In Enemy Hands hh-7 Read online

  She was impressed by how swiftly and smoothly Alvarez's boat bay officer had coordinated the transfer, but the scrubber was big enough (and awkwardly enough shaped) that he'd been forced to close off the after two-thirds of the pinnace's modular interior to free up the cargo space to accommodate it. That had also required him to remove the seating which usually occupied that space, of course, and accounted for the cramped personnel area which had been Honors excuse to leave MacGuiness behind.

  Even without the steward, seats were at a premium. In addition to the precious scrubber unit, Sinkowitz was sending along a half dozen of his own people to assist Lieutenant Commander Palliser, Prince Adrian's chief engineer, in the job of installing it. That used up a third of the available places, and Honor had quickly filled the rest. Besides her armsmen, Commander Marchant, and Venizelos, she was bringing along Fritz Montoya, Marcia McGinley, Jasper Mayhew, Anson Lethridge, and Scotty Tremaine, and she'd added Carson Clinkscales almost as an afterthought. Her flag lieutenants performance had improved markedly over the past three weeks. He remained an accident looking for a place to happen, but he was learning to anticipate and minimize disasters... and to cope with the embarrassment when they happened anyway. Yet that was when he was among superiors he'd come to know, and she'd decided it would do him good to spend a few hours with strangers. His confidence had grown steadily aboard Alvarez, and if his improved efficiency survived the visit to a new environment, it would do his overall self-image a world of good.

  Besides, when it came to the ostensible purpose of her visit, Carson's inclusion was at least as logical as Montoya's. After all, there was no practical reason for the squadron's senior medical officer to sit in on a discussion of tactics... even if he did happen to be an old personal friend of Prince Adrian's CO.

  The last of the passengers found a seat, and Harkness sealed the hatch. He consulted the telltales carefully, then spoke into the boom mike of his headset.

  "All secure aft," he announced to the cockpit.

  "Thank you, Chief," Scotty Tremaine’s voice replied. "Disengaging tube and umbilicals now."

  The pinnace's hull transmitted indistinct thuds and bangs to its passengers as Tremaine unhooked from Alvarez's systems, and Harkness watched his readouts.

  "Green board," he informed Tremaine after a moment. "Clear to undock."

  "Undocking," Tremaine said crisply, and the mechanical docking arms retracted as Honors electronics officer drifted the pinnace free of the bay on reaction thrusters.

  Honor watched through the view port, smiling at her reflection in the armorplast as the brilliantly illuminated boat bay slid away from her. At least fitting Scotty aboard hadn't been a problem. He'd made it respectfully but firmly clear at a very early date that staff officer or no, he would permit no one else to serve as Honor's small craft pilot. Given protocol's dictate that Honors seniority meant she couldn't fly herself, she was more than willing to let Tremaine have his way, since he happened to be one of the five or six best natural pilots she'd ever seen. But he and Harkness came as a matched set, so letting him onto the flight deck had also made it inevitable that the senior chief would be aboard as her flight engineer. Precisely how Harkness managed to manipulate BuPers in order to turn up wherever Tremaine went remained one of the unexplained mysteries of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Honor wasn't about to attempt to get to the bottom of it, either. They were far too useful a pair for her to risk jinxing the magic.

  The pinnace cleared the bay, and Alvarez dropped her impeller wedge long enough for a stronger kick from the pinnace's thrusters to carry it beyond its own wedge's safety perimeter. Tremaine brought his drive up quickly and smoothly, transitioning from thrusters to impellers, and the pinnace accelerated away from the flagship at well over four hundred gravities. Alvarez's wedge snapped back up behind her, and Honor leaned back in her seat as Tremaine steadied down to overtake Prince Adrian.

  The flight would require the better part of the available two hours, for a pinnace's particle shielding limited its top speed to little more than 22,500 KPS more than a merchantman could pull here, and McKeon’s ship was almost nine full light-minutes ahead of Alvarez. Deep down inside, a part of Honor still resented the fact that she'd had to put someone else in that exposed position, but she'd had plenty of time to learn to accept it. Besides, she knew her resentment was silly. It was her job to command the squadron, just as it was Alistair's job to take the point position, and that was that.

