Honor Among Enemies

She glared at him, mouth working soundlessly, but he held her eyes, and something seemed to flicker deep within them. Her mouth stilled, and he nodded, then rose once more, holding his hand out to her.

'Come with me, Commander. I'll take you Doctor Jankowski. She'll get you and your captain cleaned up before we talk again, all right?'

She stared at his hand for a long, tense moment, and then her shoulders sagged. Her head hung for just an instant, and then she reached out. She took his hand as skittishly as a wild animal might have, and he squeezed gently and drew her to her feet.

Two hours later, Harold Sukowski sat in Caslet's briefing room, facing the citizen commander, Allison MacMurtree, and Denis Jourdain across the table. Christina Hurlman wasn't there. She was sedated in sickbay under Citizen Doctor Jankowski's care, and Caslet prayed Jankowski's prognosis was accurate. Jankowski had been a civilian doctor in DuQuesne Tower before the coup attempt. She'd dealt with rape trauma before, and she seemed almost relieved by Hurlman's homicidal attitude.

'Better someone who's still willing to fight back than someone who's completely beaten, Skipper,' the doctor had said. 'She's in terrible shape right now, but we've still got something to build on. If she doesn't break up when she realizes she really is safe, I think she's got a good chance to come back. Maybe not all the way, but a lot further than you might believe just now.'

Now Caslet shook himself and looked at Sukowski. The Manticoran looked much better now that he'd showered and changed into a clean shipsuit, but the strain in his face hadn't even begun to ease yet, and Caslet wondered if it ever would.

'I think,' the citizen commander said, 'that we can assume you and Commander Hurlman are who you say you are, Captain Sukowski. I'd still like to know what you were doing aboard that ship, however.'

Sukowski gave a small, bitter smile of understanding. Branscombe's Marines had brought all the surviving pirates across to Vaubon by now, and Caslet had never seen a more psychopathic crop in his life. He'd never really believed in Attila the Hun in starships. By and large, spacers required a certain degree of intelligence, but these people were something else. No doubt they were intelligent, in their own way, but they were also brutal, sadistic scum, and Caslet couldn't imagine how Sukowski and Hurlman had survived as their captives.

'As I said, Citizen Commander, they took my ship in Telmach. I got most of my crew off, but Chris...' His eyes flickered. 'Chris wouldn't leave me,' he said quietly. 'She thought I needed looking after.' He managed a shaky smile. 'She was right, but God, I wish she'd gone!' He looked down at the tabletop for a moment, then inhaled deeply and raised one hand to where his right ear had been.

'I got this right after they boarded,' he said flatly. 'They were... angry my people got away from them, and three of them held me down while another sawed my ear off. I think they were going to kill me just because they were pissed off, but they wanted to take their time about it, and Chris got loose from the one holding her somehow. I wasn't much use, but she crippled the bastard with the knife and took three more of them down before they all piled onto her.' He looked away, and his jaw worked. 'I think she took them by surprise, but they beat the hell out of her once they had her down, and they...' He broke off and drew another deep breath, and MacMurtree handed him a glass of ice water. He sipped deeply, then cleared his throat. 'Sorry.' The word came out husky, and he cleared his throat again, then set the glass very carefully on the table. 'Sorry. It's just that what they did to her... diverted them from me. They took it out on her, instead.' He closed his eyes, and his jaw clenched. 'The men were bad enough, but, Jesus, the women! They actually gave the sick bastards advice, like it was all some kind of...'

His voice chopped off, and his nostrils flared. 'If you need more time...' Jourdain began softly, but Sukowski shook his head sharply.

'No. No, I'm as close to all right as I'll get for a while. Let me go ahead and tell it.'

