But how much com capability did they have? If it was any more than fragmentary, he'd never get the Steadholder to safety, because there were simply too many people aboard this ship. If their officers could tell them where to go to intercept the escapees...
"I'll take it," Candless said calmly. He hadn't even glanced at LaFollet, and he never looked away from the shaft now, but his conversational tone proved he'd been thinking exactly what LaFollet had. "Head back about sixty meters and try that service tunnel on deck nineteen," he went on. "Commander McGinley can show you."
"Now wait a minute!" McGinley began. "We can't just..."
"Yes, we can," LaFollet said softly. "Here." He thrust the memo board at her, then jabbed a thumb back down the shaft. "Go," he said, and his flat voice held an implacable note of command. McGinley stared at him for a moment, then inhaled sharply, turned, and slithered into the dimness, and LaFollet looked at Candless.
"Are you sure, Jamie?" he asked quietly.
"I'm sure." Candless' reply was almost serene, and he turned his head to smile at LaFollet. "We've had some good times, Major. Now go get the Steadholder out of this."
"I will," LaFollet told him. It wasn't just a promise; it was an oath, and Candless nodded in satisfaction.
"You'd better be going then, Andrew," he said much more gently. "And later, when you've got her out of here, tell her..." He paused, unable to find the words he wanted, and LaFollet nodded.
"I will," he said again, and put one arm around his fellow armsman, hugging him tight. Then he turned and followed McGinley back down the shaft.
It took him only a few minutes to reach Honor and Venizelos. They stood where McGinley had already passed them, gazing up the shaft as a flechette gun coughed again in rapid fire, and he stepped brusquely past them.
He stood ramrod straight in his dress uniform, gloved hands folded behind him, swagger stick clasped in his right armpit, and glowered at the lift doors. A double watch section stood with him, weapons slung, each man and woman as immaculately groomed and polished as he himself while they waited for the camera crews to come collect the single prisoner in their charge. His people had taken special pains with their appearance, and not just because of the impending cameras. Their detail commanders growing frustration had been apparent for weeks, and no one wanted to give him the slightest excuse to vent it on them. Timmons knew that, and knowing they recognized his wrath only made it worse, for in recognizing it, they'd obviously guessed what caused it.
Timmons had been posted to the command of Tepes' brig detachment only a few weeks before Cordelia Ransom sailed for Barnett, and considering his relatively junior rank, the assignment had been quite a plum for him. It had also been an indication of the favor in which his superiors held him... and of their faith in his abilities. In the course of his career with StateSec, he'd specialized in the management of politically sensitive prisoners, and he'd always delivered them in exactly the desired condition. Usually, that had meant breaking them to heel, reducing them to cringing compliance with whatever StateSec might demand of them, and Timmons was confident he could break anyone. After all, a man was usually good at his work when it was a job he loved.
That was, in fact, the reason he'd been assigned to Ransom’s personal transport, for the Secretary of Public Information had anticipated an occasional need for the services of such a specialist. But the citizen lieutenant was a frustrated man this time, for Honor Harrington had eluded his best efforts. Of course, he'd been handicapped by Committeewoman Ransom's demand that she be delivered to the executioner in shape to appreciate, and react to, all that happened to her. After all, the cameras would be recording her big moment for later broadcast. But knowing she would be going before those cameras had ruled out the application of much direct physical coercion, it wouldn't do to mark her badly enough to evoke sympathy from the viewers, and Ransom’s insistence that she react properly to her execution had ruled out the use of drugs.
Viewed objectively, Timmons couldn't really fault the restrictions. It wasn't as if they were trying to get information out of Harrington, and there was no real need to break her if they were only going to hang her. But that didn't change the fact that he'd wanted to crush her. He had his professional pride, after all. Besides, he enjoyed his work, and he'd been confident of his ability to break her as he'd broken everyone else... which only made the blow to his pride even more severe when he failed.
It should have been so simple! Even without the cruder forms of physical abuse or drugs, humiliation should have done the trick. He'd recognized the steel at her core, but that had only added to his anticipatory pleasure, for he hated the proud ones. The ones who looked down from the mountains of achievement to sneer at the lesser mortals at their feet. There was a special joy in hurling them down from the heights, and one thing he'd learned dealing with Legislaturalist prisoners was that humiliation's effectiveness as a means of breaking resistance was directly proportional to the power a prisoner had wielded before his fall. Someone accustomed to seeing his orders swiftly implemented, of having control of himself and his surroundings, was far more vulnerable to impotence than someone who had never been in a position of command. When it was borne in upon him that nothing he did could have any effect on what happened, that his authority had become total helplessness, the shock and shame struck with crippling power. Timmons had seen it again and again, in civilian and military prisoners alike, and because he had, he'd never doubted that Harrington would follow the same pattern.
