CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Honor stood in the boat bay gallery and watched with mixed feelings as the pinnace docked. She'd spent two hours sucking the raiders into going after Wayfarer, and she'd been more than a little concerned over how to handle all three of them. She'd had the firepower to take them, but unless they'd come in massed tight, at least one would have had an excellent chance to rip Wayfarer up before she or her LACs could nail him. Then a light cruiser—and a Peep, at that—had come tearing in out of nowhere to "rescue" her. Despite all the scenarios she and her tac people had gamed out, this one had never occurred to them, and she'd felt both dishonest and guilty as she let the Peep sail straight into her trap and take a hammering in the process. That skipper had lost some of his people—over fifty of them, if Susan Hibson's and Scotty Tremaine's initial reports were accurate—to save an enemy merchantman, and it seemed cruelly ungrateful to "reward" him by taking his ship away from him.

But she had no choice. The mere presence of a Peep CL in Silesia demanded investigation, and that ship was an enemy man of war. Yet she could at least do everything in her power to assist with the wounded it had taken in its uneven battle, and Angela Ryder, both her assistant surgeons, and a dozen sick berth attendants had gone over in the first pinnace.

Now Honor stood back as grim-faced SBAs swam the tube with the most critical of those wounded. Wayfarer's Marines were very much in evidence in the gallery, but they cleared a path to the lifts, and the SBAs charged down it with Lieutenant Holmes running at their head.

The rush of broken bodies continued for an agonizingly long time, and then Honor drew a deep breath as another group came down the tube. The man at their head wore a Peep skinsuit with a commander's insignia, and she stepped in front of him as he swung into Wayfarer's internal gravity.

"Captain," she said very quietly. The wiry, dark-haired man looked at her for a moment, face white, eyes still shocked, then saluted with painful precision.

"Warner Caslet, Citizen Commander, PNS Vaubon." He spoke in the mechanical tones of a nightmare. He cleared his throat, then gestured to the man and women behind him. "People's Commissioner Jourdain; Citizen Lieutenant Commander MacMurtree, my exec; and Citizen Lieutenant Commander Foraker, my tac officer," he said hoarsely.

Honor nodded to each of the others in turn, then held out her hand to Caslet. He looked down at it for several seconds, then squared his shoulders and reached out to take it.

"Commander," she said in that same quiet voice while Nimitz sat very still on her shoulder, "I'm sorry. You showed both courage and compassion in aiding an enemy-flag vessel. The fact that you didn't know we were armed only makes your action in taking on such odds even more remarkable, and I truly believe you would have taken all three of them. I deeply regret the necessity of 'rewarding' you by taking your ship. You deserve better, and I wish I could give it to you. For what it's worth, I can only extend my own and my Queen's thanks."

Caslet's mouth twisted, and he bobbed his head. There was very little else he could do, and she felt his bitter sense of loss through Nimitz. There was a deep, searing anger in that loss—less at Honor than at the universe's ghastly practical joke—and there was also fear. That puzzled her for a moment, and then she kicked herself. Of course. He wasn't afraid of what she might do to him or his people; he was afraid of what his own government would do to them—or their families—and she felt a fresh, bitter anger of her own. This man had taken a dreadful chance to do the honorable thing, and she hated what it was going to cost him.

He stood a moment longer, then drew a deep breath.

"Thank you for your prompt medical assistance, Captain Harrington," he said. "My people—" His voice faded, and she nodded compassionately.

"We'll take care of them, Commander," she promised him. "I guarantee it."

"Thank you," he said again, and cleared his throat once more. "I don't know if you've been told, Captain, but we have two Manticoran nationals on board. We took them off another pirate, and they've had a pretty bad time."

"Manticorans?" Honor's eyebrows rose, and she started to ask more questions, then stopped. Caslet and his companions were on the ragged edge, and the least she could do was give them time to compose themselves. No doubt some hard-boiled ONI type would have argued that catching them while they were still in shock was the best way to get information out of them, but that was too bad. The war between the People's Republic and the Star Kingdom was an ugly one, yet Honor Harrington would treat these people with the respect their actions demanded.

