Honor Among Enemies

officers and send most of her enlisted personnel, and all the wounded, off in her, and I'll have Reynolds ask the IAN to take her casualties off in Sachsen.'

Cardones nodded back. He understood the logic in stripping out Vaubon's officers; they were the ones most likely to instigate some effort to retake their ship during the voyage ahead. 'I'll ask Major Hibson to detail a suitable security detachment,' he remarked, and Honor nodded.

'Well!' the exec said more briskly. 'That takes care of the Peeps, what about the pirates?'

'They get the standard treatment,' Honor replied. There was some risk in turning the handful of raiders who'd survived the engagement over to the system governor. Even if he was an honest man, they might spill the beans about Vaubon's capture. On the other hand, there weren't many of them. In fact, there were none from the two lighter ships, and no bridge officers from the light cruiser. The survivors knew they'd been shooting at a light cruiser, but it was unlikely they knew it had been a Peep, and they'd had no opportunity to discover that since. Still... 'It might not be a bad idea to gloat a little over how they fell for 'our' light cruisers ambush,' she added.

'I'll see to it, Ma'am,' Cardones agreed. He moved off to pass the necessary orders, and Honor remained where she was, still gazing at the display.

There were unanswered questions here. Those raiders' numbers had come as a surprise, and they'd also been unusually heavily armed. Merchantmen were almost universally unarmed, and it didn't take a lot of firepower to force them to surrender, but these people had packed in enough weapons to seriously reduce the life support required by the big crews pirates normally carried.

Well, at least she had an excellent chance to find out what it had all been about. There'd been no survivors from Vaubon's first victim; total compensator failure and fifty-one seconds of runaway acceleration at over four hundred gravities had seen to that. But her computers were intact. It had taken three of Commander Harmon’s LACs five hours to chase the hulk down and tow it back to Wayfarer, but Harold Tschu and Jennifer Hughes had crews tickling the system. Honor tried not to think about the human wreckage they were working amidst while they did it and turned away from the plot at last, hoping at least some answers would be forthcoming shortly.

Warner Caslet kept his shoulders straight as he followed the Marine lieutenant down the passage. It wasn't easy, and he raged at his own stupidity. He'd lost his ship, the most terrible sin any captain could commit, and he'd done it for nothing.

He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles ached. It didn't do a bit of good to know he'd done the right thing, the honorable thing, his brain sneered, given the information he'd had. Intelligence hadn't warned him the Manties were using Q-ships. He'd had every reason to believe Wayfarer truly was a merchantman when he'd gone to her assistance. And even in his self-hatred, he remained convinced he'd made the right decision on the basis of everything he'd known. None of which could temper his self-contempt... or save him from the consequences.

At least it won't happen anytime soon, he thought mordantly. The People's Republic had refused to exchange POWs for the duration. There were precedents for and against prisoner exchange, but the Manties had a far smaller population than the Republic... which had no intention of returning trained personnel to the RMN. Besides, he thought with a flash of bitter humor, we'd have to trade them twenty to one just to hold even!

Warner Caslet didn't look forward to spending the next few years in a POW camp, even if the Manties were supposed to treat their prisoners better than the Republic did. Still, it would be better for his health to remain a prisoner permanently. At least the Manties weren't going to shoot him for his stupidity.

He'd considered asking for asylum, but he just couldn't do it. He knew some PN personnel had, like Alfredo Yu, who was now an admiral in the Grayson Navy. Any one of them was a dead man if he ever fall back into Republican hands; that went without saying, but it wasn't the reason Caslet couldn't do it. For all the excesses of the Committee of Public Safety, for all the lunatic handicaps the Committee and its commissioners and StateSec had inflicted upon the Peoples Navy, Warner Caslet had sworn an oath when he accepted his commission. He could no more turn his back upon that oath than he could have let Warnecke's butchers rape and murder the civilian spacers he'd thought crewed this ship. It had come as a shock to him to realize that, yet it was true. Even if it did mean he was probably going to be shot by his own people.

