"I wish you would, Captain," he said, and his voice was a soft, hungry whisper.
It is not pleasant to see the beaten face of a human who accepts defeat neither easily nor often. Most on Ortega's bridge looked away in something akin to embarrassment as his words burned across the light-seconds. They stared at their consoles, waiting, as Li Han faced their admiral and saved the lives of her crews by forcing herself to say: "Understood."
Trevayne broke the connection and spoke in a drained, almost inaudible voice. "Commodore Yoshinaka, please take charge of the surrender arrangements. I'll be in my quarters." He turned on his heel and strode away.
He had barely stepped off the flag bridge when the cheering began, and spread, and grew until the mobile fortress rang with its echoes. He never heard it.
BOND
"War is fought by human beings."
General Karl von Clausewitz, On War
De facto capital of the Rim Worlds or no, Prescott City wasn't much of a city by Innerworld standards. But it was the largest one on Xanadu, and it was large enough to have traffic problems. Ground traffic was bad enough, but the aerial traffic patterns were even worse, despite the best efforts of overtaxed controllers, human and robotic.
It might not have been so bad had the Provisional Government not established itself here. Not only had the city's population risen by almost fifty percent, but more and more military skimmers reduced its traffic patterns to chaos as they cut across them, their shrill transponder signals clearing a path through the carefully nurtured order. To the air traffic authorities, the Peaceforcer skimmer approaching Government House was only one more flaw in the jigsaw puzzle of their job.
Government House, located on a hilltop in what had been the outskirts of town two years earlier, was the city's most imposing edifice. Silhouetted against the bustling traffic of Abu'said Field, it took on an even more imposing air when the Fleet was in port. Unlike the newer buildings surrounding it, Government House dated back to the Fourth Interstellar War and the initial settlement of Xanadu. Constructed of natural materials, its façade dominated by the addition of Admiral Prescott's monumental bronze column, Government House had been built to last for centuries-and on a far larger scale than it had needed to be. For it had been more than a mere headquarters for a new planetary government. It had been a grand gesture of defiance, thrown in the faces of the Arachnids, one warp transit away.
Ian Trevayne had once told Miriam Ortega that Government House reminded him of a certain Peter the Great, who'd constructed a new capital city on the territory of a country he was then fighting for possession of that very land. Miriam, to his delight, had responded with a pithy phrase from her late mother's lexicon: Government House, she'd said, had chutzpah.
The Peaceforcer skimmer slid down onto the Government House roof just at sunset. (At least, Zephrain A was setting. Zephrain B remained high in the sky, glowing as a very tiny sun or a very bright star, depending on how one chose to view it.) A Marine major in undress dark-green trousers and black tunic stepped onto the roof to meet the brown-uniformed Peaceforcers who emerged from the skimmer. With punctilious formality-the two services wasted little love on one another-he took custody of their prisoner, addressing her with a noncommittal "ma'am." Whether Li Han was a captain or an admiral-or, in fact, whether an admitted rebel and mutineer was entitled to a military rank at all-involved political questions the major preferred to leave to older, wiser, and better-paid heads.
Li Han looked even smaller than usual between her two guards. They towered above her, and their combined body weight outmassed her by a factor of over five. Her cheeks were slightly sunken (the food at the prison compound was adequate, but not always appetizing), emphasizing her clean facial structure, and she moved with her habitual grace, thanks to a rigidly self-imposed exercise schedule, but she looked like a child in an adult's pajamas in her standard-sized gray prison garb. The major eyed the unprepossessing little figure with a measure of curiosity mingled with contempt-anything less like a Navy flag officer was hard to imagine.
Until she opened her mouth.
"Good evening, Major," she said crisply. "You may escort me to the Governor-General."
The major's hand was halfway into a salute before he caught himself. He managed to maintain his military bearing, but there was a brief pause before he mumbled, "This way, ma'am." He turned on his heel and led the small, ramrod-straight figure to the elevator, glaring at any of his subordinates who looked like they might even be thinking of smiling.
Prisoners were rare in warfare against alien species-the only sort of war the TFN had ever fought. Not only did ship-to-ship combat generally result in the annihilation of the loser's crew, but what prisoners were taken were usually turned over to the xenologists (or their alien equivalents) rather than becoming a charge of the military authorities. Hence, the Federation's Navy's codes, both for treatment of prisoners and conduct when captured, were badly underdeveloped. As senior prisoner, Han had been forced virtually to reinvent the whole concept of a POW doctrine.
She'd been offered parole and freedom of the planet, as befitted her rank, but she'd refused, electing to stay with her fellow prisoners. The shock of defeat and-far worse-the desertion of their fellows had come hard for them. Morale had deteriorated as their sense of betrayal became resentment, directed almost as much at their own officers for surrendering as at those others who had deserted them. For Han, even less accustomed than her crews to the notion of defeat and supremely incapable of dishonoring herself by abandoning her comrades, surrender had held a particularly painful poignancy. And the situation was made still worse because her battlegroup's late transfer to Kellerman's command had left her a virtual unknown to most of her fellow POWs-an unknown who'd surrendered them all to the Rim. But she'd attacked her problems and theirs with all the compassion and ruthlessness which made her what she was. Now, nine months later, the captured Republican personnel were warriors once more.
But once the immediate personnel problems were resolved, Han found herself with nothing to do. The camp was like a well-run ship or squadron, fully capable of humming smoothly along under the direction of her exec as long as she stood aloofly behind him as the distant yet instantly available balance wheel. She'd found that being a "commander-in-chief," even of a prison camp, was even more lonely than battlegroup command.
As fall gave way to the short, mild winter of Xanadu's temperate zones, Han realized the irony of her success. She'd given her subordinates purpose and unity while she herself fretted like a captive bird against the maddening inertia and monotony of her captivity. Only once had there been any excitement to vary the soul-crushing boredom of her life.
Han's experience with governments in general, and particularly with those serving the purposes of the Corporate Worlds, had not been happy. So when she was summoned to meet a Ms. Miriam Ortega, Provisional Grand Councilor for Internal Security of the Rim Systems, she was prepared to confront yet another bored, insensitive bureaucrat.
But Ms. Ortega had begun by gracefully dismissing the camp commandant, effectively placing the entire interview off the record, which was not typical of the red tape-worshipping automatons Han associated with "government" outside the Terran Republic.
It was both a shrewd and a generous gesture, Han had thought, and felt herself warm towards the other woman. She thawed further as they discussed camp conditions and the needs of the prisoners, and it was heaven to talk to someone new after months of the same faces! Especially to someone like this irreverently intelligent woman with her earthy sense of humor. Han had worked hard for the serene devotion to duty which was hers, yet she'd paid a price of loneliness along the way. Now, as she talked with Miriam Ortega, she felt the attraction that opposites often exert, and it was hard to remember they were enemies.