Mission of Honor-ARC (48 page)

Truth be told, O'Cleary's attitude had been less belligerent than she'd feared. Unfortunately, that didn't mean it made Michelle happy. Nor, for that matter, did it mean the
other
officers and enlisted personnel aboard those surrendered ships were going to share O'Cleary's attitude.

* * *

"ETA three minutes, Ma'am," the pinnace's flight engineer said.

"Thank you, PO Pettigrew," Abigail Hearns replied, then stood and turned to face the armed, skinsuited men and women of her boarding party. Given the nature of their mission, there weren't a great many of them. In fact, there were a lot
less
of them than she wished she had.

"Three minutes, people," she said, and saw expressions and shoulders tighten. "Remember your briefings, and watch yourselves. We don't want any accidents—or incidents—and this sort of thing can be risky enough even aboard a friendly ship. So while we'd like to avoid any unpleasantness, we'd really like to have all of you back on board safe and sound, too."

One or two people chuckled, and Abigail allowed herself an answering smile. Then she looked at the youthful midshipman in the seat beside hers. In some ways, young Walter Corbett reminded her of Gwen Archer, with the same red hair and green eyes. But Corbett had a truly monumental nose, compared to Archer's, and he was only nineteen and skinny as a rail, to boot. He was also possessed of a nervous energy that found the onerous task of sitting still difficult under normal conditions.

Today's conditions were anything but normal, however, and Corbett had sat almost unbreathing for the last ten minutes, his nose two centimeters from the viewport as he stared out it at the shattered behemoth waiting for them.

Abigail didn't blame him. Corbett's snotty cruise might have been less personally and directly terrifying (so far, at least) than her own aboard then-Captain Oversteegen's
Gauntlet
, but there'd been terror and cataclysm enough to go around. And, she thought, any temptation to smile fading as she remembered how the other ships of HMS
Tristram
's division had been slaughtered by Josef Byng, he'd had ample demonstration of the risks attendant upon his chosen profession.

And he's about to get more
, she reminded herself e grimly. Unlike young Corbett, she'd seen the insides of butchered starships before.
Let's try and see to it he gets back aboard
Tristram
in one piece so he can at least profit from the experience that's about to provide so much nightmare fodder
.

"Remember, Walt," she hadn't spoken loudly, but Corbett's head twitched around like a startled rabbit's, "you're a Queen's officer. I know you never expected to be doing anything like this on your snotty cruise. Well, I didn't expect everything that happened on
my
snotty cruise, either, as Lieutenant Gutierrez here could testify."

She twitched her own head at the massive lieutenant sitting in the row of seats immediately behind the two of them. His Marine-style armored skinsuit was badged with the shoulder flash of the Owens Steadholder's Guard, not the Royal Manticoran Marines, and a well-used flechette gun rode the cargo rack above his head. A sound which might have been an understatement-spawned snort came from the general direction of the lieutenant in question, and a quick grin danced across Corbett's face in response. Clearly he'd heard all about then-Sergeant Matteo Gutierrez and Midshipwoman Hearns' adventures on the planet Refuge.

"You need to remember three things," Abigail continued in a rather sterner tone. "First, you
are
a Queen's officer. Second, any Sollies still alive in there "—she nodded towards the forward bulkhead, beyond which the wreck of SLNS
Charles Babbage
, one-time flagship of Battle Squadron 371, Solarian League Navy, waited for them—"have spent their entire careers thinking of themselves as the most powerful navy in the galaxy and of the Star Empire of Manticore—and it's navy—as an upstart little pipsqueak with delusions of grandeur. Third, we have no idea how many Solly personnel may still be alive aboard the
Babbage
or what kind of shape they may be in, but there are less than thirty people in our boarding party."

She looked into his eyes steadily until he nodded, then continued.

"Right this minute, most of
Babbage
's surviving crew are probably still in a state of shock. I don't know how long that's going to last, and from our perspective, it could be either a good thing or a bad thing . . . or possibly even both at once. On the one hand, most of them are probably too stunned and too focused on hoping someone's going to come and find them to be thinking about any organized, effective resistance. On the other hand, even if ninety percent of her company is dead, there are still ten times as many survivors aboard her as in
Tristram
's entire complement. A lot of them are going to be too happy to see anybody coming to pull them out of the wreckage to give us any trouble, but I'll be astonished if any of them are thinking very clearly. For the ones who aren't, the shock and humiliation—and the
anger—
of being hammered so badly by a bunch of 'neobarbs' may push some of them into open defiance. And, frankly, the fact that you're only a midshipman's going to piss off a lot of the people you're about to run into. They'd probably resent taking orders from you under any circumstances; under
these
circumstances, what they feel is going to be a lot worse than simple resentment.

