Cauldron of Ghosts (40 page)

“That you, Binford?” Somogyi said, then went straight on. “Look, I don’t have much time to explain, but in about twenty minutes—”

* * *

At first, the consternation on
Prince Sundjata
’s bridge wasn’t nearly as great as it was on Balcescu Station. The slave ship was still well over a hundred and fifty million kilometers—and almost two and a half hours at her present acceleration rate—from the hyper limit. But she was also over 2.3 light-minutes from the station, well outside the range of anything which might happen in its immediate surroundings. Gravitic scanners were FTL, and
Prince Sundjata
’s sensors had quickly detected the shuttles’ impeller signatures, but for all their combat power, the Mk 19Ts were obviously small craft, and equally obviously headed for the station, not launching any whimsical pursuit of the departing slave ship.

That changed radically about six minutes after she’d picked up the shuttles, however.

“We’ve got trouble coming, Ma’am,” Mason Scribner,
Prince Sundjata
’s sensor officer, said as he turned away from his console. “I’ve got two more impeller signatures. One of them’s matching decel with the freighter, but the other one’s accelerating like a bat out of hell. I think that one’s coming after us and the
Luigi Pirandello
.”

“Not heading for the station?” Bogunov asked sharply.

“Could be,” Scribner conceded. He was the closest thing the slave ship had to a tactical officer, although no one was more aware than he was of his limited qualifications for that post, but he shook his head. “If those are assault shuttles, they aren’t going to need anybody else’s firepower to deal with anything Somogyi could think about throwing at them. Besides, the one staying back with the freighter’s better placed to support any assault. We’ll know for sure in another two or three minutes, when the shuttles have to make turnover for their zero/zero with the station. If this other bastard doesn’t flip with them, then he’s damn sure coming after us.”

“What is he, do you think?”

“From their acceleration, they’ve got to be warships,” Scribner replied. “The lead one—I guess we should label it ‘Bogey One’—is pulling right on five hundred gravities. That means a military-grade impeller. And it’s small.”

“A destroyer?”

“Not even that big, Ma’am.”

“Well . . . fuck.”

“Smaller than a destroyer” meant either frigates or LACs, Bogunov thought, and none of the military forces who regularly used such ships were going to be friendly. And if they were
frigates
, then most likely they belonged to . . .

If
Prince Sundjata
couldn’t make it over the alpha wall, they were really and truly screwed. It was sometimes a death sentence if a slaver was caught by the Manties, Haven, or Beowulf, which was bad enough. But only Torch would be sending frigates here, and that was
very
bad. If their captors were actually ex-slaves themselves, that death sentence was probably pretty much guaranteed.

She pressed a stud on the arm of her command chair.

“Engineering,” a voice untouched by the alarm coursing through her own veins replied.

“Mitch, it’s the captain,” she said crisply. “How good is our compensator?”

“What?” The chief engineer’s voice still wasn’t alarmed, but it was clearly surprised. “It’s fine, Ma’am. Uh, is there some reason it
shouldn’t
be?”

“Not yet,” she told him a bit more grimly. “But I want you to cut the margin to zero.”

There was silence for a moment, then the sound of a cleared throat.

“Are you sure about that, Ma’am? I know I said it’s fine, but we’re over two thirds of the way through the current maintenance cycle. If we put that kind of stress on it, we could—”

“I know,” Bogunov cut him off.

And she did know. According to The Book, civilian-grade inertial compensators were never supposed to be run at more than eighty percent of their theoretical maximum. The only good thing about the failure of a compensator at high rates of acceleration was that the people aboard the ship in which it was fitted would probably be dead before they knew anything about it. A couple of hundred uncompensated gravities would turn them into anchovy paste on the bulkheads with terrifying efficiency. The
chances
of a compensator failure weren’t especially high, although the curve bent upward sharply as you got closer to full power, but it seldom gave you any warning
before
it failed. That meant maxing the compensator wasn’t something that gave you any margin at all for error. But—

“I know,” she repeated. “But someone’s attacking the station, and we’ve got at least two warships—probably frigates,” she added, knowing he could figure out who they most likely belonged to as well as she could “—and they’re pulling five hundred gravities. I
need
those extra fifty gees, Mitch.”

