Worlds of Honor

was obviously trying to think of an intelligent answer. It was Ryder's turn to want to glare or mutter curses.

Was agreeing so fast smart?

If we don't have time to spare and don't intend to abort, yes.

That had been a short mental debate, but long enough for the weapons platoon officer to answer. The vehicles would have to be struck below to avoid crowding the deck unacceptably, so once below, they might as well be worked on.

Further calculations showed that Nautilus was strong enough to stand the recoil. Built in an archaic style called 'composite,' with heavy wooden planks on a steel frame, she was nearly a century old and originally built for two steam reciprocating engines instead of her current diesels. If she had survived a century of storms, stresses, and heavy loads, and could still support the weight of loaded freighters on her handling deck, she could undoubtedly survive a few hundred rounds' worth of recoiling mortars and rocket tail- flares.

Still more calculations declared that reducing the airlift requirements by the weight of the heavy weapons and their ammunition would let the ground assault take all the ammunition they still had for their own weapons. Except that a couple of those were staying behind, too—a light machine gun and the one Erewhonese pulser the raiders had brought along.

'Otherwise,' Ryder said, 'the Peeps could fly out in a tourist air bus and drop grenades on your deck. If they hit the ammunition, it could ruin your taste for whiskey forever.'

Everybody was carefully not mentioning the pinnace, although with Peep-quality piloting it might not be much good at low altitude. Ryder carefully did mention one non-trivial problem, which was the legal status of Nautilus and her crew.

'I don't think I can commission you in the Canmore Republic Navy,' Ryder began. 'But if you don't have some military status, the Peeps could shoot you, and King Bira might let them. Never risk being the victim of an atrocity you can't live to laugh over.'

'Any positive suggestions?' Chung said. Captain Biddle looked as if he would rather say something stronger.

'Would and your crew—and Sir Patrick's people—like to volunteer for the Sea Fencibles? We do have our Personnel Officer with us, believe it or not. She leads the Boat Maintenance gang in her spare time. I think she can print up enough certificates to cover everybody.'

'Like a tarpaulin,' Chung said. This time he got Captain Biddle's dirty look.

* * *

Testaniere peered out into a night completely opaque with fog. If the port finally had been blacked out, it could hardly have been any darker. All that told Citizen Commissioner Testaniere that he wasn't looking into the depths of the Central Sea was a dim glow from the tank workshop.

Citizen Sergeant Pescu coughed behind the commissioner, then went on coughing. Testaniere reached for the teapot and poured two cups.

'Warm your throat, please. That's not an order. But you are the last person I want catching a cold from this soggy soup.'

'Thank you.' Pescu drank, then put the half-empty cup down. 'A girl has disappeared.'

'We are not an Office of Missing Persons,' Testaniere said. 'Is there anything particular about her?' He picked up his cup and drank.

'She was—ah, friendly—with several of the Navy ratings. Not any of our SS, to my knowledge, but they wouldn't be telling on themselves.'

Since 'lack of revolutionary virtue' could mean a labor camp or worse, Pescu was probably right. 'Are you implying that one of them killed her?

'Maybe. Or maybe one of the local gangs didn't like her going with off-worlders. Or—'

'She could have been spying?' Testaniere filled in.

Pescu nodded.

'Not impossible. But impossible to tell for whom. We can't terminate agents from the Royal Army's Counter-Intelligence Office, let alone from Euvinophan's staff.'

He did not like the timing, though, in spite of the fog. 'I suggest that we propose a stand-to for dawn tomorrow. Tank crews, security, Field Police, and our Navy friends. I'll sweeten Weldon if you can work on everybody else.'

'I can alert the dawn duty watch, and be there myself. Everybody else may be a bit busy then. The first of the infantry are coming in. Five hundred of them, by truck.'

Testaniere nearly choked on his tea. 'You might have told me this first.'

'I'm sorry, Citizen Commissioner. But after so long, it's hard to believe that it's actually happening.'

* * *

The raiders' reprieve from disaster lasted until Claymore Flight entered both darkness and fog. Maintaining electronic silence meant dubious navigation, worse station-keeping, and eventually total loss of contact with Claymore Three. At that point Ryder and Chung risked IR signals to bring the remaining four freighters down on the first convenient island that offered enough flat surface.

Fortunately, Claymore Three contained only forty people and a single light scout car. The raiders still had more than a hundred and fifty Sea Fencibles, thirty assorted advisers, three scout cars, and an adequate load of everything else needed for light infantry combat and heavy demolitions work.

'It's a good thing you handed out the material on Peep weapons,' Ryder said, as she and Chung stood beside a freighter. A four-Fencible security patrol walked past, feeling their way cautiously forward on the fog-slick rock. 'We may be using them!'

'That would solve the heavy weapons problem nicely,' Chung said. 'And if we can bag the pinnace and their airlift as well, only the Peeps will complain.'

It would need more than captured heavy weapons to be sure of striking the local air base before anything could get off. It would need a force large enough to carry out the original plan of simultaneously striking both the ground-forces depot and the air base. They no longer had that.

But if Chung said that he would try it, he would—and do as well as anyone could. Ryder leaned back into her lover's arms.

'I am losing my enthusiasm for yachting,' he said, into her ear. 'When I knew I was going to try for Manticore, I thought of a vacation on a rented sailboat. You and me, a well-stocked galley, days of wearing nothing but sun screen—'

'You, Sir, assume a good deal.'

'It would be better than a good deal, good lady. Furthermore, I am only assuming that if the idea repelled you, you would have pushed me off a cliff into the sea or otherwise discouraged me some time ago.'

Unfortunately, Ryder had no reply to that. Of course, that was because there was none.

SIX

The four surviving freighters ran in at such low altitude and high speed that the sea was a gray glaze rushing toward Ryder as she stood in the cockpit of Claymore One. The other freighters were leaving visible wakes, and an agile treecat could probably have jumped from sea level into an open hatch of any of the freighters—if they'd dared open a hatch at this speed.

They still hadn't heard from Claymore Three, which suggested either disaster or complete radio discipline. Ryder was betting on the second, and not only to keep up morale. They'd heard a good deal of radio traffic, much of it commercial, some of it in low-grade Peep codes easily broken on the freighter's computer. None of it suggested that anyone ashore knew about Claymore Three, Nautilus, or the four grim gray darts