But she hadn't, and he couldn't understand it. Other prisoners had tried to escape him by withdrawing into their own private worlds, but none had succeeded. There were too many ways to jerk them back, and they always worked. Except that they hadn't worked this time. There was a strange, elastic power to Harrington’s resistance, as if by refusing to resist the blows he rained upon her she somehow deprived them of their power, and in a way he couldn't quite define, that made her refusal to resist the most potent defiance he'd ever encountered. Most of his mind insisted that if he'd only had more time he could still have smashed that nondefiance, but deep inside, he knew better.
He'd calculated everything so carefully, metered the humiliation so precisely. He'd opted for the death of a thousand cuts, stripping away her defenses with her dignity and her self-confidence with her ability to control her fate, and for a time, he'd thought he was succeeding. But he hadn't been, and he'd slowly realized he wouldn't. What she'd done to Bergren three days earlier only confirmed what had already become obvious to him. This time, he wasn't going to succeed. He'd had her for a T-month, and if he hadn't broken her in that long, then he never would without turning to sterner measures.
And those measures were denied him. What he wanted to do was storm into her cell with a neural whip and see how she liked direct stimulation of her pain centers for an hour or two. Or there were other, older-fashioned techniques, cruder, but perhaps even more effective because they were crude, which he'd learned from the ex-InSec personnel who'd trained him. But Ransoms orders not to damage her prevented him from doing any such thing. In fact, he was more than a little afraid of how the Committeewoman was going to react anyway when she set eyes on her prize once more.
Regulations had demanded the deactivation of Harrington's implants, but he hadn't counted on what that would do to her face. Nor had he expected the tech who deactivated them to actually burn them out, leaving no way to reverse the process. He didn't expect Ransom to be pleased to have her prisoner looking like a pre-space stroke victim, nor did he expect her to be happy at how gaunt and starved looking Harrington had become. But that wasn't his fault, damn it! He'd fed her regularly! In fact, he'd...
The ship lurched. It was more of a tremor, actually, but even that was enough to make him stiffen. The battlecruiser massed the next best thing to a million tons. Only something frighteningly violent could send a shock through something that huge, and Timmons turned towards the security console... just as a second shockwave lashed through the ship.
The second one was more pronounced than the first, and Timmons moved faster. Citizen Private Hayman jumped out of his way as he stepped behind the console, but the lieutenant hardly noticed. He stabbed the com key just as the ship trembled for a third time, but nothing happened.
Timmons frowned and punched another key, but still nothing happened. He felt ripples of panic beginning to spread through his subordinates as yet another concussion echoed through the ship, and his own panic rose with theirs as he entered still a third com code and got no response at all.
People aboard starships rely absolutely upon their technology, and nothing is more terrifying than to have that technology fail, especially for no apparent reason. Timmons was no exception to that rule, and he snarled at the communicator's dead display, then reached a decision and thrust a hand into his tunic pocket for his personal com.
As the commander of the brig security detail, he'd been issued a personal communicator, to be used only in the direst of emergencies. Outwardly indistinguishable from any other, it had one important difference: it didn't go through the main com net. Instead, it was a secure link to Citizen Colonel Livermore, CO of Tepes' ground force and security detachments, via a stand-alone system which had absolute priority.
"Yes?"
The single word, without any identification, was hardly correct com procedure, and Timmons recognized the confusion and fear within it. Yet simply hearing it was still a vast relief.
"Timmons, Brig Detail," he said crisply, drawing the comfort of proper protocol about himself. "Our communications are out down here. What's happening?"
"How the hell do I know?" the unidentified voice snarled back. "The whole frigging ship is coming apart, and..."
Hanson Timmons never learned what else the voice might have said, for at that moment, the lift doors slid open. His head snapped up, and he wheeled towards them in confusion, for the tone to signal an approaching lift car hadn't sounded. His confusion deepened as he looked into the darkness of the shaft and realized the tone hadn't sounded because there was no car... and then the first flechette gun coughed.
