A broken behemoth drifted against pinprick stars, flanks ripped and torn, and Simon Monkoto sat on his flag bridge and glared at its image.
He turned his head to glower at the man beside him. Ferhat Ben Belkassem's dark face was pale from the carnage, but he'd been the first to note the hole in Procyon's fire where an entire quadrant's batteries had been blown away, and Monkoto had yielded to his appeal to hold the SLAMs.
He still didn't know why he had. They'd have to destroy it sooner or later—why risk his people on the O Branch inspector's whim? But he'd taken Audacious into the hole and worked his way along the dreadnought's hull, and there'd been something sensual in the slow, brutal destruction of Procyon's weapons, in the lingering murder of her crew's hope.
His eyes returned to the main plot, still bemused by what it showed. Thirty Imperial Fleet ships, eighteen of them battlecruisers. They'd been a more than welcome help, but the mercenaries' losses had still been horrendous. Assassin, three of nine battlecruisers, four of seven heavy cruisers . . . The butcher's bill had been proportionately lighter among the destroyers and light cruisers, but the total was agonizing, especially for mercenaries who lacked the resources of planetary navies.
Yet none of the renegade fleet had escaped, and only two destroyers had surrendered. The mass murders on Ringbolt—yes, and Elysium—were avenged . . . or would be, when Procyon finally died.
A com signal chimed, and he hid a flicker of surprise as he recognized his caller's craggy face.
"Admiral Monkoto," a voice rumbled, "I'm Brigadier Sir Arthur Keita, Imperial Cadre. Please accept my thanks on behalf of His Majesty. I'm certain His Majesty will wish to personally express his own gratitude to you and all your people in the very near future. The Empire is in your debt."
"Thank you, Sir Arthur." Monkoto's heart rose, despite the pain of his losses. Sir Arthur Keita was not known for meaningless praise. When he spoke, it was with Seamus II's voice, and the Terran Empire paid its debts.
"I also wish to thank you for not destroying that dreadnought." Keita's face hardened. "We want its crew, Admiral. We want them badly."
"I also want them, Sir Arthur." Monkoto's voice took on the steely edge of a file.
"I understand, and we intend to give you the justice you and your people deserve, but we need live prisoners for interrogation."
"That's what Inspector Ben Belkassem said," Monkoto acknowledged, and Keita's tight face eased just a bit.
"So he is with you. Good! And he's right, Admiral Monkoto."
"Fine, but how do you intend to collect them? We've pulled most of their teeth and disabled their shield generator, but they have to know what the courts have waiting for them. Do you really think they'll surrender?"
"Some of them will," Keita said with flat, grim finality. "I've got an entire battalion of Cadre drop commandos over here, Admiral. I believe we can pry them out of their shell."
"Drop com—" Monkoto closed his mouth with a snap. A battalion? For just a moment he felt a shiver of hungry sympathy for the bastards aboard that hulk. He shook himself and cleared his throat.
"I imagine you can, Sir Arthur, as long as they don't blow their power plants and take your people with them."
"They won't," Keita said. "Watch your plot, Admiral."
Monkoto's eyes dropped to the display as four battlecruisers moved towards Procyon. For a moment he thought they were about to launch assault shuttles, but they didn't. Keita had something no one else did—the complete blueprints for a Capella-class dreadnought—and the battlecruisers' short-range batteries stabbed into Procyon's hull. It was over in less than two seconds; long before the renegades could have realized what was happening, every one of Procyon's fusion plants had become an incandescent ruin.
"As I say, Admiral," Keita said with cold satisfaction, "they won't be blowing those plants." He paused a moment, then nodded as if to himself. "Another thing, Admiral. I don't know if it'll be possible to salvage that ship. If it is, however, she's yours. My word on it."
Monkoto sucked in in astonishment. Badly wrecked as Procyon was, she was far from beyond repair if a replacement Fasset drive could be cobbled up, and the thought of adding that eight-million-tonne monster to his fleet . . .
"But now," Keita said more briskly, "my people have a job to do. I'll speak with you again later, Admiral."
