"Two hits forward of Frame Sixty," Commander Tyson reported from Damage Control Central. "We've lost Graser Fourteen, Laser Cluster Eight and Ten, and Lidar Two. No casualties from those hits. But we took another one aft of Frame One-Zero-Niner. It took out Missile Twenty and Graser Twenty-Four, and we took heavy casualties on the energy mount."

"Understood," Captain Oversteegen replied, but his eyes were fixed on his tactical plot as he watched Blumenthal's most recent broadsides roaring down upon Number One. Good as the enemy's missile ECM was, Gauntlet's was better, and Oversteegen's eyes glittered in anticipation as the target's counter missiles went wide and its point defense lasers fired late.

 

"Shit! Heavy damage to Laser Seven and Miss—"

The voice from Damage Control chopped off in mid-word, and Jerome Tyler's hungry smile vanished as Fortune Hunter heaved madly. He clung to his command chair's arms on the bucking bridge, and his face was ashen as alarms screamed and the bridge lighting flickered. At least four missiles from the Manty's last salvo had gotten through this time, and he didn't need more reports from Damage Control to know Fortune Hunter had been badly hurt.

"Captain, our accel is dropping!" the helmsman reported, and Tyler grimaced as he stabbed a quick look at his own displays. Of course their acceleration was dropping—the goddamned Manty had just blown four nodes out of their after impeller ring!

"I've lost contact with Missile Niner, Eleven, and Thirteen," the tac officer reported. "Missile Defense Seven and Niner don't respond either. And I've lost the port decoy!"

"Roll hard port!" Tyler barked. "Get our starboard broadside to bear on them!"

 

"Good hits on Number One!" Blumenthal announced jubilantly. "Their wedge strength is dropping, Sir!"

"Good work, Guns!" Oversteegen replied, even as he watched Gauntlet's defensive fire annihilate an entire incoming broadside well short of laser head attack range. Number One was bleeding air and trailing debris, and her fire seemed to have dropped. And—yes, she was rolling ship to snatch her damaged flank away from Gauntlet! But it looked like she'd left it too late to evade Blumenthal's follow-up salvo.

"Time t' hyper limit?" he demanded.

"Four minutes, Sir," Atkins responded.

"Communications, record a transmission for Midshipwoman Hearns," Oversteegen commanded.

"Standing by, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Cheney acknowledged.

"Message beg—"

"Incoming! Missiles in acquisition, bearing one-seven-five! Impact in one-five-zero seconds!"

Oversteegen's eyes snapped back to his tactical repeater as the fresh threat came roaring in from astern. It couldn't be from Number Three—not on that bearing! Which meant there was a fourth enemy ship in the system, and they'd missed her completely!

"Stern wall!" he barked. "Get it up now!"

 

Tyler's eyes clung to the tactical display as the Manty missiles sliced through his badly battered defenses. He no longer had a port decoy, and his EW emitters had taken heavy damage from the hits which had lacerated Fortune Hunter's port flank. His counter missile and point defense crews did the best they could, but it wasn't going to be good enough.

 

Gauntlet's missiles raced down upon their target and detonated at ranges as short as ten thousand kilometers. The powerful X-ray lasers ripped deep into Fortune Hunter, shattering bulkheads and opening compartments like knives. Energy mounts and their crews were smashed and mangled, missile tube mass-drivers arced madly as their capacitor rings shorted, and atmosphere gushed from the brutal wounds. The cruiser heaved bodily sideways, and then the last hit came slicing in, and Number One Impeller Room exploded with a cataclysmic fury that destroyed her entire forward hammerhead.

The ship tumbled madly as her wedge unbalanced, and then her inertial compensator failed.

Whether any of her crew were still alive when the savage torquing effect on her hull snapped her back scarcely mattered.

 

Michael Oversteegen was peripherally aware of Number One's spectacular destruction, but he had little attention to spare for it. Not with twenty-plus missiles racing straight for Gauntlet's kilt.

Behind the mask of his features, he cursed himself for not having found whatever ship had just fired. He knew, intellectually, that Blumenthal had done extraordinarily well just to spot Number Three, given the effectiveness of these "pirates' " electronic warfare capabilities. But that was no comfort at all as he watched those missiles come.

Gauntlet's acceleration dropped abruptly to zero as her stern wall snapped up. She was one of the first Edward Saganami-B-class ships which had added that passive defense, and this was the very first time any of them had tested it in actual combat. It had worked well enough for the LACs who'd first employed it during Eighth Fleet's decisive offensive, but a heavy cruiser was scarcely a LAC.

More to the point, it took time for the wall to come up, and time was in very short supply.

 

Samson Lamar stared in horror at the broken, lifeless wreckage which an instant before had been a heavy cruiser. The sheer, blinding speed with which Fortune Hunter had been transformed into so much splintered rubble stunned him. And it also terrified him, because he knew who the next target of the Manty's wrath had to be.

He opened his mouth to order his helmsman to turn Predator up on her side relative to the Manty, sheltering behind the impenetrable roof of her wedge. But before he could get the order out, Dongcai Maurersberger's missiles exploded dead astern of the enemy ship.

 

HMS Gauntlet bucked in agony as the incoming laser heads detonated. Her after point defense had knocked out twelve of them, despite the surprise of their launch from stealth. Five more were sucked off by the cruiser's decoys. But the remaining six ran straight in on their target and detonated eighteen thousand kilometers astern of her.

If not for her stern wall, she would have died then and there. Even with it, the damage was terrible. The wall was still spinning up to full power when the lasers came slashing in. It could bend and attenuate them, but it couldn't stop them, and damage alarms shrieked.

"We've lost the after ring!" Tyson barked from Damage Control Central. "Grasers Thirty-Two, Thirty-Three, and Thirty-Four are gone! We've lost at least half the after laser clusters, and I'm getting no response from Environmental Four or Boat Bay Two!"

Oversteegen's jaw tightened. Raising the stern wall had cut Gauntlet's acceleration to zero when it closed the after aspect of her wedge, but without the after impeller ring, it would be halved even after the wall came down. And with his after missile defenses so badly damaged, he dared not lower it at all until he'd wrenched his stern away from the previously unsuspected attacker.

"Can we get the wedge back?" he asked Tyson sharply.

"I can't say for certain, Sir," the engineer replied. He was hammering at his keyboard even as he spoke, eyes locked to the scrolling diagnostic reports.

"I don't like t' rush my officers," Oversteegen said, "but it would be most helpful if you could expedite that estimate."

"I'm on it, Sir," Tyson promised, and Oversteegen looked up from his com screen.

"Helm, reaction thrusters. Bring us ten degrees to starboard and pitch us up fifteen degrees."

"Ten degrees starboard, pitch up fifteen degrees, aye, Sir!"

"Tactical, we need t' find this gentleman astern of us," Oversteegen continued, swiveling his eyes to Blumenthal's section.

