Barbarians at the Gates (36 page)

He keyed the intercom.

“Elf, we have some prisoners for you,” he said. “Board and secure the ship, then check out the hostages. We’ll set up care for them on board
Midway
if necessary.”

“Aye, sir,” Elf said. There was a dull
clunk
in the background as the Marine shuttles detached themselves from
Midway
. “We’re on our way.”

Roman braced himself for last-minute treachery as the Marines flew toward the pirate ship. They were protected by ECM and shields, but even weapons dating all the way back to the First Interstellar War would easily be able to pick off the Marine shuttles. The pirate ship would never survive the barrage Roman would throw at it in response, yet Elf and two platoons of Marines—and the hostages—would still be dead. The pirates might suspect that he meant to trick them, or believe that they’d never see the light of day again; anything could push them over the edge. Pirates were simply not rational.

“We’re boarding now,” Elf’s voice said, in his ear. “No sign of resistance yet...”

“Good,” Roman said.

On the live feed, pirates were swiftly secured by the Marines, their hands cuffed after a rough search and the removal of anything that could be used as a weapon. The remaining pirates—wonder of wonders—had followed orders. Elf and her team rapidly arrested them and left them to cool their heels in their own cargo bay. It didn’t take any DNA testing to determine that these were the pirates responsible for the attack on the liner. The look on their faces was enough.

The Marines moved on to the hostages, who had been stowed into one of the other holds and a handful of cabins. Roman suspected that most of them were enthusiastic supporters of Admiral Justinian, but they’d probably be grateful to be rescued by anyone at this point. And if gratitude didn’t make them talkative, ONI would inject them with truth drugs and strip them of anything worth knowing. There didn’t seem to be any reason why some of the captives had been separated from the others. None of the female captives, at least, had been raped, although it was certain that they’d been threatened with it if they refused to cooperate, or if their relatives refused to pay the ransom. They would probably be
delighted
to see the Federation Navy.

Elf buzzed him on their private line.

“Captain, I believe that you should see this one personally,” she said. There was something odd in her voice. “One of the captives is far more important than we thought.”

“They didn’t capture Admiral Justinian himself, did they?” Roman’s eyes narrowed.

“Oh, no,” Elf said. “They captured his
daughter
.”

“Pardon?” Roman blinked. “What the hell was
she
doing there?”

* * *

Over three hundred hostages had been rescued from the pirate ship
The Black Knife
, creating an immediate humanitarian crisis for Roman and his crew. Most of the hostages hadn’t been injured or mistreated, but they did want to go home as soon as possible, particularly the ones who suspected that ONI wanted a few words with them. They couldn’t all be accommodated on
Midway
, creating a minor problem until the engineering crew re-activated some of the space liner’s passenger compartments. The
Harmonious Repose
might have been disabled, but she made an adequate passenger space—and a prison for the pirates. Roman wasn’t about to leave them on their own vessel.

He looked through the monitor into the holding cell. Henrietta Beauregard-Justinian had been separated from the other hostages on the pirate ship—clearly, the pirates had known who she was—and Roman had ordered her kept in isolation. She was a remarkably pretty girl, barely out of her teens, with long blonde hair and an utterly perfect face. Her file stated that she had been engineered to fit the fashion of her birth time, a technique rarely available to anyone outside the upper class. The RockRats rarely engineered their children for looks.

And she was under sentence of death.

Roman scowled as he studied the oddly composed girl. The Senate had passed decrees ordering that anyone related to Admiral Justinian and the other warlords was to be killed on sight, with their properties seized and their personal effects confiscated. If he handed her over to Admiral Mason, Henrietta would be executed before she had a chance to beg for her life—indeed, Roman knew that his orders suggested that he should execute her himself. And yet, she was too young to be involved in her father’s treachery. It wasn’t
right
that she should die for his actions.

He looked over at Elf, to see her looking at him speculatively.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. There was no one else in the compartment. Henrietta was guarded by an armoured female Marine, but she was alone in the holding cell. Roman understood how she must feel. “You want to save her.”

“Am I that predicable?” Roman snorted.

“You’re a decent person,” Elf said. She leaned forward until her lips were almost touching his lips. “Now tell me; are you willing to risk everything you’ve earned since you set foot on
Enterprise
to keep her alive?”

And that was the nub of it, Roman thought numbly. Refusing to execute her—or hand her over to Admiral Mason to be executed—would break the Senate’s decree. The Senate would not be charmed with this challenge to their authority. It was true that starship commanders had wide latitude to decide how to interpret regulations, but Senatorial decrees left no room for maneuver. He swallowed, hard. Professor Kratman had warned them that there might be times when they had to choose between following orders blindly or risking court martial, but he’d never considered, even in his worst nightmares...he’d thought about choosing to refuse orders to bombard an inhabited planetary surface, not refusing to execute a slip of a girl. Bombarding an entire planet would be wrong.

And that was the answer, wasn’t it?

“Yes,” he said. He closed his eyes for a long moment, thinking hard. “How many people know that we took her alive?”

“Only you and I,” Elf said. “The others don’t know her identity. Her fellow travelers were separated from her as soon as the pirates figured out who she was.”

“Good,” Roman said. “We keep her here as a prisoner. No one is to know anything about her.”

“As a pet?” Elf asked dryly. “What do you intend to do with her in the long run?”

“I’ll figure something out.” Roman shook his head slowly. At the moment, he didn’t have the slightest idea what, though. Keeping her alive was bad enough, but should he report her death? The admiral would be furious if he knew that Roman had signed a lie into the ship’s log, with good reason. “You never know. Having her alive might come in handy.”