There was another, briefer silence. Then—

“I guess you do, Ma’am. You’ll have full power in twenty seconds.”

“Good.”

Bogunov released the stud and turned towards Tabitha Crowley, her astrogator. There was a reason she’d gone to maximum power, despite the risks involved. At a hundred seventy gravities, they
wouldn’t
beat anything that could pull
five hundred
gravities to the hyper wall. Oh, it was unlikely any pursuer could actually overhaul them before they escaped into hyper, but
missiles
might be another matter entirely. She needed to get together with Matsuzawa and Scribner and figure out—

She paused as she found herself looking at the visitors she’d invited onto the command deck—and now wished she hadn’t. Whether or not they really understood what was happening, they clearly understood enough to be worried as hell, and she couldn’t blame them.

“I’ll have to ask you all to return to your quarters.”

“No.” That came from the man who was their . . . guardian. “We all need to be in one room.”

Bogunov winced. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t supposed to know why the Gaul—what was his name? Zhukov? something like that—was aboard or even that he
was
a Gaul. Then again, she knew quite a few things she wasn’t supposed to know, and she’d transported some unsavory and . . . high-risk passengers other than slaves in her day. That was why she’d used the ship’s com systems to eavesdrop on
these
passengers. No names had been given to her before they departed Balcescu Station, but she’d overheard a brief snatch of conversation between the man—Zachariah—and one of the women. She didn’t pretend to understand what either of them did or who they worked for, but clearly whoever it was had no intention of allowing their knowledge—whatever the hell it might be—to fall into enemy hands. It wasn’t the first time someone who worked for the Jessyk Combine and Manpower had encountered a similar situation; both transstellars paid well, but were also ruthless about eliminating employees who might have compromised their operations.

And that was why she knew Zhukov—or whatever the hell his name was—wanted them all in one compartment: so he could kill all of them if they were going to be captured. She had no idea what information they possessed might be so dangerous to whoever had sent him along to kill them, and she didn’t
want
to know, just as she’d been very careful to refrain from anything that even
looked
like she might be trying to find out who’d given him his orders in the first place. From their drawn expressions, however, it was obvious that the three scientists were as aware of why Zhukov—or whoever—was there as she was.

“There’s an officers’ lounge just down the passage,” she said, pointing to the bridge hatch. “Second hatch on the left.”

He nodded, then waved his charges toward the exit.

“Let’s go, people.”

They didn’t move.

“
Now
,” he said, drawing a small pulser from his jacket.

The male scientist made a face, but turned to go. The two women fell into line behind him. Their keeper brought up the rear.

Bogunov turned back to her sensor officer.

“Any developments, Mase?”

“Not yet.” Scribner’s naturally pale face looked considerably paler than usual, and she wondered how much of that was due to the tactical situation and how much to what he’d just witnessed right here on the bridge. “We’ll know for sure in about another—” he checked the time display “—forty-three seconds if Bogey One’s going to rendezvous with the station. Even if they are, if five hundred gees is the most they can pull they’re not going to be able to overhaul us. But . . .”

His voice trailed off, and Bogunov nodded. She could fill in the rest for herself. At five hundred gravities, Bogey One was already well above the maximum acceleration rate frigates of most navies could turn out. Another not-so-subtle suggestion that they were looking at the Royal Torch Navy. It was unlikely any pursuer would have still more acceleration in reserve, but it certainly wasn’t impossible. And who knew what sort of missiles they might carry? Torch’s frigates came from the Manties, who’d demonstrated over and over again the . . . unwisdom of underestimating their ships’ acceleration rates.

And the still
greater
unwisdom of underestimating their missiles’ range.

“Well . . . fuck,” she repeated.

Chapter 44

Once they reached the officers’ lounge, Zachariah pulled out a chair from the compartment’s single table and sat down. With a hand gesture, he invited Weiss and Juarez to join him.