"We're on it, Sir," Blumenthal replied. "We've got a good fix on the missiles' launch locus, and these bastards' EW isn't good enough to hide from us when we know where to look for them!"

"Good. Astro," Oversteegen turned towards Lieutenant Commander Atkins, "recompute our course t' the wall t' reflect my last helm orders. Then generate a random course change as soon as we cross the wall. With our after ring down, these people are goin' t' be able t' stay with us after all."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

"Guns," Oversteegen turned back to Blumenthal, "forget about Number Two for now. She's goin' t' slide past us whatever she does; it's Number Three and this Number Four we have t' worry about right now."

"Aye, aye, Sir. I'm recomputing now."

"And as for you, Commander Cheney," Oversteegen said, returning his attention to the communications officer with a thin smile, "I believe we were about t' record a transmission for Ms. Hearns."

 

" . . . so things are gettin' just a little tight up here, Ms. Hearns." Abigail stared at Captain Oversteegen's impossibly composed face on the pinnace's tiny com screen in something that wasn't disbelief simply because her shock was too deep for her to feel anything yet. She could hear combat chatter and the beeping of priority alarms behind him, but that irritating, aristocratic accent was as calm as ever.

"We've destroyed one hostile, but at least two are in position t' follow us into hyper," he continued. "If they're foolish enough t' come through separated, we should be able t' take them easily. If they stay concentrated, it's goin' t' be a little dicier, of course. Either way, we'll be back t' pick you and your people up as soon as possible.

"In the meantime, however, be advised that at least one enemy heavy cruiser is goin' t' be unable t' follow us. Since they chose t' engage us when they didn't have to, I'm assumin' that they feel they have somethin' here in Tiberian which they have t' conceal at all costs. If that's true, I anticipate that the cruiser which can't follow us will come lookin' for you. I can't advise you from here, Ms. Hearns. You're on your own until we can get back here. Evade any way you can, but avoid contact with the Refugians at all costs. It's our job t' protect people like them; not t' set them up t' draw fire.

"Good luck, Ms. Hearns. Oversteegen, clear."

The screen blanked, and Abigail inhaled deeply. As the oxygen filled her lungs, it seemed as if it were the first breath she'd taken in at least an hour.

She stood up in Chief Palmer's compartment, and her brain began to work after a fashion again.

The captain's transmission was over fifteen minutes old, because the pinnace had no ability to receive FTL transmissions. Which meant it was entirely possible that Captain Oversteegen and Gauntlet's entire company were already dead.

No. She put that thought firmly aside. If it was true, then nothing she and her people could do to evade the enemy would succeed in the end. But if it wasn't true, and she allowed the possibility to paralyze her, then whatever slim chance of survival they had would disappear.

She squared her shoulders and stepped onto the flight deck.

"You heard, PO Hoskins?" she asked the pilot.

"Yes, Ma'am." The petty officer looked back over her shoulder at Abigail, her face taut. "Can't say I like the sound of it very much, though."

"I don't much care for it, myself," Abigail assured her. "But it looks like we're stuck with it."

"As you say, Ma'am." Hoskins paused a moment, then continued. "What are we going to do, Ma'am?"

"Well, one thing we're not going to do is try to evade a heavy cruiser in space, PO," Abigail said, and surprised herself with a smile which held a hint of true humor. "Any proper warship could run us down without too much trouble, and it's not as if we could hide from her sensors. Not to mention the fact that she's probably got at least a dozen or so small craft of her own she could deploy to come after us."

"That's true enough, Ma'am," Hoskins acknowledged, though her tone was dubious. "But if we can't evade them in space, how well can we hope to evade them dirtside?"

"Refuge's got some pretty rough terrain, PO," Abigail replied. "And we've got all of Sergeant Gutierrez's well-trained Marines aboard to help us hide in it. Of course, it would be best of all if we could convince them to not even look for us, wouldn't it?"

"Oh, yes, Ma'am," Hoskins said fervently.

"Well, in that case, let's just see what we can do about that."

 

"Are you sure about this, Ma'am?" Sergeant Gutierrez asked quietly, and Abigail smiled sourly. At least the towering noncom was asking the question as privately as the pinnace's cramped confines allowed. That, unfortunately, didn't change the fact that he appeared to be less than overwhelmed with her plan.

Such as it was, and what there was of it.

"If you're asking if I'm sure it will work, Sergeant," she said coolly, "the answer is 'no.' But if you're asking if I'm confident this is what will give us our best chance, than the answer is 'yes.' Why?"

"It's just— Well, Ma'am, no offense, but what you're talking about doing would be hard enough if we were all trained Marines."

"I'm aware that Navy personnel aren't trained in planetary evasion and concealment tactics the way Marines are, Sergeant. And if I had another choice, believe me, I'd take it. But you'll just have to take my word for it that there's no way this pinnace could possibly avoid detection, interception, and destruction if we try to stay in space. That's an area where we Navy types have a certain degree of expertise of our own." She gave him a thin smile. "So, the way I see it, that only leaves us the planet. Understood?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Gutierrez said. He remained clearly unhappy, and she suspected he also remained somewhat short of total confidence in her leadership ability, but he couldn't avoid the force of her argument, either.

"Well," she told him with a more natural smile, "at least we already had our survival supplies ready to go, didn't we?"

"Yes, Ma'am, we did." Gutierrez surprised her with a chuckle which acknowledged that he knew she'd given him the initial assignment just to yank his chain. She grinned back wryly, but then their moment of shared humor faded, and she nodded to him.

"All right, Sergeant. Once we're down, I'm going to be relying very heavily on your expertise. Don't hesitate to offer any suggestion that occurs to you. I know what I want to do, but this isn't an area in which I'm trained to know how to do it."

"Don't worry, Ms. Hearns," he told her. "You know the Corps motto: Can do! We'll get through it when we have to."

"Thank you, Sergeant," she said, and she was genuinely grateful for his attempt to bolster her confidence, even though she was just as aware as he was of how slender their chances actually were against any determined orbital and aerial search for them. She smiled briefly at him, then returned to the flight deck.

"How are we coming, PO?" she asked.

"Almost there, Ma'am," Hoskins replied. Her co-pilot had the controls while Hoskins and Chief Palmer put their heads together over the autopilot programming panel. The petty officer looked up at the midshipwoman with an expression that was half-smile and half-grimace. "Too bad we didn't have any canned routines on file for this."

"I know. But Sir Horace didn't have one either when he set it up," Abigail pointed out. "And at least you and Chief Palmer get to work with our own software instead of the Peeps'."

"True, Ma'am," Hoskins agreed, and Abigail smiled encouragingly and returned to the passenger compartment.

 

"We should hit Refuge orbit in about twelve minutes," Commander Thrush said, and Samson Lamar nodded in acknowledgment of his astrogator's announcement just as if he didn't think this hunt for the Manty pinnace was ridiculous. And pointless.