The brig passageway opening off the lift formed a dogleg to the right on its way to the cells. LaFollet didn't know if that was a deliberate security feature, but it certainly had the effect of one.
He and Candless had been ready when the rest of the rescue party opened the lift doors manually... which was more than could be said for the half-dozen people standing there in their black-and-red dress uniforms. Each had a flechette gun slung over his or her shoulder, and a pulser rode at each right hip, but most of them had been looking away from the lifts, at the officer behind the security console at the bend in the corridor. Their heads started to turn as the doors slid apart, and one of them actually shouted something and clawed frantically at his slung weapon, but he was too late. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless had debts to pay, one to their Steadholder, and a very different one to her enemies, and their eyes were merciless as they squeezed their triggers.
Flechette guns were designed for shipboard combat. The modern descendants of pre-space shotguns, their grav drivers punched out masses of knife-edged flechettes. With much lower velocities than pulser darts, they were less prone to dangerous ricochets or punching holes in important pieces of equipment, but they were lethal against any unarmored target. Their projectiles dispersed into deadly patterns, controllable by the "choke" setting on their pistol grips. They could be set to cover a cone over a full meter wide at a range of five meters from the muzzle, or as little as fifteen centimeters across at a range of fifty meters, and flesh and bone meant very little to the razor-cruel flechettes.
LaFollet and Candless had set their weapons to maximum dispersion and full automatic. The cycle time on a flechette gun was much slower than that of a pulser, but that hardly mattered given their wide area of effect. The guns coughed rhythmically, belching death and destruction, and the waiting SS guards exploded in a bloody mist.
"We're under attack! We're under attack!" Timmons screamed into his com even as he flung himself down behind the security console. Flechettes slammed into it like deadly sleet, and he scuttled down the passage on his elbows and belly. A single flechette, licking through the gap between the console and bulkhead, caught him just as he rounded the bend, and he screamed as it chewed into his thigh. Slower than a pulser dart or not, it was still traveling at three hundred meters per second, and it sliced the back of his leg like a high-velocity axe. The lieutenant dropped his com involuntarily to clutch at the bloody wound with both hands, and the communicator slithered away across the deck. He heard the shouted questions from the other end even through his own sobs of anguish, but he had no time to worry about answering them. Most of his people were down already, but the two he'd posted as formal guards outside Harrington’s cell had been shielded by the bend in the corridor. That pair had been intended as window-dressing for the formal transfer of the prisoner, but stationing them here had had the effect of giving him a reserve, and he bared his teeth in a pain-stretched snarl. "Get ready!" he gasped at them, and took his right hand from his gashed leg. His fingers were slimy with his own blood, but he drew his pulser and covered the bend as he shoved himself along the deck on the seat of his trousers and his wounded thigh left a bright red blood trail behind him.
"Go!" LaFollet snapped, and Robert Whitman vaulted from the lift shaft into the brig passage. "At least one got around the turn!" LaFollet warned him.
The other armsman nodded, but he never slowed in his dash for the security console. He went down on one knee, weapon ready, and stiffened as he heard a voice.
"Timmons! Timmons! What the fuck is going on down there?"
He realized instantly what he was hearing, and that whoever was on the other end of that com link would be sending help as quickly as he could. Time had just become an even more deadly foe, and he looked back over his shoulder at LaFollet and Candless, just starting to climb out of the shaft.
"Open com link!" he shouted, and then, before anyone could stop him, rolled out of his cover with the flechette gun on full automatic.
Timmons heard the shout and grinned viciously. The bastards knew someone would be coming up their backsides any minute now. All he and his remaining men had to do was hold out, and he suddenly realized how he could do just that. These idiots had to be here to rescue Harrington, so all he had to do was open her cell and drag her out into the middle of the firefight, and...
His thoughts broke off as someone rolled out into the very middle of the passage. His sudden appearance took Timmons totally by surprise, and he gaped at the apparition in shock, unable to believe anyone would deliberately throw himself into what he knew had to be a deathtrap. But that was because he'd never encountered a Grayson armsman whose Steadholder was in danger. Robert Whitman had only one purpose in life, and his very first shot tore Citizen Lieutenant Timmons to bloody rags.
The two men further up the passage poured fire back, but the bare bulkheads and deck offered no cover... for anyone. Deadly clouds of flechettes shrieked past one another, intermingling and then separating, all of them set for maximum dispersion, and there was no place to hide.
