The Service of the Sword

instance, Refuge has a secondary moon—more of a captured hunk of loose rock, actually—that doesn't appear. We're finding some other little items like that. Small stuff, nothing significant or worth worrying about. But it's an interesting exercise, especially for my newbies.'

'Good, but don't get too attached to it. I don't imagine we'll be hanging around very long after we recover Ms. Hearns and her party.'

'Understood.' Atkins looked around for a moment, then leaned closer to the executive officer. 'Is it true she left her watchdogs at the pinnace?' she asked quietly, with a slight smile.

'Now, how did you hear that?' Watson responded.

'Chief Palmer made some observations for me on his way to the planet,' Atkins said. 'When he reported them to Chief Abrams, he . . . might have commented on it.'

'I see.' Watson snorted. 'You know, the grapevine aboard this ship must be made out of fiber optic, given how quick it works!' She shook her head. 'In answer to your question, however, yes. She left Gutierrez and his people at the landing field. I don't think the Sergeant was particularly happy about it, either.'

'He doesn't think she's actually in any sort of danger, does he?' Atkins asked in a more serious tone.

'On a planet full of nonviolent religious types?' Watson snorted again, harder, then paused. 'Well, Gutierrez is a Marine, so I suppose he could be a little less trusting than us Navy types. But my read right this minute is that he's just a bit on the disgusted side. I think he's put her down as one of those Little Ms. Sunshine types who think the universe is populated solely by kindly, helpful souls.'

'Abigail?' Atkins shook her head. 'She's a Grayson, Ma'am.'

'I know that. You know that. Hell, Gutierrez knows that! But he's also down on a planet we don't know anything about, really, on a first-hand basis, and his pablum-brained midshipwoman has just gone traipsing off on her own with the locals. Not something exactly designed to give a Marine the most lively possible faith in her judgment.'

'You think it was the wrong decision?' Atkins asked curiously.

'No, not really. I'm going to give her a little grief over it, when we get her back aboard, and suggest that I sent those Marines along for a reason. But I'm not going to smack her for it, because I think I know why she did it. Besides, she's the one down there, not me, and over all, I think I have considerable faith in her judgment.'

'Well,' Atkins said, after a glance at the bulkhead time/date display, 'she's been dirtside for almost four hours now. Nothing seems to have gone wrong so far, and I suppose she should be heading back shortly.'

'As a matter of fact, she's on her way back to the pinnace right now,' Watson agreed, 'and—'

'Hyper footprint!' The tactical rating whose report interrupted the exec sounded surprised, but his voice was crisp. 'Looks like two ships in company, bearing zero-three-four by zero-one-niner!'

Watson wheeled towards him, eyebrows rising, then crossed quickly back to the command chair at the center of the bridge and hit the button that deployed the tactical repeater plot. She gazed down into it, watching until CIC updated it with the red caret that indicated an unidentified hyper footprint on Gauntlet's starboard bow at just over sixteen light-minutes.

'Well, well, well,' she murmured, and pressed a com stud on the chair arm.

'Captain speakin',' Michael Oversteegen's voice acknowledged.

'Sir, it's the Exec,' she told him. 'We've got an unidentified hyper footprint at roughly two hundred and eighty-eight million kilometers. Looks like it might be a pair of them.'

'Do we, indeed?' Oversteegen said in a thoughtful voice. 'Now, what do you think someone might be doin' in a system like Tiberian?'

'Well, Sir, unless they're as noble, virtuous, and aboveboard as we are, then I suppose it's possible they might be nasty old pirates.'

'The same thought had occurred t' me,' Oversteegen said, and then his voice went crisper. 'Send the crew t' Action Stations, Linda. I'm on my way.'

Abigail leaned back in her comfortable chair in the pinnace's passenger compartment, watching the dark indigo of Refuge's stratosphere give way to the black of space, and considered what she'd learned from Brother Tobias and Brother Heinrich.

It wasn't much, she reflected. In fact, she doubted she'd learned a single thing that hadn't already been included in the captain's ONI analyses. Except that it was pretty evident that the captain had been right about the way Star Warrior's captain had rubbed the Refugians the wrong way during his own visit to Tiberian.

It wasn't anything Tobias or Heinrich had said, so much as the way they hadn't said it, she thought. She hated to admit it, but their attitude towards Star Warrior and her crew was precisely the same as the one certain Graysons must have had when Lady Harrington first visited Yeltsin's Star. The irreligious outsiders had come blundering into their star system, bringing with them all of their own, hopelessly secular concerns and all of their readiness to shed blood, and they'd hated it.

It seemed likely to Abigail that both Star Warrior's captain and the landing party from the Erewhonese cruiser which had followed up the destroyer's disappearance had taken exactly the wrong tack with the Fellowship of the Elect. She was sure they hadn't deliberately stepped on the Refugians' sensibilities, but they did seem to have radiated precisely the sort of eagerness to find and destroy their enemies which the Refugian religion would have found most distasteful.

And whatever might have been true in Star Warrior's case, the cruiser which had followed her to Tiberian had obviously been in vengeance-seeking mode. Clearly, the members of her crew who had spoken with Brother Heinrich and his fellow Elders had been both baffled by and at least a little contemptuous of the locals' rejection of their own eagerness to hunt down and destroy whoever had attacked their destroyer.

To be fair to the Fellowship's Elders, they'd recognized that however nonviolent their own religion might be, the suppression of the sort of piracy which had apparently murdered several thousand of their fellow believers was an abomination in the sight of God. That hadn't made them happy about their Erewhonese visitors' attitudes, however. Nor had it made them any less aware of their own religion's commands against violence, and their cooperation, however sincere, had been grudging.

It had taken Abigail a good hour to overcome that grudgingness, herself, and she'd come to the reluctant conclusion that Captain Oversteegen had chosen the right person for the job, after all. It irked her enormously. Which, she had been forced to admit, was petty of her . . . which only made it even more irksome, of course. Her own beliefs were in a great many ways very different from those of the Refugians. For one thing, while Father Church taught that violence should never be a first resort, his doctrine also enshrined the belief that it was the duty of the godly to use whatever tools were required when evil threatened. As Saint Austen had said, 'He who does not oppose evil by all means in his power becomes its accomplice.' The Church of Humanity believed that—helped, no doubt, she admitted, by the threat Masada had presented for so long—and she found the Refugians' hesitance to take up the sword themselves very difficult to understand. Or to sympathize with. Yet at least she understood its basis and depth, and that meant she was undoubtedly a far better choice as Gauntlet's emissary than any of her hopelessly secular fellow middies would have been.

Now if only the trip had actually turned up some vital information that would have led them to the pirates! Unfortunately, as helpful as the Elders had been, in the end, they hadn't been able to tell her anything that seemed significant to her. She'd recorded the entire meeting, and the captain might be able to find something in the recording that she'd missed at the time, but she doubted it. Which meant—

'Excuse me, Ms. Hearns.'

Abigail looked up, startled out of her thoughts by Chief Palmer's voice.

'Yes, Chief. What is it?'

'Ma'am, the Captain is on the com. He wants to speak to you.'

'Oh, damn!' Haicheng Ringstorff muttered in tones of profound disgust. 'Tell me you're lying, George!'

'I wish.' If possible, Lithgow sounded even more disgusted than his superior. 'But it's confirmed. It's Tyler and Lamar, all right. And our nosy friend couldn't have missed their footprints if he'd tried.'

'Crap.' Ringstorff shoved himself back in his chair and glared at his com display. Not that he was pissed off with Lithgow. Then he sighed and shook his head in resignation.