He doubted very much that the cruiser had taken the time to squeal any sort of detailed download to the pinnace's crew. Certainly it must have had other things on its mind once it realized Cutthroat and Mörder were both behind it. Despite what the Manty had done to Fortune Hunter, the chances of its successfully defeating two more heavy cruisers had to be low, especially in light of the way Mörder's fire had smashed its after impeller ring. And if the cruiser was destroyed, then there was certainly no rush in hunting down its orphaned pinnace! If, on the other hand, the cruiser succeeded in escaping destruction by some unlucky chance, then there was no point in destroying the pinnace, either.

But that pain in the ass Ringstorff had insisted, and Lamar had been unable to come up with any logical reason why he shouldn't just as well do what Ringstorff wanted. On the one hand, there'd been no way to decelerate in time for Predator to join Cutthroat and Mörder's pursuit of the Manty, and, on the other, Predator's base course had already been almost directly towards the planet.

So here she was, a fully armed heavy cruiser hunting for a single pinnace. It was rather like sending a sabertooth tiger to hunt down a particularly vicious mouse.

"Anything yet?" he asked his tac officer.

"Not yet. Of course, if they're lying doggo, they're going to be a pretty small target."

"I know. But Ringstorff says the remote platforms tracked them back to the planet, so they have to be around here somewhere."

"Maybe so, but if I were a pinnace that figured a heavy cruiser might be hunting for me, damned if I'd park myself in orbit where it could find me!"

"Yeah? Where would you hide?"

"The planet's got two moons," the tac officer pointed out. "Well, one and a fraction. Me, I'd probably look for a nice crater somewhere and hide in a ring wall's shadow. Either that, or find myself a nice deep valley down on the planet, somewhere. Damned sure I wouldn't hang around in space!"

"Makes sense to me," Lamar acknowledged after moment. "But we have to start somewhere, so let's get on with it. If they're not in orbit, Ringstorff is just going to make us look somewhere else until we find them, after all."

"What a pain in the ass," the tac officer muttered, unaware that he was paralleling Lamar's own opinion of Ringstorff. Lamar smiled at the thought, and returned to his own console.

Fifteen minutes passed. Predator slowed, killing the last of her motion relative to Refuge as she slid into a high orbit, and her active sensors began a systematic search for any other artificial object in orbit around the planet.

It didn't take them long to find one.

"There she goes," PO Hoskins said softly, staring down at the palm-sized display of the portable com. The unit's transmit key was locked out to prevent any accidental transmission which might give away their position, but the signal from the orbiting pinnace came in just fine.

Not that it was much of a signal. Just a single, omnidirectional burst transmission which would give away nothing about its intended recipients' location even if it was picked up. But it was enough to let them know what was happening.

High overhead, the pinnace which had returned to parking orbit under the preprogrammed control of its autopilot recognized the lash of radar when it felt it. And when it did, it activated the other programs Hoskins and Palmer had stored in its computers.

Its impellers kicked to life, and the small craft slammed instantly forward at its maximum acceleration, darting directly away from the planet in an obvious, panicky bid to escape.

It was futile, of course. It had scarcely begun to move when Predator's fire control locked it up. The pirate cruiser didn't even bother to call upon the pinnace to surrender. It simply tracked the wildly evading little vessel with a single graser mount . . . then fired.

There was no wreckage.

 

"Well, that seems straightforward enough," Lamar said with an air of satisfaction.

"Yeah," his tac officer agreed. "Still seems pretty stupid of them, though."

"I think Al may have a point, Sam." It was Tim St. Claire, Predator's improbably named executive officer, and Lamar frowned at him.

"Hey, don't blame me," St. Claire said mildly. "All I'm saying is that Al's right—only a frigging idiot would have sat here in orbit waiting for us to kill him. Now, personally, I figure there's a damned good chance that anyone who's just seen his ship haul ass out of the system with the bad guys in hot pursuit is gonna act like a frigging idiot. Panic does that. But if he didn't panic, then this was way too easy. And if we don't go ahead and look for him some more on our own now, Ringstorff is just gonna send us back here and make us do it later. Besides, it'd give the crew something to do while we wait for Morakis and Maurersberger."

"All right," Sampson sighed. "Break out the assault shuttles and let's get to it, then."

 

"They didn't buy it, Ma'am," Palmer announced quietly, watching the display as the small tactical remote they'd deployed on a high peak several kilometers from their present position tracked the impeller signatures far above the surface of Refuge. The remote was too simpleminded to give them very detailed information, but it was obvious that the single pirate cruiser was deploying small craft.

"Not entirely, anyway," Hoskins put in, and Abigail nodded, even though she suspected that the pinnace pilot had only said it in an effort to make her feel better. But then another, deeper voice rumbled up in agreement.

"Chances are they're at least half-convinced they got us," Sergeant Gutierrez said. "At the very least, it's going to generate a little uncertainty on their part, and that's worthwhile all by itself. But whether they figure we're already dead or not, it looks like they're going to look down here until they're sure, one way or the other."

"We knew it was likely to happen," Abigail agreed, looking about in the dusk of an early winter evening. Their carefully hidden position was tucked away in a narrow, rugged mountain valley on the opposite side of the planet from Zion. It was winter here, and winter on Refuge, she was discovering, was a cold and miserable proposition.

She shivered, despite the parka from the pinnace's emergency survival stores. It was warm enough, she supposed, but she was a Grayson, raised in a sealed, protected environment, not someone who was accustomed to spending nights outside in the cold.

At least it should be hard for them to find us, she thought. Any planet's a big place to play hide-and-seek in.

These rocky, inhospitable mountains offered plenty of hiding places, too, and Gutierrez and his Marines had rigged thermal blankets for overhead cover against the heat sensors which might have been used to pick them out against the winter chill. Unfortunately, they had only fifteen of the blankets, which wasn't enough to provide cover for all of them even when their smaller personnel doubled up. Worse, they hadn't been able to do away with power sources. Their weapons, the two long-range portable communicators they had to have if they were ever going to contact Gauntlet when she returned, and at least a dozen other items of essential survival gear all contained power packs which could be readily detected by an overhead flight, and the thermal blankets wouldn't do much to change that.

They'd done their best to put solid rock between those power sources and any sensors which might fly past, but there was only so much they could do. 

"All right, Sergeant Gutierrez," she said, after a moment. "Who's got first watch?"

 

"This has got to be the most boring fucking job yet," Serena Sandoval grumbled as she brought the heavy assault shuttle around for another sensor sweep.

"Yeah?" Dangpiam Kitpon, her co-pilot, grunted. "Well, 'boring' beats the shit out of what happened to the Hunter, doesn't it?"

Sandoval made an irritated sound, and Dangpiam laughed sourly.

"And while we're talking about things that 'boring' is better than," he continued, "I wonder just how 'interesting' things are being for Morakis and Maurersberger about now?"

"You've got an over-active mouth, Kitpon," Sandoval half-snarled, but she couldn't quite dismiss Dangpiam's question. It had been hours since Cutthroat and Mörder had translated into hyper in pursuit of the Manty cruiser. As badly damaged as the Manty had been, they had to have caught up with her quickly, so where the hell were they?

