Honor Among Enemies

nodded again, feeling just a bit giddy and yet suddenly aware that a part of him really believed he might actually be able to do this. At least Senior Chief Harkness and Sergeant Major Hallowell seemed to think he could, and that same part of him told him almost calmly that the two of them were surely better judges of his capabilities than he was. It was a surprisingly comforting thought, and he managed to return Hallowell's smile.

'Good! In that case, Wanderman, why don't we start with a little loosening up? Trust me,' the sergeant majors smile turned into a lazily wicked grin, 'you're gonna need it.'

Honor crossed to the main plot and stood gazing down into the display. She considered her options for several seconds, then snorted mentally, for there weren't really all that many available to her. Besides, she'd discovered what she needed to and made her own point, and it was time to go.

Her ship had spent ten days orbiting Walther's single inhabited planet, and the way System Governor Hagen had spun out the paperwork on the pirates had confirmed her suspicions. He intended to delay their 'trial' until Wayfarer disappeared over the hyper limit, and she knew why. With her out of sight, he could stage manage his hearings to guarantee the pirates walked, or, at worst, received a slap on the wrist, on the basis of some suitable technicality or 'ambiguities' in the evidence. But he had no intention of trying that while Honor and her personnel were available to offer testimony to clarify those ambiguities... and he knew time was on his side. Every day Honor delayed in Walther was a day she wasn't chasing other pirates, and she found his mask of pious concern over due process and protecting the sovereignty of the Silesian Confederacy more irritating with every conversation.

Well, she'd known what was going to happen from the moment she'd turned the raiders over... and she'd warned them, she thought grimly. Of course, she hadn't mentioned that the dispatches she'd left with the local Manticoran attache would provide each ship of the squadron with positive IDs of her erstwhile prisoners as it arrived. If the governor and his raider allies thought hers was the only Q-ship in the sector, or that she was the only RMN captain prepared to carry out her promises to them, they might just discover their error the hard way.

For now, however, it was time to go. Not that the time she'd spent here had been wasted. She'd taken long enough to make the point that she was looking over Hagen's shoulder, on the one hand, and to give the governor some rope, on the other. By now, Hagen knew she was dead serious. He might be laughing at her inability to make him do his part, might even consider her an overly officious fool, but he knew she wouldn't have burned ten full days unless she'd meant business. That might help when the next member of the squadron turned up, and, at the very least, it ought to make him a bit more wary where she was concerned.

More to the point, every conversation with him was on record, along with his promises that the raiders would be severely punished. When it turned out, as she was certain it would, that nothing of the sort had happened, those recordings would be forwarded to his superiors by Her Majesty's Government. The Star Kingdom seldom involved itself directly in the internal affairs of the Confederacy, but it had done so on occasion, and this was a point she'd discussed in some detail with her superiors before leaving Manticore. Obstructionism by Silesian officials was an old story, and Honor entertained no false hope that it could be eliminated. But the Star Kingdom periodically pruned it back by identifying specific governors whose hands were dirty and going after them with every weapon at its disposal. Even with the current reduction in force levels, Manticore retained more than sufficient nonmilitary clout to squash any given governor. If nothing else, the Board of Trade could simply blacklist Walther for all Manticoran shipping, with devastating consequences for the system's economy. Coupled with official demands for Hagen's recall and prosecution for complicity with the raiders, that was guaranteed to bring his career to a screeching halt. And without his governorship, he had no value to his criminal associates... many of whom had a habit of eliminating discarded allies to keep them from turning state's evidence.

Honor hated that sort of roundabout maneuvering, but her options were limited, and the fact that it would be slow didn't mean it would be ineffective. Even if Hagen lived through the experience, other corrupt governors would take note of what had happened to him. It probably wouldn't cause any of them to actually reform, but it would make them more circumspect, and anything might put a crimp into the raiders' operations had to be worthwhile. But she'd assembled all the information she required for that part of the operation, and there were plenty of other pirate vessels out there. It was time to be about dealing with them, she thought, reaching up to rub Nimitz’s chest, and glanced at Lieutenant Kanehama. 'Plot a course for Schiller, John,' she said. 'I want to pull out within the next two hours.'

Ginger Lewis watched Electronics Mate Second Class Wilson’s section run through the drill. It still felt a bit strange to be supervising, though no one could have guessed it from her expression. Just a few weeks ago, she'd been in Wilson’s section; now, as chief of the watch, she was the second-class petty officers boss. But at least she didn't have to put up with the crowd Brace had down in Impeller One.

She bared her teeth at the thought. Ginger’s own people here in DCC were at least civilized, and the fact that she knew her job forward and backward seemed sufficient for most of them. The way Wilson had made it quietly clear he had no problems taking orders from her was an enormous help, as well, and her watch's efficiency was climbing steadily.

That should have been a source of unflawed satisfaction. She had, after all, made something like a fifteen T-year jump in seniority in less than three months, and the fact that Lieutenant Commander Tschu and his officers knew she was pulling her weight in her new slot meant she'd probably get to keep her new grade. And she was satisfied in that respect. Yet worry over Aubrey gnawed at her, and her own experience with Steilman only made her even more certain somebody had to jerk the son-of-a-bitch up short and hard.

Of course, it was possible that same experience was making her paranoid, she told herself as Wilson's people completed their drill well within parameters. Wilson looked up, and she nodded her approval, then moved to the central station to call up the duty log. Her watch ended in another twenty minutes, and she busied herself annotating the log entries for her relief, but even as she worked, her brain kept worrying at the problem.

By now, it was an open secret that it was Steilman who'd beaten Aubrey up, and the way the power tech seemed to have gotten away with it had added to his stature. The Captain had come down on him like a hammer over the drive room incident, she'd busted him to third-class and given him five days' brig time, about the maximum punishment for his official offense, and the icy talk which came with it would have terrified any reasonable soul into walking the straight and narrow. But Steilman wasn't reasonable. The more Ginger learned about him, the more convinced she became that the man was barely even sane. He'd taken his demotion and brig time not as a warning but as proof that he'd gotten away with arranging Kirk Dempsey’s 'accident.' Worse, his apparent immunity not only won envious respect from the other bad apples but also made those he frightened even more nervous about crossing him. Ginger knew Lieutenant Commander Tschu had delivered his own short, coldly pointed lecture, but the lack of an official follow through for the two acts which should have bought him a crash landing had blunted the chief engineer's warning just as it had the Captains. Steilman had protested, his innocence of all charges, except the insolence, for which he'd actually 'apologized' to Ginger, and sworn he was purer than the driven snow, and all the time, Ginger knew, he'd been laughing at what he'd gotten away with. He and his cronies were being circumspect for the moment, yet she was grimly certain they were only biding their time.

She sighed mentally as the formalities of the change of the watch flowed about her. Sooner or later, Steilman and his crowd were going to screw up and the entire universe was going to come down on them. It was as inevitable as entropy, and Ginger knew it. Yet that wasn't going to make whatever damage they did first any less ugly. No, she thought. They needed to be slapped down, hard, and the sooner the better, but without any official accusation from Aubrey...

She watched Lieutenant Silvetti turn over to Lieutenant Klontz and nodded to Senior Chief Jordan, her own relief, then headed down the passage towards her quarters. Somehow, some way, she had to get Aubrey to open up, but he'd turned into a clam, and he no longer wandered around the ship, exploring its passages and access ways. She was both relieved and saddened by his obvious wariness, how hard he worked on never being alone anywhere someone else might be lurking. But he wouldn't even talk to her, and she'd caught one or two echoes of Steilman’s gloating delight at Aubrey's