He didn’t bother to extend the same invitation to Zhilov. Zachariah knew perfectly well why the Gaul had insisted they all needed to be in the same compartment—so he could murder the three of them at his convenience, should their capture become imminent. If there’d been any doubt about that, the fact that Zhilov hadn’t bothered to reseal his jacket after returning his pulser to its belt holster—and that he made no attempt to conceal the weapon afterward—had resolved it quite handily.

Stefka Juarez stared at that pulser for a moment before abruptly sitting down. She then transferred the stare to a blank stretch of the far bulkhead. Her olive complexion was dark enough she didn’t look pale, but her expression was so tightly drawn her face looked like a mask.

Gail Weiss seemed more relaxed. Much more, in fact. Rather than sitting, she moved over to the beverage dispenser.

“Anybody besides me want some coffee? Stefka? Zachariah?”

“I’ll have some,” Zachariah said. “Black, please. And thanks.”

Juarez just kept staring at the bulkhead.

Zachariah noted that Weiss hadn’t bothered to extend her invitation to Zhilov, either. That was interesting. He knew nothing about the woman or her personal history, but she clearly had a spine. She would neither quaver in front of the Gaul nor make any pointless attempt at placating him.

For the first time, he noticed that she was rather nice-looking. Tall, a bit on the heavy side; hazel eyes; a rich head of auburn hair. She wasn’t exactly pretty, and was certainly not beautiful, but she had the sort of open-featured face that reflected a strong and vivid personality.

This was a ridiculous time, however, to be contemplating the attractiveness of a woman he barely knew at all, and he shifted his attention back to Juarez as Weiss took her own seat at the table with both cups of coffee and slid one of them over to him.

“Stefka . . .” He really didn’t know her well enough for that familiarity, but Juarez was so tense he wanted to crack through her brittle exterior, “relax, will you? There’s really not much chance we won’t make it to the hyper limit.”

Juarez jerked her head around to look at him. “You’re just guessing! You don’t know that!”

Zachariah began to respond, then paused as Weiss tapped a command into the tabletop unit. The lounge’s smart wall came to life in response, showing them a duplicate of
Prince Sundjata
’s maneuvering plot. Not the most soothing of all possible images, he thought as he surveyed the imagery. The once-amber icon which had represented the freighter approaching Balcescu Station had turned crimson . . . and been joined by six smaller, equally crimson icons. Four of the quintet of smaller light dots which had been accelerating towards the station had now made turnover, decelerating just as hard towards rendezvous with it.

The fifth had not, and his coffee seemed suddenly less tasty at the confirmation that at least one of the attacking warships was in pursuit of
Luigi Pirandello
and their own vessel. Juarez clearly recognized the same thing, and she jabbed a finger at it.

“See?!” she demanded. “They
are
chasing us!”

“Maybe they are,” Weiss said calmly. “Doesn’t mean they’ll catch us, though. In fact, they won’t.”

“Oh, yeah? And what makes you so sure of that?” Juarez snapped back.

“The fact that astrogation is one of my specialties,” the other woman replied. She leaned back in her chair and gestured with her coffee cup at the display. “Even if that’s a Manty-built frigate, there’s no way it has the acceleration to overhaul us short of the wall. One of their LACs might have the legs for it, but if they’d brought LACs along, then they’d have been pulling somewhere closer to seven hundred Gs on their approach to the station. I’m entirely in favor of Captain Bogunov running as fast as we can just in case, even if that does put a bit more strain on the compensator than I’m entirely happy with. Every bit of additional velocity we can tack on to our base—and as quickly as we can tack it—is a really good idea, since things can always go wrong. For example, we
could
lose an impeller node. Chances are about one in four hundred thousand of that happening, you understand, but there’s something to be said for not taking any chances that it might. Unless it does, though, there’s no way they can catch us.”

“They don’t have to catch as to kill us with missiles,” Juarez pointed out. She didn’t sound a lot calmer, Zachariah noted.

“No, but they’d still have to bring us into missile
range
,” Weiss replied. “And, like I say, nothing this side of a LAC is going to manage that, either.”