She concentrated on her flight controls, ignoring the moonless winter night beyond the cockpit canopy, and took herself firmly to task for letting Dangpiam get to her. Sure, it was a Manty, but there was only one of it, and it already had the shit shot out of it! It had just gotten lucky against Fortune Hunter, that was all, and—

A signal pinged quietly, and Sandoval's eyes dropped to her panel.

"Well, dip me in shit," Dangpiam murmured beside her.

 

"Wake up, Ma'am!"

The hand on Abigail's shoulder felt as if it were the size of a small shovel. It felt as strong as one, too, although it was obviously restraining itself, since it was only ripping one shoulder off at a time.

She sat up abruptly, eyes snapping open. The sleeping bag was like an entrapping cocoon, for all its warmth, and she squirmed, fighting her way out of it even as her brain spun up to speed.

"Yes? I'm awake, Sergeant!" she said sharply.

"We've got trouble, Ma'am," Gutierrez told her in a low voice, almost as if he were afraid of being overheard. "Overflight four or five minutes ago. Then whoever it was came back again, lower. They must have gotten a sniff of something."

"I see." Abigail sucked in a deep lungful of icy mountain air. "Should we move, or sit tight?" she asked the platoon sergeant, deferring to his expertise, and heard him scratching his chin in the darkness.

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other, at the moment, Ma'am," he replied after a moment. "We know they must have picked up something, or they wouldn't have come back. But there's no way to know what they picked up. For that matter, they could've come back around and missed us the second time, in which case they may decide that this is a clear area. In that case, it would be the safest spot we could find. And there's always the fact that people moving around are easier to spot than people bellied down in a good hide. I'd stay here, unless—"

Gutierrez never completed the sentence. The whine of air-breathing turbines seemed to come out of nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, filling the night with thunder. Abigail threw herself flat in instinctive reaction, but her eyes whipped around, seeking the threat source.

She caught a brief, nightmare image of a vast, black shape, looming out of the night like some huge, high-tech bird of prey. It wasn't a pinnace, she realized. It was an assault shuttle, the heavily armed, heavily armored kind that could carry an entire company of battle-armored infantry.

Then something flashed in the night.

 

"There!" Dangpiam shouted, pointing at the visual imagery as the low-light cameras swept the craggy mountain terrain. Sandoval darted a look at the display herself, but she couldn't afford to take her attention off the flight instruments this close to the ground. Not in terrain like this.

"I'll take your word for it," she said as she brought the big shuttle back around for a third pass. "Punch up the com. Tell Predator we've got them, and then tell Merriwell we're about to drop his people on top of the Manties. I'll stand by for support after that, and th—"

Lightning flashed somewhere beneath her and interrupted her in mid-word.

 

A Royal Manticoran Marine Corps rifle squad consisted of thirteen men or women divided into two fire teams and commanded by a sergeant. Each fire team consisted of a single plasma rifle, the standard heavy firepower of the Marines, covered by three pulser-armed riflemen and one grenadier, and was commanded by a corporal.

Platoon Sergeant Mateo Gutierrez had deployed his two squads to cover the narrow valley in which they'd found refuge, and his instructions had been explicit. No one was to fire without direct orders from Abigail or him, unless it was obvious that they'd been discovered. But if it was obvious, then he expected his people to use their own initiative.

Which was why four plasma rifles fired virtually simultaneously as Serena Sandoval, who'd forgotten that this time she was hunting Royal Manticoran Marines and not terrified, unarmed civilian spacers, swept back over them for the third time.

The assault shuttle was big, powerful, and well armored for an atmosphere-capable craft. But it wasn't well enough armored to survive simultaneous multiple plasma strikes at a range of less than three hundred meters. The incandescent energy ripped straight through its hull, and Abigail tried to burrow her way into the stony ground as Sandoval, Dangpiam, their flight engineer, and the seventy-five armed pirates who'd thought they were hunting mice, vanished in the brilliant blue flare of igniting hydrogen.

 

"God dammit!" Lamar slammed a fist on the arm of his command chair as the report came in. "God dammit! What did those idiots think they were doing?!"

"I imagine they thought they were closing in on the Manties," St. Claire replied tartly. Lamar glared at him, and his exec glared back. "Don't let your emotions shut down your brain, Sam," St. Claire advised coldly. "It looks like Al was right—that pinnace was a decoy." He smiled sourly. "Ringstorff will be pleased we found them."

"Yeah? Well, now that Sandoval's gotten her silly ass blown out of the air, who have we got in position to go get them?" Lamar demanded scathingly.

"Nobody, right this minute," St. Claire admitted. "We've only got so many shuttles. But we can have another bird directly over them within twenty minutes, max. And this time, we'll come in smarter."

 

"Move, move, move!" Sergeant Gutierrez shouted, driving the Navy personnel before him while his Marines moved along the flanks. At least they all had decent low-light vision equipment, but that didn't make the terrain any less rugged, and Abigail had already discovered that running down a rocky gorge in the middle of a winter night was nothing at all like the track at Saganami Island.

She stumbled over a rock and would have fallen if that same shovel hadn't darted out and caught her. She was a slender young woman, but she knew she couldn't possibly weigh as little as Sergeant Gutierrez made it seem as he held her up one-handed until she got her feet back under her.

"They'll be back overhead as quick as they can," he told her, his breathing almost normal despite the pace he was setting. Of course, a corner of Abigail's mind reflected, Refuge's gravity wasn't that much more than half the gravity to which he'd been born. "The fire will screw up their thermal sensors, at least to some extent," he continued. "But they'll still be able to sweep for the power sources unless we can get back under cover in time."

Abigail nodded in understanding, but unlike Gutierrez, she had no breath to spare for conversation. She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. That was quite enough to keep her completely occupied, under the circumstances.

"Here! Turn left here!" It was Sergeant Henrietta Turner, the sergeant commanding the second squad Commander Watson had assigned to Abigail all those lifetimes ago. She looked up, and saw Turner literally pushing Chief Palmer down a narrow ravine. Gutierrez had scouted the vicinity carefully before he settled on their first hiding place, and he'd chosen it at least in part because there were others, almost as good, close at hand. Now Abigail saw Palmer disappear, and then it was her turn to follow him into the ravine.

It was so narrow that she couldn't believe Gutierrez would be able to squeeze his bulk into it, but the platoon sergeant fooled her again, following close on her heels as she ducked her head under a stone overhang. The northern wall of the ravine inclined steadily towards the southern wall as it rose, until the gap between them was no more than a meter or two wide. Over the years, debris had gathered, narrowing the gap still further and effectively turning the ravine into a cave, and the party of refugees pressed themselves back against the walls, panting gratefully as Gutierrez finally allowed them to stop.

The overhead cover was actually better than it had been in their original position, but the ravine was so much narrower that they were hard-pressed to fit all of them into the available space. Worse, there was only one entry and one exit.