* * *
Tannis Cateau closed her armor's visor. The soft "shusssssh" of a solid seal answered her, and she checked her battle-rifle's servos. Many drop commandos preferred plasma guns or lasers for vacuum. Energy weapons weren't very popular in atmosphere, where their range was drastically reduced, and even in vacuum a well-timed aerosol grenade did bad things to lasers, but the laser's lack of recoil made it popular in zero-G. Of course, lasers had horrific power requirements, and plasguns could hardly be called pinpoint weapons, especially in the confines of a starship's passages, yet most seemed to feel their advantages more than compensated. Not Tannis. The battle-rifle was her chosen precision instrument, and using her armor's thrusters to offset the recoil had become instinct years ago.
She shook off her woolgathering thoughts with a wry smile. Her brain always insisted on wandering in the last moments before action was joined . . . unlike Alley, who only seemed to focus to an even greater intensity.
She pushed that memory away quickly and watched the troop bay repeater as the assault shuttles formed up. At least Alley had gotten away. She hadn't been killed by her own, and there was still hope—
The last shuttle slid into place, thrusters flared, and they swooped across the kilometers towards Procyon's savaged hulk.
* * *
Monkoto felt his stomach tighten as the silvery minnows darted towards the wounded leviathan. They were such tiny things—little larger than an old pre-space airliner—and if he'd missed even a single energy mount . . . .
But no weapons fired. The Bengals snarled down on their prey, belly-mounted tractors snugged them in tight, and hatches opened.
* * *
Tannis ducked instinctively and swore as a blast of penetrators spanged off her armor. One of her headquarters section reared up between her and the fire, staggering back a meter as the heavy-density projectiles slammed into him. They were from a standard combat rifle, and fiery ricochets bounced and leapt as his armor shrugged them aside. His weapon rose with the deadly economy of tick-enhanced reactions, and Tannis winced as a gout of plasma spewed up the passage, silent in the vacuum. The rifleman vanished—along with twelve meters of bulkhead.
"Prisoners, Jake," she said mildly. "We want prisoners."
"Sorry, Ma'am." The hulking drop commando, a third again Tannis's height, sounded almost sheepish. "Got carried away."
"Yeah, well, thanks anyway."
Her lip twitched as her team picked its way past the glowing wound. Corporal Jake Adams sometimes forgot how drastic the consequences could be when he got "carried away." Combat armor gave anyone the "muscle" to use truly heavy weapons; Adams also had the size, and his "plasma rifle" was the equal of a shuttle cannon.
Her amusement faded as she focused on her display. Boarding assaults were always ugly. Even though they knew every nook and cranny of their battlefield, there were still too many places for die-hards to hole up, and no pirate had any illusion about his or her ultimate fate. Her HQ section's circuitous route had been planned to reach their real objective while her other wings distracted the enemy rank and file to clear her path. They were doing it . . . but they were taking losses despite their equipment.
She peered about her, checking corridor traffic markings against her mental HUD, and grunted in satisfaction.
"Wolverine-One, Ramrod has cleared route to Tango-Four-Niner-Lima down Zebra-Three. Form on my beacon."
Captain Schultz's acknowledgment came back, and she swung her rifle into fighting position as Bravo Company began closing on her current positions.
"All right, Jake. You see that hatch down there?"
"Yes, Ma'am. I surely do."
"Well, this piece of shit's flag bridge is on the other side of it." She smiled up at him and waved a hand with the tick's dancelike fluidity. "Feel free to get carried away."
* * *
James Howell crouched behind his useless console in his vac suit. The laser carbine was alien to him, clumsy-feeling in his grip, but he waited almost calmly, his mind empty. There was no room for hope, and no point in fear. He was going to die, and whether it happened in a few minutes or a few hours—or even in a few months, if he was taken alive—didn't matter. He'd betrayed all he was sworn to uphold to play the great game; now he'd lost, and his own stupidity had brought all of his people to the same degrading end.
Echoes of combat quivered through the steel about him, and he glanced across the bridge at Rachel Shu, small and deadly behind a bipod-mounted plasma rifle. Others crouched with them, waiting, eyes locked on the hatch. Any moment now—
The heavily armored hatch shuddered. A meter-wide circle flared instantly white-hot, and a tongue of plasma licked through it, a searing column that leapt across the bridge. Someone got in its way and died without time even to scream as the heart of a sun embraced him.
