In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V-ARC (37 page)

For the moment, however, it was obvious Samson—and Angelina, for that matter—had breathed a huge sigh of relief when Aniella Matsakis turned up to handle the steering chore for this little expedition. And unlike Boyd, Matsakis seemed to have remarkably few problems with the notion of cooperating with the Ballroom.

“Yes, Captain.” Honor decided to let just an edge of her smile show. “That matches our calculations, as well.”

Samson’s lips quivered, but he managed not to smile back at her.

“Have any last-minute details occurred to you, Commander?” he asked instead.

“No.” Honor shook her head. “I think it’s the best plan we could put together under the circumstances, and the last thing we need to be doing is trying to make last-minute revisions that are just going to confuse our people.”

I wonder if it sounds as peculiar to him as it does to me for a Queen’s officer to be referring to Ballroom “terrorists” as “our people”?
she wondered.

“Agreed.” Samson nodded, then rotated his shoulders and exhaled noisily. “I guess I’m a little more anxious over all of this than I’d like to think I am.”

“I imagine we all are,” Honor replied, feeling rather touched by the veteran freedom fighter/terrorist’s admission.

“Well, I’ll get off your com and let you get down to business, then,” he said. “Samson, clear.”

*
   
*
   
*

The beep of the com interrupted Edytá Sokolowska at a very inconvenient moment. She ignored it, but it beeped again, less than three seconds later, this time with the sequence which indicated a priority message. She snarled a curse, shoved her bed partner roughly aside, grabbed the remote off the bedside table, and stabbed the acceptance key.

“Yes? What is it?” she demanded, raising her voice to carry across the sleeping cabin to the desktop unit as its display blinked to life.

“We’ve got an unscheduled incoming,” Julian Watanabe said from the display. “One headed for us, not Anná or Beatá.”

“What?” Sokolowska got out of bed, ignoring the man who was still in it, and crossed the compartment’s carpeted floor towards the com. As she did, she realized she wasn’t seeing the icon that indicated it was an audio-only call, and she grimaced and hit the remote button to kill the camera at her end.

“What
kind
of incoming?” she demanded.

“Impeller signature’s showing a merchant wedge, probably around two megs,” Watanabe replied confidently. As Casimir Station’s weapons officer, the platform’s sensors (such as they were, at any rate) reported to him. “Definitely not military, anyway. And she’s squawking a Jessyk Combine transponder code, but we don’t have her in our files.”

Sokolowska frowned, using both hands to wipe sweat from her face while she considered what he’d just said.

The whole reason Manpower had moved in on Casimir in the first place was that, despite its strategic location within the Silesian Confederacy, it was a podunk little system which attracted little or no legitimate commerce. No one was likely to notice anything that was going on—especially this far out from the system primary—and any genuine merchantman who did turn up was going to be interested in the two inhabited planets—Anná and Beatá, otherwise known as Casimir I and II—and not Elsbietá, the gas giant the platform orbited. Elsbietá was thirty-three light-minutes from the system’s K0 primary…which was another reason Manpower had been attracted to the depot; the planet was actually better than fifteen light-minutes outside the system hyper limit. Elsbietá was massive enough to generate a hyper limit of its own, but it was only three light-minutes deep, which meant ships could disappear into hyper a lot faster than they could if someone caught them in the inner system, deep inside the main limit. But all of that meant the huge gas-ball was located in an extraordinarily inconvenient position for almost any other purpose. Even the gasses harvested by the platform’s scoop ships were collected by a pair of shuttling short-haul tankers and transported back to Beatá for processing and distribution.
 

As far as Sokolowska knew, neither of the tankers’ crews were aware that anything untoward was happening out here, either. She knew their schedules, and whenever they were due to collect a cargo, any “visitors” headed off to the other side of Elsbietá-3, the largest of the planet’s moons, and hid there until the tankers had turned back in-system. Of course, the local system governor most certainly
did
know (and was doing very well for herself out of the knowledge; Sokolowska knew she was, because she personally handled the monthly payoff), so she supposed it was possible the tanker crews knew all about it and had simply been ordered to keep their mouths shut.