"Check the remote, Chief," Abigail panted.

"Yes, Ma'am." Palmer slipped his shoulders free of his backpack's straps and delved into it. It only took him a moment to extract the com tied into the remote still watching over their old encampment.

"Damn," Gutierrez said softly as he peered over Abigail's shoulder at the small display and the image of the second shuttle grounded beside the roaring flames of the first. "I'd hoped they wouldn't be quite that fast off the mark." He checked his chrono. "I make it roughly twenty-three minutes."

Abigail only nodded silently, but her heart sank. She'd hoped it would take much longer than that for a follow-up flight to reach their original campsite. The speed with which the pirates had actually managed it dismayed her. This wasn't the sort of tactical problem they'd trained her for at the Academy, and somehow, when she'd devised her plan, she'd assumed they'd have more time to move from covered position to covered position.

She patted Palmer on the shoulder, then nodded to Gutierrez to follow her, and the two of them made their way back to the mouth of the ravine. Abigail crouched there, Gutierrez squatting behind her, and gazed back up the way they'd come. Their position was as close as they were going to get to a private conversation, she thought.

"They're fast," she said finally, and half-sensed Gutierrez's shrug behind her.

"People who fly are always faster than people who walk, Ma'am," he said philosophically. "On the other hand, people who walk can get into places people who fly can't."

"But if they can pin us down in a place like this," she said quietly, "they won't really have to get into here after us, will they?"

"No," Gutierrez agreed.

"And it won't take them long to work their way here," Abigail continued in that same quiet voice.

"Longer than you think, Ma'am," Gutierrez assured her. She looked up at him, and her low-light gear showed her his expression clearly. To her surprise, he seemed completely serious, not as if he were simply trying to cheer her up.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Ma'am, they can overfly us in just a few minutes, but we're under pretty good cover here. They're not going to see us from overhead, and that means they're going to have to send people in looking for us on foot. Now, we knew exactly where we were going, and it took us a good fifteen, sixteen minutes to get here at a hard run. It's going to take them a helluva lot longer to cover the same distance not knowing where they're going. Especially when they're going to be wondering if the same people who shot down their shuttle are waiting to shoot them up, too."

Abigail nodded slowly as she realized he was right. But even if it took the pirates four or five times as long to cover the same distance, they'd be to the ravine in no more than an hour and half or so.

"We need to buy some more time, Sergeant," she said.

"I'm certainly open to ideas, Ma'am," Gutierrez replied.

"How good are those thermal blankets at blocking sensors, really?"

"Well," Gutierrez said slowly, "they're pretty damned effective against straight thermal sensors. And they'll help some against other sensors. Not a lot. Why, Ma'am?"

"We don't have enough of them to cover all of us," Abigail said. "Even if we did, it will only be a matter of time until they work their way far enough down the valley to spot this ravine." She thumped the rock wall behind her. "And when they do—" She shrugged.

"Can't argue with you there, Ma'am," the sergeant said slowly, in the tone of a man who was pretty sure he wasn't going to like what he was about to hear.

"It occurs to me that if we just stay here, they'll get all of us once they reach this point," Abigail said steadily. "I'm sure you and your people will put up a good fight, but with us pinned down in here, all it would take would be one or two grenades or plasma bursts, wouldn't it?"

Gutierrez nodded, his expression grim, and she shrugged.

"In that case, our best bet is to decoy them away from the ravine," she said. "If we just stay here, we all die. But if some of us use the thermal blankets for cover while we move away from here, then deliberately show ourselves further down the valley, well away from the ravine, we can draw them after us, pull them past the others. There should even be a pretty good chance that they'll assume all of us are somewhere out there ahead of them and extend their perimeter past the ravine without ever realizing it's here."

Gutierrez was silent for several seconds, then he drew a deep breath.

"Ma'am, there may be something to what you're saying," he said very slowly. "But you do understand that whoever does the decoying isn't going to make it, don't you?"

"Sergeant, if we all stay here, we all die here," she said flatly. "It's always possible some of the decoy force might survive." She held up a hand before he could protest. "I know how heavy the odds against that are," she told him. "I'm not saying I think any of them will. I'm only saying that it's at least theoretically possible . . . whereas if we stay here, there's no possibility at all, unless Gauntlet somehow miraculously gets back in the nick of time. Or would you disagree with that assessment?"

"No, Ma'am," he said finally. "No, I wouldn't."

"Well, in that case, let's—" she looked up at the sergeant with a bittersweet smile he didn't quite understand "—be about it."

 

It wasn't quite that simple, of course. Especially not when Gutierrez found out who she intended to command the decoys.

"Ma'am, this is a job for Marines!" he said sharply.

"Sergeant," she shot back just as sharply, "it was my idea, I'm in command of this party, and I say that makes it my job."

"You're not trained for it!" he protested.

"No, I'm not," she agreed. "But let's be honest here, Sergeant. Just how important is training going to be, under the circumstances?"

"But—"

"And another thing," she said, deliberately dropping her voice so that only Gutierrez could hear her. "If—when—they finally catch up with the decoys," she said unflinchingly, "they're going to realize they've been fooled if all they find are Marines. That was a Navy pinnace. They may assume some of the crew stayed aboard to draw their fire and cover the rest, but do you think they're not going to be suspicious if they don't find any naval personnel dirtside?"

Gutierrez stared at her, his expression unreadable, as he realized what she meant. That despite anything else she might have said, she knew the decoys were going to die . . . and that she was deliberately planning to use her own corpse in an effort to protect the other personnel under her command.

"You could have a point," he acknowledged, manifestly against his will, "but you really aren't trained for this. You'll slow us down."

"I'm the youngest, fittest Navy person present," she said bluntly. "I may slow you down some, but I'll slow you down the least."

"But—"

"We don't have time to debate this, Sergeant. We need every minute we've got. I'll let you choose the rest of the party, but I'm coming. Is that clearly understood?"

Gutierrez stared at her for perhaps another three heartbeats. And then, slowly, obviously against his will, he nodded.

 

"It's taking too long," Ringstorff said.

"It's a big planet," Lithgow replied. The depot ship was far enough from Refuge that Lamar's light-speed message reporting the loss of his assault shuttle had yet to reach it.

"I'm not talking about that," Ringstorff said. "I'm talking about Morakis and Maurersberger. They should have been back here by now."

"It's only been fourteen hours," Lithgow protested. "It could easily have taken them that long just to run the Manty down!"

"Not if this report from Lamar about her impeller damage was accurate, it couldn't," Ringstorff shot back.

"Unless she got it fixed before they caught her," Lithgow said. "Or maybe they got just enough of it back to stay ahead for a few extra hours." He shrugged. "Either way, they'll catch her, or after a few more hours, they'll turn around and come home to announce they've lost her."