"Citizen Admiral?" Lester Tourville looked up quickly, for there was something very odd about Shannon Foraker’s tone.
"What?" he asked, and the ops officer frowned.
"I think you'd better look at this, Sir," she said. "Tepes' active sensors just went down."
"What?" Tourville said again, in a very different tone, and Foraker nodded.
"Every one of them, Sir." Foraker had gotten even more careless, or deliberate, about her "elitist" vocabulary over the last month, but this time Tourville was certain she'd used "Sir" without even thinking about it. "They shouldn't have done that," she went on. "They're through the main minefields and into orbit, but nobody in her right mind would shut down her radar."
Tourville nodded and walked quickly across the deck towards her station, for she was right. Tepes might be in her designated parking orbit, but with so many mines floating around the possibility of one having strayed into her orbital path could never be completely ruled out.
"Anything from her at all, Harrison?" he demanded.
"Negative, Citizen Admiral," the com officer replied. "I don't, Just a second, Citizen Admiral." Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser listened to his earbug intently, then turned to Tourville. "Citizen Captain Hewitt reports that he was receiving a message from Citizen Captain Vladovich, Citizen Admiral. Apparently the transmission was interrupted in the middle of a sentence."
Tourville and Bogdanovich looked at one another, then turned as one to Everard Honeker. The People's commissioner looked back at them, as confused as either of the naval officers but not as immediately concerned. Unlike them, he didn't fully understand just how massive an interruption Tepes' systems had just apparently suffered.
Tourville saw Honeker’s incomprehension and started to speak, then stopped himself and looked back down at Foraker. The tac officer was bent over her display with focused intensity, and he glanced at it himself rather than disturb her.
The relative orbital positions of Hades and Cerberus-B-3 were such that Count Titty had passed within less than two light-minutes of the former on her vector for the latter. Hades now lay almost exactly three and a half light-minutes off her starboard bow, moving away from her at a little over 26,000 KPS as she continued to decelerate towards Cerberus-B-3, and he glanced back up at Citizen Commander Lowe.
"Assume we go to maximum military power. How soon could we reach Tepes?"
Lowe punched numbers into her panel quickly, then looked back up.
"We'll need a little over eighty-three minutes to decelerate to rest relative to Hades, Citizen Admiral. If we go for a least-time flight from that point, we can reach the planet in another hundred and seventeen minutes, call it three hours and twenty minutes total, but our relative velocity would be over thirty-six thousand KPS. If we go for a zero-velocity intercept, it'll add almost another hour to the flight profile."
Tourville grunted and turned back to Foraker's panel. He drew a cigar from his pocket and unwrapped it slowly, never taking his eyes from the data on the display. He had the cigar half-way to his mouth when Foraker sucked in an audible breath and his own hand froze.
"Citiz..."
"I see it, Shannon," he said quietly, and his hand moved the cigar the rest of the way to his mouth. "How bad is it?" he asked almost absently.
"I can't say, Citizen Admiral. But look here and here." She tapped a secondary display at her elbow, and Tourville nodded slowly as he scanned the readouts.
"Stay on it," he told her, then beckoned for Honeker and Bogdanovich to join him.
"I don't know what's happening, but something sure as hell just went wrong aboard Tepes," he told them in a flat, lowered voice.
"What do you mean, 'wrong'?" Honeker asked tautly.
"Citizen Commissioner, warships don't just suddenly go off the air unless something very unusual happens to them. And Citizen Commander Foraker just picked up debris and atmosphere loss. I'd say she's suffered at least one major hull breach."
"A hull breach?" Honeker stared at him in disbelief, and Tourville nodded grimly.
"I don't know what caused it, and the air loss is low enough, for now, at least, to indicate that they managed to seal off the damaged areas. But whatever’s going on over there is serious, Citizen Commissioner. Very serious."
"I see." Honeker rubbed sweaty palms together and made himself take a deep breath. "What do you propose to do about it, Citizen Admiral?" he asked quietly.
"What we're seeing now happened at least four minutes ago," Tourville told him, still in that flat tone. "By now, she could already have blown up, and we wouldn't know it. But if she's in serious trouble, she's going to need help."
"And you propose taking Tilly to render it," Honeker said.
"Yes. Sir. The only problem is that we don't know what she may have already told Camp Charon... or how they may react if we suddenly head for the planet when they told us to stay the hell away from it."
