Honor Among Enemies

The freighter shouldn't have been there.

The dead hulk drifted in the outer reaches of the Arendscheldt System, so far from the G3 primary no one should ever have found it. And no one ever would have if the light cruiser had been less busy hiding herself. She'd taken up a position from which her sensors could plot the commerce of the system, evaluating the best locations in which to place other ships when the time came, and she'd detected the wreck only by a fluke. And, Citizen Commander Caslet thought coldly, because my resident tac witch had 'a feeling.'

He wondered how he could phrase his report to make it seem he'd had a concrete reason to chase down the faint radar return. The fact that Denis Jourdain, PNS Vaubon's people’s commissioner, was a surprisingly good sort would help, but unless he could come up with some specific reason for making the sweep, someone was still going to argue he should have tended to his own knitting. On the other hand, the Committee of Public Safety didn't trust the military to ride herd on its own. That meant the people who passed ultimate judgment upon its actions, by and large, had no naval experience... and that most people who did have that experience were prepared to keep their mouths shut unless someone screwed up royally. It should be possible to come up with the right double-talk, especially with Jourdain’s covert assistance.

Not that it mattered all that much to Caslet right this moment as he watched the secondary display which relayed Citizen Captain Branscombe's video to him. The citizen captain and a squad of his Marines were still sweeping the cold, lightless, airless interior of the ship, but what they'd already found was enough to turn Caslet’s stomach.

The ship had once been a Trianon Combine-flag vessel. The Combine was only a single-system protectorate of the Silesian Confederacy. It had no navy, the Confederacy's central government was leery about providing prospective secessionists with warships, and it was unlikely anyone was looking out for its commerce. Which might explain what had happened to the hulk which had once been TCMS Erewhon.

He turned his head to glance at the main visual displays image of Erewhon's exterior, and his mouth twisted anew as he saw the ugly puncture marks of energy fire. The freighter had been unarmed, but that hadn't stopped whoever had killed her from opening fire. The holes looked tiny against her five- million-ton hull, but Caslet was a naval officer. He was intimately familiar with the carnage modern weapons could wreak, and he hadn't needed Branscombe's video to know how that fire had shattered Erewhon's interior systems.

Why? he wondered. Why in hell do that? They had to know they were likely to wreck her drive and make it impossible to take her with them, so why shoot her up that way?

He didn't have an answer. All he knew was that someone had done it, and from all the evidence, they seemed to have done it simply because they'd felt like it. Because it had amused them to rape an unarmed vessel.

He winced at his own choice of verb as Branscombe led his Marines back into what had been Erewhon's gym and the pitiless lights fell on the twisted bodies. Whoever had hit Erewhon had been unlucky in their target selection. According to the manifest in her computers, the ship had been inbound to pick up a cargo from Central, Arendscheldt’s sole inhabited world, and she'd been running light, with little in her holds but heavy machinery for Central's mines. Loot like that was low in value, and the raiders' fire had crippled Erewhon's hyper generator. There'd been no way to take the ship with them, and it seemed they'd had too little cargo capacity to transship such mass-intensive plunder. But they appeared to have found a way to compensate themselves for their loss, he thought with cold savagery, and made himself look at the bodies once more.

Every male member of the crew had been marched into the gym and shot. It looked like several had been tortured, first, but it was hard to be sure, for their bodies lay in ragged rows where they'd been mowed down with pulser fire, and the hyper-velocity darts had turned their corpses into so many kilos of torn and mangled meat. But they'd been luckier than their female crewmates. The forensic teams had already compiled their records of mass rape and brutality, and when their murderers were done with them, they'd shot each woman in the head before they left.

All but one. One woman was untouched, her body still dressed in the uniform of Erewhon's captain. She'd been handcuffed to an exercise machine where she could see every unspeakable thing the raiders did to her crew, and when they were done, they'd simply walked away and left her there... then cut the power and dumped the air.

Warner Caslet was an experienced officer. He'd seen combat and lived through the bloody horrors that were part of any war. But this was something else, and he felt a cold, burning hatred for the people behind it.

'We've confirmed it, Citizen Commander,' Branscombe reported, and Caslet heard the matching hatred in his voice. 'No survivors. We've pulled her roster from the computers and managed to ID all but three of the crew from it. They're all here; those three're simply so torn up by what the bastards did to them that we can't positively identify them.'

'Understood, Ray,' Caslet sighed, then shook himself. 'Did you get their sensor records?'

'Aye, Citizen Commander. We've got them.'

'Then there's nothing else you can do,' Caslet decided. 'Come on home.'

'Aye, Citizen Commander.' Branscombe switched to his Marine command circuit to order his people back to Vaubon, and Caslet turned to Citizen Commissioner Jourdain.

'With your permission, Sir, I'll report the hulk's position to the Arendscheldt authorities.'

'Can we do that without revealing our own presence?'

'No.' Caslet managed not to add 'of course not,' and not just out of prudence. Despite his role as the Committee of Public Safety's official spy aboard Vaubon, Jourdain was a reasonable man. He had an undeniable edge of priggish revolutionary ardor, but the two and a half T-years he'd spent in Vaubon seemed to have dulled it somewhat, and Caslet had come to recognize his fundamental decency. Vaubon had been spared the worst excesses of the Committee of Public Safety and Office of State Security, and her pre-coup company had remained virtually intact. Caslet knew how lucky that made him and his people, and he was determined to protect them to the very best of his ability, which made Jourdain's reasonableness a treasure beyond price.

'If we report it, they'll know someone was here, Citizen Commissioner,' he said now. 'But without an ID header they won't know who sent it, and by the time they receive it, we'll already be over the alpha wall and into h-space.'

'Into hyper?' Jourdain said a bit more sharply. 'What about our scouting mission?'

'With all due respect, Sir, I think we have a more pressing responsibility. Whoever these butchers are, they're still out there, and if they did this once, they'll sure as hell do it again... unless we stop them.'

'Stop them, Citizen Commander?' Jourdain looked at him with narrowed eyes. 'It's not our job to stop them.

'We're supposed to be scouting for Citizen Admiral Giscard.'

'Yes, Sir. But the Citizen Admirals not scheduled to begin operations here for over two months, and he's got nine other light cruisers he can send to take a look for him before he does.'

He held Jourdain's gaze until the citizen commissioner nodded slowly. There was no agreement in his eyes, but neither was there any immediate rejection of what he had to know Caslet was about to suggest, and the citizen commander chose his next words carefully.

'Given Citizen Admiral Giscard's other resources, Sir, I believe he can dispense with our services for the next few weeks. In the meantime, we know there's someone out here who deliberately tortured and butchered an entire crew. I don't know about you, Sir, but I want that bastard. I want him dead, and I want him to know who's killing him, and I believe the Citizen Admiral and Commissioner Pritchart would share that ambition.'

Jourdain's eyes flickered at that. Eloise Pritchart, Javier Giscard's people's commissioner, was smart, tough-minded, and ambitious. The dark-skinned, platinum-haired woman was also strikingly attractive... just as her sister had been. But the Pritcharts had been Dolists, living in DuQuesne Tower, arguably the worst of the Haven