In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V-ARC (25 page)

“You know, Ma’am,” Nairobi said in a carefully neutral tone, “we did catch them in the act.” He twitched his head at where the master plot showed the icon of the Andermani freighter
Sywan Oberkirch,
still close aboard. “We’ve got
Oberkirch
’s people’s testimony, as well as our own tac recordings. And then there are the prisoners Lieutenant Janecek found aboard the pirate. That’s pretty conclusive evidence
Oberkirch
isn’t the first ship they’ve attacked.”

“I’m aware of that, Taylor,” Honor said just a bit more coolly than was her wont.

“I think what Taylor’s trying to say, Ma’am,” O’Neal put in, “is that under interstellar law, there’s—”

“Thank you, Al,” Honor interrupted. “I’m also aware of the relevant provisions of interstellar law. And we’re still going to Saginaw. So let’s be about it.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

O’Neal’s response could not have been more respectful, yet it was obvious he saw no good reason to make the four-day voyage from their present location in the Hyatt System all the way to the Saginaw System and the sector’s capital. He’d
probably
have been willing to at least shoot them first, but Honor didn’t doubt for a minute that he would also have been perfectly willing to see how well pirates did trying to breathe vacuum.

Which was, after all, the traditional penalty for pirates who’d been—as Nairobi had pointed out—caught in the act.

But it’s not what’s going to happen this time,
she told herself.
Not when the Admiralty was so clear about the need to stay on Charnowska’s good side
.

She tried very hard to tell herself that was the only reason she’d rejected O’Neal’s solution to the problem. That it had nothing at all to do with squeamishness, or any desire to pass the buck for the execution of almost two hundred human beings. She was
almost
sure she believed herself…but only almost.

*
   
*
   
*

“So over all, Ma’am,” Surgeon Lieutenant Mauricio Neukirch said, “I’m as satisfied with my patients’ condition as I probably have any right to be.”

Which isn’t any too damned pleased,
his tone and body language added.

“Pretty bad, was it?” Honor asked gently, and the powerfully built doctor drew a deep breath, then nodded.

“Yes, Ma’am. It was.” He grimaced, and his dark brown eyes glittered with unaccustomed anger. “There’s a couple of them—”
 

He broke off and shook his head.

“A couple of them are going to need lots of counseling, Ma’am,” he went on after a moment, his expression bleak. “One of them, especially. I haven’t had time to really sit down with her yet, but one of the others told me she was serving on a family-owned ship. One of her sisters and at least two of her brothers were crew members. She was the youngest—she’s only about twenty-three—but she was holding down the assistant engineer’s slot when these…people took their ship.”
 

He closed his eyes, his broad shoulders sagging as he sat in the comfortable chair in Honor’s day cabin.
 

“The brothers never made it off the ship. From what the woman who was telling me about it had to say, it would’ve been God’s own mercy if her sister hadn’t, either. And she got to watch it all, of course.”

His jaw clamped, and Honor made herself sit back and inhale a deep draft of cleansing oxygen.

Mauricio Neukirch, despite his last name, had been born and raised on the planet of San Martin. His mother was a physician, and his father had been a senior undersecretary in the Trevor’s Star system government before the Havenite conquest of San Martin, seventeen T-years ago. Dr. Neukirch had managed to refugee out to the Star Kingdom with four of her five children, of whom Mauricio—then in his second year of college—had been the eldest.

The eldest to
survive,
that was. His older sister had been an engineering officer in San Martino’s navy; her ship had been destroyed with all hands during the San Martinos’ desperate fighting retreat to cover the Trevor’s Star terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction long enough for the refugee ships to break free. Mauricio’s father had been shot by the Peeps’ occupation force a few T-months later, after they broke his cell of the San Martin resistance.

Yet despite all that had happened to him and to his family, Mauricio was one of the gentlest, most compassionate people Honor had ever met. Which was why he hated pirates even more than she did, if that were possible.

