Echoes Of Honor

years, the best of their personnel were at least a decade out of date. Some of them, like Benson, were more like half a century out of date, and blowing that kind of rust off their skills required something on the order of an old- fashioned nuke. Of course, Benson was a special case, Metcalf admitted. The captain had a genuine gift—she might even be as good in the captain's chair as Admiral Harrington was reputed to have been—and her skills were coming back with astonishing speed. But a lot of the others were still pretty pathetic by RMN standards.

Which was the reason Metcalf prayed they wouldn't have to deal with any regular navy crews that approached the quality of, say, Lester Tourville's people. It would not be a pleasant afternoon in space if they did.

Now stop that, she told herself with absent severity. So far, things have gone better on the retraining front than you could ever have expected, now haven't they?

And so they had. Bacchante had come swanning along as innocently and unsuspectingly as Krashnark, and Warner Caslet had talked her skipper through the minefields and energy platforms just as smoothly as he'd talked Citizen Captain Pangborn through them. The actual capture of the ship had been a little trickier, since Bacchante had just stopped in for a little R&R and a broader selection of fresh vegetables. Since she hadn't been delivering any prisoners, finding a justification for sending multiple shuttles full of boarders up to meet her had been much harder. In fact, it had been impossible... but it hadn't been necessary, either. Citizen Commander Vestichov hadn't been able to surrender fast enough when the targeting systems of a dozen graser platforms locked his ship up at a range of less than twelve thousand kilometers.

And so the light cruiser had become the second unit of what Commodore Ramirez had christened the Elysian Navy. She was nowhere near as powerful as Krashnark, and Metcalf knew the Admiral had been tempted to turn her loose as a courier to the Alliance, but the lieutenant commander was grateful she hadn't. Having two ships with which to exercise against one another had increased the effectiveness of their quickie training program by at least a hundred percent.

And now the fact that we have two ships means the Admiral is off in one of them, and Commodore McKeon is off in the other one, and they've taken Ramirez and Benson with them. Which means I get to make the call on this, unless I want to drag Simmons into it. And I can't do that until they get him to the other end of a com link, and I really shouldn't shuffle the decision off onto him even then. Because the longer that boat sits up there, the more likely it is that something will blow up in our faces, isn't it?

'Dust off the stored response, Anson,' she said, and to her own surprise, her voice sounded almost as calm as the Admiral's would have. 'Transmit it, and let's get that boat out of here before its crew notices something they shouldn't.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' Lethridge said formally, his eyes showing his respect for how quickly she'd decided, and nodded to PO Alwyn. 'You heard the Commander, PO. Let's send them on their way.'

'Aye, aye, Sir.'

The petty officer entered a command sequence on his board, and Metcalf watched a green light blink, confirming transmission of the stored message Admiral Harrington had ordered Harkness and Scotty Tremaine to create six months earlier. It wouldn't tell anyone at the other end anything very exciting—only that Proxmire and his crew had pulled out on schedule for their next destination. The message was from Camp Charon's chief com officer, courtesy of Harkness' computer generation efforts. The real com officer had hanged herself five months ago rather than face court-martial on charges of murder and torturing prisoners. Metcalf didn't quite understand the logic behind that, but in light of the evidence against her, she'd simply advanced the date of her demise by a few weeks without altering its manner in the slightest.

Thanks to Harkness, however, they hadn't really needed her, and now the message flicked up to the courier boat. The time and date stamp had been left blank when the message was recorded, but the computers automatically entered today's as they transmitted it. A little more worrisome was the fact that it didn't say where Proxmire had been supposed to go, since no one they'd managed to take alive appeared to have known what his next assignment was, and Metcalf was tempted to update the recording now that they knew he'd been supposed to go to Shilo. But that shouldn't be important enough to justify futzing about with the message and possibly screwing something else up. The people who'd sent the inquiry knew where Proxmire had been bound, and a simple 'departed on schedule' ought to more than suffice.

'Message receipt confirmed, Ma'am,' PO Alwyn announced, and Metcalf nodded.

'Anything else in the queue require an immediate response?'

'Nothing else,' Lethridge told her. 'Of course, we haven't opened most of the mail yet,' he added.

'Understood. But I want that boat out of here ASAP, and if nothing else is marked urgent, no one's going to be upset if we don't answer it before we boot them out. Send the release, Anson.'

'Yes, Ma'am.'

* * *

'Message coming in from Charon Control,' Citizen Ensign Howard reported. Heathrow turned his chair to look at her, but she was busy inputting commands at her console. Then she looked up. 'One return transmission received and stored in the secure banks, Sir. No other return traffic or outgoing messages. We're cleared to depart.'

'Flight plan information?' Bouret asked.

'Coming through now, Sir,' Howard replied. 'I'm dumping to your console.'

'Got it,' Bouret confirmed a moment later. He studied the vectors and accelerations displayed on his maneuvering plot, then made a small sound of mingled satisfaction and disgust. 'Pretty straightforward, Skipper. We go back the way we came, for all intents and purposes, except for a couple of little dog legs.'

'Dog legs?' Heathrow repeated with a raised eyebrow.

'It's just dirtside bullshit, Skipper,' Bouret assured him—being very careful to use the spacer's generic term for planet-bound idiots rather than call the idiots in question StateSec. 'They're just flexing their muscles. Citizen Commander Jefferies warned me they liked to do that when he gave me the system coordinates.'

'All right.' Heathrow sighed. 'If that's the way the game's played here, then that's the way it's played. Are we cleared to head out now?'

'Yes, Sir,' Howard said.

'And according to this, we can even use impellers, Skipper,' Bouret told him.

'Oh frabjous day!' Heathrow muttered under his breath, and pressed a com stud on his chair arm.

'Engineering,' a voice replied.

'They're going to let us have our impellers back, Andy,' Heathrow said. 'How soon can you have the nodes back on-line?'

'Give me seven minutes, and you're hot, Skipper,' Citizen Lieutenant Anderson assured him.

'Good.' Heathrow released the stud and looked back at Bouret. 'All right, Justin, we've got reaction mass to burn, so let's get the hell out of here now. We'll transition to impellers as soon as Andy can bring them up.'

'You got it, Skipper,' Bouret said with fervent agreement, and began tapping commands into his console. Then he closed his hand on the joystick. 'Coming about to new heading of one-seven-eight relative, same plane,' he announced, and the courier boat quivered as her thrusters began to fire.

'And so we say farewell to sunny Hell,' Heathrow muttered under his breath.

* * *

'Well, at least he made out better than the last one,' Metcalf said softly to herself as she watched the courier boat's wedge come up. The little craft went scooting away from Hell, accelerating hard down the flight path that would take it well clear of the Admiral's exercise area, and she smiled crookedly. Those people had no idea at all of how close to annihilation they'd just come, she thought, and more power to them.

More than one person in the control center let out a sigh of relief as the boat headed outward. Of course, some of those present didn't, too. Not all of Admiral Harrington's people were happy with the thought of letting any ship depart, however unsuspicious it might appear to be.

Personally, Metcalf agreed with the Admiral, especially in this case. It was far smarter to let courier traffic in and out of Cerberus with the word that everything was normal there than it would have been to turn the system into a complete black hole. And that was a regular Navy vessel, not a StateSec courier, which meant its crew was much less likely to notice any little glitches which might have crept into the behavior of Camp Charon's new managers. For that matter, if they were like many of the officers Metcalf had met during her incarceration aboard