"Just a minutejust a minute!" he shouted over the bay intercom. "What the hell is going on here? Nobody said anything about this to me! Who's in command of you people, anyway?"
"I am," an amplified voice replied over a suit speaker, and someone stepped to the front of the newcomers. It was a man's voice, deep but very young, Riogetti thought, and there was something about its soft accent...
"And who the hell are you?" Ericson demanded, storming out of his control cubicle to glare at the newcomer. The very tall newcomer, Riogetti realized. Battle armor made anyone look tall, but this fellow must have been a giant in his bare feet. And he and most of his fellows were armed with flechette guns, not pulse rifles. Well, that made more sense than most of what was happening. The flechette guns were much more effective than pulse rifles for prisoner controland much less likely to blow holes in shuttle hulls or other important equipment.
The giant turned, gazing thoughtfully at the boat bay officer through his armorplast visor while still more armored troopers emerged from the shuttles. There must have been forty-five or fifty of them in the bay gallery by now, and then the giant smiled thinly, and somehow his flechette gun was in his armored hands and the safety was off.
"In answer to your question," he told Ericson flatly, "my name is Clinkscales. Carson Clinkscales, Ensign, Grayson Space Navy, and this ship is no longer under StateSec command."
The citizen lieutenant gaped at him, and so did Riogetti and every other guard in the boat bay. The words were clear enough, but they made no sense. They couldn't make sense, because they were manifestly impossible. But then, suddenly, one of the guards shook herself and reacted. She wheeled with her flechette gun, reacting out of pure instinct, not reason, and hosed a vicious stream of flechettes at the nearest boarder.
The razor-edged projectiles whined uselessly off her target's armor, ricocheting wildly, and another SS guard screamed as three of them chewed into his back. One of the boarders jerked up his own weapon and triggered a single shot back at the guard who'd opened fire, killing her instantly, and a StateSec officer shouted something frantically. Perhaps it was an offer to surrender, or an order for the boat bay guards to lay down their weapons. But whatever it was, it came too late. Other guards were following the dead woman's example while prisoners flung themselves desperately to the deck to get out of the line of fire, and the rest of the borders responded with lethal efficiency.
Citizen Sergeant Riogetti saw Citizen Lieutenant Ericson reach for his holstered pulser, saw him jerk it free, saw the giant's gun come up, and saw the citizen lieutenant's mangled body fly backward under a blast of flechettes. And then the citizen sergeant saw the same flechette gun swinging towards him, and another muzzle flash.
And then he never saw anything at all again.
"I should have called on them to surrender before the shuttles docked," Honor said with quiet bitterness. She, McKeon, Ramirez, and Benson sat in the small briefing room off the main control center, viewing Solomon Marchant and Geraldine Metcalf's report from Krashnark. Marchant was safely in command of the ship, and there had been remarkably little fighting after the initial outbreak in the boat bay. Or perhaps not so remarkably, given that Krashnark's skipper had been given his options by Charon Central just about the time that idiot guard opened fire. With the equivalent firepower of three or four squadrons of the wall locked onto his ship, Citizen Captain Pangborn had recognized the better part of valor when he saw it.
Unfortunately, twenty-nine members of his crewand eight POWshad been killed in the boat bay bloodbath first.
"Anyone can be wise after the fact, Honor," Jesus Ramirez said almost gently.
"But if they'd waited to board until Pangborn had agreed to surrender, none of this would have happened," Honor replied, jabbing her index finger at the casualty figures on the terminal before her.
"Maybe, and maybe not," McKeon said before Ramirez could respond. "Don't forget that Pangborn was up against a two-pronged threatboarders inside and weapons platforms outsideand we really don't know which was the decisive factor for him. Without the boarders, he might have tried to bluff or threatened to kill the prisoners. Hell, he might have figured you wouldn't dare push the button, since you couldn't kill him without killing the POWs as well!"
"But"
"Don't second-guess yourself!" Ramirez rumbled more forcefully. "Alistair is right. It wasn't your fault, and it wasn't young Clinkscales' fault, either. It was that idiot Black Leg. Once the first shot was fired"
He shrugged, and Honor sighed. He and Alistair were right, and she and Nimitz could both feel Benson's firm agreement with her superiors. But still...
She sighed again, then made herself nod unhappily. Yet despite Ramirez's firmness, she knew she was going to go right on second guessing herself, and knowing he was right wouldn't change a thing. She'd made the call hoping the double threat would minimize any temptation to resist, and it should have workedhad worked, once the initial firefight (if you could call such a one-sided massacre that) was over. But she was the CO. It was her job to get things right, and she hadn't, and whether it was reasonable or not, she blamed herself for it.
Still, she couldn't afford to brood on it, either, and she opened her mouth to speak, then looked up as the briefing room door opened to admit Geraldine Metcalf and a stranger in an orange jumpsuit. Honor felt a spasm of confused emotiondistaste, anger, and an undeniable stab of fearas she saw the jumpsuit, for she had worn one just like it in PNS Tepes brig, but the jumpsuit hardly registered, for it was buried in her surprise at seeing Metcalf. The situation aboard Krashnark had only just started settling down, and she'd expected Metcalf to remain aboard the cruiser as Marchant's XO until they had everything buttoned up. But she hadn't... and Honor stiffened in her chair as Metcalf's emotions hit her like a hammer.
"Gerry?" she asked, half-raising a hand to reach out to the other woman before she could stop herself.
"Excuse me, Ma'am," Metcalf said, her voice curiously flat and almost stunned sounding. She didn't even seem to see Honor's hand, and she clasped her own hands behind herself, coming to a sort of parade rest and straightening her spine. "I realize I shouldn't have burst in on you like this, Milady," she went on in that same flat voice, "but this is Commander Victor Ainspan. He was the senior Manticoran POW aboard Krashnark, and Solomon and I thought you should hear his news as quickly as possible."
"What news would that be?" Honor's voice sounded almost calm, but that was solely because decades of command experience had control of her vocal cords. Underneath her apparent composure the jagged spikes of stress and shock radiating from Metcalf twisted her nerves like taut cables, and she kept herself in her chair only by sheer force of will.
"The prisoners aboard Krashnark, Ma'am," Metcalf told her. "They're all military POWs, not politicals, and fifteen of them are from the Zanzibaran Navy."
"Zanzibaran?" Honor's eyebrows furrowed. The Caliphate's navy didn't have anything bigger than a heavy cruiser, and its units were assigned almost exclusively to the defense of their own home system, so how
"Zanzibaran," Metcalf confirmed harshly, and her nostrils flared. "Milady, according to the prisoners, the Peeps hit Zanzibar hard two T-months ago." Alistair McKeon muttered a disbelieving imprecation behind Honor, but she couldn't look away from Metcalf's face. "They rolled right over itsucked the picket into a head-on pass, blew it out with missile pods, and then went on and took out every industrial platform in the system."
Ramirez and Benson looked perplexed. They'd been on Hell too long, and they were too unfamiliar with the members and dynamicsnot to mention the astrographyof the Manticoran Alliance to realize how far into the Allies' rear the Peeps had gone to strike at Zanzibar. But Honor and McKeon knew.