In Enemy Hands

because they weren't manned, there was no need to come up with personnel to crew them. Of course, 'cheap' was a purely relative term where defenses on this scale were concerned, but even purely relative savings mounted up. He could understand that, just as he understood that StateSec's decision, like that of InSec, before it, to conceal this place’s location from its own military had meant they couldn't call in Navy personnel to man its defenses. But surely they could have come up with sufficient personnel of their own to man at least a cargo station! That would have tremendously simplified the transshipment of freight (and prisoners) from orbit to surface, so why not do it? Were they so paranoid they didn't trust anyone, even their own, in orbit above them?

He didn't know the answer to that, and he doubted he ever would. Nor did he understand why they'd bothered with orbital defenses at all. If they weren't going to let the Navy know where the system was and put a picket force into it, then all the mines and remote energy platforms in the galaxy were ultimately useless, for a planet suffered from one enormous tactical disadvantage: it couldn't dodge. An attacker always knew exactly where it was, and that meant a single battlecruiser, probably even a heavy cruiser, could take out every weapon orbiting Hades with old-fashioned nuclear warheads launched on purely ballistic courses from beyond the defenses' own range. A few dozen fifty or sixty- megaton detonations would blow gaping holes in the massive, interlocking shells of mines, and not even modern hardening could have prevented the EMP from at least temporarily crippling the electronics of any spaceborne platform that survived outright destruction. He supposed ground-based missiles on the planet or its moons (if, in fact, there were some) would survive, but any competent defensive planner knew purely orbital systems, even proper fortresses with bubble sidewalls, were ultimately useless against mobile attackers.

The only explanation he could come up with was that whoever had ordered the immense (and wasted) expenditure to put this abortion together hadn't bothered to consult a competent defensive planner. Well, that actually made a sort of sense, didn't it? If you distrusted your own military personnel so much that you refused even to tell them a prison existed, far less where it was, lest they decide to attack it for some unimaginable reason, then you were hardly likely to ask those same people for advice on how to fortify it against themselves, now were you?

But whatever the rationale behind the emplacements, Yuri was right; the paranoiacs who'd put them up would never allow a warship manned by anyone except their own people any closer to Hades than they had to. And parking Count Tilly clear out around Cerberus-B-3 would put her a full seventeen light- minutes from the prison planet, and condemn Tourville, Honeker, Bogdanovich, and Foraker to an almost three-hour pinnace flight to reach it. Well, at least Tilly would be well outside the range of the defensive shell, too. In his present mood, Lester Tourville had to consider that a major plus.

'Very well,' he said to Fraiser at last. 'I assume Citizen Captain Hewitt already has that information?' Fraiser nodded, and Tourville shrugged. 'In that case, inform Citizen Committeewoman Ransom her message has been received.'

No one on Flag Bridge missed the fact that he hadn't told Fraiser to acknowledge Ransom's message, thus confirming her orders would actually be obeyed. Nor did any of them, including Honeker, fail to grasp that by Navy standards, a simple, curt notice of receipt was, in fact, a none-too-veiled insult to the message's originator. It was possible Ransom might not realize that, but, frankly, Tourville no longer really cared what Cordelia Ransom did or did not realize.

Count Tilly's vector diverged gradually from Tepes', and Tourville watched the small, bright dot of Cerberus-B-3 grow slowly on the main view screen.

Horace Harkness twitched as the chrono under his pillow beeped. He'd taken it off his wrist and shoved it under the pillow to keep its sound from waking anyone else, and he swallowed a silent curse as it beeped again. He hadn't been to sleep all night, though no one would have thought it to look at him, or he hoped they wouldn't have, anyway, and he'd set the alarm as the only way he could think of to keep himself from checking the time at compulsive five-minute intervals. He'd been confident the pillow would swallow its sound completely, yet now that the thing had gone off, its muted voice seemed to echo in the darkened compartment like thunder.