"Commander Cardones, my exec," she said, gesturing Rafe forward, "will escort you to your quarters. I'll have your personal gear brought across as soon as possible so you can get out of those skinnies. We can talk later, over dinner."

"My people—" Caslet began, then stopped. They were no longer "his" people. They were POWs and her responsibility now, not his. But at least he'd already seen that their captors intended to treat them properly, and he nodded. Then he and his companions followed Cardones from the gallery while two Marines fell in behind, and Honor watched them go with a sad smile.

"What do we do with Vaubon?" Cardones asked. He and Honor stood on Wayfarer's bridge, gazing at the plot and wondering what the Schiller authorities made of it all. Even Silesian system surveillance sensors must have picked up the emissions of the short, savage battle, but no one was coming out to ask any questions. That might indicate the Schiller governor, like Hagen, had an "understanding" with the local raiders, but it might also be simple prudence, especially if they'd gotten good reads on the weapons employed. According to Honor's intelligence files, Schiller's heaviest unit was a corvette, and nothing that small would want to irritate anything which mounted a ship of the wall's grasers.

"I don't know," she said after a moment. Nimitz chittered softly from the back of her command chair, and she reached out to stroke him without taking her eyes from the plot.

Caslet had followed the proper protocols for surrendering his ship. If a captain had time, she was supposed to take her crew off in her own small craft, then fire her scuttling charges, but the rules of war established different standards if she found herself in a hopeless tactical position. The enemy was supposed to give her a chance to surrender, and she was supposed to take it rather than get her crew killed for nothing. There were, after all, few survivors from a ship destroyed by point-blank fire, and the quid pro quo for getting them off alive was that her ship, once surrendered, stayed surrendered as the intact prize of the victor.

But before her ship was boarded, she was also supposed to purge her computers and destroy classified equipment, and Caslet had. No doubt ONI would still want to examine the ship in detail, and Honor's search parties would ransack her for any hardcopy documents. Yet there would be precious little data to be recovered, and by now the RMN had taken enough Peep ships to be fully conversant with their technology. Honor expected no treasure trove from Vaubon, but she still had to decide what to do with her prize . . . and her prisoners.

"The most important thing," she said after a moment, as much to herself as to Cardones, "is to keep the Peeps from knowing we've got her. The loss numbers in Posnan probably explain what she's doing out here, but if she was part of a commerce-raiding operation, she wasn't alone. So the first thing is to make sure our people know about this before their people realize we do."

"Makes sense, Ma'am. But what about notifying the Peeps?"

"There's that," Honor agreed unhappily. The Deneb Accords required combatants to report the names of prisoners—and KIAs—to the other side, usually through the Solarian League, since it was almost always the most powerful neutral around. Though the Peeps were traditionally sloppy about that, the Star Kingdom wasn't, yet telling the Peeps Caslet and his people were prisoners would also tell them his ship had been taken.

"We can hold off for a while," she decided. "We're required to notify their government in 'a reasonable time period', not as soon as physically possible. Given our own operational security requirements, I'm going to interpret that a bit liberally." Cardones nodded, and she brooded down at the display for a few more moments, then nodded in decision.

"She's still hyper-capable, so we'll put a prize crew aboard—Lieutenant Reynolds can take command—and send her in to Gregor Station for return to Manticore. On the way, she can call at the Andy naval station in Sachsen and again at New Berlin. I think this is something we need to pass on to Herzog Rabenstrange, and we can ask our Sachsen ambassador to relay the information to our stations in the Confederacy. We'll drop dispatches with our naval attaché here in Schiller for the rest of the squadron as they rotate through, too. That's probably the fastest way to get the word out without blowing security."

"Yes, Ma'am. And the prisoners?"

"We don't have brig space to hang onto them," Honor murmured, rubbing the tip of her nose, "and I'd like to get their wounded into a proper hospital as soon as possible. We owe them that." She scooped Nimitz off her chair and cradled him in her arms while she considered, then nodded once more. "Vaubon's sickbay is undamaged, and her life support's in good shape. We'll strip out the officers and send most of her enlisted personnel—and all the wounded—off in her, and I'll have Reynolds ask the IAN to take her casualties off in Sachsen."