"Understood." Honeker stood another moment, still rubbing his hands together, then looked at Fraiser. "Contact Camp Charon, Citizen Lieutenant. Inform them that we are going to the assistance of Tepes on my authority at our best acceleration and request that they confirm the minefields have been safed for our passage."
Honor Harrington rose and faced the door of her cell as it opened, and the right side of her face was almost as expressionless as the dead left side.
It wasn't easy to keep it that way. Timmons had taken great pleasure in informing her that the next time her cell was opened would be for her trip to the hangman. That would have been enough to make maintaining her composure difficult even without the flashes of emotion she'd begun receiving from Nimitz. They were too far apart, their link stretched too thin, for her to tell exactly what the 'cat was feeling, but there was a sense of... movement, and sharper flashes of pain, as if the movement hurt him. At first she'd been certain he was being transported to the planet to die with her as Ransom had promised, yet she'd become steadily less positive, for a flush of excitement and a strange, fierce determination seemed to have wrapped itself about all of his other emotions. She had no idea what might have caused it. For that matter, it might all be nothing more than a delusion on her part, inspired by her own fear and half-starved weakness. But whatever else was happening, she would meet Timmons and his ghouls without flinching.
The door lock clacked, and she braced herself as it swung open. And then...
"My Lady! Lady Harrington!"
Honor staggered, her good eye flaring wide, as Andrew LaFollet shouted her name. Her personal armsman stood in the open doorway, face haggard and his normally immaculate uniform ragged, and he cradled a flechette gun in his arms.
Not possible, her brain told her calmly. This is not possible. It has to be a hallucination.
But it wasn't, and she stumbled forward as he freed one hand from the gun and held it out to her. Her working eye misted, making it hard to see, but his hand was warm and firm as it closed on her too-thin fingers. He squeezed hard, and Honor dragged in a deep, shuddery breath and put her arms around him, hugging him fiercely.
"We're here to get you out, My Lady," he said into her shoulder, and she nodded and made herself release him. She stood back, blinking to clear her vision, and saw his face change as he took in her own appearance. The brightly colored jumpsuit seemed two sizes too big for her wasted body, and his gray eyes went harder than steel as he took in the dead side of her face. He opened his mouth, but she shook her head.
"No time, Andrew," she told him huskily. "No time. Later."
He gazed at her for a fraction of a second longer, and then shook himself like a dog shedding water from its coat.
"Yes, My Lady," he said, and nodded to someone else. Whoever it was was to her left, and Honor turned quickly, then inhaled in fresh surprise as Andreas Venizelos stepped to her side and fastened a gun belt around her waist. He looked up from his work to meet her eyes with a tense, strained smile, and she touched his shoulder for a moment, then drew the pulser and checked it quickly.
"This way, My Lady," LaFollet said urgently, and she turned to follow him... then stopped. Four bodies lay on the deck, all oozing blood from multiple flechette hits. She recognized two guards whose names she'd never bothered to learn, and Timmons... and Robert Whitman.
"Bob," she whispered. She started to go to her knees beside him, but LaFollet gripped her upper arm and shook his head fiercely.
"There's no time, My Lady!" If Honor had known him even a little less well, she would have hated him in that moment, for the words came out brusque and harsh, devoid of any emotion. But she did know him, and she recognized the matching anguish behind that mask of nonfeeling as he tugged on her arm again. "We've got to get moving, My Lady. They got the alarm out before Bob killed them."
Honor nodded and tried to clear her mind as Candless appeared on her other side and he and LaFollet half-lifted her down into the lift shaft. Marcia McGinley was waiting to help, and Honor clung to her for a moment while her armsmen jumped down beside her. She tried to speak, but her ops officer only gave her a short, fierce hug, picked up a flechette gun of her own, and vanished into the shafts dimness on Candless' heels while Venizelos joined Honor and LaFollet.
"At least we've got plenty of guns," the commander told Honor grimly, handing her a flechette gun to go with her pulser. "I stocked up on spare magazines, too."
"Come on, My Lady," LaFollet said urgently, and he and Venizelos urged her into motion.
"They're trying the lift again!" Alistair McKeon heard someone shout, and a grenade launcher coughed in rapid fire.