But that was all in his mind, he told himself firmly, not that his pulse rate seemed impressed by his firmness. It was only because the beep told him it was time to put his plans into operation. Well, that and the fact that he realized just what a piss-poor chance he had of actually carrying all this off. Unfortunately, they were the only plans he'd been able to come up with, which didn't offer him a lot of options.

The chrono beeped yet again, and his hand darted under the pillow to silence it. Then he drew a deep breath, licked his lips, and sat up in his bunk. He swung his legs over the side and stood very slowly, bare feet silent on the decksole. Heinrich Johnson's deep, slow breathing and Hugh Candleman’s nasal snores didn't even falter, and his jaw clenched. This was the part he'd hated most when he planned it, but he had no choice, and he drifted across the deck like a ghost. The faint glow of the night-light Candleman insisted on leaving on lent a dim illumination to the compartment, which let him watch where he was going as he moved noiselessly towards Johnson's bunk. He reached its head and paused, drawing another of those deep silent breaths, and then he struck.

His left hand snapped out, grasping Johnson’s chin and yanking it upward, pushing the back of the StateSec man's head harder into his pillow and arching his neck. The corporal's eyes opened, unfocused and confused, but he hadn't even realized he was awake, much less what was happening, when Harkness' right hand came down like an axe. Johnson started to suck in air, but any shout he might have given died in an agonized wheeze as his larynx shattered. He thrashed and jerked, hands pawing at his throat while he fought for breath that wouldn't come, but Harkness had already turned away. Heinrich Johnson was already a dead man; he simply hadn't realized it yet, and Harkness still had Candleman to worry about.

The second StateSec guard made a snorting sound and stirred sleepily. For all their violence, Johnson’s death throes weren't very loud, and Candleman never had a chance to realize what the harsh, choking sounds which had penetrated his sleep might portend. He was still moving muzzily towards the boundary of wakefulness when two callused hands locked on his head and twisted explosively. For just an instant, the sickening crunch of vertebrae seemed to completely bury the sounds of Johnson’s fading, desperate efforts to breathe, and then those sounds, too, died, and Horace Harkness stood back in the darkness, closed his eyes, and shuddered with sick loathing.

It wasn't the first time he'd killed, but it was the first time he'd killed someone he actually knew or done it with his bare hands rather than missiles or an energy mount, and it was different this way. He felt unclean, for neither Johnson nor Candleman had even guessed what was coming. But that had been the point. He couldn't have allowed them to guess, and so he'd had to become their partner, their good friend and buddy the venal ex-Manty, so that he could murder them in their sleep.

His fists clenched at his sides, and he stood motionless but for the tiny shudders he couldn't quite still. But then his nostrils flared, and he opened his eyes once more. He'd already been through this when he planned the entire thing, and he'd been right then. He'd had no choice, and he knew it, and however pleasant Johnson and Candleman might have been drinking beer while they planned their next scam, they'd also been StateSec thugs. God only knew how many people they'd helped others of their kind to torture or kill. That thought might be an attempt to salve his conscience, but that didn't make it untrue, either, and he turned away from the dead men to their lockers.

Both of them were locked, but Horace Harkness had opened quite a few locks which had belonged to someone else over the course of a checkered career, and he had the advantage of having watched their owners open these dozens of times. He input the combinations quickly, and his mouth twitched in a hungry smile as the lockers' internal lights gleamed on his dead watchdogs' weapons.

He strapped Johnson’s gun belt around his own waist before he drew and checked the pulser. Magazine and capacitor both showed full, and he went quickly through the belt pouches to confirm the presence of extra magazines and power packs. Then he shoved one of the corporal's uniform tunics and a pair of trousers into a laundry bag and turned to Candleman's locker. He made the same check on the private's side arm and hung the second gun belt diagonally from right shoulder to left hip like a bandoleer, then closed the lockers, scooped up the minicomp he'd used to rig the game software, and plugged it into the access slot on the compartment