“At any rate, Ma’am,” the surgeon lieutenant continued in a determinedly more normal voice, “I don’t think we’re in any danger of losing any of them because of their injuries. That’s better than it could be. Thomas and I are going to be keeping a pretty close eye on them until were positive of that, though.”

“Good, Mauricio. Good.”

What he really meant, Honor reflected, was that he and his senior sickbay attendant, Chief SBA Thomas Dwyer, were going to be keeping an especially close eye on one particular patient. One Neukirch didn’t want to officially designate as a “suicide watch” situation.

“In that case,” she went on after a moment, “I’ll let you be about whatever it is you need to be doing. Keep me informed, please. Especially if the young woman you mentioned needs to talk. Nimitz can help a lot, sometimes, in situations like that.”

“Yes, Ma’am, he can,” Neukirch agreed, climbing out of his chair and producing his first smile since entering her cabin. He looked affectionately at the treecat napping on his bulkhead perch. “If that little bugger could only talk, Skipper, he’d make one hell of a counselor or therapist!”

“Speaking from personal experience,” Honor told him with a somewhat lopsided smile of her own, “he manages pretty darned well
without
being able to talk.”

*
   
*
   
*

“Captain, we have a communications request for you from the Confed cruiser
Feliksá
. It’s from a Commodore Teschendorff,” Lieutenant Florence Boyd said.

Honor looked across the bridge at her attractive platinum-haired, sapphire-eyed com officer. Boyd was three or four T-years younger than Honor, but she was also a second-generation prolong recipient, which meant she actually looked older than her commanding officer.

And on
her,
it looks pretty darned good,
too,
Honor thought with more than a touch of envy, remembering the way her own
third
-generation prolong had stretched out her gawky, overgrown horse adolescence. Was
still
stretching it out, really, as far as she was concerned, she thought, running a hand over her close-cropped hair. Boyd, she’d noticed, never seemed particularly lacking in male companionship.

Nimitz made a small sound of amusement from the back of her command chair as he followed the familiar thought through his person’s emotions. She smiled and reached up to rub his ears, but her almond eyes simultaneously narrowed thoughtfully.
Hawkwing
had crossed the Saginaw System’s hyper limit just under forty-one minutes earlier with a normal-space velocity of eight hundred kilometers per second. She’d been accelerating steadily towards Jasper, the system’s single inhabited planet at just under four hundred and nineteen KPS
²
for that entire time, and her velocity relative to the planet had increased to 10,905 KPS. She was still almost an hour from her scheduled turnover point, and over an hour and a half from Jasper.

More to the point, she’d announced her presence to the system traffic control authorities immediately after crossing the limit. It had taken almost nine minutes for her transmission to reach planetary orbit, and another nine minutes for Saginaw Traffic Control’s acknowledgment to get back to her, but she’d been cleared for a standard approach without any unusual questions.

And no one at STC had mentioned anyone named “Teschendorff” to her. Which was particularly interesting because the senior officer here in Saginaw was supposed to be one Rear Admiral Gianfranco Zadawski.

She glanced at the master plot and found the caret which indicated the transmission’s source, blinking steadily under the tactical icon of a heavy cruiser at a range of two light-minutes. The icon’s appended vector information indicated that the
Feliksá
was headed out-system at a leisurely two KPS
²
on an almost reciprocal course, and she and
Hawkwing
were closing at a combined rate of just over sixteen thousand kilometers per second.

“And would it happen that we know who Commodore Teschendorff is, Florence?” she asked.

“I have him in our ONI database as the commander of a Confed cruiser squadron, Skipper,” Lieutenant Commander Nairobi offered before the com officer could reply. Something about the exec’s tone raised one of Honor’s eyebrows, and he shrugged. “According to our latest information on him, he’s supposed to be over in the Hillman Sector, not here in Saginaw.”

“Really?” Honor rubbed the tip of her nose thoughtfully.
 