The operative point, however, was that Elsbietá was in a hell of an out-of-the-way spot. So, logically, any ship which made her translation into normal-space this far out had to be here expressly to visit the depot. Which fitted with the transponder code Watanabe had reported.

So far, so good. But Edytá Sokolowska hadn’t been chosen to run Casimir Depot because she was inclined to take anything for granted, and she didn’t like the fact that they didn’t have this ship in their database, Jessyk transponder or not. On the other hand…

“Have they said anything to us yet?”

“Not yet. But they just got here.”

“Sure they have. And how far out are they?”

“About three light-minutes.”

“And they’ve been back in normal-space, what? Five minutes, maybe?”

“Oh.” Watanabe frowned, and Sokolowska snorted.

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I think we should go ahead and contact them,” she said. “I know they’re squawking the right kind of transponder, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re who they say they are.”

“Yeah. I’ll get right on that.”

“And while you’re doing that, make sure the ready-duty ship knows what’s going on. Who is it right now? Lawson or Tsien?”

Watanabe punched a button, looking at something outside the com’s field of view, then looked back up.

“Lawson,” he said.

“Great.”
 

Sokolowska rolled her eyes. Emmet Lawson was never going to be confused with anyone’s concept of a regular navy officer. He’d been successful at what he did for a long time, but he seemed to be slipping a bit, of late, and he’d never been at the apex of his profession to start with. All of which meant Sokolowska didn’t have the liveliest confidence in how he was likely to react if a real emergency turned up.

“Go ahead and inform him we’ve got an unscheduled arrival,” she said. “Do me a favor and stress the word ‘unscheduled’ when you talk to him, too. You might even want to add ‘unidentified,’ if you can get his attention.”

“I’ll do that,” Watanabe promised with a lopsided grin. He and Sokolowska had their differences, but their opinions of Emmet Lawson were very similar. Sokolowska snorted at the thought, then glanced back over her shoulder at the man still waiting obediently in her bed.

That was another thing she and Watanabe had in common, she thought.

“How long for them to reach us?” she asked.

“They only carried about twelve hundred KPS across the wall with them, and they’re only showing about two hundred gravities. Call it…two hours and forty-five minutes, give or take a couple of seconds.”

“Then we’ve got some time, don’t we?” She smiled hungrily. “Go ahead and talk to them. Find out who the hell they are. If anything sounds out of line, screen me back ASAP. Otherwise, I’ll be up to the command deck in…oh, thirty minutes or so.”

“Got it.” Watanabe smirked on the display. “Have fun.”

*
   
*
   
*

“The platform is hailing us, Ma’am.”

Lieutenant Boyd’s voice sounded much more like its normal, crisp self, Honor noticed. She’d expected the communications officer to settle down once things actually started happening, but she was still glad to hear it.

“Are they accepting our transponder code so far?” she asked.

“Yes, Ma’am. Or at least they’re hailing us as
Rapunzel
.”

“Then I suppose we ought to see just how good our friends’ intel really is,” Honor said calmly. “Throw it to my display, please.”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am.”

A moment later, Honor’s display lit with the face a youngish looking man with brown hair and green eyes. He appeared to be a pleasant enough fellow, but looks could be deceiving, and he matched the description the Ballroom had given her for one Julian Watanabe. As Wolfe Tone had told her, “He looks like a choirboy, but he’s one sick, sadistic piece of work. We’ve been wanting to meet up with
him
for a long time.”

I think
you
may just have a bit of a problem surrendering to my “allies
”
intact, assuming you’re who I think you are,
she thought.
Pity about that
.

“
Rapunzel,
this is Casimir Station,” the face on her display said. “We read your transponder, but we weren’t expecting you. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

Honor smiled into her com pickup. Samson X and Christophe had both been emphatic about who had to handle this particular conversation, and she’d found herself in agreement with their reasoning.
Reprisal
’s electronics were a lot less sophisticated than
she
would have wanted if she’d been engaged in an illegal trade which was (depending upon who captured one, of course) punishable by death. They didn’t include the ability to play games with outgoing com signals, and anyone associated with Manpower would recognize someone like Samson or Christophe—or, at least, recognize what they
were—
on sight.