Three grenades sizzled past him and dropped neatly through the doors the first assault attempt had left jammed half open, and there was a moment of silence. Then the screams began a half heartbeat before the grenades exploded in rapid succession. Their effect in the enclosed lift shaft must have been indescribable, but Jasper Mayhew sent two more after them.
McKeon grunted in satisfaction, but he also looked at Solomon Marchant.
"We need somebody in position to actually see who's coming down that shaft," he said urgently. "The one thing we don't want is to accidentally kill our own people if they come that way with Lady Harrington!"
"I'll take care of it," the Grayson assured him, and waved for Clinkscales to join him as he loped over to the jammed lift. The lift at the other end of the bay gallery appeared undamaged so far, but Russ Sanko and Senior Chief Halburton were camped right outside its doors with a plasma rifle dug in behind a barricade of shattered machinery and equipment pallets.
Another of Harkness' programs had locked all the lifts to Boat Bay Four, a fact the Peeps obviously had already discovered. So far, they were restricting themselves to the forward lift only, and since they couldn't use the lift car itself, they'd come down the shaft and tried to blow the doors into the gallery. They'd partially succeeded, and the explosion when they blew the doors had killed Chief Reilly, but the rest of McKeon's people had massacred the entire assault team before it could clear the shaft. The undamaged rear lift remained a threat, but McKeon had decided against blowing it himself. Honor might need it, and Sanko and Halburton made a pretty effective security measure. Anyone who tried to use it to attack the boat bay might get as far as opening the doors; he certainly wouldn't get any further.
McKeon turned where he stood, watching the rest of his people scurry about their tasks, and even as he barked orders, a corner of his mind continued to marvel at Horace Harkness. The senior chiefs "defection" had fooled even McKeon, and the captain fully intended to sit on him, if that was what it took, to get the entire story out of him. But that would have to wait. Just now, all that mattered was that Harkness' crazy plan actually seemed to be succeeding.
The fact that Tepes was a State Security ship worked in their favor at the moment. Each of the assault shuttles in the boat bay was configured to drop one of StateSec's outsized infantry companies, approximately seventy-five percent bigger than a Royal Manticoran Marine company, at minimum notice. That meant their onboard guns and external ordnance racks were left permanently armed... and that the weapons in their small arms racks were kept charged, with ammunition ready to hand. His people had many times more firepower than they could possibly use, all courtesy of StateSec, and they were employing everything they had the manpower to fire with savage satisfaction.
But not all of them could be spared to shoot bad guys. Harkness had moved his precious minicomp from the access slot Clinkscales had used to the cockpit of one of the shuttles and put it into straight terminal mode to wage war against the Peep computer techs who had belatedly realized what was going on. The senior chief had two enormous advantages: he was a better programmer than any of them, and, unlike them, he knew exactly what he'd done in the first place. But he had two matching disadvantages, for there were more of the Peeps and, unlike him, they had physical access to all the ships systems. After twenty minutes of trying to take control back from him, they'd begun shutting computers down, or ripping them out, and going to manual control.
Fortunately for the escaped prisoners, Harkness had planned his original sabotage carefully. Wherever possible, he'd used the computers to inflict major damage on systems rather than simply locking them down, and Tepes was going to require months of repairs before she could possibly return to service. Her crew, unfortunately, seemed to have grasped that, and they appeared to be perfectly willing to inflict massive additional damage on their own ship if that was the only way to get at their enemies.
"Ready to launch, Sir!"
McKeon turned at Geraldine Metcalf's shout. She stood just outside the docking tube to the bay's number two assault shuttle, and he waved acknowledgment. His tac officer swam down the tube while Anson Lethridge unlocked the docking arms. Then the shuttle's thrusters flared as Metcalf sent it drifting out of the bay, and McKeon took a moment to breathe a silent prayer that Harkness really had gotten the Peeps' weapons shut down.
Geraldine Metcalf took the shuttle up the side of the battlecruiser on reaction thrusters alone. The big assault boat felt logy and clumsy, and a part of her screamed to kick up the wedge and get more acceleration, but that was out of the question. She had a very specific job to do, and any betraying emissions would keep her from doing it.
She settled into position above the ship, passive sensors searching down past its hammerhead bow. If anything came up from Camp Charon, it was almost certain to come in from ahead, and she glanced sideways at Sarah DuChene as her copilot ran her fingers down the weapons panel and green standby lights began to burn an ominous scarlet.