It was always possible their information was simply out of date and the Confederacy had changed this Teschendorff’s assigned station since the Office of Naval Intelligence had last heard about him. For that matter, there could be any number of reasons for him to be hanging around Saginaw even while he was officially assigned to a neighboring sector, especially given that Saginaw boasted one of the Confederacy’s larger naval shipyards. But the Confederacy Navy had a tendency to leave its squadrons permanently assigned to specific sectors and naval bases. Personally, Honor thought that was a not insignificant part of the many problems Silesia faced; leaving the same ships (and ships’ companies) assigned to the same stations for literally years on end encouraged them to establish all sorts of long term relationships with the local population and authorities. Most places that might have been a good thing, but here it was only one more opportunity for the people who were supposed to be suppressing piracy and smuggling to be co-opted by the people who were
doing
the pirating and smuggling.

“Do we have any more information on him?” she asked after a moment.

“Not a lot, Ma’am.” Nairobi shrugged slightly. “We’ve got some boilerplate bio, but not any real details.”

“I see.”

Nairobi’s reply was scarcely surprising. ONI did its best to keep tabs on the Confederacy Navy’s senior officers, but trying to keep up with all of them was a daunting task. Besides, more and more of the RMN’s intelligence capacity was being consumed by its far more important concentration on the People’s Republic. Much as Honor would have liked to, she couldn’t really fault that prioritization, but it was making things even more difficult for starship commanders assigned to commerce protection duties here in the Confederacy.

“Very well, Florence. Go ahead and put him through to my display.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

An instant later, a gray-eyed man in the uniform of the Silesian Confederacy Navy appeared on Honor’s com display. His dark blond hair was going noticeably lighter at the temples, which suggested he was probably first-generation prolong. In which case, he was probably about Honor’s father’s age.

“Good afternoon, Sir,” she said politely. “How may I be of service?”

“Good afternoon, Commander,” the blond-haired man replied after the inevitable light-speed lag. “I’m Commodore Mieczyslaw Teschendorff, and my flagship’s tactical section has informed me you appear to have a prize in company. Which led me to wonder if there might be some way the Confederacy Navy and I might be of service to
you
?”

Honor kept her eyes from widening, despite Teschendorff’s unusually direct manner. Relations between the Royal Manticoran Navy and the Confederacy Navy were often strained, in large part because many of the Confederacy’s naval personnel deeply resented Manticore’s long-standing tradition of “interfering” here in Silesia. Unlike some Manticorans, Honor had always found that perfectly understandable. No doubt a great many of those who resented Manticore’s presence were indeed—as the majority of her own fellows were automatically wont to opine—in the pockets of the very pirates, smugglers, and slavers they were supposed to be hunting. But even (or especially) those officers who were doing their level best to discharge their own and their service’s responsibilities were bound to resent the way Manticore’s intrusiveness underscored their inability to deal with their star nation’s internal problems. The fact that quite a few Manticoran officers, over the years, had made that same point to them in thoroughly undiplomatic terms didn’t help, she was certain, yet even if every Queen’s officer had been a paragon of diplomacy (which they weren’t, by a long shot), they would still have been—by their very presence—a crushing indictment of the Confederacy’s internal corruption and the CN’s ineffectuality.

That inevitable tension between the Confederacy Navy and the RMN had produced quite a few testy exchanges over the years. What it had
not
produced was a tendency for CN officers to go out of their way to be any more helpful to the Manticoran interlopers and they absolutely had to be.

Nor, for that matter, she thought, would very many Confed Navy tactical sections have realized so quickly that
Hawkwing
was accompanied by a prize ship.
Hawkwing
hadn’t informed system control of
Evita
’s status when she checked in with the STC, and she hadn’t said a single word to this
Feliksá
. Even granting that the cruiser’s tac people had been sufficiently on their toes to notice
Hawkwing
’s arrival in the first place (which had scarcely been a given), deducing that the merchant vessel with her was a prize wouldn’t necessarily have followed. The logical conclusion upon detecting a Manticoran destroyer in company with a freighter would have been that the destroyer was
escorting
the freighter, not that she’d captured it.

Unless, of course,
she thought rather more grimly,
they recognized the freighter’s emissions signature and already knew she was a pirate. Which raises the interesting question of exactly
how
they’d know that, doesn’t it, Honor?