"Maybe," Ringstorff said moodily. He moved morosely around the depot ship's bridge for a few minutes. He didn't care to admit, even to himself, how shocked he'd been by Fortune Hunter's destruction. Despite all of his inbred respect for the Royal Manticoran Navy, he hadn't really believed that a single RMN cruiser stood the proverbial chance of a snowball in hell against no less than four Solarian-built cruisers, even with Silesian crews. But he'd viewed Lamar's report carefully, and he was privately certain that if Mörder hadn't hit her with that single totally unexpected broadside, Gauntlet could have taken all three of the ships she'd known about.

Which, he finally admitted to himself, was the real reason he was so antsy. If an undamaged Gauntlet could have taken three of the Four Yahoos, then it was distinctly possible that, even damaged, she could deal with two of them. And that assumed she'd really been damaged as severely as Lamar thought she had.

"Bring up the wedge," he said abruptly. Lithgow looked at him in something very like disbelief, but Ringstorff ignored it. "Take us out of here very slowly," he told his astrogator. "I want a minimum power wedge, and I want us under maximum stealth. Put us outside the outermost planetary orbital shell."

"Yes, Sir," the astrogator acknowledged, and Ringstorff walked back across to his command chair and settled into it.

Let Lithgow feel as much disbelief as he liked, he thought. If that Manticoran cruiser did manage to come back, there was no way in hell Haicheng Ringstorff intended to confront it with an unarmed depot ship. The chances of anyone spotting them that far out from the primary were infinitesimal, and they could slip undetectably away into hyper anytime they chose.

"What about Lamar?" Lithgow asked in a painfully neutral voice, and Ringstorff looked up to find his second-in-command standing beside his command chair.

"Lamar can look after himself," Ringstorff replied. "He's got an undamaged ship, and he's way the hell inside the system hyper limit. He certainly ought to be able to spot a heavy cruiser's footprint in plenty of time to run before it comes in on him. Especially if his damned report about its impellers was right in the first place!"

 

"I'm picking something up," Sergeant Howard Cates announced.

"What?" Major George Franklin demanded nervously. Franklin wasn't really a "major," any more than Cates was a "sergeant," of course. But it had amused Ringstorff to organize his cutthroat crews' ground combat and boarding elements into something resembling a proper military table of organization.

"I'm not positive . . ." Cates said slowly. "I think it's a power pack. Over that way—"

He looked up from the display of his sensor pack and pointed . . . just as the supersonic whip crack of a pulser dart blew the back of his head into a finely divided spray of blood, bone, and brain tissue.

Franklin cursed in falsetto shock as the scalding tide of crimson, gray, and white flecks of bone exploded over him. Then the second dart arrived, and the major would never be surprised by anything again.

 

Mateo Gutierrez had his vision equipment in telescopic mode, and he smiled with savage satisfaction as Private Wilson and Staff Sergeant Harris took down their targets.

"Well, they know we're here now," he said, and Abigail nodded beside him in the dark. She'd seen the sudden, efficient executions as clearly as he had, and she marveled, in a corner of her mind, that it hadn't shocked her more. But perhaps that wasn't really so surprising after the last four or five hours. And even if it was, there wasn't time to worry about it now.

"They're starting to circle around to the west," she said instead, and it was Gutierrez's turn to nod. He'd managed, for reasons Abigail hadn't been prepared to argue against, to assign her as his sensor tech. They'd had less than a dozen of the sensor remotes, but they'd planted them strategically along their trail as they scrambled across the mountainside under the cover of their thermal blankets. Abigail was astounded at the degree of coverage that small number of sensors could provide, but very little of the information coming in to her was good.

There were well over two hundred pirate ground troops moving steadily in their direction. It was obvious to her that they weren't even remotely in the same league as Gutierrez and his people. They were slow, clumsy, and obvious in their movements, and what had just happened to the pair that had strayed into Sergeant Harris' kill zone was ample evidence of the difference in their comparative lethality. But there were still over two hundred of them, and they were closing in at last.

She leaned her forehead against the rock behind which she and Gutierrez had taken cover and felt herself sag around her bones. The sergeant had been right about how untrained for this she was. Even with the advantage of her low-light gear, she'd fallen more than once trying to match the Marines' pace, and her right knee was a bloody mess, glued to her shredded trouser leg. But she was better off than Private Tillotson or Private Chantal, she thought grimly. Or Corporal Seago.

At least she was still alive. For now.

She'd never imagined she could feel so tired, so exhausted. A part of her was actually almost glad that it was nearly over.

Mateo Gutierrez interrupted his focused, intense study of their back trail long enough to glance down at the exhausted midshipwoman briefly, and the hard set of his mouth relaxed ever so slightly for just a moment. Approval mingled with bitter regret in his dark eyes, and then he returned his attention to the night-covered valley behind them.

He'd never thought the girl would be able to keep up the pace he'd set, he admitted. But she had. And for all her youth, she had nerves of steel. She'd been the first to reach Tillotson when the pulser dart came screaming out of the dark and killed him. She'd dragged him into cover, checked his pulse, and then—with a cool composure Gutierrez had never expected—she'd taken the private's pulse rifle and appropriated his ammo pouches. And then, when the three pirates who'd shot Tillotson emerged into the open to confirm their kill, she'd opened fire from a range of less than twenty meters. She'd ripped off one neat, economical burst that dropped all three of them in their tracks, and then crawled backward through the rocks to rejoin Gutierrez under heavy fire while the rest of Sergeant Harris' first squad put down covering fire in reply.

He'd ripped a strip off of her for exposing herself that way, but his heart hadn't been in it, and she'd known it. She'd listened to his short, savage description of the intelligence involved in that sort of stupid, boneheaded, holovision hero, recruit trick, and then, to his disbelief, she'd smiled at him.

It hadn't been a happy smile. In fact, it had been almost heartbreaking to see. It was the smile of someone who knew exactly why Gutierrez was reading her the riot act. Why he had to chew her out in order maintain the threadbare pretense that they might somehow survive long enough for her to profit from the lesson.

She'd killed at least two more of the enemy since then, and her aim had been as rock steady for the last of them as for the first.

"I make that thirty-three confirmed," he said after a moment.

"Thirty-four," she corrected, never lifting her forehead from the rock.

"You sure?" he asked.

"I'm sure. Templeton got another one on the east flank while you were checking on Chantal."

"Oh." He paused in his rhythmic search and raised his pulse rifle. Her head came up at his movement, and she brought her own appropriated rifle into firing position.

"Two of them, on the right," Gutierrez said quietly from the corner of his mouth.

"Another one on the left side," she replied. "Up the slope—by that fallen tree."

"You take him; I'm on the right," he said.

"Call it," she said softly, her youthful contralto calm, almost detached.

"Now," he said, and the two of them fired as one. Gutierrez dropped his first target with a single shot; the second, alerted by the fate of his companion, scrambled for cover, and it took three to nail him. Beside him, Abigail fired only once, then rocked back to cover their flanks while the sergeant dealt with his second target.

"Time to move," he told her.

