The Service of the Sword

not only because his own precious skin was aboard. If they tumbled to the hook too quickly, that skin wouldn't be worth very much.

And therein lay the rub. Because if Commodore Dominick was safely under control, Captain Vaccares was another matter entirely. He was primed for that trip to the edge of hell, eager to give the Crippler the kind of baptism of fire that Charles couldn't afford for it to have.

Something would have to be done about that. Something that wouldn't rock the boat Charles had so carefully maneuvered along this potentially treacherous channel for the past few months.

'Charles?'

Charles turned his attention and his smile to Dominick. 'Yes, Commodore?'

'If they're on schedule, we'll have another four days before the Harlequin arrives,' Dominick said. 'While we're waiting, I want to put the crew through some extra simulations.'

'Excellent idea,' Charles agreed. 'How can I help?'

'I want you to supervise the Crippler crew,' the commodore said. 'We're going to practice going up against a Manty warship, and you're the only one who can tell us if the simulation is accurate enough.'

'I'll do what I can,' Charles promised smoothly, even as he felt his stomach muscles bunching up. So Dominick was smelling blood in the water now, too. Damn that Vaccares, anyway.

Still, it could be worse. If the attack on the Harlequin fell out as planned, this particular Manty escort should be too far away to be a problem. And if for some reason it was closer or faster than anticipated, he should still be able to get the Vanguard out before the Manty could move in on them.

And supervising the Crippler drills would be a perfect opportunity to lay the necessary groundwork for that kind of strategic withdrawal. 'When do we begin?' he asked.

'Immediately,' Dominick said, smiling wolfishly. 'If you'll head down to the Crippler ops station, I'll sound battle stations.'

'Certainly,' Charles said, getting to his feet. Besides, he'd known going in that there was a fair chance this house of cards would eventually come tumbling down. That was why his own private yacht was snugged away in Vanguard's Number Four boat bay, and why he'd introduced that little bug into the battlecruiser's transponder and sensor systems so that the yacht wouldn't even be noticed if and when he had to leave.

And it was also why he'd made sure the up-front half of the price he'd negotiated with Hereditary President Harris for the Crippler would be enough to make him a respectable profit. If he never saw the half-on-approval money, he would survive.

He just hoped that if and when he had to vanish the Vanguard would be in a system where he had some contacts. His little sublight runabout wasn't going to take him anywhere else, and he would hate to still be stuck in some Silesian backwater trying to get home when the Havenites came looking for him.

He glanced at the main viewing screen as he crossed the bridge, noting the delicate sweep of a distant comet's tail slashing across the starscape behind it. Back on Old Earth, he knew, comets had been considered bad omens.

Groundless superstition, of course. He hoped.

Directly ahead, visible in all its glory on the cabin viewscreen, the delicate sweep of Baltron-January 2479's tail arched its way across the starscape. Comets, Cardones remembered, had once been considered bad omens.

Groundless superstition, of course. He hoped.

'Your attention, please,' the pilot's voice came over the lounge speakers, and the two dozen well-dressed passengers scattered around paused in their drinking or conversation to listen. 'I'll put it on the main display in a minute, but if you want to look out the right side of the cabin at the comet's head, you should be able to see the main building of the Sun Skater Resort.'

There was no mad rush for the viewports; people with the kind of money these folks had, Cardones reflected, made a point of not looking hurried. Instead, they made a sort of concerted but leisurely drift toward the starboard side, those with glasses still sipping from them, most pretending it was no big deal even as they jockeyed genteelly for the best viewing positions.

Cardones glanced to his left, wondering if Captain Sandler was as amused by it as he was. But if she was, it didn't show in the bland, self-indulgent, wealthy-beyond-all-belief expression she was wearing. It was an expression designed to match those of the rest of the passengers, just as the rest of her posture and behavior let her mix seamlessly with them.

And, not surprisingly, she was doing it far better than Cardones was. He looked back at the crowd by the viewports and wished for the umpteenth time that he'd been able to talk Sandler into picking one of the others for this role instead of him.

But she'd had all the logic on her side, not to mention the command authority to back it up. Even he had had to admit that the probability of the raider attacking the Harlequin within sight of anyone, even the dilettantes lounging around the Sun Skater, was really quite low. The Shadow was silently covering the more likely attack area, and Sandler had insisted the ship be fully crewed with pilot, copilot, and all three techs. Cardones and Sandler had thus been the only two people the spy ship could spare; and so it was Cardones and Sandler who were going to spend a couple of nights in Tyler's Star's premier resort.

In one of the four honeymoon cabins.

Cardones squirmed in his seat. Sandler had made it quietly clear that none of the standard honeymoon activities would be taking place between them, and that she'd booked the cabin solely for its distance and therefore privacy from the main resort complex. But that hadn't stopped Cardones from feeling excessively uncomfortable with the whole arrangement. Nor had it stopped the others, most notably Damana and Pampas, from ribbing him about it.

But all that was forgotten as the camera zoomed in on the resort and he got his first real look at the place.

Sun Skater had been the brainchild of some Solly developer who had noticed Baltron-January 2479 drifting in toward Tyler's Star and seen possibilities no one else had. The entire complex had been thrown up in a matter of months, built onto—and partially sunk into—the comet's five-kilometer-diameter head.

It must have seemed like a fool's fever dream back when the comet was nothing but a huge lump of ice and rock floating out beyond Hadrian's orbit. But now, with the comet in close enough for the solar wind to work its magic, the investment had paid off handsomely. Carefully positioned just past the comet head's midpoint, the resort was squarely in the flow of the ethereal tail being gently boiled off the ice.

It was a vantage point virtually no one in the galaxy had ever had before, and that alone would have guaranteed it at least a trickle of the rich and jaded. Adding in the highly ephemeral nature of the place—for the resort would most likely be abandoned once the comet had circled the sun and its magnificent tail faded away—and that trickle had become a steady stream.

'There's our place,' Sandler murmured from his side, pointing to the left of the main building complex. 'That little red-topped building off to the left. See it?'

Cardones patted her hand in what he hoped was a husbandly sort of way. 'Yes, dear,' he said.

Still, he had to admit that there was a certain kick in being able to call an attractive female superior officer dear. Especially when he'd actually been ordered to do so.

Honeymoon Suite Three was located a hundred meters from the main resort complex, accessible through a half-underground tunnel. Like the tunnel, the suite had been partially sunk into the rocky ice of the comet for stability; and like the rest of the complex, it had the comet's tail sweeping over it, drifting past its windows. It was a strange and curiously magnetic sight, Cardones decided as he stopped their luggage cart just inside the main pressure door and peered out the kitchenette window. Rather like a horizontal snowfall, but without the howling windstorm that would be needed to create such a phenomenon on any normal planet. Here, instead, all was silence and calm.