Honor Bound

She was sitting upright, she discovered, strapped into a padded chair, staring into the lenses of a machine she recognized all too well: a hypnoprobe. It loomed in front of her, sinister in its plastic and metal sterility, so much more terrifying from this side than it had even been from the other. She struggled to control her breathing and heartbeat and to try to force her mind to work. She’d been hit by a stunner… presumably one built into the room as a security system. The whole thing had been a trap…

“Ah, Dobroe utro, Colonel Stark,” she heard Antonov’s voice from her right side and just behind her. Good morning. So, she hadn’t been out for very long. She tried to twist around to see the man, but he was too far behind her and she could only see the bare wall of whatever room she was in.

“Why…” she tried to speak, but her mouth felt as if it were stuffed with cotton. Antonov came into her peripheral vision, holding a cup of water. She considered resisting but that, she reflected silently, would be pointless. She sipped the water and sighed slightly in relief.

“I think,” Antonov said cheerfully, “you were about to ask me why I didn’t kill you, no?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. Antonov walked behind her and around to her left. She tried to follow him, but the strap around her forehead restricted her motion.

“I kept you alive,” he informed her, “because as you said, I can’t leave without you. As I don’t have time for anything more entertaining,” he chuckled at that, and she fought back an instinctive shiver as his calloused finger traced a line across her left cheek, “…and believe me, my dear, I can think of much more entertaining ways to bend a beautiful woman to my will… I will be forced to rely on the more antiseptic option of using this mashina.”

“It won’t work,” she told him tightly. “To use the probe on me without drugs, I’d have to do it voluntarily… and if you drug me, I won’t recover quickly enough to call my air cover before they sound the alert and seal this place off.”

“I did indeed consider this, Colonel,” he assured her, voice as confident and cheerful as ever. He walked back around behind her and she felt a surge of panic as her chair started to shake, but then she realized he was turning it so she could see farther to her left.

As she slowly turned, she could see that she was in some sort of medical lab or clinic, filled with a fairly sophisticated array of equipment; turned a bit more and she could see a wheeled gurney was rolled up a couple of meters to her left and that there was someone laid out on it. She recognized the boots as belonging to the stealth armor her team had been wearing and she felt her heart rise into her throat.

Another jerk on the side of her chair and she could see that the soldier had half-dried blood spattered on those boots and a pair of smart bandages on the right leg, at the knee and hip. A bit more to her left and she saw a bedraggled female in rumpled clothes that she recognized from Jameson’s description as Dr. Maggie Cochrane. Cochrane was standing behind the gurney, looking supremely uncomfortable, her face twisted in what looked like a combination of distaste and abject terror. Next to her and slightly behind her, backs against the wall, were two armored biomechs, their weapons trained on her and the soldier on the gurney, standing stock-still.

One final turn of the chair and she saw that the man on the table was Tom Crossman.

“I know this man,” Antonov told her, leaning close and speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. Shannon found it hard to focus on his words as she scanned Tom’s face, saw that he was unconscious but still breathing. His skin was pasty from loss of blood and coated with sweat. She could see another smart bandage on his neck and one on his arm as well. “He was on my ship five years ago,”

“Your memory is impressive,” she said in a neutral tone, trying not to let her feelings creep into her voice. All she could think about was Tom’s children…

“My memory is not what it once was,” Antonov countered. “The hazards of living over two centuries. But I saw the movie.”

Shannon bit back a bitter laugh. Tom hated that damned movie…

“So, here is what we will do, moi dorogoi,” he went on. My dear. “You will submit to the hypnoprobe without resistance, and I will allow the very competent Dr. Cochrane here to treat your friend. When we leave this place, we will leave them here and your man will survive. The alternative… well, if you refuse, I will have the good doctor tear off those ingenious smart dressings of yours and bring your man to full consciousness and then we will see just how much blood he has left in him.” A snort. “Not all at once, of course.”

“Where are the rest of my people?” She asked in a voice that could have come from a computer.

“Ah, I am so sorry to tell you,” Antonov said, his mock dismay sounding just as cheerful, “but I am afraid that Sergeant Crossman was the only survivor.”

Shannon closed her eyes for a moment and her mouth formed into a hard line. “All right,” she said softly.

“What?” Antonov said in slight surprise. “No cliched questions about how you can trust me?”

“I know I can’t fucking trust you,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “But I have very little choice.”

“Ah, I do love a pragmatic woman,” he laughed, pulling her chair back around until she faced the hypnoprobe once more. He moved around to the other side of the machine and she could see him again: the genius and insanity blended in his eyes, the cruel humor in his smug, arrogant smile. He reached out to the hypnoprobe and hit a control to activate it. “And now… just relax…”

* * *

“Well, at least they’re not trying evasive maneuvers,” Lt. Franks murmured, staring at the main viewscreen. The twin Eysselink ramships showed on the gravimetic sensors like glowing comets, arrayed one a few light seconds in front of the other: they had to stay separated to avoid the same sort of drive field entanglement that he and Perez were going to try to use against them.

“At their current velocity,” the Tactical Officer, Lt. Wolford, reported, his breathing a bit labored due to the two g acceleration, “the lead ship is forty minutes from Earth impact and ten minutes from rendezvous with the Bradley. The trailing ship is approximately ten minutes behind him.”

“Engineering,” Perez spoke into the intercom, his voice strained, “how are the modifications going?”

“Just about done, sir,” the Engineering Officer replied, her voice improbably cheerful. “It’s mostly software adjustments and a few circuit bypasses… well, that’s all we have time for, anyway. I can’t honestly say if this is going to work or not… every experiment that’s been done with intersecting drive fields has led to pretty spectacular mutual destruction.”

Perez’ eyes widened and he shot a glare at Franks.

Franks spread his hands. “Commander Prieta, the Chief Engineer on the Decatur swears it’ll work.”

“I’ve got the vectors plotted for the field intersect,” Bevins, the Helm Officer, announced. “This is going to be real tricky, Captain…”

“Just program the vectors, Lieutenant,” Perez told him tersely. “There’s no second option and there won’t be a second chance.” He turned to Lt. Franks. “Tell me something, Lieutenant, you could have told us all this over the radio… why come on board yourself?”

Franks shrugged expressively. “Sir, I’ve been following a lot of the communications from Decatur and they’ve given me some idea of how these ramships work… I figured it would be better if I were on board just in case something came up that I could help with.” He grinned. “And, to be honest sir, I’ve spent the last two years sitting at a desk, funneling communications from one covert operation after another. I wasn’t about to sit on my ass while the Protectorate was attacking Earth.”

Perez chuckled softly. “You remind me of Colonel McKay… when he was a Captain.”

“You served with the Colonel?” Franks asked, surprised.

“I was the Assistant Weapons Officer on the Patton during the war,” he said, an understandable pride in his voice. “I fired the missile that destroyed Antonov’s flagship.”

Franks began to smile a “that’s cool!” sort of smile, but it froze on his face as a realization passed through his mind like a wash of ice-cold water.

“That’s awesome, sir,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could fake. “Did you stay with the Patton after the war?”

“Only till we got back from a resupply mission to Aphrodite,” the Captain confirmed Franks’ worst fears.