"Right," she agreed, and started further up the valley. They'd picked their next two firing points before they settled into this one, and she knew exactly where to go. She kept low, ignoring the pain in her wounded knee as she crawled across the rocky ground, and she heard the sergeant's pulse rifle whine again behind her before she reached their destination. It wasn't quite as good a position as it had seemed from below, but the rough boulder offered at least some cover, as well as a rest for her weapon, and she rolled up into position, thanking the Marine instructors who had insisted on drilling even midshipwomen in the rudiments of marksmanship.

The pulse rifle's built-in telescopic, light-gathering sight made the valley midday bright, and she quickly found the trio of pirates who were engaging the sergeant. She took a moment to be certain of their exact locations, then swept the lower valley behind them from her higher vantage point, and her blood ran cold. There were at least thirty more of them, pressing up behind their point men, with still more behind them.

Gutierrez had the lead trio pinned down, but they had him pinned down, as well, and he couldn't get the angle he needed on them.

But Abigail could. She tucked the pulse rifle into her shoulder, gathered up the sight picture, and squeezed off the first shot.

The rifle surged against her shoulder, and the left shoulder and upper torso of her target blew apart. One of his companions darted a look in her direction and started to swing his own rifle towards her, but in the process, he rose just high enough to expose his own head and shoulders to Gutierrez.

The platoon sergeant took the shot, and then Abigail had her sights on the third pirate. Another steady squeeze, and she keyed the com they hadn't dared to use until they were certain the pirates were already closing in on them.

"Clear, Sergeant," she said. "But you'd better hurry. They brought along friends."

 

"Piss on this!" Lamar snarled as the latest reports came up from groundside. His ground troops had run the damned Manties to ground, but in the process they'd run into an old-fashioned buzz saw. He didn't believe the kill numbers they were sending up to him for a moment. Hell, according to them, they'd already killed at least forty of the bastards . . . and even at that, they'd lost forty-three of their own. Not that there was any damned way the Manties had sent forty people down to a dirt ball like Refuge in the first place!

"Piss on what?" St. Claire asked wearily.

"All of this—every damned bit of it! Those frigging idiots down there couldn't find their asses with both hands!"

"At least they're in contact with them," St. Clare pointed out.

"Sure they are! Such close contact that we can't get in there to use the shuttles for air support without killing our own troops! Dammit, they're playing the Manty bastards' game!"

"But if we call them back far enough to get air support in there, the Manties will break contact again," St. Claire argued. "They've done it three times already."

"Well, in that case, maybe it's time for a few 'friendly fire casualties,' " Lamar growled.

"Or time to give it up," St. Claire suggested very, very quietly, and Lamar looked at him sharply.

"I don't like how quiet Ringstorff's been being for the last several hours," his exec said. "And I don't like hanging around this damned planet chasing frigging ghosts through the mountains any more than you do. I say bring our people up, and if Ringstorff wants these Manties, he can go down there and get them himself!"

"God, I'd love to tell him that," Lamar admitted. "But he's still calling the shots. If he wants them dead, then that's what we have to give him."

"Well, in that case, let's go ahead and get it done, one way or the other," St. Claire urged. "Either pull them back far enough to get in there with cluster munitions and blow the Manties to hell, or else tell our ground people to get their thumbs out and finish the damned job!"

 

"We've lost Harris," Abigail told Gutierrez wearily, and the sergeant winced at the pain and guilt in her voice. The dead staff sergeant's thirteen-person squad was down to four Marines . . . and one midshipwoman.

"At least we did what you planned on," he said. "They're way the hell and gone this side of the others. No way they're going to backtrack and search for survivors that close to the original contact site."

"I know." She turned an exhausted face towards him, and he realized that it wasn't as dark as it had been. The eastern sky was beginning to pale, and he felt a vague sense of wonder that they'd survived the night.

Only they hadn't, of course. Not quite yet.

He looked back down their present hillside. All four of First Squad's survivors were on the same hill, and there was no place left for them to go. The ground broke down in front of them for just under a kilometer, but the hill on which they were dug in was squarely in the mouth of a box canyon. They were finally trapped with no avenue of retreat.

He could see movement, and he realized the idiots were going to come right up the slope at them instead of standing back and calling in air strikes. It wasn't going to make much difference in the end, of course . . . except that it would give them the opportunity to take an even bigger escort to hell with them.

Well, that and one other thing, he told himself sadly as he looked with something curiously like love at the exhausted young woman beside him and touched the butt of the pulser holstered at his hip. Mateo Gutierrez had cleaned up behind pirates before. And because he had, there was no way Abigail Hearns would be alive when the murderous scum at the foot of that hill finally overran them.

"It's been a good run, Abigail," he said softly. "Sorry we didn't get you out, after all."

"Not your fault, Mateo," she said, turning to smile up at him somehow. "I was the one who thought it up. That's why I had to be here."

"I know," he said, and rested one hand on her shoulder for a moment. Then he inhaled sharply. "I'll take the right," he said briskly. "Anything on the left is yours."

 

"About fucking time!" Samson Lamar swore, and gestured for the com officer to hand him the microphone. "Now, listen to me," he snarled at the ground troops' commander—the third one they'd had, so far, "I am sick and tired of this shit! You get in there, and you kill these bastards, or I will by God shoot every last one of you myself! Is that clear?!"

"Yes, Sir. I—"

"Incoming!"

Lamar spun to face Predator's tactical section, and his jaw dropped in disbelief as he saw the blood-red icons of incoming missiles. It was impossible! How could—?

 

Michael Oversteegen's eyes were bloodshot in a drawn and weary face, but they blazed with triumph as Gauntlet's fire streaked towards the single surviving pirate cruiser. The idiots were sitting there with their wedge at standby, and it was obvious that they hadn't even bothered to man point defense stations!

He looked around his own bridge, counting the price his ship and crew had paid to reach this moment. Auxiliary Control was gone, and so was Environmental Two and Four, Damage Control Central, Boat Bay Two, and Communications One. Only two tubes and one graser remained operational in her forward chase armament, and none at all aft. Half her gravitics were gone, and her FTL com had been destroyed. Over thirty compartments were open to space, her surviving magazines were down to less than fifteen percent, and Fusion Two was in emergency shutdown.

Lieutenant Commander Abbott was dead, along with Commander Tyson and over twenty percent of Gauntlet's total crew, and Linda Watson and Shobhana Korrami were both among the many critically wounded in Anjelike Westman's sickbay. Barely a quarter of Gauntlet's after impeller ring—and only one of her after alpha nodes—were on line, and her forward impeller ring had taken so much damage that her maximum acceleration was barely two hundred gravities. Nine of her broadside missile tubes, six of her broadside graser mounts, and four of her sidewall generators had been reduced to wreckage, and there was no way in the galaxy he could take on yet another undamaged heavy cruiser and win.

But he and his people had already destroyed three of them, he thought grimly. If they had to, galaxy or no galaxy, they would damned well take out a fourth. Either way, there was no way he was going to abandon Refuge to the animals who had already slaughtered so many, and he had people of his own down there.