Cardones nodded back. He understood the logic in stripping out Vaubon's officers; they were the ones most likely to instigate some effort to retake their ship during the voyage ahead. "I'll ask Major Hibson to detail a suitable security detachment," he remarked, and Honor nodded.

"Well!" the exec said more briskly. "That takes care of the Peeps—what about the pirates?"

"They get the standard treatment," Honor replied. There was some risk in turning the handful of raiders who'd survived the engagement over to the system governor. Even if he was an honest man, they might spill the beans about Vaubon's capture. On the other hand, there weren't many of them. In fact, there were none from the two lighter ships, and no bridge officers from the light cruiser. The survivors knew they'd been shooting at a light cruiser, but it was unlikely they knew it had been a Peep, and they'd had no opportunity to discover that since. Still . . . "It might not be a bad idea to gloat a little over how they fell for 'our' light cruiser's ambush," she added.

"I'll see to it, Ma'am," Cardones agreed. He moved off to pass the necessary orders, and Honor remained where she was, still gazing at the display.

There were unanswered questions here. Those raiders' numbers had come as a surprise, and they'd also been unusually heavily armed. Merchantmen were almost universally unarmed, and it didn't take a lot of firepower to force them to surrender, but these people had packed in enough weapons to seriously reduce the life support required by the big crews pirates normally carried.

Well, at least she had an excellent chance to find out what it had all been about. There'd been no survivors from Vaubon's first victim; total compensator failure and fifty-one seconds of runaway acceleration at over four hundred gravities had seen to that. But her computers were intact. It had taken three of Commander Harmon's LACs five hours to chase the hulk down and tow it back to Wayfarer, but Harold Tschu and Jennifer Hughes had crews tickling the system. Honor tried not to think about the human wreckage they were working amidst while they did it and turned away from the plot at last, hoping at least some answers would be forthcoming shortly.

Warner Caslet kept his shoulders straight as he followed the Marine lieutenant down the passage. It wasn't easy, and he raged at his own stupidity. He'd lost his ship, the most terrible sin any captain could commit, and he'd done it for nothing.

He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles ached. It didn't do a bit of good to know he'd done the right thing—the honorable thing, his brain sneered—given the information he'd had. Intelligence hadn't warned him the Manties were using Q-ships. He'd had every reason to believe Wayfarer truly was a merchantman when he'd gone to her assistance. And even in his self-hatred, he remained convinced he'd made the right decision on the basis of everything he'd known. None of which could temper his self-contempt . . . or save him from the consequences.

At least it won't happen anytime soon, he thought mordantly. The People's Republic had refused to exchange POWs for the duration. There were precedents for and against prisoner exchange, but the Manties had a far smaller population than the Republic . . . which had no intention of returning trained personnel to the RMN. Besides, he thought with a flash of bitter humor, we'd have to trade them twenty to one just to hold even!

Warner Caslet didn't look forward to spending the next few years in a POW camp, even if the Manties were supposed to treat their prisoners better than the Republic did. Still, it would be better for his health to remain a prisoner permanently. At least the Manties weren't going to shoot him for his stupidity.

He'd considered asking for asylum, but he just couldn't do it. He knew some PN personnel had—like Alfredo Yu, who was now an admiral in the Grayson Navy. Any one of them was a dead man if he ever fall back into Republican hands; that went without saying, but it wasn't the reason Caslet couldn't do it. For all the excesses of the Committee of Public Safety, for all the lunatic handicaps the Committee and its commissioners and StateSec had inflicted upon the People's Navy, Warner Caslet had sworn an oath when he accepted his commission. He could no more turn his back upon that oath than he could have let Warnecke's butchers rape and murder the civilian spacers he'd thought crewed this ship. It had come as a shock to him to realize that, yet it was true. Even if it did mean he was probably going to be shot by his own people.

He looked up as his escort came to a stop. A man in a green-on-green uniform which certainly wasn't Manticoran stood outside a closed hatch and raised an eyebrow at the lieutenant.

"Comman—Citizen Commander Caslet to see the Captain," the Marine said, and Caslet's lips quirked at the correction. It still sounded ridiculous, but it was also an oddly comforting link to who and what he'd been only a few hours before.