"Message from Camp Charon, Citizen Admiral," Harrison Fraiser announced, and Tourville gestured for him to continue. "Your intention to render aid to Tepes, if required, is approved, but Brigadier Tresca says he has no confirmation that it is required. He's sending up some shuttles to check, and he'll advise us of their findings. In the meantime, we are not to cross the outer mine perimeter without express permission."
"Wonderful," Bogdanovich growled. "The bastards still don't want us anywhere in their sky, do they?"
"Now, now, Yuri," Tourville said mildly, watching Honeker's eyes for any flash of condemnation. He didn't see one, and he filed that away for future consideration...
"Down!"
Andrew LaFollet tackled Honor as gunfire suddenly broke out ahead of them. The fall drove the breath from her, and she coughed, fighting for air as the whine of pulsers and the heavier coughing of flechette guns filled the shaft. There were shouts and screams, and LaFollet released her and went crawling up the shaft. She started to follow, but a hand closed on her ankle and she jerked her head around.
"You stay here," Andreas Venizelos told her flatly. She opened her mouth, and he shook his head. "You're a commodore. More to the point, you're that man's Steadholder, and he didn't come all this way to get you just to have you killed now."
Pulser darts shrieked as they ricocheted from some projection in a shower of sparks, and LaFollet ducked involuntarily. But he never stopped moving, and he quickly caught up with Candless and McGinley. They were bellied down behind a flange supporting one of the shafts pressers, with an excellent field of fire. Unfortunately, the Peeps further up the shaft had an equally excellent field of fire, which meant the escapees' best covert route to Boat Bay Four was blocked.
More pulser darts screamed down the shaft, and Candless moved to the side to hose the enemy with flechettes in response. He had the dispersion pattern set for medium coverage, and he tracked his fire across the entire width of the shaft. A horrible, gurgling shriek answered, and he drew back into cover just as more darts whined past.
"How many?" LaFollet asked.
"I don't know," Candless replied, eyes sweeping the dimness ahead. "It was pure luck we saw them in time to take cover. I'd guess there're at least fifteen or twenty. No heavy weapons, yet, or they'd already have taken us out, but that's going to change."
"If they can coordinate well enough," McGinley put in. She sounded much tenser than Candless, but then, this wasn't exactly her kind of fight. "If Harkness' sabotage worked, their communications're probably at least as screwed up as ours are."
LaFollet nodded absently. Their own stolen communicators were getting only gibberish, which probably meant Harkness' efforts to cripple the Peeps' central communications net had worked. But the presence of those people up ahead was proof it hadn't worked completely... and that somebody on the other side had figured out at least part of what was going on. If they hadn't guessed what was happening, they wouldn't have known to block the lift shaft between the brig and Boat Bay Four, and if they hadn't had at least some communications ability, they couldn't have gotten these people here to do the blocking. But how much com capability did they have? If it was any more than fragmentary, he'd never get the Steadholder to safety, because there were simply too many people aboard this ship. If their officers could tell them where to go to intercept the escapees...
"I'll take it," Candless said calmly. He hadn't even glanced at LaFollet, and he never looked away from the shaft now, but his conversational tone proved he'd been thinking exactly what LaFollet had. "Head back about sixty meters and try that service tunnel on deck nineteen," he went on. "Commander McGinley can show you."
"Now wait a minute!" McGinley began. "We can't just..."
"Yes, we can," LaFollet said softly. "Here." He thrust the memo board at her, then jabbed a thumb back down the shaft. "Go," he said, and his flat voice held an implacable note of command. McGinley stared at him for a moment, then inhaled sharply, turned, and slithered into the dimness, and LaFollet looked at Candless.
"Are you sure, Jamie?" he asked quietly.
"I'm sure." Candless' reply was almost serene, and he turned his head to smile at LaFollet. "We've had some good times, Major. Now go get the Steadholder out of this."
"I will," LaFollet told him. It wasn't just a promise; it was an oath, and Candless nodded in satisfaction.
"You'd better be going then, Andrew," he said much more gently. "And later, when you've got her out of here, tell her..." He paused, unable to find the words he wanted, and LaFollet nodded.
"I will," he said again, and put one arm around his fellow armsman, hugging him tight. Then he turned and followed McGinley back down the shaft.
It took him only a few minutes to reach Honor and Venizelos. They stood where McGinley had already passed them, gazing up the shaft as a flechette gun coughed again in rapid fire, and he stepped brusquely past them.