And so he'd come back anyway. Made his excruciatingly gradual alpha translation almost twenty light-minutes out, well beyond detection range from the inner system, and accelerated inward steadily. Now Gauntlet came roaring out of the dark at over fifty percent of light-speed, and every one of her surviving tubes spat missiles at the totally unsuspecting Predator.

It was over in a single salvo.

 

"Holy shit!"

Gutierrez didn't know which of his surviving Marines it came from, but the exclamation summed up his own feelings admirably. The huge, blinding, sun-bright flashes as whole clusters of laser heads detonated almost directly overhead could mean only one thing. And then, almost instantly, there was a far larger, far brighter, far closer boil of fury, and he knew a starship's fusion bottle had just let go.

"Here they come!" somebody else yelled, and the platoon sergeant jerked his attention back down from the heavens as the pirates below started up the slope at a run. Pulse rifles, tribarrels, and grenade launchers poured in a heavy covering fire, trying to keep the defenders' heads down, but Gutierrez had positioned his people with care and built sangars of rock for cover.

"Open fire!" he shouted, and five pulse rifles poured darts back down the hill. The Marines were running low on ammo, but there was no point conserving it now, and they blazed away furiously. Their one surviving plasma rifle walked its fire across the slope, painting the pre-dawn dark with brief, terrible sunrises, and he could hear the shrieks of wounded and dying pirates even through the thunder of battle as the wave of attackers shredded under that savage pounding.

Still they came on, and he wondered what in God's name they thought they could accomplish now. They were done, damn it! Didn't they even realize what those explosions overhead had meant?!

Maybe they thought they could take some of their enemies alive, use them as hostages or bargaining chips. Or maybe it was simple desperation, the move of people too tired and too tightly focused on the job at hand to think about anything else. Or maybe it was simple stupidity. Not that it mattered either way.

Private Justinian died as a pirate-launched grenade detonated almost directly above her, and Private Williams went down as a head-sized lump of rock was blasted into the breastplate of his unpowered clamshell armor. But the armor held, and Williams dragged himself back up and opened fire once more.

The attack rolled on up the hill, melting under the defenders' fire but still coming, and Gutierrez saw Abigail drop her pulse rifle as her last magazine emptied. She drew her sidearm, holding the pulser in a firing range, two-handed grip, and he realized that even now she was choosing her targets, spending each round carefully, refusing to simply blaze away in blind, suppressive fire.

And then, suddenly, there were no more attackers. Perhaps thirty percent of the force which had come up the slope survived to retreat back down it, but they were the lucky ones. The ones who had just discovered what professionals like Gutierrez already knew. You did not charge into the teeth of modern infantry weapons, however outnumbered the defenders were. Not without powered armor or a hell of a lot more support than those yahoos had had.

He raised his head cautiously and peered out and down. Motionless bodies and writhing wounded littered the frosty hillside between the roaring pockets of flame the plasma rifle had left in the underbrush in its wake, and Gutierrez blinked in disbelief.

They were still alive. Of course, that could still change, but—

"Now hear this," the voice rattled from every com on the planet, hard as battle steel and broadcast over every frequency, "this is Captain Michael Oversteegen, Royal Manticoran Navy. Any pirate who lays down his weapons and surrenders immediately will be taken into custody and guaranteed a fair trial. Any pirate who does not lay down his weapons and surrender immediately will not be given the opportunity t' do so. You will be shot where you stand unless you surrender at once. This is your first and last warning!"

Gutierrez held his breath, staring down the hill, wondering.

And then, by ones and twos, men and women began to step out of cover, lay down their weapons, clasp their hands behind their heads, and simply stand there as Tiberian rose above the eastern horizon at last.

"All right, Sergeant Gutierrez," a soft Grayson accent said beside him. "We've got some prisoners to take into custody, so let's be about it."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Gutierrez gave her a parade-ground salute which somehow completely failed to look out of place, despite his filthy, bloodstained uniform. Or hers. She looked up at his towering centimeters for a moment, and then she returned it.

"All right, people!" Gutierrez turned to his survivors—all three of them—and if his voice was just a little husky, of course it was only due to fatigue. "You heard the Midshipwoman—let's go take these bastards into custody!"

 

"Ah, Ms. Hearns!"

"You wanted to see me, Captain?"

"Indeed I did. Come in."

Abigail stepped through the hatch into the captain's day cabin, and it slid shut behind her.

The man sitting behind the desk in that cabin was exactly the same man she'd seen at that first formal dinner, down to the last non-regulation touch of the superbly tailored uniform. He still looked exactly like a younger version of Prime Minister High Ridge, and he still had all of the maddening mannerisms, all the invincible faith in the superiority of his own birth, and that incredibly irritating accent.

As if any of that mattered.

"We'll be dockin' at Hephaestus in about three hours," he said to her. "I realize that you'd prefer t' remain aboard until we hand the ship over t' dockyard hands. In fact, I requested permission t' retain you on board until that time. Unfortunately, I was overruled. I've just been informed that a personnel shuttle will be arrivin' in approximately forty minutes t' deliver you, Mr. Aitschuler, Ms. Korrami, and Mr. Grigovakis t' the Academy."

"Sir, we'd all prefer to remain aboard," she protested.

"I know," he said in a surprisingly gentle voice. "And I sincerely wish you could. But I believe there are people waitin' for you. Includin', if my sources haven't misled me, Steadholder Owens."

Her eyes widened, and he permitted himself a slight chuckle.

"It's traditional for immediate family members t' be present for the award of the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, Ms. Hearns. Naturally, I feel confident that that custom is the only reason your father has seen fit t' become the first Grayson-born steadholder ever t' visit Saganami Island. I believe I may also have heard that the Queen intends t' be present, however. And I understand there was some mention of Steadholder Harrington's administerin' your oath as a Grayson officer."

The young woman on the other side of his desk blushed darkly, and his deep-set eyes twinkled. She seemed at a loss for words, then shook herself.

"And will you be present, Sir?" she asked.

"I believe you may count on that, Ms. Hearns," he told her gravely. "I'm informed that there will be more than sufficient preliminary festivities and family greetin's t' give me time t' hand Gauntlet over t' the yard dogs and still make the award ceremony."

"I'm very glad to hear that, Sir," she said, and hard though it would once had been for her to believe it, she meant it.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world, Ms. Hearns," he told her, and rose behind his desk. "Some of my compatriots have seen fit t' express contempt for Grayson. They seem t' feel that such a primitive and backward planet can't possibly have anythin' t' offer a star nation so sophisticated and advanced as our own. I never happened t' agree with that position, and if I ever had, I certainly wouldn't now. Especially not after havin' the honor and considerable privilege of seein' firsthand just what sort of young women Grayson will be calling t' the service of the Sword. And havin' seen it, I intend t' be there when the first of them receives the recognition she so richly deserves."