War Of Honor

find, then this would be one of the best days she'd had in months, possibly years. And if he was wrong . . . Well, she was only a Marine. None of the crap was going to splash on her for following orders, and she'd never much liked Sollies, anyway.

* * *

The pinnace settled into the docking arms, the personnel tube mated with the lock, and the Solarian merchant marine lieutenant Kanjcevic had sent down to greet their visitors straightened into what might charitably have been called a posture of attention. He didn't much care for Manties—damned arrogant upstarts; that's what they were, crowding Solarian shipping lines all the time—but he'd been ordered to make nice this time. Given the circumstances, he thought that was an excellent idea, however much it might gripe him to do anything of the sort, and he pasted a smile on his face as the green light of a good seal showed above the tube hatch.

The smile disappeared into sickly shock as that same hatch slid open and he suddenly found himself looking down the business end of a stun rifle. One held in the powered gauntlets of a Royal Manticoran Marine in the menacing bulk of battle armor. A Marine, a corner of the lieutenant's stunned brain noted with something almost like detachment, who appeared to be followed by dozens of other Marines . . . most of whom appeared to be armed with things considerably more lethal than stunners.

'My name is Hammond, Lieutenant,' the Marine behind the stun rifle said over her armor's external speakers in a soprano which would probably have been pleasantly melodious under other circumstances. 'Captain Hammond, Royal Manticoran Marines. I suggest you take me to your captain.'

'I—I—' The lieutenant swallowed hard. 'Uh, what's the meaning of this?' he demanded. Or tried to demand, anyway; it came out sounding more like a bleat of terrified confusion.

'This vessel is suspected of violating the provisions of the Cherwell Convention,' Hammond told him, and felt a profound sense of internal satisfaction at the way his face went suddenly bone-white. 'So I suggest,' she went on as the rest of her boarding party swiftly and competently secured the boat bay, 'that you see about getting me to your captain. Now.'

* * *

'It's confirmed, Skipper,' Denise Hammond told Captain Ackenheil. There was no visual, because she was speaking to him over her helmet com, but he didn't need a visual from her. He'd already seen the imagery from the external cameras of the Marines who'd forced the hatches into Wayfarer's 'passenger cabins.' Even in Silesia and even aboard freighters with strictly limited personnel space, passengers were seldom packed in twelve to the cabin.

Of course, Wayfarer's crew had managed to save a little space for them in their quarters. After all, they didn't need much space to store their personal belongings when they didn't have any . . . including clothing of any sort.

The expressions of abject terror on the faces of those naked, hopeless 'passengers' had been enough to turn a man's stomach. But the moment when they realized they were looking at Royal Marines, not the bully boy guards of the owners to whom they had been consigned, had been something else again. Indeed, seeing it had given him almost as much pleasure as the sick, stunned expression on Kanjcevic's face when she realized what had happened. And when she remembered that under the terms of solemn interstellar treaties, the Star Kingdom of Manticore equated violation of the Cherwell Convention's prohibitions on trafficking in human beings with piracy.

Which was punishable by death.

'Good work, Denise,' he said sincerely. 'Very good work. Keep an eye on things over there for another twenty minutes, and I'll have the prize crew across to you.'

'Aye, aye, Sir. We'll be here.'

* * *

'Do you know what I hate most about our political lords and masters?' Dr. Wix demanded.

Jordin Kare tipped back his chair and cocked his head with a quizzical expression as he regarded the astrophysicist who'd just burst unceremoniously through his office door. It was very early in the day—which was the only reason Wix had gotten past the secretary who would have intercepted him during regular working hours—and Kare's coffee cup sat steaming on the corner of his blotter beside a half-eaten croissant.

'No,' he said mildly, picking up his napkin and brushing crumbs from his lips. 'I don't know what you hate most about our political lords and masters, TJ. But I feel somehow certain that you can scarcely wait to enlighten me.'

'Um?' Wix stopped just inside the door, alerted by his superior's tone of voice that he'd just committed a social faux pas. Then he had the grace to blush. 'Oops. Sorry, Boss. I forgot it was breakfast time for you.'

'For me? Most people eat breakfast even earlier than I do, TJ—between the time they get up and the time they begin work,' Kare pointed out. Then he noticed Wix's somewhat scruffy appearance and sighed. 'TJ, you did go home last night at some point, didn't you?'

'Well, actually . . . no,' Wix admitted. Kare drew a deep breath, but before he could deliver yet another homily on the desirability of something resembling a normal sleep schedule, the younger scientist hurried on.

'I was going to, honest. But one thing led to another, and, well—' He twitched one shoulder in impatient dismissal. 'Anyway,' he went on more enthusiastically, 'I was looking at that latest data run—you know, the one Argonaut pulled in last week?'

Kare recognized the futility of trying to introduce any other topic until Wix had run down about this one and resigned himself.

'Yes,' he said. 'I know the data you're talking about.'

'Well,' Wix went on, starting to bounce around the office in his excitement, 'I went back and reran them, and damned if I don't think we've actually hit the proper approach vector. Oh,' he waved one hand as Kare let his chair come suddenly back upright, 'we still have a lot of refining to do, and I want to make at least two or three more runs to get a broader observational base to double-check my rough calculations. But unless I'm mistaken, the analysis is going to confirm that we've hit the target pretty much on the nose.'

'I wish,' Kare said after a moment, 'that you'd stop doing this, TJ.'

'Doing what?' Wix asked, obviously confused by his superior's tone of voice.

'Finding things ahead of schedule,' Kare told him. 'After the Director and I spent days hammering home the need for us to do all of the time-consuming detail work, you turn around and find the damned approach vector a good four months early! Do you have any idea how hard this is going to make it to convince the politicos that they should listen to us the next time we tell them we need more time to complete our research?'

'Of course I do,' Wix told him in a moderately affronted tone. 'That's what I hate most about our political lords and masters, if you'll remember the way I began this conversation. Besides, it really sours my day to start it off by literally stumbling across something which I ought to feel only pleased about finding and then realize how much it pisses me off to realize I'm going to do exactly what the idiots I work for wanted done all along. Well, that and the way the assholes are going to steal the credit for it.'

'You do realize how paranoid—if not petty—this entire conversation makes two reasonably intelligent adults sound, don't you?' Kare asked with a wry grin, and Wix shrugged.

'I don't feel particularly paranoid, and I don't think we're the petty ones. In fact, that's why it pisses me off—I don't like working for a prime minister who's so damned petty. Besides, as soon as we tell them about it, that asshole Oglesby is going to be back over here for another news conference. At which you and Admiral Reynaud will be doing well to get a single word in edgewise.'

'Oh, no, TJ! Not this time,' Kare said with a seraphic smile. 'You found it, so this time you're the one who's going to be doing well to get a single word in edgewise.'

* * *

'That was delicious, Your Grace,' Mercedes Brigham sighed, sitting back from the breakfast table with a comfortable sense of repletion. The plate before her bore the sticky remains of her eggs Benedict's hollandaise sauce and a few bacon crumbs, while the rind of a musk melon stood up like the keel of a stripped ark on a smaller plate, accompanied by two purple grapes which had somehow escaped the massacre of their fellows.

Honor's breakfast, as always, had been considerably more substantial, as a concession to her enhanced metabolism, and she smiled at Brigham's comment as she reached for the cocoa carafe and poured herself another mug.