In Enemy Hands

complicated than the other games by several orders of magnitude, and he'd been confident that the time required to put in the fix would eat up his free time quite nicely.

But now that it was finished, he still had to explain it to his partners in crime, and he drew a deep breath.

'You see,' he began, 'there are an enormous number of variables in this program, and the fact that, in a really big game, every ship in it is being individually controlled by someone, by another human player, not simply the computer, only makes that worse. That means I've gotta be careful how I come at it, 'cause any brute force approach is likely to be pretty damned noticeable, okay?'

Candleman said nothing, but Johnson nodded.

'I can see that,' the corporal agreed. 'You figure that if, say, the order of arrival in the Tango Variant suddenly started favoring the Sollies every time it was played, or if one players ships started disobeying his orders, somebody'd get wise.'

'Exactly!' Harkness congratulated him. 'So what I did, I set it up so that when you plug one of the user IDs I've flagged into the player queue, you get a little edge. You'll have to be careful using it, but basically, if you double-tap the firing key in an iffy situation, the computer will add a fifty-percent bonus to your probability of scoring a hit.'

'Oh boy! That part I understand!' Candleman put in happily.

'Figured you would,' Harkness told him with a grin. 'Like I say, you've gotta be careful not to overuse it, but it should give you a good advantage in a close situation. I've also worked in an adjustment to the damage allocation subroutine. If one of 'our' ships takes a hit, the damage allocator will reduce the damage applied to it. That part still needs a little work to fine tune it, and I've got a few more ideas, but basically, what you guys are gonna have to do is play this one out on a game-for-game basis. 'Course, with this kind of edge, you oughta be able to sharp some poor sucker pretty damned well.'

'I'd think so, yeah,' Johnson agreed with a smile. 'Thanks.' He took the chip from Candleman and bounced it in his palm for a moment. 'You're all right, Harkness,' he said after a second. 'And you're worth every centicredit of your cut, too.'

'Glad you think so,' Harkness said with an answering smile. 'I like to think I earn my way wherever I am, Corp, and I always look after my friends.'

Chapter Twenty-Seven

'Message from Tepes, Citizen Admiral.'

Lester Tourville raised a hand at Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser’s announcement, interrupting his conversation with Citizen Captain Bogdanovich and Everard Honeker, and turned towards the com officer.

'What does it say, Harrison?' His voice carried no emotion whatsoever, yet its very neutrality seemed to shout his tension, for Count Tilly was six hundred and ninety hours out of Barnett, with the white, G3 furnace of Cerberus-B twenty-four light-minutes ahead of her.

'Tepes will continue to a parking orbit around Hades, but we're to place ourselves in orbit around Cerberus-B-3, Citizen Admiral,' Fraiser replied respectfully, then paused and cleared his throat. 'There's a personal attachment from Citizen Committeewoman Ransom,' he added. 'She says that you, Citizen Commissioner Honeker, Citizen Captain Bogdanovich, and Citizen Commander Foraker should report to her on Hades by pinnace at oh-nine-hundred local tomorrow.'

'Well isn't that just ducky,' Bogdanovich grunted with an obvious disgust every member of Tourville's staff understood only too well. Their original orders had been to accompany Tepes clear to Hades, and the abrupt change at this late date struck all of them as being almost as incompetent as it was insulting. 'They don't want a Navy ship any closer to their precious prison than they have to let her,' Bogdanovich went on. 'Probably think we'd open fire on it or some goddamned thing!'

The chief of staffs vicious voice carried an outright hatred he would never have allowed to show a month before. It cut like a lash, but Honeker didn't even bat an eyelid. He'd had plenty of time during the voyage here to realize he was just as doomed as Tourville and his officers. He supposed he should blame Tourville for that, but he couldn't. He'd gone into it with open eyes, and he was still convinced the Navy officer had been right. Cordelia Ransom's determination to have Honor Harrington judicially murdered was going to be a disaster for everyone, not just for the people who'd tried to prevent it. The Solarian League would be almost as infuriated as the Manties and their allies, which could have devastating consequences for the movement of technology from the League to the PRH, and altogether too many members of the Republic’s own military would be just as sickened and shamed by it as Tourville had predicted. And quite aside from all the pragmatic considerations that made executing her an act of lunacy, trying to keep Harrington alive had been the right thing to do morally, as well.

No, much as he regretted, and feared, the consequences, Honeker couldn't fault Tourville for making the effort or enlisting his own tacit support. And that had produced an odd effect on Everard Honeker. He'd come aboard Count Tilly, and before that aboard Tourville’s old flagship, Rash al- Din, to spy on him for StateSec and the Committee of Public Safety, and though he'd learned to like the aggressive, hard-fighting rear admiral, he'd never forgotten he was Tourville's keeper. That there must always be that sense of separation, of standing apart and watching warily for signs of unreliability.

But the separation had vanished now. Perhaps it was only because Honeker knew they were both doomed, yet it was a vast relief nonetheless. And partly, he knew, it was because he no longer had to lie, to others or to himself, to justify actions he'd always known deep inside couldn't be justified. By betraying and condemning him for trying to do his duty despite its own idiocy, the system had finally freed him from his bondage to it, and he realized, now, that 'unreliables' like Lester Tourville and his staff were far better champions of the cause he'd once thought the Committee served than people like Cordelia Ransom could ever be.

Unaware of the thoughts behind his people's commissioner's silence, Tourville simply nodded to Bogdanovich, for the citizen captain was obviously correct. The entire Cerberus System was a monumental tribute to the institutional paranoia of the PRH’s security services, old and new alike. Its coordinates weren't even in Count Tilly's astrogation database, for the very existence of the system, much less its location, had been classified by the Office of Internal Security when the old regime first authorized Camp Charon's construction. Even today, or perhaps especially today, that information was a fanatically guarded secret known only to StateSec, and the fact that no one else had the slightest idea of where to find it was but the first layer of a defense in depth.

In all his years of naval service, Tourville had seldom seen orbital defenses as massive as those which surrounded Hades, otherwise known as Cerberus-B-2, and its three largish moons. The data on it available to Count Tilly was severely limited, but Citizen Captain Vladovich had given her a fragmentary download when it was assumed she would accompany Tepes all the way in. He'd had to, for the planet-moon system was literally smothered with firepower which would have made short work of any ship which made a single wrong move. Yet even a cursory glance at Vladovich's information had been enough to show that StateSec's chronic distrust had produced a bizarre defensive arrangement whose like neither Tourville nor any member of his staff had ever imagined.

There wasn't a single manned fortress in the entire star system. Shoals of mines, old-fashioned 'contact' nukes designed to kill small craft as well as the laser buoys designed to shoot LAC’s and starships, and both seemingly thick enough to walk across, surrounded the planet and its moons, seeded with more sophisticated and modern energy platforms for good measure, and he suspected there were ground-based missiles on the planet, at least, if not on the moons. Taken all together, Hades must have had the raw combat power of a full squadron of super-dreadnoughts... but all of those weapons were remote-controlled from Camp Charon. There wasn't even an orbital cargo station. Everything within a good light-minute of the planet was covered by massive amounts of firepower, but no permanent manned orbital presence of any sort had been tolerated, and Tourville wondered why that was.

To be sure, minefields and energy platforms were cheaper than manned systems would have been, and