  Now she leaned back in her comfortable seat, one hand rubbing Nimitz’s ears while the 'cat purred contentedly in her lap, and watched the eerie, beautiful depths of hyper space flicker beyond her view port's thick armorplast.

  "So what did you think of my girls' and boys' ideas?" Honor asked, raising an eyebrow at her host as the lift carried them smoothly up-ship towards his dining cabin. Prince Adrian's design was over sixty years old, one consequence of which was that her lifts were more cramped than those of newer ships, and Honor's staffers and McKeon's exec had decided with silent tact to let their seniors have the first car to themselves. Well, to themselves and Honor's armsmen, which was as close to 'to herself' as she was likely to come ever again.

  "Impressive. Very impressive," McKeon replied. "That's some particularly nice work on the EW side from Scotty, and your McGinley’s done an excellent job integrating his deception plans with the extra reach of our new passive systems, too. Of course," he added in an elaborately casual tone, "we won't be able to make maximum use of either of those until we get our hands on some of the new missile pods."

  "New pods?" Honors brows came back down, not in a frown, but rather in the absence of one, and her voice was cool. "What new pods would those be?"

  "The low-image, top secret, burn-before-reading-classified pods with the new long-ranged, multiengined missiles," McKeon replied patiently. "You know, the ones you helped write the final specs on while you were at the WDB? Those pods."

  "Oh," Honor said expressionlessly. "Those pods. And just how, Captain McKeon, do you happen to know 'those pods' even exist, much less who wrote the specs?"

  "I'm a captain of the list," McKeon explained. "But back in my lowly days as a mere commander, I just happen to have been assigned to field-testing the original FTL drones' utility for light units back before the war. Playing test bed was my first big job with Madrigal, remember? And I'm still tapped into BuWeaps and BuShips. As a matter of fact, I'm still on Admiral Adcock's short list for operator input."

  "His 'short list?" Honor repeated. "I didn't know he had one."

  "He doesn't, officially. But the Admiral's always been a little leery of giving the back room types too free a rein. He likes to run their concepts by line officers he's worked with before and whose judgment he trusts. Nobody gets a peek unless they're cleared to whatever classification level a given proposal's been assigned, but we're outside the official loop. Which means, since no one with the WDB will ever see our reports, that we can speak frankly without worrying about retaliation."

  "I see."

  Honor gazed at McKeon thoughtfully. Vice Admiral of the Green Jonas Adcock, the Bureau of Weapons' commanding officer, was one of the RMN's characters. He was also one of the Navy's very few senior officers who had never received prolong, for he and his family had immigrated to the Star Kingdom from Maslow, a planet as technically backward as Pre-Alliance Grayson. Adcock had been too old to accept prolong when he arrived, but there hadn't been anything wrong with his brain. He'd graduated eighth in his Academy class, despite not having encountered a modern educational system until he was nineteen T-years old, and his career had been distinguished. Now, at an age of just over a hundred and fourteen, he was far too physically frail ever to hold a spacegoing command again, but there was still nothing wrong with his brain. He'd taken over BuWeaps eleven years before, just in time for the war, and he'd been an aggressive dynamo ever since. Indeed, he was probably the largest single reason that rationalized versions of the jeune ecole's proposals were beginning to come off th
e drawing boards as useable hardware.

  Honor had enjoyed several far-ranging discussions with him while she'd been assigned to the Weapons Development Board, and she'd been impressed by his ability to think outside the boxes. She also liked and respected him, and, looking back with the advantage of what McKeon had just said, she realized he'd picked her brain on current operational problems even more thoroughly than she'd realized at the time. But he'd never suggested that he maintained an unofficial network of evaluators.