The green-uniformed man nodded and spoke into the intercom for a moment, then stood aside as the hatch opened. The lieutenant also stood aside with a respectful nod, and the citizen commander nodded back before he stepped through the hatch and stopped.

A long table covered in snow-white linen awaited him, set with glittering china and crystal. Delicious culinary aromas filled the air, and Denis Jourdain, Allison MacMurtree, Shannon Foraker, and Harold Sukowski were already seated, along with a half-dozen Manticoran officers, including Commander Cardones and the young lieutenant who'd commanded the pinnaces which had boarded Vaubon. Another green-uniformed man stood against a bulkhead, and a third—auburn-haired, with watchful gray eyes that whispered bodyguard—followed quietly at Captain Harrington's elbow as she crossed to him.

Caslet watched her warily. He'd been too shocked to form much of an impression of her in the boat bay gallery. That irritated him, though he'd certainly had ample excuse, but he was back on balance now, and he sized her up carefully. From her reputation, she should have breathed fire and been three meters tall, and something itched between his shoulder blades at finding himself in her presence. This woman was one of the PN's bogeymen, like Admiral White Haven or Admiral Kuzak, and he couldn't imagine what she was doing commanding a single Q-ship in this backwater. He supposed he should be grateful the Manties were misusing her abilities so thoroughly, but it was a bit hard at the moment.

She was a tall woman, and she moved like a dancer. The braided hair under her white beret was much longer than in the single picture in her intelligence dossier, and those almond eyes were far more . . . disconcerting in the flesh. He knew one of them was artificial, but the Manties built excellent prosthetics, and he couldn't tell which of them it was. It was odd. He knew about her hand-to-hand skills, and somehow he'd expected her to be . . . stockier? Heftier? He couldn't think of exactly the right world, but whatever it was, she wasn't. She had the sturdiness of her high-grav home world, and her long-fingered hands were strong and sinewy, yet she was slender and graceful—a gymnast, not a bruiser—without an excess gram of bulk anywhere.

"Citizen Commander." She extended her hand, and smiled as he took it. That smile was warm but just a bit lopsided. The left side of her mouth moved with a fractional hesitation, and he heard a very faint slurring of the "r" in "commander." Were those legacies of the head wound she'd suffered on Grayson?

"Captain Harrington." In light of the aggressive egalitarianism of the People's Republic's new rulers, Caslet had already decided to take refuge behind her naval rank rather than use any of her various "elitist" titles.

"Please, join us," she invited, and walked him back to the table and seated him in the chair to the right of her place before sitting herself with a graceful economy of movement. Her treecat sat facing the citizen commander across the table, and Caslet felt a stir of surprise at the bright intelligence in those grass-green eyes. One look told him her dossier had been wrong to dismiss it as a dumb animal, but, then, the Republic knew very little about treecats. Most of what they had were only rumors, and the rumors themselves were widely at variance with one another.

A sandy-haired steward poured wine, and Harrington sat back and regarded Caslet levelly.

"I've already said this to Commissioner Jourdain and Citizen Commander MacMurtree and Foraker," she said, "but I'd like to thank you once more for what you tried to do. We're both naval officers, Citizen Commander. You know what duty requires of me, but I deeply regret the necessity of obeying those requirements. I also regret the people you lost. I had to wait until the raiders were deep enough into my energy envelope to guarantee clean kills before engaging. . . and, of course, to be certain your own ship couldn't escape." She said it levelly, without flinching, and Caslet felt an unwilling respect for her steady eyes. "If I could have fired sooner, some of those people would still be alive, and I'm genuinely sorry that I couldn't."

Caslet nodded stiffly, unwilling to trust his voice. Or, for that matter, to respond openly in front of Jourdain. The people's commissioner was in just as much trouble as Caslet, but he was still a commissioner, and just as stubbornly aware of his duty as Caslet himself. Was that, the citizen commander wondered wryly, one reason they'd gotten along so much better than he'd initially expected?

"I'd also like to thank you for the care you took of Captain Sukowski and Commander Hurlman," Harrington said after a moment. "I sent your Dr. Jankowski off with the rest of your crew to see to your wounded, but my own surgeon assures me that her care for Commander Hurlman was all anyone could have asked for, and for that you have my sincere thanks. I've had some experience of what animals can do to prisoners," her brown eyes turned momentarily into flint, "and I deeply appreciate the decency and consideration you showed."