"That leaves you with two problems you're going to have to balance off. First, be aware of their resentment and make what allowance for it you can, but, second, remember you
are
an officer, that they
are
subject to your orders, and that an appearance of weakness may well lead to some kind of incident."

She paused once more, and Corbett nodded again.

"Yes, Ma'am," he said, and despite her grim awareness of what awaited them inside that broken ship, Abigail's lips twitched. It would have been unfair to call his tone plaintive, but that was headed in the right direction.

"It probably won't be
that
bad, Walt. Not where the survivors are concerned, at least. Yes, you have to be aware of all the things I've just said. But that's why I've attached the Bosun to your group. I wouldn't go so far as saying I'm sending him along to 'look after you,' but I
will
say I expect you to remember he's been in the Navy since
you
were five T-years old. Use his experience accordingly."

"Yes, Ma'am," Corbett said more firmly, and Abigail glanced over his shoulder at Gutierrez. The lieutenant's eyes met hers with the memory of another middy who'd desperately needed the experience of another veteran noncom, and his reassuring nod was a vast relief. Obviously, Matteo had had a few words of his own with Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Musgrave,
Tristram
's bosun.

"Then all I'm going to add," she told the youngster, "is that you're going to see some terrible things in the next few hours." She held his gaze steadily and felt a glow of approval when it didn't waver. "No matter what you think you can imagine, it's going to be worse. I know. I've seen it before, and there's no way to really prepare someone for it until they've experienced it for themselves. It's all right to feel shocked, nauseated. In fact, there'd be something wrong with you if you didn't. But whatever we feel, we still have our responsibilities, and I think if you focus
on
your responsibilities, on getting the job done, you'll find it helps. That's another thing I found out the hard way."

"Yes, Ma'am," he repeated.

"Good."

She looked up into her personal armsman's eyes again for a moment, gave him a tiny nod of acknowledgment, then patted Corbett lightly on the shoulder and—as she'd just advised the midshipman to do—turned her thoughts to her own duties.

* * *

Rear Admiral Michael Oversteegen watched his plot aboard HMS
Rigel
. Despite his relaxed, comfortable, loose-limbed sprawl in his command chair, his eyes were alert, sharply focused on the display's icons.

"Anythin' from Major Markiewicz or Sebastián, Irena?" he asked.

"No, Sir," Lieutenant Irena Thomas' tone could not have been more respectful, but Oversteegen's lips twitched in a slight smile. Respectful or not, it was the tone a subordinate used to inform a superior officer that he should tend to his own knitting, secure in the knowledge she would somehow remember to inform him if anyone asked to speak to him.

Showin' more worry than you want to, aren't you, Michael?
he asked himself sardonically.
Still, I s'pose you're not th' only one that's true of just now
.

His smile faded, and he glanced at the tactical board at Commander Steren Retallack's station. His ops officer sat tipped back, arms folded, but Oversteegen knew Retallack was watching the "surrendered" Solarian SDs like the proverbial hawk. And well he should be.

Like everyone else in Tenth Fleet, Oversteegen devoutly hoped Michelle Henke's elaborate precautions would prove unnecessary, but he fervently agreed with his CO's disinclination to be proven wrong about that sort of assumption. At the moment, none of the Solarian SDs had more than fifteen hundred personnel still aboard, which—given their old-fashioned manpower-intensive design philosophy—was too few people for them to effectively move or fight. That, unfortunately, wasn't quite the same thing as saying they didn't have enough people to fire their weapons. To be sure, their active targeting systems were down, as were their wedges and defensive sidewalls, but the hugely redundant passive sensors any ship-of-the-wall mounted would be more than capable of providing accurate target data on anything inside energy range.

