Honor Bound

and forth inside his hide, trying to get out of the line of fire.

“He’s lame, Tom,” she transmitted. “Take him now.”

There wasn’t a reply, but she could see a red and yellow form moving up the stairs into the shooter’s room, then duck through the doorway and raise a weapon in outstretched hands. The assassin on the floor convulsed once and then went limp.

“He’s down, ma’am,” Tom Crossman told her, and she could see him turning the unconscious form over and slipping restraints on his wrists. “I’m bringing him downstairs.”

“Roger that. Good job.”

Shannon grabbed her rifle and binoculars and scrambled to her feet, heading out of the apartment, being careful to avoid the gaping holes in the floor. The stairs were solid concrete and still in fairly good shape and she sprinted down them as quickly as she could, exiting the centuries-old building through a side door, having to jump a meter down to the street because the stoop had been washed away by the years.

“Jason goes off looking for the Protectorate dozens of light years away,” she muttered to herself as she jogged towards Valerie, “and I wind up in a damn firefight. Figures.”

Valerie was helping Amanda to her feet as Shannon approached and she could see that the journalist was ashen, shaking with fear. “Are you all right?” She asked them, putting a supporting hand on the journalist’s shoulder.

Amanda looked up and saw the woman dressed in combat utilities and body armor, carrying a sniper rifle and jerked away from her with a screech of fright.

“It’s all right, Amanda,” Valerie assured her. “She’s a friend… this is Major Shannon Stark.”

Amanda blinked, looked back at Shannon with wide eyes. “The Shannon Stark?”

Shannon sighed. While Valerie explained things to Amanda, Stark turned to see Tom Crossman and Sergeant Miller, one of their most trusted Special Operations NCOs, carrying an unconscious man between them on a folding stretcher. She stepped over to them, examining the assassin.

He was a solidly-built man somewhere in his middle years, the bushy mustache and shoulder length hair giving her the impression of ex-military, probably a gun for hire. He wore plain black utilities and a combat vest, along with a fresh smart bandage wrapped around his right knee. He was still motionless, having been hit with a fairly large jolt from the electro-dart shooter holstered at Tom’s right hip. The gun used compressed air to shoot darts containing small capacitors that could deliver enough of a shock to render someone unconscious for hours.

“That was some good shooting, ma’am,” Crossman grinned. “Didn’t even nick the artery. He’ll be good as new in days.”

“Good,” she nodded. “Get him to the flyer and get him secured.” She looked back at Valerie and they shared a grim smile. “He has a lot of questions to answer.”

Chapter Fourteen

Jason McKay watched with a predatory set to his eyes as the blackened and cracked hull slid by on the Sheridan‘s master viewscreen. It had taken some tricky maneuvering, but the big cruiser had finally matched orbits with the disabled Protectorate lighter. In the days since the space battle, it had drifted in an eccentric orbit that was eventually going to slingshot it around the system’s primary star and send it out into interstellar space, but for now it was accessible to their recovery teams. And since it was the only Protectorate ship to survive the battle even partially intact, McKay badly wanted to see what they recovered.

He could see their shuttle hugging the surface of the pirated and converted freighter like a remora on a blue whale, but the men themselves were not visible.

“The boarding party has burned through the airlock,” the Sheridan‘s communications officer announced. “They’re broadcasting a video feed now.”

“Put it on screen, Lieutenant,” Admiral Patel ordered. He was strapped into his command couch, but McKay was making do holding onto a handle affixed to the bulkhead beside him. It wasn’t convenient, but somehow he felt more at home there than in a seat of his own.

The image on the screen switched abruptly from the exterior shot to a darkened, claustrophobic corridor in the ship’s interior. From the helmet-mounted camera, they could see the other Marines and Fleet technicians in the boarding party, all of them dressed in massively-armored vacuum suits and the Marines armed with backpack-fed lasers only practical in zero gravity.

“There’s still no sign of any survivors?” McKay asked.

“No, sir,” the Tactical officer told him, checking her sensor displays. “We have some spots that still have auxiliary power and probably life support, but no attempts to maneuver or communicate.”

“It’s been days,” Patel pointed out. “If anyone survived the battle, they’d have got out in landers or escape pods by now.”

“You’re probably right, sir,” McKay admitted with a shrug. “But a live prisoner to interrogate would be nice.”

“You spooks,” Patel lamented, shaking his head. “You always want egg in your beer.”

Jason had to chuckle at that. A few days ago, he’d felt lucky to be alive and not stranded on Peboan for the foreseeable future. It had been a close thing. The Protectorate ship that had split off to try to strike them from orbit had been close enough that he’d been able to see the explosion from the ground when Captain Minishimi’s Shipbusters caught up with it. At the time, he’d been morally certain that the blast was the Decatur being destroyed, and he’d experienced a terrifying flashback to the Protectorate attack on Aphrodite until the transmission from the patrol shuttles told them what had actually happened.

The view on the helmet cam shifted as the party made a turn into a broader corridor that abruptly ended with a mass of charred, twisted metal and a view of the stars.

“The main bridge is toast,” the voice of the leader of the investigation team came through the transmission. McKay had met him before the shuttle had launched… he was a competent young Lt. Commander named Landers. “We’re moving toward the auxiliary control room to see what we can find there.”

“You know, Admiral,” McKay said, eyes still on the feed on the viewscreen, “we’ve been pretty busy the last few days, what with cleaning up the mess on Peboan and trying to get the Decatur repaired, so I haven’t had the chance to ask you… how the hell did you wind up here weeks ahead of schedule right when we needed you?”

“You should be grateful I didn’t waste any more time on that wild goose chase,” Patel snorted. “We hit the first system and found a habitable that had some pretty accessible mineral deposits, but no evidence of any Protectorate activity and my XO and I got to thinking: why would Antonov risk discovery for some resources on Peboan when there are a lot of other places he could get them?” The Admiral shook his head. “It didn’t make any sense. So we decided that the only thing that did make sense was if there was something unique or at least rare about Peboan or the star system there, so I ordered a max-g burn back to the system. I brought us down to sublight in the cometary halo and started working our way inward, doing a slow sweep. We didn’t contact you because I had a sense that whatever made this system important could mean the Protectorates were still around somewhere and I didn’t want to advertise our presence.”

“Well, you’re smarter than me, Admiral,” McKay admitted ruefully. “It took me till about five minutes before the attack to figure out why this place was important to Antonov.”

“Oh?” Patel glanced over, curious. “You know what he wants with the planet?”

“I think so, sir. It’s a guess, but it feels right. Podbyrin told me that the network of wormhole jumpgates they’re using has several systems that contain multiple gates-sort of transportation hubs. My guess is that this is one of those hubs. Antonov needs this system to get his ships where they’re going, so he won’t give it up without a fight.”

“Not bad,” Patel judged. “Whether you’re right about that or not, we’ll need to keep an eye on this place long term.”

“The auxiliary control room is intact,” Landers finally reported. On the screen, they could see the door to the