Hawkwing
’s electronics, on the other hand, were far more sophisticated than one would normally have expected out of a destroyer growing so long in the tooth. Partly, that reflected standard Manticoran refit policies, but it also reflected the fact that she was intended for service in Silesia, where the ability to pretend to be someone else was often essential when it came to sucking a potential pirate into range.

Or vice versa.

And even if that weren’t true,
a corner of her brain reflected,
Samson and his people are too psyched up. I don’t care how professional they are, it’d be awful hard for any of them to keep that from showing if they actually had to talk to one of these…people
.

“Casimir Station,” she said levelly while
Hawkwing
’s computers replaced her naval skinsuit with the uniform of the Jessyk Combine, “this is
Rapunzel,
Daniela Magill, commanding. We know you weren’t expecting us, but we got orders to divert to you from Caldwell. According to the word we got, there’s a Manty cruiser sitting on top of our people there.” She shrugged. “We’ve got places we’ve got to be, so they told us to drop our cargo off with you, so you could hold them until the Manties clear out of Caldwell and someone else can run them in.”

So far as anyone aboard
Reprisal
or
Hawkwing
knew, there was no Jessyk Combine captain named Daniela Magill, nor was there a ship named
Rapunzel
in Jessyk’s service. They’d debated trying to pass themselves off as one of the ships the Ballroom had identified as one of Casimir’s at least semi-regular visitors. There’d been some arguments in favor of that approach, assuming they could guarantee they had an accurate reading on the transponder code—and emissions signature—of the ship in question. There’d been some downsides, as well, however…including the high probability that someone on the platform would have a personal acquaintance with somebody aboard the ship and want to talk to her.
 

Which was why they’d decided against trying it. To be sure, there were risks associated with fabricating an ID out of whole cloth, as well. On the other hand, nobody could possibly know everyone who worked for something the size of Jessyk. Besides, the Caldwell System was far enough away from Casimir to be outside the Casimir depot’s operational area, and Manpower’s normal procedure was to avoid putting any unnecessary information into its depot databases as a means of limiting damage if those databases should fall into unfriendly hands. It seemed probable the Jessyk Combine, which had worked so closely with Manpower for so long, would follow the same policy, so it was unlikely the station’s crew would
expect
to recognize a ship which had been diverted to them at the last minute from so far away. All of which had suggested to Honor that it would be wiser to create an entirely fictitious vessel and a CO to go with it than to try to pretend she was someone they might actually know.

The transponder code
Reprisal
was squawking, on the other hand, was
mostly
genuine. Lieutenant Hutchinson and Lieutenant Boyd had spent several hours carefully altering the ship’s number attached to the Jessyk house code, and Honor was confident it would stand up to any scrutiny it was likely to receive—except, of course, in the highly improbable event of that particular number belonging to one of the ships which was
supposed
to be operating in Casimir’s vicinity.

Six minutes ticked away while the light-speed signal crossed to the platform and its response returned to
Hawkwing
.

“Aren’t we a little bit far out of your way from Caldwell, Captain Magill?” Watanabe asked then.

“Actually, you’re a hell of a lot out of the way from Caldwell,” Honor agreed in an exasperated tone. “They didn’t tell me exactly why I was supposed to dump this cargo on you, either. According to the routing instructions I’ve seen, though, at least half of it was going to be split off in Caldwell and sent your way.” She shrugged. “Maybe they’re just figuring they might as well get that part of it closer to delivered. And, to be fair, you were pretty close to our base least-time course to where it is we’re supposed to be from where we were when they told us not to go to Caldwell. If you follow me.”

Six minutes later, Watanabe grinned at her.

“Actually, I
do
follow you. Scary, isn’t it? How big is this cargo of yours, Captain? How much life support are we going to need?”