“We could always sell her back to her father,” Elf said mischievously.

Roman gaped at her.

“Just kidding, but you do have to admit that it is an interesting point. What
would
his father do to get his daughter back?”

“That’s one question,” Roman agreed. “And here is the other. What was she doing on that ship in the first place?”

An officer who knowingly lies to a superior officer, for whatever reason, can be court-martialled at the request of the victim. A Board of Inquiry will decide if the incident was justified or not. If not, the ultimate sentence is death
.

-Observations on Federation Navy Regulations, 4056

FNS
Golden Hind
/FNS
Midway
, FAS-48237892, 4095

“I assume, young man,” Admiral Mason said coldly, “that you have some kind of explanation for this?”

Roman kept his expression blank. The flight to the rendezvous point had been fraught with tension. A single assault cruiser might slip through an unguarded Asimov Point without anyone detecting its passage, but a star carrier was far larger—and
Golden Hind
was supported by seventeen older-model starships. The admiral had known the risks of detection and chosen to brave the passage anyway, even though it would put them out of direct contact with the loyalists for several months. He couldn’t blame the admiral for feeling a little concerned. He
had
overstepped his orders, after all.

“Yes, sir,” he said carefully. “I have a very good explanation.”

“Really?” Admiral Mason said. His tone suggested that he didn’t believe a word of it. “Let me see now, shall we? You were ordered to scout out enemy convoy routes and attempt to determine their numbers and strength in our area of operations. You were not ordered to engage their ships, or engage pirate ships. By doing so, you have imperilled the operation’s chances of success. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Roman bit down on his temper. Shouting at a superior officer wouldn’t help.

“The civilian ship was attacked by pirates and I chose to rescue her, knowing the risks,” he said. “The pirate ship was nearby and I chose to engage her, capturing the crew and rescuing the hostages.” Including one he wasn’t going to mention to the admiral. “My actions were in line with the Federation Navy’s very reason for being.”

“An interesting argument,” Admiral Mason said with a sneer. “And do you think that your mentor will accept it?”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said.

“Oh,” Admiral Mason said. “I know that captains have wide latitude in carrying out their orders, but very few captains have ever been granted the authority to rewrite their own orders—and I can assure you, Garibaldi, that
you
are not one of them. Please tell me, exactly, why you feel that this little bout of disobedience will not result in a court martial for gross insubordination in the face of the enemy?”

Roman gathered himself. “Because, as I stated in my report...”

“I am asking you, captain,” Admiral Mason said. “I want to hear the answer from your own mouth.”

“The pirates didn’t board, storm and loot any old commercial ship,” Roman said. “They boarded a
White Swan
-class liner with a very strange passenger manifest. The passengers we were able to identify, sir, were all from Admiral Justinian’s government. We took the liberty of carrying out preliminary interrogations, and they sang like canaries under truth drugs.”

“My,” Admiral Mason said drolly. “And you feel that this stroke of luck makes up for disobeying orders?”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said. “If I had chosen to ignore the wrecked ship, or blown the pirate craft into atoms, we wouldn’t have had such an intelligence windfall drop into our laps.”

“True,” Admiral Mason agreed. He leaned forward, his dark eyes fixed on Roman’s face. “I think you’d better tell me what you found.”

Roman kept his face impassive. Had the admiral not read his report, or was he intent on giving Roman enough rope to hang himself with? Or was he just testing how his youngest captain handled himself under pressure?

“Admiral Justinian and Governor Hartkopf—he now styles himself Governor-General Hartkopf—are on the verge of concluding an alliance,” Roman said. That, at least, hadn’t been hard to discover. “The liner we discovered, the one that was attacked and pillaged by the pirates, was carrying the negotiating team to discuss the final terms of the treaty. It was also carrying”—and here he knew he was venturing into dangerous waters—”the admiral’s daughter. She was to be given to Hartkopf in marriage.”

Admiral Mason stroked his chin, thoughtfully. “Curious,” he said finally. “I was under the impression that Hartkopf was already married.”

“I looked it up,” Roman said. “His wife was on the list of proscribed personages after the governor abandoned his claims of loyalty to the Federation. She may already be dead, executed by the Senate. In any case, they were not on speaking terms, and she was on Earth with her lover when her husband declared independence.”

He smiled inwardly at the admiral’s expression. It had been Blake Raistlin who’d introduced him to the underground news-sheets that followed Earth’s political elite and their children, turning their doings into entertainment for the rest of the Federation. Roman was hardly a prude—RockRats were rarely prudes—but some of their activities shocked even him. Mistress Hartkopf had not only cheated on her husband, she’d blatantly flaunted her many affairs all over Earth when the war began. Roman could easily understand how the Governor-General might prefer a nubile teenage girl as a wife...and if his own wife was dead, so much the better. High Society tended to frown on bigamy, much to his surprise. It wasn’t as if it frowned on many other deviant behaviors.

“It makes sense,” Admiral Mason said slowly. He sounded as if having a tooth pulled out would be preferable to agreeing with Roman. “Admiral Justinian doesn’t have much to offer that would actually prove his sincerity, but his daughter...yes, that makes sense. She’d be a hostage for her father’s good behavior as well as an incentive for Hartkopf to cooperate. And besides, it isn’t like he has much else in the way of legitimacy...”

“Sir?” Roman blinked.

“The Federation Senate is the elected government of the Federation,” Admiral Mason said. “That very fact alone gives it legitimacy in the eyes of trillions of human beings, even those who hate and fear the Federation’s power. Admiral Justinian, on the other hand, is a usurper. He has to rely on force and persuasion, threats and blandishments, to encourage people to cooperate with him.”