“Are you sure it’s
not
a LAC?” Zachariah asked.

“Positive,” Weiss said firmly. “First, Bogunov’s sensor officer would have to be completely incompetent to be unable to distinguish between a light attack craft and a destroyer or a frigate. Second, like I said, if it was a LAC, it would already be showing a hell of a lot more acceleration than we’re seeing.” She sipped coffee, then twitched her head at the smart wall again. “And since it is a frigate, it can’t have the mass or volume to mount the sorts of launchers the Manties’ long-range missiles need. So, it doesn’t have a LAC’s legs to run us down, and it doesn’t have a cruiser or battlecruiser’s missile range to kill us if it can’t catch us.”

She took another sip from her coffee. Which was also black, Zachariah noted approvingly. Like everyone else in his family except weak-sister JoAnne, Zachariah sneered at adulterating the beverage essential to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom.

Juarez was now staring at Weiss with the same intensity she’d lavished upon the bulkhead earlier. But where her stare had been blank before, it now bordered on hostility.

“And what makes you such an expert on the subject?” she demanded.

“The fact that I
am
an expert on the subject. Project Mir—” Weiss began, then stopped and flicked a glance in Zhilov’s direction. The Gaul clearly wasn’t concerned about maintaining security about project code names at this point, however, but habits died hard, so she shrugged, then looked back at Juarez.

“The project I headed up,” she continued, naming no names, “was devoted to the study of naval tactics. Which, for anyone with a brain—that excludes pretty much the entire officer corps of the Sollies’ Battle Fleet, of course—means constant and careful analysis of the Manty-Haven war. If it would settle your nerves, I can lecture you into a state of utter stupor on the capabilities of any class of warships in the galaxy.”

A crooked half-smile came to her face. “I’ll grant you, my expertise is academic, not hands-on. But I’m not the one flying this ship. Captain Bogunov is—and I’ve seen nothing so far that leads me to think she’s no good at it.”

* * *

Fourteen million kilometers astern of
Prince Sundjata
, Captain Roldão Brandt had reached a far less happy conclusion on the command deck of
Luigi Pirandello
, and he glared at
Prince Sundjata
’s icon. It was probably small souled of him to resent Caroline Bogunov’s good fortune, but that didn’t keep him from wishing their positions were reversed. He’d picked up Colonel Toussaint’s transmission to Somogyi—his ship was eighteen million kilometers from Balcescu Station but almost directly on Toussaint’s transmission path and the colonel hadn’t bothered to encrypt his transmission or use a whisker laser—so there was no question at all in his mind about just who the star system’s unwelcome visitors were. And looking at the numbers on his display, there was no doubt that even at his best acceleration the frigate pursuing his ship could bring her into missile range in no more than another hour or so.

Unlike
Prince Sundjata.

He looked up from his display and glanced at Genora Hinkley, his second officer, who shook her head.

“No way, Captain,” Genora said. “No way we’re going to out run the bastards.”

“So you think we should just go ahead and stop running?” Brandt asked, and Hinkley shrugged.

Brandt thought about it for a moment, then shook his head and answered his own question.

“So far, we’re still way out of weapons’ range,” he said. “It’s going to take them a while to change that, and in the meantime, who knows what may happen?” He removed his cap, ran his fingers through his hair, and twitched a smile. “
Their
compensator may fail. Or they may blow two or three nodes and have to reduce acceleration. Or it might turn out there’s more trouble aboard the station than they counted on and they end up recalled to help deal with it.”

“And just how likely are any of those to happen?” Hinkley asked with what might actually have been a tiny edge of humor.
Gallows
humor, perhaps, but still humor.

“A tad more likely than the system’s primary suddenly deciding to go nova,” Brandt told him. “Not a
lot
more likely, maybe, but more likely. And in the meantime, I figure it’s smarter to play the hand all the way out rather than fold any earlier than we have to.”

“Our compensator’s more likely to fail than theirs is,” Hinkley pointed out, and Brandt shrugged.