He looked up as his escort came to a stop. A man in a green-on-green uniform which certainly wasn't Manticoran stood outside a closed hatch and raised an eyebrow at the lieutenant.

'Comman ... Citizen Commander Caslet to see the Captain,' the Marine said, and Caslet's lips quirked at the correction. It still sounded ridiculous, but it was also an oddly comforting link to who and what he'd been only a few hours before.

The green-uniformed man nodded and spoke into the intercom for a moment, then stood aside as the hatch opened. The lieutenant also stood aside with a respectful nod, and the citizen commander nodded back before he stepped through the hatch and stopped.

A long table covered in snow-white linen awaited him, set with glittering china and crystal. Delicious culinary aromas filled the air, and Denis Jourdain, Allison MacMurtree, Shannon Foraker, and Harold Sukowski were already seated, along with a half-dozen Manticoran officers, including Commander Cardones and the young lieutenant who'd commanded the pinnaces which had boarded Vaubon. Another green- uniformed man stood against a bulkhead, and a third, auburn-haired, with watchful gray eyes that whispered bodyguard, followed quietly at Captain Harrington's elbow as she crossed to him.

Caslet watched her warily. He'd been too shocked to form much of an impression of her in the boat bay gallery. That irritated him, though he'd certainly had ample excuse, but he was back on balance now, and he sized her up carefully. From her reputation, she should have breathed fire and been three meters tall, and something itched between his shoulder blades at finding himself in her presence. This woman was one of the PN's bogeymen, like Admiral White Haven or Admiral Kuzak, and he couldn't imagine what she was doing commanding a single Q- ship in this backwater. He supposed he should be grateful the Manties were misusing her abilities so thoroughly, but it was a bit hard at the moment.

She was a tall woman, and she moved like a dancer. The braided hair under her white beret was much longer than in the single picture in her intelligence dossier, and those almond eyes were far more... disconcerting in the flesh. He knew one of them was artificial, but the Manties built excellent prosthetics, and he couldn't tell which of them it was. It was odd. He knew about her hand-to-hand skills, and somehow he'd expected her to be... stockier? Heftier? He couldn't think of exactly the right world, but whatever it was, she wasn't. She had the sturdiness of her high-grav home world, and her long-fingered hands were strong and sinewy, yet she was slender and graceful, a gymnast, not a bruiser, without an excess gram of bulk anywhere.

'Citizen Commander.' She extended her hand and smiled as he took it. That smile was warm but just a bit lopsided. The left side of her mouth moved with a fractional hesitation, and he heard a very faint slurring of the 'r' in 'commander.' Were those legacies of the head wound she'd suffered on Grayson?

'Captain Harrington.' In light of the aggressive egalitarianism of the People's Republic's new rulers, Caslet had already decided to take refuge behind her naval rank rather than use any of her various 'elitist' titles.

'Please, join us,' she invited, and walked him back to the table and seated him in the chair to the right of her place before sitting herself with a graceful economy of movement. Her treecat sat facing the citizen commander across the table, and Caslet felt a stir of surprise at the bright intelligence in those grass-green eyes. One look told him her dossier had been wrong to dismiss it as a dumb animal, but then, the Republic knew very little about treecats. Most of what they had were only rumors, and the rumors themselves were widely at variance with one another.

A sandy-haired steward poured wine, and Harrington sat back and regarded Caslet levelly.

'I've already said this to Commissioner Jourdain and Citizen Commander MacMurtree and Foraker,' she said, 'but I'd like to thank you once more for what you tried to do. We're both naval officers, Citizen Commander. You know what duty requires of me, but I deeply regret the necessity of obeying those requirements. I also regret the people you lost. I had to wait until the raiders were deep enough into my energy envelope to guarantee clean kills before engaging... and, of course, to be certain your own ship couldn't escape.' She said it levelly, without flinching, and Caslet felt an unwilling respect for her steady eyes.