In Enemy Hands

Foraker told him. 'And they must've been fairly small birds, or I'd have seen their impeller signatures from here, and I didn't.'

The chief of staff stared at her, as if unable or unwilling to believe what she'd just said, then wheeled to Tourville.

If he'd expected the citizen rear admiral to reject the ops officer's diagnosis, he was disappointed. Instead, Tourville simply nodded and walked slowly back to his command chair. He parked himself in it, and spoke very calmly.

'Shannon, I want you to launch an RD. It can get there a hell of a lot quicker than we can, and I want a closer look at what's going on. Got it?'

'Aye, Citizen Admiral,' Foraker replied, and Tourville looked up as Bogdanovich and Honeker arrived on either side of his chair.

'It would seem,' he said in a quiet voice accompanied by a tight smile, 'that Committeewoman Ransom is being hoist by her own petard.'

'Meaning what?' Honeker asked flatly.

'Meaning that the only thing I can think of to explain what's going on over there is that her prisoners are up to something.'

'But that's even crazier than any other explanation!' Bogdanovich protested, less, Tourville suspected, because he truly disagreed than because he felt someone had to do it. 'There are only thirty of them, and Vladovich has over two thousand people!'

'Sometimes quantity means less than quality,' Tourville observed. 'And whatever they're doing, they seem to have completely paralyzed that ship. I wonder how they got to her computers...?'

He frowned, in thought, then shrugged. At the moment, how they'd done it was less important than the fact that they had, and he sighed unhappily as he realized what he had to do. He suspected he would spend a lot of time avoiding mirrors for the next several weeks, or months, but his duty left him no choice.

'Harrison, com Warden Tresca.' He looked up and met Honeker's eyes. 'Tell him I think the prisoners aboard Tepes are trying to take the ship... or destroy it.'

'Here they come again!'

McKeon wasn't certain who'd shouted the warning this time, but it came not a moment too soon. The Peeps had finally gotten reorganized, and they came storming down the crippled lift shaft behind a curtain of grenades. Pulsers snarled and ripped and flechette guns coughed from the shaft, and McKeon swore bitterly as Enrico Walker took a pulser dart that blew his head apart. The surgeon lieutenant’s body went down with the bonelessness of the dead, and he saw Jasper Mayhew thrown backward as a burst of flechettes slammed into his chest. But like all of them, Mayhew had found time to climb into unpowered body armor from one of the assault shuttles, and he dragged himself back up to his knees and his launcher hurled grenades down the Peeps' throats. Another of McKeon's petty officers went down, dead, he was grimly certain, as a Peep grenade bounced out of the open lift doors and exploded directly behind her, but then Sanko and Halburton got their plasma rifle turned around, and a packet of white hot energy went roaring up the shaft. Anyone who got in its way never had time to realize he was dead, but those on the fringe of its area of effect were less fortunate. Shrieks of agony and secondary explosions as ammunition cooked off rolled from the lift shaft like the voices of the damned, and then Sanko fired a second round and the screams cut off instantly.

No more shots were fired from the shaft, and McKeon heaved a sigh of relief. But he knew the respite would be brief. There were limits on the weapons the Peeps would willingly use against them as long as they held the boat bay, the explosions in the other bays had been a pointed reminder that there were things in here which didn't take kindly to combustion, but there were a lot more of them than there were of his people. And there were fewer of his than there had been, he thought, looking at Walkers body.

He pushed up and walked over to Harkness. The senior chiefs face was drawn and soaked with sweat, but his hands were no longer busy on the keyboard, and he looked up at McKeon’s approach.

'Looks like they finally kicked my butt out, Sir,' he said, and bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. 'But by the time they did, just about everything but life support got slagged right down to glass. Even if we don't make it, they're gonna be a long time trying to put this bucket of bolts back on-line.'

'So they've got complete control of whatever’s left?' McKeon asked.

'Just about, Sir. I don't think they can break my lock on that lift...' he pointed to the intact lift doors through which no attack had yet come '...and there's no software left down here in the bay itself. But give 'em another forty, fifty minutes, and they're gonna start getting some sensors and weapons back under manual control. And when they do...'

He broke off with a shrug, and McKeon nodded grimly.

'Now remember, Ma'am,' Venizelos said, his voice low and urgent as they crouched just inside a ventilation grate, 'if Harkness pulled it off, that lift'll be waiting when we get there.'

Honor nodded. Their journey through the bowels of the ship had been too rushed for Venizelos to give her many details on Harkness' achievements, but he'd managed to hit the high points, and she was astounded by how thoroughly the senior chief had worked this all out. The fact that StateSec had seen fit to maintain outdated files where the brig area was concerned had thrown a monkey wrench into a part of his plans, but that was hardly his fault. And if the rest of them hadn't been working, so far, at least, the Peeps would already have reasserted control of their computers... in which case it would all be over by now.

But if it wasn't going to be over, anyway, they had to get to the boat bay, quickly. Andy and Marcia were right about that, and she leaned back against the wall of the duct, panting for breath and hoping none of the others realized how exhausted she was. The weight and muscle tone she'd lost during her confinement dragged at her like an anchor, and she forced her eyes open and gave her people, her friends, one of her half-smiles.

'At least I shouldn't have any trouble remembering the code,' she said, and Venizelos surprised her with a genuine chuckle, for Harkness had used her birthday. She had no idea how he'd happened to remember it, but the senior chief was turning out to be full of surprises.

'All right,' Venizelos said, and looked at LaFollet. 'Andrew?'

'We go down the passage in single file,' the armsman said. 'I take point, then Lady Harrington, Commander McGinley, and you. Here, My Lady.' He handed the memo board to Honor to take his flechette gun in a two-handed grip.

'You're sure of the route?' she asked.

'Positive.' LaFollet took one hand from the gun long enough to tap his temple. 'And I want you to have the map if something...'

He shrugged, and she nodded, heart aching for the risks these people, and Jamie Candless and Bob Whitman, had taken for her. She wanted to say something, to thank them, but there was no time and she didn't have the words, anyway. And so she only smiled at her armsman and put an arm around each of her staff officers, hugging them briefly.

'All right,' she said then, gathering her own weapon back up. 'Let's be about it.'

'Warden Tresca thanks you for your warning, Citizen Admiral,' Harrison Fraiser reported. 'However, he thinks you may be overly alarmed, and he's confident Tepes' crew will soon regain control of their vessel. In the meantime, he's ready to deal with any small craft which may attempt to launch.'

'Oh, that's just wonderful!' This time the mutter came from Shannon Foraker, not Bogdanovich. Tourville glanced at Honeker, and then, to their mutual astonishment, both of them grinned matching helpless what-the- hell-do-we-do-now? grins at one another.

'How so, Shannon?' Honeker asked after a moment, and Tourville wondered if Shannon even noticed that the Peoples commissioner had used her first name.

'Well, I was just thinking, Sir,' the ops officer replied. 'He says he can deal with any small craft that try to launch, right?' The People's commissioner nodded, and Foraker shrugged. 'I'd be more reassured by that if they didn't already have at least one small craft, and an armed one, at that, in space.' Honeker quirked an eyebrow, and Foraker sighed. 'Sir,' she said gently, 'where else