“Of course it is. If it goes, though, at least it’ll be fast. And to be honest, I’d rather take my chances with compensator failure than with a shipload of ex-slaves. Half of them are probably ex-
Ballroom
, for that matter! I’d really, really rather not make their acquaintance, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Oh, it’s
definitely
all the same to me!” Hinkley said fervently.

“Good. On the other hand, let’s get some security in place. I don’t want the cargo getting wind of this—the last thing we need is for them to try to break out and seize the ship—and I don’t want any of our more panic-prone people on this bridge to argue with any decisions I may have to make.”

“On it,” Hinkley agreed laconically.

* * *

“I’m
not
arguing. I’m just telling you that I’m doing the best I can,” Zoltan Somogyi tried to speak as calmly as he could, although he rather suspected that the sweat streaking his face suggested he was less than happy about the situation. “Look, I’m no angel, but do you think I want to give you an
excuse
to slaughter all of us?!”

The face on his com display seemed unmoved by his plea, and he swallowed a desire to curse wildly.

He and Bordás had done their best to prevent panic, but their efforts had not been blessed by success. What he’d
wanted
to do was to sit on any news of the situation until the Torch assault shuttles had already docked and begun disgorging their troops. The sudden emergence of four shuttles’ worth of armed-to-the-teeth Marines who already knew combat was probable should have gone through any attempted resistance like a graser through Swiss cheese, and with just about the same consequences the cheese would have suffered. While that would have been a bit hard on anyone who got in their way, it should also be fast enough for them to secure control of the slave holds before any of his less tightly wrapped personnel did something profoundly stupid and got all of them killed. Under the circumstances, Somogyi would have been just delighted to sustain the collateral damage involved if it kept his own personal hide intact.

Unfortunately, word had leaked almost instantly. He was pretty sure it had been someone in Flight Control, not that it really mattered. The station’s personnel had been given almost fourteen minutes to go from flat-footed surprise to fullbore panic, and things had gone downhill from the moment the word broke. Now the shuttles were less than three minutes out, and things were not looking good from the perspective of Angela Somogyi’s little boy Zoltan.

“The first thing we did,” he told Colonel Toussaint, “was to lock out the jettison command.” He didn’t much care for the way the ex-slave’s eyes flickered at his use of the word “jettison,” but he also had no choice but to continue. “You
know
how they’re set up. I’ve got an armed guard sitting on the master panel here on the command deck, but there are local command stations on each of the holds. For now, we’ve managed to lock them down, but there are some people on the station who don’t trust your offer not to shoot them out of hand if we surrender. Or maybe they’re just crazies—I don’t know! But
somebody’s
trying to hack into the local control station on Hold Number Three. I’ve got security people trying to fight their way in to stop them, and my people here on the command deck are trying to keep them locked out, but we’re losing ground and if they cut the physical links between our systems and the local station, then there won’t be anything I can—”

“It sounds to me like you have a problem then, Mr. Somogyi,” Toussaint said coldly. “I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I don’t feel a huge amount of sympathy for you.”

“I don’t want your damn sympathy!” Somogyi snapped, then shoved himself physically back in his command chair. “I want to stay alive,” he said frankly then, his tone flat, “and for that to happen those slaves you’re so eager to rescue have to stay alive, too. So I know you hate my guts and the guts of everyone else on the station, but at this moment, you and I want the same thing, whatever our reasons for it.”

Donald Toussaint felt a faint—very faint—stir of respect for the Balcescu Station CO. Not enough to make him want to do anything except put a pulser dart squarely between the man’s eyes, of course. Unfortunately, Somogyi had a point. A very good point, in fact.

Donald looked at the secondary com screen by his right knee and a skinsuited Ayibongwinkosi Kabweza looked back at him from it. She’d been monitoring his communications with Somogyi while her command shuttle decelerated towards the station. Now he worked one eyebrow at her.

“I’ve been looking at the schematic he uploaded to us,” Kabweza said, her voice audible in his earbug, although Somogyi couldn’t hear it. “As nearly as we can tell, it matches everything we already knew about its layout. I think he’s being straight with us—if only to save his own ass, of course—and I think we can do it. But it’s not going to be pretty.”