Another bolt of fury blew the hatch from its frame in half-molten wreckage, and the first drop commando charged through it.
Howell braced his laser across the console and squeezed the stud. A dozen others were firing, flaying the armored figure with tungsten penetrators and deadly beams of light, and the invader staggered. His battle-rifle flashed white fire as he went down—an unaimed spray of heavy-caliber penetrators that chewed up consoles and people with equal contempt—and then Rachel's plasgun fired, and what hit the deck was a less than human cinder.
* * *
Tannis Cateau swallowed a curse as her point man went down.
It was her fault. Other teams had already taken heavy fire; hers hadn't, and she'd let herself grow overconfident. Now she slid forward, hugging the bulkhead and trying not to think about Adams and his monster gun behind her. Her racing mind rode the tick, and she reached out through her armor sensors. She couldn't get a clear reading, but with a little help . . .
A hand signal brought her HQ grenadier up on the other side of the passage, and she unhooked a small device from her armor harness, then nodded.
The grenadier opened up on full auto. It was a mixed belt, mostly smoke and pyrotechnics with only a handful of light HE, for they wanted prisoners, but it did its job. Anyone beyond that hatch was hugging the deck as flash-bangs and antilaser vapor exploded in his face when she tossed the sensor remote with a smooth, underhand motion. It bounced across the deck, unnoticed under the cover of the grenades, and she smiled the cold, distant smile of a drop commando as she keyed it alive.
Ah! She oriented her remote perspective, tallying threat sources and taking careful note of the plasma rifle, then nodded to the grenadier a second time. He ripped off another burst; then Tannis Cateau flowed into the hatchway with the uncoiling deadliness of a bushmaster, and her battle-rifle's powered mounting was an extension of her own nerves. Her target was invisible behind the last of the grenade bursts, but the rifle rose without an instant's waste motion, and she squeezed off a three-shot burst. The rounds left the muzzle at fifteen hundred meters per second; the three-millimeter sub-caliber projectiles reached their target virtually instantaneously and cut its legs from under it—literally.
Answering fire ripped back at her despite the blinding effect of the grenades, and she ignored it. She knew it was unaimed; they couldn't see her, but her eyes were in their midst.
Her rifle was a magic wand, spewing agony and death with merciless precision, and for once there was no pity in her. Her ammo belt burned through the feed chute in three- and four-shot bursts, and the answering fire ebbed. A last spattering of penetrators whined off her armor, and she went through the hatch like a panther, already calling for the medics.
* * *
"My God."
Ben Belkassem's words hung in the sickbay air, and he wondered if they were a curse or a prayer. He sank back into his chair, as nauseated as Tannis Cateau had been as she came down from the tick.
Sir Arthur Keita said nothing, only stared down at the woman in the hospital bed. Tannis's fire had sliced away her legs like a jagged scalpel, but no one pitied her. She lay there, smiling a bemused, cheerful smile, and Keita wanted to strangle her with his bare hands.
Rachel Shu was the only member of the renegades' field staff to be taken alive. He knew he should be grateful, that no one except James Howell himself could have given them more information, but simply listening to her fouled him somehow. She carried an invisible rot with her, a gangrene of the soul all the more terrible for how ordinary she looked, and she'd explained it all with appalling cheerfulness under the influence of Ben Belkassem's drugs.
Under normal circumstances, no imperial subject could be subjected to truth drugs outside a court of law—which, Keita knew, wouldn't have stopped Ben Belkassem or Hector Suarez for a moment. For himself, the brigadier was just as happy that no laws had been broken. Bent, perhaps, but not broken. Shu had been taken in the act of piracy; as such, she had no rights. Keita could have had her shot out of hand, and he wanted to. Oh, how he wanted to! But she was far too valuable for that. His medicos would cosset and pamper her as they would the Emperor himself, for her testimony would put Subrahmanyan Treadwell and Sir Amos Brinkman in front of a firing squad.
He stepped back from the bed as from a plague carrier and folded himself into a chair opposite Ben Belkassem. Tannis Cateau was a white-faced ghost at his side, and silence hung heavy until the inspector broke it.
"I can't—" He shook his head. "I heard it all, and I still can't believe it," he said almost wonderingly. "All these months hunting for the cold-blooded bastards behind it, only to find this at the end of them."
