The captain fought down a smile. It wasn't often that his ATO lagged behind his own calculations.
"Oh," Gohr repeated. "The Queen must have been part of the deception from the beginning. We're swimming in deep waters here, Sir, if you'll pardon my saying so."
"Deep waters, indeed," Oversteegen murmured.
Princess Ruth continued: "But the thing is, you see, they didn't really manage to abduct her either. Because-with some help from-oh, lots of people-she escaped. She's quite safe, at the moment. And now-"
Oversteegen suspected that he was witness to an unusual event. Princess Ruth seemed at a loss for words. Something which, he was almost certain, happened very rarely to the young woman.
Where military protocol seemed no longer quite applicable-and with Manticoran diplomatic niceties in the complete mess which High Ridge and his crew had left it-Oversteegen decided to fall back on old-fashioned aristocratic chivalry.
"Would you like me t' come and pay a personal visit then, Your Highness?" A quick glance at the tactical display. The freighter was giving no signs of life at all. "So long as you can assure me-"
The princess' loss of words was momentary. Firmly, even regally: "Yes, I would, Captain. And I can assure you there will be no-what did you call it?-outbreak of 'hostilities.' " Her slender jaw set. "Not the kind you meant, anyway. Forget that freighter, Captain. That slaver ship, I should say, because that's what we're sure it really is."
The princess glanced aside, as if studying someone not visible in the display image. Her jaw seemed to tighten further, and she almost hissed the next words.
"I shall be very surprised, Captain, if any guilty party on that ship is alive for very long. If they are alive, they'll certainly be in custody-and might very well wish they were dead."
Oversteegen now found himself as curious as he was relieved.
"You must have met some interestin' people lately, Your Highness. I do hope you'll see fit t' introduce me. In any event, I'll be over as soon as my pinnace can bring me. We'll consider the matter a family visit."
He cocked an eye. "Armed, or unarmed, Your Highness? And with or without a military escort? Naturally, I'd normally come unarmed and unescorted into your presence, on such an occasion."
Princess Ruth's smile was now royal graciousness personified. "Oh, I don't think arms will be necessary, Captain, other than your own personal sidearm. As for an escort, I'd simply recommend your ATO. That's Lieutenant Gohr, I believe. Betty Gohr. My-ah, Captain Zilwicki-has a high regard for her."
"Done, Your Highness."
The image vanished, and Oversteegen glanced at Gohr. The lieutenant's face looked simultaneously pleased and-very, very apprehensive.
"I don't know Anton Zilwicki, Sir!" she protested. "How the hell-sorry, pardon the language-how would he possibly know me?" Almost wailing, now: "I'm just a lieutenant!"
For some peculiar reason, the young officer's distress cheered Oversteegen up immensely.
"Deep waters, indeed, Lieutenant Gohr. Though it's said, y'know-granted, mostly by a lot of disreputable rascals-that Captain Zilwicki is the shrewdest fish in those waters."
Chapter 28
As it happened, Thandi did get there in time. When she entered the main gaming area of the space station, Berry and her women in tow-they'd left the mangled Scrag in the hands of security guards, to be given medical attention-she saw that the huge hall had been almost cleared of people. Except for five people sitting at a table some distance away, everyone was gathered in the center. Two of the gaming tables had been pushed aside to make for an open space perhaps ten meters in diameter.
Thandi couldn't really see who the five people were, at the table to the side. Three men and two women, but beyond that she couldn't make out their faces. The hall was very dark, except for the spotlights shining down in the center.
"It's so dark,"Berry whispered, glancing up at the ceiling far above. Thandi couldn't tell exactly how far above, because the ceiling was pitch black.
Four men were sitting on chairs in the center of the hall. More precisely, they were shackled to the chairs: ankles to the chair legs, and their arms cuffed behind the back rests. The chairs were arranged in an arc, covering perhaps a third of a circle. Enough of an arc, Thandi realized at once, to enable them to see each other easily.
She recognized those men, of course. Their faces, unlike those of the people at the table to the side, were brightly lit by the spotlights.
Flairty, who was now one of the few survivors of Templeton's original group of Masadans and Scrags.
Unser Diem, the roving troubleshooter-ha! Thandi jeered silently-talk about trouble!-for Jessyk Combine; and, effectively, Mesa's chief representative in the Erewhon system.
Haicheng Ringstorff, who was officially a "security consultant" but was, in reality, Mesa's strong-arm specialist in the area.
Thandi studied him for a moment, through slitted eyes. She knew Ringstorff was suspected by Lieutenant Commander Watanapongse of having been responsible for a number of major crimes over the past couple of T-years, including:
– the presumed massacre of two thousand religious colonists headed for the planet Tiberian;
– an upsurge of piracy in general in Erewhon's galactic region;
– the destruction of an Erewhonese destroyer sent to investigate;
– and the ensuing attack on the Manticoran cruiser Gauntlet sent to investigate the disappearance of the destroyer.
That last attack had gone awry, mainly because the captain of the Manticoran cruiser had proven to be ferociously more competent at his trade than the pirates who attacked him. It remained unclear exactly how pirates had managed to get their hands on naval cruisers in the first place, but Thandi had heard Watanapongse speculate that they'd probably gotten them from Technodyne Industries of Yildun.
TIY's reputation for shady dealings wasn't quite in the same league as Jessyk's or Manpower's, but it was fairly impressive in its own right. Yildun's location, roughly a hundred and eighty-three light-years from Earth, put the A1 star almost exactly on the boundary between the ultra-civilized core planets of the original League and the more recently settled systems whose attitude towards things commercial (and sometimes military) remained rather more bare-knuckled than the satisfied worlds nearer the League's heart. Yildun was far enough off the main sequence to have no habitable planets, but the system was rich in asteroids and contained the second oldest known wormhole junction in the galaxy. It had only three termini, including the central junction, yet that had been more than enough to turn it into a central hub for shipping. Industry had followed, exploiting the incredible natural wealth of the system's asteroids, and, over the centuries, TIY had become one of the SLN's primary builders, with an in-house R amp;D division which enjoyed an enviable prestige.
TIY was also one of the trans-stellars which had vociferously protested the technology embargo the League had slapped on the belligerents in the Manticore-Haven War. Which might have had just a bit to do with its habit of occasionally disposing of the odd modern warship under questionable circumstances. It was rumored that the Yildun yards routinely built five to ten percent more hulls than the SLN had ordered and either kept them off the books completely or else "lost" them in a maze of paperwork which eventually deposited them in some very strange places indeed. And it was a demonstrated fact-no rumor, this!-that dozens of warships TIY had purchased "for reclamation" had ended up in the hands of third and fourth-tier navies (and sometimes pirates).