The Shadow of Saganami

needs to clear that with his own superiors, he should have time before we actually head down.'

'Aye, aye, Sir. I'll get right on it.'

'Good. Terekhov, clear.'

The captain cut the com link and looked up. Ragnhild had already disappeared in Helen's wake, and he gazed at the tactical plot. There were more orbital installations and traffic than he'd anticipated from Bernardus' description of the Split economy and tech base, although the plot still looked incredibly sparse compared to what it would have shown around Manticore, Sphinx, or Gryphon.

'Guns.'

'Yes, Sir?' Naomi Kaplan said.

'I want to know just what orbital assets the Kornatians have. I expect they'll be perfectly willing to brief us on their capabilities, but sometimes there's a discrepancy between what people tell you they can do and the capabilities of the hardware they actually have in place. Put out some arrays to give us a look at the far side of the planet. Then run a detailed analysis of every ship and satellite out there. I'd like you and Lieutenant Hearns to be prepared to give me a full-dress brief on your findings right after breakfast tomorrow.'

'Aye, aye, Sir. We'll be there,' Kaplan assured him, and began giving instructions of her own to her ratings.

Terekhov gave the plot one more brief examination, glanced at the main visual display and the huge blue and white globe of Kornati, then stood. If he was going to go call upon the local head of state, acting or no, it behooved him to make the best impression that he could, and Chief Steward Agnelli would never forgive him if he didn't give her enough time to make him what she considered presentable.

* * *

'They're here.'

The voice didn't identify itself. On the other hand, it didn't have to. First, because Nordbrandt recognized it. And, second, because it was speaking over one of the secure military coms which had been landed the evening before. Only four people, including Nordbrandt, had so far received those.

'You're positive?' she asked.

'They've contacted the graybacks to clear their small craft into the spaceport,' Drazen Divkovic replied. 'I'm not sure of their arrival time, but Rajkovic'll want to see them as soon as possible.'

'Agreed.'

Nordbrandt frowned at the drably painted wall of her one-sun's kitchen. She knew why Drazen had contacted her directly this way, and a part of her agreed with him. But it was too soon. The Manties' guard would be up, and the essentially civilian weapons her action groups had used against Kornatian opposition would be grossly inadequate against Manticoran hardware. Her people needed the time to become reasonably proficient with their new weapons before they crossed swords with the Manties.

'Take no action at this time,' she said.

She could visualize the expression of frustration her words sent flickering across Divkovic's face. He'd been fiery and impatient enough even before his brother was killed. But he was also disciplined.

'Acknowledged. Clear,' was all he said, and the link went dead.

Nordbrandt put the fist-sized com back into its hiding place in the flour canister, stopped by the oven to check the bread whose rich aroma filled the kitchen, then sat back down to consider the implications.

They'd known the Manties were coming. Tonkovic was unaware one of her own aides at her precious Constitutional Convention was a FAK sympathizer and information source, and that source had informed Nordbrandt almost as quickly as Tonkovic had informed Rajkovic. But the man hadn't been able to tell Nordbrandt when Hexapuma would arrive, and the actual timing was... inconvenient.

She'd arranged for the second load of weapons to be landed that very night. Things had gone so well the first time that she'd decided to go ahead and run in a full shuttle load-over a thousand tons-in a single flight. Since she had enough from the first load tucked away in her twelve separate caches to meet her immediate operational needs in and around the capital, she'd decided to risk landing that large a chunk of the total consignment at Charlie One, the carefully hidden base training camp also known as 'Camp Freedom.'

Charlie One had been located with security in mind, which meant it was incredibly inconveniently placed to support operations in or around Karlovac. Or any of Kornati's other major cities. Or even moderately large towns, for that matter. But its very isolation should mean it would be reasonably safe to hold the majority of the new weapons and equipment there for at least a short time-long enough, certainly, to carefully disperse it all to secondary hidden locations.

But all of that had been predicated on relative freedom of movement, and certainly hadn't included the intrusion of a Manticoran warship. She rather suspected that Firebrand's delivery crew would be less than delighted by that turn of events.

* * *

'You're shitting me.'

'I wish!' Annette De Chabrol shot back.

'A goddamned Manty cruiser ?' Duan Binyan stared at her, still trying to scrub the last rags of sleep out of his brain.

'A Saganami -class, no less!' De Chabrol snarled. 'The son of a bitch is sitting in a parking orbit less than a thousand kilometers from us right this instant!'

'All right. All right! Calm down,' Duan urged. She looked at him out of his cabin com as if she thought he were an idiot, and he shrugged.

'So there's a Manty cruiser in orbit with us,' he said, just a bit more calmly than he actually felt. 'So what? We're a legitimate merchantship, certified by the locals' own customs inspectors, and we're here to pick up and drop off a half-dozen small consignments and a dozen passengers. It's all logged with Traffic Control— and with Customs and the KNP-and it was set up months ago. There's absolutely no reason for these Manties to be any more suspicious of us than the Kornatians are.'

De Chabrol stared at him for three seconds, then shook -herself.

'That's all well and good, Binyan,' she said in a marginally calmer voice. 'But it overlooks one little point. The Kornatians' sensors suck; Manty sensors most empathically do not . This cruiser's a helluva lot more likely to spot anything out of the ordinary we might do... like landing, oh, I don't know-say, another thousand tons or so of prohibited military-grade weapons for a bunch of murdering terrorists.'

Her tone was withering, and Duan was forced to admit she had a point.

'I don't have any more desire to stick my reproductive equipment into a power outlet than you do,' he said. 'Unfortunately, we may not have a lot of choice. Nordbrandt's people have already set up tonight's delivery, and we don't have any way to tell them we're not coming. We can always simply scrub the delivery without telling them, of course. But there's no telling how they'll react if we don't show up.'

'What? You expect them to call the authorities and say, 'Hi, this is your friendly local terrorist organization speaking. Those nasty people in the Marianne were supposed to deliver a thousand tons of weapons and explosives to us so we could kill more of you, and they didn't. So we're ratting them out to you. Go arrest them'?'

'No,' he said with considerable restraint. 'What I'm afraid of is that if we don't make the delivery, someone in their part of the pipeline is going to ask one question too many, stay in the wrong place just too long, or panic and start trying to contact their own leaders— something that ends up drawing the local cops' attention. And if that happens, and they get busted, and the locals roll up the delivery chain and find us at the end of it, I don't doubt for a minute that Mr. Saganami -class cruiser will very cheerfully board us or blow us out of space at their request.'

'So why don't we just leave ? Let them go ahead and roll up the locals! It's no skin off our ass if they do.'

'Oh, yes, it is. Nordbrandt's contact for this shipment's the Jessyk agent here on Kornati. If we pull out, and Nordbrandt's people get nailed, there's no way they won't tell the authorities exactly who was supposed to deliver their weapons... and didn't. And if it's escaped your attention, our agent doesn't have diplomatic immunity. The locals will bust him in a heartbeat, and when they do, they'll hand him over to the Manties. And the one thing we can't afford is for the Manties to start wondering why the Jessyk Combine-a Mesan