The peoples commissioner nodded, though his face was distressed as he sat back in his chair, and Sukowski opened his eyes once more. 'The only reason we're alive is that we're with the Hauptman Cartel. Mr. Hauptman's agreed to ransom any of his people who fall into pirate hands, and one of their 'officers' came along before they quite killed Chris. God, I never talked so fast in my life! But I managed to convince him we were worth more alive than dead, and he called his animals off. Not that I was sure they'd stay called off. The brother of the bastard who'd sliced my ear off came by the brig the first night and tried to rape Chris again. She was barely even conscious, but that didn't bother him, only I caught him with his back turned and kicked his balls up between his ears. I thought for sure they'd kill us both then, and part of me hoped they would. I must've been out of my head. I was screaming I'd kill anyone who touched her, and the bastards buddies were screaming that they were going to kill me, and then Chris was on her feet somehow, trying to get at them, and they butt-stroked her with a pulser and I went for the one with the gun, and...'

He broke off, hands shaking violently, and cleared his throat again.

'That's all I remember for a day or two,' he said flatly. 'When I started tracking again, their 'captain' told me I'd damned well better be right about that ransom, because if I was lying, he was going to give Chris to the crew and make me watch before they spaced us both. But in the meantime, they left us pretty much alone. I think,' he actually managed a ghastly parody of a smile...'they were afraid that if they tried anything else they'd have to kill one or both of their golden geese. At any rate, that's what we were doing in that hell ship, and even a POW camp is going to look like heaven compared to it.'

'I think we can avoid that, Captain Sukowski,' Jourdain said, and Caslet looked at him in surprise. 'You and Commander Hurlman have been through enough. We'll have to hold you for some time, I'm afraid, but I personally assure you that you'll both be handed over to the nearest Manticoran embassy as soon as our own operational posture permits.'

'Thank you, Sir,' Sukowski said quietly. 'Thank you very much.'

'In the meantime, however,' Caslet said after a moment, 'any information you can give us would be extremely useful. We may be at war with your kingdom, Captain Sukowski, but we're not monsters. We want these people, all of them.'

'You're going to need more than one ship,' Sukowski said grimly. 'I never got a chance to look at any of their astrogation data, but they decided I should 'earn my keep' and put me to work in Engineering. They said that since I'd fixed it so they had to man Bonaventure, I could help take up the slack in their ship. They enjoyed the hell out of giving me all the shit jobs, but frankly, I was glad to have something to do, and they talked in front of me. I kept track of the ships' names they dropped, and as near as I can make out, they've got at least ten of 'em, maybe a few more.'

'Ten?' Caslet couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice, and Sukowski smiled bitterly.

'I was surprised, too. I couldn't imagine that anyone would be crazy enough to bankroll maniacs like this, but these aren't 'pirates' at all. What you're dealing with, Citizen Commander, used to be an official squadron of privateers operating out of the Chalice.'

'Oh, God,' MacMurtree muttered, and Caslet’s mouth tightened. Their background brief had covered the Chalice Cluster Uprising and the lunatic who'd launched it. Only a government like the Confederacy's could have let a madman like Andre Warnecke take over a single city, far less an entire cluster with three inhabited planets. Of course, to be fair he'd started out sounding sane enough, until he was in power, anyway. He'd announced his intention to create a republic and hold free and open elections as soon as he'd 'provided for the public safety,' then put his cronies in charge of internal security and launched a reign of terror which made State Security's purges back home look like a tea party. What had once been NavInt estimated that he'd killed something like three million citizens of the Chalice himself before the inept Confederacy Navy managed to move in and crush his rebellion after over fourteen T-months of trying.

'Exactly,' Sukowski said in that same, grim voice. 'The Silesians were even more incompetent than usual, and these bastards managed to get out before the roof caved in. Worse, they took Warnecke with them.'

'Warnecke's alive?' Caslet gasped, and Sukowski nodded. 'But they hanged him,' Caslet protested. 'We've got copies of the imagery in our database!'

'I know,' Sukowski grunted. 'His people have copies of it, too, and they laugh their asses off over it. The best I could figure it, the Confeds figured he'd died in the fighting but still wanted to make an 'example' of him, so they faked up the imagery of his hanging. But he's alive, Citizen Commander, and he and his murderers have taken over some outback planet lock, stock, and barrel. I'm not sure where it is, but the locals never had a chance when the squadron came in on them. Now Warnecke's using it as a base of operations until he's ready to mount his