The Deneb Accords and interstellar law were very clear on the mutual responsibilities of victor and vanquished. When O'Cleary dropped her impeller wedges in the universal FTL signal that she surrendered, Tenth Fleet had been legally obligated to grant quarter rather than continuing the attack while it waited for her formal, light-speed surrender offer to arrive. (Assuming, of course, that Michelle Henke had chosen to regard them as anything besides pirates.) By the same token, O'Cleary's ships were legally required to
stay
surrendered, with their crews obedient to the lawful orders of any boarding party, if they didn't want the other side to renew the action. There was, however, a bit of a gray area in that the crew of any captured ship had a legal right to attempt to retake their vessel, and one could argue that ambushing a boarding party when it first came onboard constituted a sort of preemptive retaking. Whether or not the argument held up in court would depend upon whose court it was, but that would be cold comfort to anyone—on either side—who got killed in the course of the attempt.

And although at the moment, Michael Oversteegen admitted with a cold lack of apology, he didn't really much care what might happen to any Sollies who tried something like that, he
did
care—very much—what happened to any Manticoran personnel who might be involved.

So just remember we're watchin' you, Admiral O'Cleary
.
And it's perfectly all right with me for you t' go right on sweatin' all those missile pods. Because th' first time one of those superdreadnoughts even twitches, we
are
goin' t' blow the son-of-a-bitch straight t' hell
.

* * *

This
, Major Evgeny Markiewicz reflected sourly,
is the kind of story you really like to kick back over a good beer and bullshit about later. Preferably,
much
later. It's
not
the kind of story you enjoy while the damned thing is happening
.

He'd collected quite a few stories like that over the eighteen-T-years since he'd enlisted in Her Manitocran Manjesty's Marine Corps, and he'd just as soon have avoided adding this one to his collection.

Well, if I can't take a joke, I shouldn't have joined
, he told himself, and turned his attention to the task at hand.

The good news was that a
Nike
-class battlecruiser carried a three hundred-man Marine detachment, twice the size of a
Saganami-C
's. The bad news was that that still gave HMS
Rigel
only two companies. And the even worse news, as far as he was concerned, was that he'd been tasked to provide Marine support for two separate naval boarding parties.

Which wouldn't be all that bad, I suppose, if we weren't going to be outnumbered ten-to-one by the Sollies still aboard the damned ships
.

He glanced at lieutenant Sebastián Fariñas, Admiral Oversteegen's San Martin-born flag lieutenant, standing at his shoulder, then across the pinnace's troop compartment at Captain Luciana Ingebrigtsen, the commander of his Alpha Company. He'd more or less flipped a coin to decide whether he should accompany her or Motoyuki MacDerment, Bravo Company's CO. Since he was going with Ingebrigtsen, he'd sent Gunny Danko (otherwise known as Sergeant Major Evelyn Danko) along with MacDerment to keep an eye on him. Both Ingebrigtsen and MacDerment were good, solid officers, but they were undeniably still a bit young for their rank. There was a lot of that going around, and while he was confident in their competence, there was no harm providing a little adult supervision. By the same token, he was equally confident that whichever one of them he chose to accompany, it was the
other
one Murphy would choose to drop straight into the crapper. (Both of those beliefs, he supposed, might owe a little something to his eleven years' enlisted experienced before the Corps sent him off to OTC.)

Of course, the fact that he'd assigned himself to Alpha Company also meant that Alpha Company had been assigned to board SLNS
Anton von Leeuwenhoek
, which happened to be the flagship of one Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. Which also explained Fariñas' presence.

At the moment, Ingebrigtsen was involved in a quiet conversation with Master Sergeant Clifton Palmarocchi, Alpha Company's senior noncom. Palmarocchi had been around the block and back again, and the chunky, muscular master sergeant, with his thinning fair hair and pronounced Gryphon accent would have made an admirable illustration for the term "grizzled veteran." That was just fine with Markiewicz, especially when he contemplated the absurd youthfulness of the junior officer standing at Ingebrigtsen's elbow and nodding sagely at whatever she was saying. The captain might be young, but Lieutenant Hector Lindsay looked like he ought to be playing mumblety-peg in a schoolyard somewhere. Well, maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but it was bad enough. In fact, Lindsay was still a few months shy of his twentieth birthday, standard, fresh out of OCS, which made him even younger than Lieutenant Fariñas ( no ancient graybeard himself), and he'd had "his" platoon for just under two months, having come aboard literally as
Rigel
was pulling out for Talbott.