  On the other hand, she'd been a member of the Board herself during their talks, and from what McKeon was saying, the admiral had taken pains to keep the WDB’s members from realizing that he was using line officers to critique their proposals before he signed off on them. Which, she admitted to herself, was probably wise of him, given the egos of some of the officers who'd served on the Board. Sonja Hemphill came to mind, for "Horrible Hemphill" would have been furious to find that her proposals were being independently evaluated (or, as she would no doubt have phrased it, "second-guessed") by her juniors, no matter how experienced those juniors might be. Honor wasn't certain that Hemphill would have taken overt revenge upon any junior officer rash enough to object to one of her pet projects, but the jeune ecole's leader would never, ever, have forgiven the officer in question. And other officers Honor had known most certainly would have punished any outside, unofficial evaluator who disagreed with them.

  "Were you cleared to tell me about this?" she asked after a moment, and McKeon shrugged.

  "He never told me not to, and I'll be very surprised if you don't start hearing from him yourself, now that you're off the Board. From what he said to me before Adrian pulled out of Manticore for Yeltsin, you really impressed him. In fact..." McKeon grinned "...he sounded a mite perplexed over how you landed on the Board in the first place. He's fond of mangling an old cliche: 'Those who can, fight; those who can't, get assigned to the WDB to figure out ways to handicap those who can.'"

  "Am I to understand," Honor said, once she was certain she could keep her voice steady, "that he regards the WDB as somewhat less than effective?"

  "Oh, no! Not the Board," McKeon assured her. "Only the officers who keep getting assigned to it. But you, of course, are the exception that proves the rule."

  "Of course." Honor regarded him sternly for several seconds, then shook her head. "He should never have encouraged you," she observed. "You were quite bad enough before you had friends in high places."

  "Like you, Your Ladyship?" McKeon’s obsequious tone would have fooled anyone who didn't know him. Andrew LaFollet and James Candless, who'd been with Honor long enough to realize that McKeon was one of her two or three closest friends, were sufficiently accustomed to his sense of humor to take it in stride. Whitman, however, had never met the captain before, and Honor felt her newest arms-man's immediate, instinctive flash of anger at McKeon’s familiarity. But she also felt him get that anger under control almost instantly as he took his cue from his fellow armsmen and Honor herself, and she smiled at him before she glanced back at McKeon and grimaced.

  "Maybe in Yeltsin," she told him, only half humorously, "but it might not be very smart to let too many people back in the Star Kingdom know we're friends. I haven't been entirely rehabilitated yet, you know."

  "Close enough," McKeon said, and his voice was suddenly serious. "Some idiots will always listen to assholes like Houseman or the Young’s, but the people whose brains still work are starting to figure out that your personal enemies are a batch of..."

  He bit off whatever he'd been about to say, but his expression was so disgusted, and angry, that Honor reached out and rested a hand on his shoulder.

  "You're probably not the most unprejudiced judge of them," she replied in a tone whose lightness fooled neither of them, "but I like your evaluation. And Nimitz certainly agrees with you."

  "An excellent judge of men, and women, is Nimitz," McKeon observed. "I always said so."

  "He just likes you because you slip him celery."

  "Why not? How could anyone who doesn't recognize a deeply sincere bribery attempt when he sees one possibly be a good judge of character?" McKeon grinned at her, and she shook her head sadly.

  "And to think," she sighed, "that the Lords of the Admiralty saw fit to make someone of your dubious moral character a Queens officer."

  "But of course, Milady!" McKeon said, grinning even more broadly as the lift came to a halt. "Surely you didn't think Nimitz was where I started bribing people, did you?"

  The lift doors slid open, and Honor and McKeon headed down the passage, walking side by side and laughing while her armsmen brought up the rear.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Citizen Admiral Theisman walked silently into the War Room and stood watching the incoming green dot decelerate towards Enki. It was late arriving, System Control had expected it over a week ago, but delayed arrivals weren't all that unusual. Of course, an entire week was a bit excessive. In fact, a regular Navy captain who turned up that late could expect his superiors to devote several unpleasant minutes to discussing exactly why he'd been so casual about his movement orders. But no one was likely to raise any such question with the captain of this ship.

