Mission of Honor

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 Sebastiбn, 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 Sebastiбn Fariсas, 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