Caslet nodded again, and Harrington picked up her wineglass. She looked down into it for a few seconds, then returned her gaze to her "guest's" face.

"I have every intention of notifying the People's Republic of your present status, but our own operational security requires us to delay that notification for a short time. For the present, I'm afraid I'll have to keep you and your senior officers aboard Wayfarer, but you'll be treated at all times with the courtesy your rank and your actions deserve. You will not be pressed for any sensitive information." Caslet's eyes narrowed a bit at that, and she smiled another of her crooked smiles. "Oh, if any of you let anything drop, I assure you we'll report it, but prisoner interrogation is properly ONI's function, not mine. Under the circumstances, I'm just as happy that's true."

"Thank you, Captain," he said, and she nodded.

"In the meantime," she went on, "I've had an opportunity to go over Captain Sukowski's stay aboard your vessel with him. I realize you didn't discuss any operational matters with him, but given what you did tell him and what we've pulled out of the 'privateers''computers, I suspect I know what you were doing in Schiller—and why you came to our assistance." Her eyes took on that flint-like cast once more, and Caslet was just as happy their cold fury wasn't directed at him. "I think," she continued in a calm voice that did nothing to hide its anger, "that the time has come to deal with Mr. Warnecke once and for all, and, thanks to you, we should be able to."

"Thanks to us, Ma'am?" Surprise startled the question out of Caslet, and she nodded.

"We recovered the full database of the ship you disabled. We didn't get anything from the other two wrecks, but we got everything from her . . . including her astrogation data. We know where Warnecke is, Citizen Commander, and I intend to pay him a little visit."

"With just one ship, Captain?" Caslet glanced at Jourdain. Disregarding the fact that he himself was on board, it was clearly his duty to do anything he could to insure Wayfarer's destruction, but he couldn't shake off memories of what Warnecke's butchers had done to Erewhon's crew—or, for that matter, Sukowski and Hurlman. Jourdain held his eyes for a moment, then nodded ever so slightly, and Caslet looked back at Harrington. "Excuse me, Ma'am," he said carefully, "but our data indicates that they have several other ships. Even if you know where to find him, you might be biting off more than you can chew."

"Wayfarer's teeth are quite sharp, Citizen Commander," she returned with a slight, dangerous smile. "And we've got complete downloads on their fleet. They've taken over the planet Sidemore, in the Marsh System. Marsh is—or was—an independent republic just outside the Confederacy, which may explain why the Silesians never looked there for him, assuming they even know he got away. But it was a fairly marginal system even before they took it, and their sole logistic support seems to be a single repair ship they brought out of the Chalice with them. Their resources are limited, despite whatever contacts Warnecke may have maintained, and by our count, they have—had—a total of twelve ships. You've eliminated two, and we've eliminated another pair, which reduces them to eight, and some of them will be out on operations. From the prize's data, their orbital defenses are negligible, and they have only a few thousand troops on the planet. Trust me, Citizen Commander. We can take them . . . and we're going to."

"I can't say I'm sorry to hear that, Captain," Caslet said after a moment.

"I thought you wouldn't be. And while it may not be much compensation for the loss of your ship, I can at least offer you a grandstand seat for what happens to Warnecke's psychopaths. In fact, I'd like to invite you and Commissioner Jourdain to share the bridge with me for the attack."

Caslet twitched in surprise. Allowing an enemy officer, even a POW, on your bridge in time of war was unheard of. Trained eyes were bound to pick up at least a little about things your own admiralty wouldn't want them to know, after all. Of course, he thought a moment later, it wasn't as if he'd be able to tell anyone back home about it, now was it?

"Thank you, Captain," he said. "I appreciate that very much."

"It's the least I can do, Citizen Commander," Harrington said with another of those sadly gentle smiles. She twitched her glass at him, and he picked his own up in automatic response. "I propose a toast we can all share, ladies and gentlemen," she told the table, and now her chill smile was neither sad nor gentle. "To Andre Warnecke. May he receive everything he deserves."

She raised her glass as a rumble of approval came back, and Warner Caslet heard his own voice—and Denis Jourdain's—in that response.