Honor Among Enemies

incubus. It was the emptiness within him, she thought. The void where a normal person kept his soul. The blood on his hands meant nothing, less than nothing, to him, and that was his armor. Since he felt no guilt, he projected none.

'Do you really think,' she said finally, 'that I can let you go? That it's as simple as that?'

'Why not? Who was it back on Old Earth who said, 'Kill one man and you're a murderer; kill a million and you're a statesman'? I may not have that quite correct, but I'm sure the paraphrase is close. And navies and armies and even monarchs negotiate with 'statesmen' all the time, Captain. Come, now! Negotiate with me... or I may just press the button anyway, to show you how seriously you should take me. For example...'

His other hand came up into the pickup's field, and his index finger pressed a button on the transmitter number pad.

'There!' he said with a brilliant smile, and Honor heard someone suck in air behind her. She turned her head and saw Jennifer Hughes staring at her display in horror. The tac officer's head whipped up, and Honor’s left hand made a quick, chopping motion outside her own pickup's field of view. Cousins was watching her intently, and he cut the sound in the instant before Hughes opened her mouth.

'My God, Ma'am!' the tac officer gasped. 'We've got a nuclear detonation on the planet! Tracking makes it about five hundred k-tons... right in the middle of a town!'

Honor felt a fist punch her in the belly, and her face paled. She couldn't control that, but her expression didn't even flicker while the horror of it rolled through her. 'Casualty estimate?' she asked flatly. 'I-I can't be certain, Ma'am.' The tough-as-nails tac officer was visibly shaken. 'From the size of the town, maybe ten or fifteen thousand.'

'I see.' Honor inhaled deeply, then turned back to the com and flicked her hand at Cousins. The sound came back up, and Warnecke's smile had vanished.

'Did I fail to mention that I can detonate any one of the charges separately?' he purred. 'Dear me, how careless of me! And there you were, thinking it was an all or nothing proposition. Of course, you don't know how many charges there are, do you now? I wonder how many more towns I can wipe off the face of the planet, just as a bargaining ploy, you understand, before I set off the big one?'

'Very impressive,' Honor heard herself say. 'And just what sort of negotiations did you have in mind?'

'I thought it was quite simple, Captain. My friends and I get aboard our repair ship and leave. Your ships stay in orbit around Sidemore until my ship reaches the hyper limit, and then you come down and clean up the riffraff I'll be leaving behind.'

'And how can I be certain you won't send the detonation command from your ship anyway?'

'Why in the world should I want to do that?' Warnecke asked with a lazy smile. 'Still, it is a thought, isn't it? I suppose I might consider it a proper way to, ah, chastise you for crippling my operations here... but that would be vindictive of me, wouldn't it?'

'I don't think we'll take that chance,' Honor said flatly. 'If, and I say if, Mr. Warnecke, I were to agree to allow you to leave, I'd need proof that it would be impossible for you to detonate your charges.'

'And as soon as you knew it was impossible, you'd blow me out of space. Come, Captain! I expected better from you! Obviously I have to retain my Sword of Damocles until I'm safely out of your reach!'

'Wait.' Honor rubbed an eyebrow for a moment, then let her shoulders sag ever so slightly. 'You've made your point,' she said in a quieter voice, 'but I've made mine, as well. You can kill the people of Sidemore, and I can kill you. The very thought of letting you go turns my stomach, but...' She drew a deep breath. 'There's no need to do anything irreversible at this point. You can't leave the system without my permission, and I can't land Marines without your seeing it and pressing your button. Let me consider this for a little while. Perhaps I can come up with a solution we can both accept.'

'Caving in so soon, Captain?' Warnecke studied her suspiciously. 'Somehow that doesn't ring quite true. You wouldn't be thinking of trying anything clever, would you?'

'Such as?' Honor asked bleakly. 'I haven't said I would let you go. All I said is that there's no point in either of us acting hastily. At the moment we're both in position to trump the other's cards, Mr. Warnecke. Let's leave it at that while I consider my options, shall we?'

'Why, of course, Captain. I always like to oblige a lady. I'll be here when you decide to com again. Good day.'

The image died, and Honor Harrington felt her mouth twist in a snarl of hate as the ready light above the pickup went dead.

Chapter THIRTY-ONE

The atmosphere in the briefing room could have been chipped with a knife. Honor's senior officers, and Warner Caslet and Denis Jourdain, sat around the long table, and more than one face was ashen.

'My God, Ma'am,' Jennifer Hughes said. 'He just went ahead and did it, killed all those people, and smiled about it!'

'I know, Jenny.' Honor closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, and inside she shivered. She no longer doubted it; Warnecke was insane. Not in the legal sense of being unable to recognize right or wrong, but in a far deeper, more fundamental sense. He simply didn't care about right or wrong, and his casual mass murder only reconfirmed her earlier decision. Whatever happened, he could not be permitted to escape to do this again. Because that was the real crux of it. He would do it again, or something just as terrible. Again and again... because he enjoyed it.

'We can't... I can't let him go,' she said. 'He has to be stopped, right here, right now.'

'But if he's ready to kill everyone on the planet...' Harold Tschu began slowly, and Honor shook her head sharply.

'He's not. Not yet, anyway. He's still playing with us, and he still thinks he can win. Think about his record, what he tried in the Chalice and what he's done since. Whatever else he may be, this man is convinced he can beat the entire universe because he's hungrier and more ruthless than anyone else in it. He's counting on that. He expects us to be the good guys and back away rather than accept the blame for the cost of stopping him.'

'But if we don't back away and he presses his button, we will be to blame, Ma'am,' Cardones said quietly. Honor's eyes flashed, and he waved a hand quickly. 'I don't mean it that way, Skipper. You were right; the decision will be his. But by the same token, we'll always know we could have let him walk and avoided it.'

He'd said 'we,' Honor thought, but he'd meant 'you.' He was trying to make it a group decision, to give her an out, to protect her.

'We're not going to consider that, Rafe,' she replied softly. 'Particularly not since we can't be sure he won't do it anyway.' She rubbed her temple and shook her head. 'However relaxed he may be trying to appear, he has to hate us for blowing away his fleet and his private little kingdom. He's already demonstrated how casually he's willing to kill an entire town, and he knows exactly how to punish us by using our own principles against us. The moral side of it wouldn't even occur to him, and what he's already done will earn him the death penalty from anyone who ever captures him. I offered him an option there, but he prefers to go for complete victory rather than accept prison as an alternative, so the threat of ultimate retribution won't deter him either. As he sees it, he's got nothing to lose, so why not do whatever he wants?'

She sat back, hugging Nimitz to her breasts, and silence ruled the compartment as the others realized she was right.

'If there were only some way to separate him from his transmitter,' she murmured. 'Some way to get him away from it so we could deal with him once and for all. Some...'

She paused, and her eyes narrowed. Cardones straightened in his own chair, gazing at her anxiously as he felt her mind begin to race, then looked around the other faces. Her other officers looked as anxious as he felt, but Warner Caslet’s expression was almost as intent as hers.