In Enemy Hands

brightly colored jumpsuit seemed two sizes too big for her wasted body, and his gray eyes went harder than steel as he took in the dead side of her face. He opened his mouth, but she shook her head.

'No time, Andrew,' she told him huskily. 'No time. Later.'

He gazed at her for a fraction of a second longer, and then shook himself like a dog shedding water from its coat.

'Yes, My Lady,' he said, and nodded to someone else. Whoever it was was to her left, and Honor turned quickly, then inhaled in fresh surprise as Andreas Venizelos stepped to her side and fastened a gun belt around her waist. He looked up from his work to meet her eyes with a tense, strained smile, and she touched his shoulder for a moment, then drew the pulser and checked it quickly.

'This way, My Lady,' LaFollet said urgently, and she turned to follow him... then stopped. Four bodies lay on the deck, all oozing blood from multiple flechette hits. She recognized two guards whose names she'd never bothered to learn, and Timmons... and Robert Whitman.

'Bob,' she whispered. She started to go to her knees beside him, but LaFollet gripped her upper arm and shook his head fiercely.

'There's no time, My Lady!' If Honor had known him even a little less well, she would have hated him in that moment, for the words came out brusque and harsh, devoid of any emotion. But she did know him, and she recognized the matching anguish behind that mask of nonfeeling as he tugged on her arm again. 'We've got to get moving, My Lady. They got the alarm out before Bob killed them.'

Honor nodded and tried to clear her mind as Candless appeared on her other side and he and LaFollet half- lifted her down into the lift shaft. Marcia McGinley was waiting to help, and Honor clung to her for a moment while her armsmen jumped down beside her. She tried to speak, but her ops officer only gave her a short, fierce hug, picked up a flechette gun of her own, and vanished into the shafts dimness on Candless' heels while Venizelos joined Honor and LaFollet.

'At least we've got plenty of guns,' the commander told Honor grimly, handing her a flechette gun to go with her pulser. 'I stocked up on spare magazines, too.'

'Come on, My Lady,' LaFollet said urgently, and he and Venizelos urged her into motion.

'They're trying the lift again!' Alistair McKeon heard someone shout, and a grenade launcher coughed in rapid fire.

Three grenades sizzled past him and dropped neatly through the doors the first assault attempt had left jammed half open, and there was a moment of silence. Then the screams began a half heartbeat before the grenades exploded in rapid succession. Their effect in the enclosed lift shaft must have been indescribable, but Jasper Mayhew sent two more after them.

McKeon grunted in satisfaction, but he also looked at Solomon Marchant.

'We need somebody in position to actually see who's coming down that shaft,' he said urgently. 'The one thing we don't want is to accidentally kill our own people if they come that way with Lady Harrington!'

'I'll take care of it,' the Grayson assured him, and waved for Clinkscales to join him as he loped over to the jammed lift. The lift at the other end of the bay gallery appeared undamaged so far, but Russ Sanko and Senior Chief Halburton were camped right outside its doors with a plasma rifle dug in behind a barricade of shattered machinery and equipment pallets.

Another of Harkness' programs had locked all the lifts to Boat Bay Four, a fact the Peeps obviously had already discovered. So far, they were restricting themselves to the forward lift only, and since they couldn't use the lift car itself, they'd come down the shaft and tried to blow the doors into the gallery. They'd partially succeeded, and the explosion when they blew the doors had killed Chief Reilly, but the rest of McKeon's people had massacred the entire assault team before it could clear the shaft. The undamaged rear lift remained a threat, but McKeon had decided against blowing it himself. Honor might need it, and Sanko and Halburton made a pretty effective security measure. Anyone who tried to use it to attack the boat bay might get as far as opening the doors; he certainly wouldn't get any further.

McKeon turned where he stood, watching the rest of his people scurry about their tasks, and even as he barked orders, a corner of his mind continued to marvel at Horace Harkness. The senior chiefs 'defection' had fooled even McKeon, and the captain fully intended to sit on him, if that was what it took, to get the entire story out of him. But that would have to wait. Just now, all that mattered was that Harkness' crazy plan actually seemed to be succeeding.

The fact that Tepes was a State Security ship worked in their favor at the moment. Each of the assault shuttles in the boat bay was configured to drop one of StateSec's outsized infantry companies, approximately seventy-five percent bigger than a Royal Manticoran Marine company, at minimum notice. That meant their onboard guns and external ordnance racks were left permanently armed... and that the weapons in their small arms racks were kept charged, with ammunition ready to hand. His people had many times more firepower than they could possibly use, all courtesy of StateSec, and they were employing everything they had the manpower to fire with savage satisfaction.

But not all of them could be spared to shoot bad guys. Harkness had moved his precious minicomp from the access slot Clinkscales had used to the cockpit of one of the shuttles and put it into straight terminal mode to wage war against the Peep computer techs who had belatedly realized what was going on. The senior chief had two enormous advantages: he was a better programmer than any of them, and, unlike them, he knew exactly what he'd done in the first place. But he had two matching disadvantages, for there were more of the Peeps and, unlike him, they had physical access to all the ships systems. After twenty minutes of trying to take control back from him, they'd begun shutting computers down, or ripping them out, and going to manual control.

Fortunately for the escaped prisoners, Harkness had planned his original sabotage carefully. Wherever possible, he'd used the computers to inflict major damage on systems rather than simply locking them down, and Tepes was going to require months of repairs before she could possibly return to service. Her crew, unfortunately, seemed to have grasped that, and they appeared to be perfectly willing to inflict massive additional damage on their own ship if that was the only way to get at their enemies.

'Ready to launch, Sir!'

McKeon turned at Geraldine Metcalf's shout. She stood just outside the docking tube to the bay's number two assault shuttle, and he waved acknowledgment. His tac officer swam down the tube while Anson Lethridge unlocked the docking arms. Then the shuttle's thrusters flared as Metcalf sent it drifting out of the bay, and McKeon took a moment to breathe a silent prayer that Harkness really had gotten the Peeps' weapons shut down.

Geraldine Metcalf took the shuttle up the side of the battlecruiser on reaction thrusters alone. The big assault boat felt logy and clumsy, and a part of her screamed to kick up the wedge and get more acceleration, but that was out of the question. She had a very specific job to do, and any betraying emissions would keep her from doing it.

She settled into position above the ship, passive sensors searching down past its hammerhead bow. If anything came up from Camp Charon, it was almost certain to come in from ahead, and she glanced sideways at Sarah DuChene as her copilot ran her fingers down the weapons panel and green standby lights began to burn an ominous scarlet.

'Message from Camp Charon, Citizen Admiral,' Harrison Fraiser announced, and Tourville gestured for him to continue. 'Your intention to render aid to Tepes, if required, is approved, but Brigadier Tresca says he has no confirmation that it is required. He's sending up some shuttles to check, and he'll advise us of their findings. In the meantime, we are not to cross the outer mine perimeter without express permission.'

'Wonderful,' Bogdanovich growled. 'The bastards still don't want us anywhere in their sky, do they?'

'Now, now, Yuri,' Tourville said mildly, watching Honeker's eyes for any flash of condemnation. He didn't see one, and he filed that away for future consideration...