  Warner Caslet had the acutely developed antennae of any staff officer, and he turned his head as he sensed Theisman’s arrival. He stood quickly and crossed to the citizen admiral, and Theisman nodded to him.

  "Warner."

  "Citizen Admiral." Caslet didn't ask what brought Theisman here. He simply turned back to the huge display, standing at his admiral's side with his own hands folded behind him, to watch the green bead. It barely seemed to move across the twenty-five meter holo sphere, but its velocity was almost twelve thousand kilometers per second, and it drew steadily closer to the larger blue icon that indicated Enki's position.

  "ETA?" Theisman asked after a moment, his tone conversational.

  "Approximately fifty minutes, Citizen Admiral. She'll reach Enki in about forty minutes, but it'll take a little longer to settle her into the designated orbit."

  Theisman nodded without comment. Normally, Traffic Control for a system as busy as Barnett assigned parking orbits to ships on a "first available" basis. Far though the system had fallen from its glory days as the Republic's launch pad to conquest, there was more than enough traffic to make its management a full-time job, and controllers hated VIP ships which required special treatment. But no one was going to complain, even if Traffic Control was required to clear all other ships from the newcomers assigned orbit and a security bubble five thousand kilometers across.

  Of course, Theisman thought mordantly, only an idiot would think five k-klicks actually provided any advantage. Oh, it might help against a boarding action or keep some demented crew of kamikazes from physically ramming you, but five thousand kilometers wouldn't mean diddly against a graser or an impeller-drive missile. Hell, for that matter, at five k-klicks a laser head would start out inside its attack range!

  Not that I harbor any such designs, of course.

  He added the last thought quickly, and then smiled with wry bitterness. He was getting even jumpier than he'd realized. Not even StateSec had yet figured out a way to bug a man's thoughts.

  Someone's heels clicked on the floor behind him, and he turned to nod to Dennis LePic. The peoples commissioner nodded back and glanced at the display. Over the course of his lengthy assignment to Theisman, LePic had acquired a certain familiarity with Navy hardware. He still didn't know a thing about how the vast majority of it worked, and he continued to require expert explanations of many of the data codes attached to the various icons, but he knew enough to pick out the newly arrived dot and the ship's name displayed beside it.

  "I see Citizen Committeewoman Ransom has arrived," he remarked.

  "Or, to be more precise, that she will arrive in the next, ah, thirty-six minutes," Theisman replied with a glance at his chrono. "Not counting however long it takes Tepes to maneuver into her final orbit, of course."

&nb
sp; "Of course," LePic agreed, and turned his head to give Theisman a smile that held genuine warmth. The citizen admiral's comment could have been a thinly disguised sneer, an implication that LePic was so ignorant that he needed extra explanations, but both he and Theisman knew it wasn't. That, in fact, the precision of Theisman’s correction had been a sort of shared joke... and evidence that they were comfortable enough with one another for the citizen admiral to risk what might have been misconstrued as insult by another commissioner.

  Of course, it helped that LePic understood not only that most of the Navy's officers resented the Committee of Public Safety's spies but the reasons they were resented. If he'd been a regular officer, he would have resented the people's commissioners' interference, and especially the fact that political appointees with little or no military training were empowered to overrule him. That was the reason he made it a point not to interfere in Theisman's professional decisions any more than he absolutely had to.

  In turn, the citizen admiral recognized a reasonable man and went out of his way to maintain as friendly a relationship as any officer was likely to manage with any commissioner. Over the last couple of years, LePic had come to suspect how Theisman and Citizen Captain Hathaway had put one over on him in the closing stages of the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin. But no one higher up had commented on it, their actions had probably saved his life as well as their own, and whatever had happened at Yeltsin, Theisman had fought stubbornly, courageously, and well at Seabring. Under the circumstances, LePic had decided to forgive the citizen admiral.