In Enemy Hands

Scotty Tremaine was at Bug Out Two's controls, with McKeon in the copilot's seat, and he watched the digital timer on the instrument panel count down and prayed that Harkness had gotten it right. It felt disloyal to doubt the senior chief, but surely it was too much to expect him to get everything right! And if he hadn't...

The third shuttle came screaming out of Boat Bay Four under maximum reaction power. Its carefully programmed flight path brought it whipping up past Tepes' armored flank, then steadied down on a course away from Hades with Tepes directly between it and the planet. Its impeller wedge came up as soon as it was clear of the ship, and its acceleration leapt instantly to four hundred gravities.

'Impeller signature!' Shannon Foraker barked.

Count Tilly had killed her velocity relative to Hades and started back the way she'd come, but she remained far beyond any range at which she could have intervened in what was happening in Hades orbit. The drone she'd launched was still too far out for good detail resolution, but it was close enough to see the brilliant gravitic beacon of a pinnace streaking for the stars. For that matter, her shipboard sensors easily picked up its impeller wedge, and Foraker clenched her jaw as the small vessel raced for freedom.

'Do they have it from Camp Charon?' Tourville asked urgently.

'They must, Sir,' she said grimly, and looked up to meet her admiral's eyes. Then she looked back at her display, already knowing what she would see.

Most of the defenses around Hades were designed to kill starships, not something as small and agile as a shuttle. None of the energy platforms or hunter-killer missiles could target something that tiny, not efficiently, and Camp Charon was in no mood to try. Nor did it need to, for that was why the old-fashioned area-effect mines had been emplaced. And so the ground base waited calmly until the small craft passed almost directly between two hundred-megaton mines, then pressed a button.

'Now!' McKeon said sharply, and Scotty Tremaine gave his thrusters one more nudge that sent Bug Out Two sliding rapidly away from Tepes. The shuttles onboard sensors were temporarily useless, blinded by the enormous power of that explosion... but so, hopefully, were those of Camp Charon.

'Should be activating just... about... now!' McKeon said, and looked through the view port at the battlecruiser shrinking against the stars.

The small craft of all impeller-drive navies have at least one thing in common. They may be larger or smaller, armed or unarmed, fast or slow, but every single one of them is fitted with safety features to prevent it from bringing up its drive when any solid object large enough to endanger it, or to be endangered by it, lies within the perimeter of its impeller wedge. And above all, it is impossible to accidentally activate an impeller wedge while still within a boat bay.

But those safeguards, while as near to infallible as they can be made, are designed to prevent accidents, and what happened in PNS Tepes' Boat Bay Four was no accident. The only vessel left in it was the pinnace upon which Scotty Tremaine had labored, and now Horace Harkness' last program brought its systems on-line. But Scotty had made one small alteration: he had physically cut the links between the pinnace's sensors and its autopilot. The flight computers could no longer 'see' the boat bay about them. As far as they could tell, they could have been in deepest, darkest interstellar space, and so they felt no concern at all when they were commanded to bring the pinnace's wedge up while it still lay in its docking buffers.

'My God.'

Shannon Foraker’s hushed whisper seemed to echo and re-echo across Count Tilly's flag deck as PNS Tepes blew apart.

No, Lester Tourville thought shakenly. No, she didn't blow apart; she simply came apart. She... disintegrated.

And that, he realized, was precisely the right word. The battlecruiser’s fusion plants blew as their mag bottles failed, spewing white-hot fury amid the wreckage, but it didn't really matter. Nothing could have survived that dreadful, wrenching blow from inside her hull. All the fusion plants did was vaporize a few score tons of wreckage and silhouette the rest of it against a star-bright fury, like snowflakes in a ground car's headlights.

He stared in awe at the visual images of the carnage transmitted from their RD to the main view screen, and he knew how it had happened. He'd never actually seen it before, but there was only one thing the Manties could possibly have done to produce that effect, and a corner of his mind wondered distantly how they'd gotten past the fail-safes that were supposed to make it impossible.

Everard Honeker stood before him, even more stunned than any officer on the flag bridge, and Tourville drew a deep breath as he looked at the People's commissioners back. He glanced around at the rest of his staff and their yeomen, every one of them as hypnotized as Honeker. All except Shannon Foraker, still bent over her display, seemed unable to think beyond the stunning shock of what had happened, but Tourville could, and a strange, vaulting exuberance warred with his horror at so many deaths. He knew he should be as numb as the others, as incapable of thought, but he couldn't help himself, couldn't keep a single thought from tolling through his brain.

Cordelia Ransom was dead. And so was Henry Vladovich and all the other people aboard that ship who'd known what Ransom had planned for Lester Tourville and his staff. No one else knew, for they'd stopped nowhere between Barnett and here, and Ransom had taken too much pleasure out of keeping them dangling in suspense to tell anyone what she intended. But now she was gone, and all her files and her entire personal staff were gone with her, and if it was wrong to rejoice when so many people had died, he was sorry, but he just couldn't help it.

And then he saw Shannon Foraker's right hand come out of her lap and move slowly, almost stealthily, towards her panel. Something about its movement caught at his attention, and he crossed quietly to stand behind her. She heard him and looked up, and her hand moved away from the 'ERASE' key even more slowly, and far more reluctantly, than it had come.

Tourville gazed down over her shoulder at the tactical recording she'd been replaying, and his jaw clenched as he saw what she'd seen: two pieces of wreckage, larger than most of the others, and on a vector which had clearly taken them away from the murdered battlecruiser before she exploded. A vector which just happened to look very much like an unpowered reentry course.

He looked at them for another long moment, rubbing his fierce mustache with one finger. Shannon’s drone had seen them, but it was highly unlikely Hades' EMP-blinded sensors had picked them up in time, and with the destruction of the 'fleeing' pinnace, no one would even think to look for them. He felt a deep flicker of admiration for whoever had thought this one up, but he knew what his duty required of him.

Yes, I know what 'duty' requires, he thought, and reached down past Shannon’s shoulder to press his own finger firmly on the 'ERASE' key. He heard Shannon inhale sharply, saw her head twitch, but she didn't say a word, and he turned away from her panel. He walked across to where Honeker and Bogdanovich stood, both still staring in awe at the visual imagery of the spreading pattern of wreckage relayed by Shannon's drone, and cleared his throat.

'Too bad,' he said gravely, and the sound of his voice startled Honeker into turning to look at him. 'There can't be any survivors,' Tourville told his commissioner, and shook his head regretfully. 'Too bad... Lady Harrington deserved better than that.'

Epilogue

She woke slowly, and that was very unlike her. Thirty-five years of naval service had trained her to awaken