"I know." Keita's lips worked as if he wanted to spit on the deck. "I know," he repeated, "but we've got it all. Or enough, anyway." He turned to Inspector Suarez, standing at Ben Belkassem's shoulder. "We won't need Clean Sweep after all, Inspector."
"I can't say I'm sorry," Suarez said, "but this is almost worse. I don't think any sector governor's ever been convicted of treason."
"There's always a first time," Keita said grimly. "Even for this, I suppose." He shook himself. "I'll speak to Admiral Leibniz myself; I don't want this going any further than the people in this room until we reach Soissons."
He inhaled deeply, then summoned a sad smile.
"This may even help, in a way." The others looked at him in astonishment, and his smile grew a bit wider. "We'd never have gotten this far without Alley, Tannis." He nodded at Ben Belkassem. "Add it to what the Inspector has to say, and we may get that shoot on sight order dropped."
Tannis's face lit with sudden, fragile hope, but Ben Belkassem sucked in air as if he'd been punched in the belly. Keita turned at the sound, and his eyes narrowed as he saw the inspector's face.
"What?" he asked sharply
"Alicia," Ben Belkassem whispered. "My God, Alicia!"
"What about her?"
"She knows. Dear God in heaven, she knows about Treadwell!"
Keita twitched in surprise. "That's ridiculous! How could she?"
"The computers." Ben Belkassem's hands gestured in frustration as they eyed him blankly and he tried to put his racing thoughts into words. "Procyon's computers! When Megaira took out the AI, Alicia tapped into the net along with her!"
"What are you talking about?" Tannis demanded. "That's—I don't think that would be possible for a trained alpha-synth pilot, much less Alley! Even if she could, Shu just told us Treadwell wasn't in the computers."
"Don't you understand yet?" Ben Belkassem snarled so fiercely Tannis stepped back. "She's not crazy—not the way you thought! Tisiphone is real!"
Tannis and Keita exchanged quick glances, then turned wary eyes upon the inspector, as if they expected him to begin gibbering any moment, and he forced his anger and frustration back down.
"You weren't listening to me earlier," he said urgently. "I told you what she did to Alexsov. She didn't question him, she read his mind. Call it telepathy, call it rogue psi talents, call it any damned thing you want, but she did it!"
Keita sank back in his chair, Tannis drove her hands deep into her pockets and hunched her shoulders, and Ben Belkassem nodded slowly.
"Exactly. You may think Tisiphone is a product of Alicia's own mind—I don't. I sat across a dinner table and talked to her, for God's sake! I don't know what she is, but she's real, and she really can read minds . . . among other things. Think about how Alicia broke out of the hospital and stole Megaira. Think about how she tracked down the 'pirates,' damn it!"
"All right," Keita said at last. "All right, let's grant that Alicia—or this Tisiphone—can read minds. If she didn't get it from Alexsov, where could she have gotten it since?"
"From Rendlemann." Ben Belkassem pointed at Shu. "Remember what she said about what happened to him when Megaira took out Procyon's AI? That was Tisiphone. It had to be."
"Oh, come on!" Keita protested. "The man was linked to a crashed AI!"
"Oh?" Ben Belkassem turned to Tannis. "What normally happens to a cyber-synth operator when that happens, Major?"
"Catatonia," Tannis said promptly. "He goes out like a light."
"Then why did they have to sedate Rendlemann to hold him down?"
"Crap!" Tannis breathed. "He's right, Uncle Arthur—that's totally outside the profile. If Alley really can read minds now . . ."
There was a long moment of silence, and then Keita sighed.
"All right. Suppose she can—and did. Why the sudden concern?"
"If she knows about Treadwell, she's going to go for him," Ben Belkassem said flatly.
"Wait—just wait a minute!" Tannis protested. "What do you mean 'go for him'?"
"I mean she and Megaira—and Tisiphone—will try to kill him. She doesn't know we got any of Howell's staff alive. As far as she knows, she's the only person who knows the whole truth, and everyone thinks she's crazy. She thinks no one would believe her—that she has to get him herself."
"But she can't," Tannis said reasonably. "Treadwell's on the Soissons command fortress—she knows that."
"And she doesn't care. My God, it was all I could do to stop her from going after Howell by herself!"
"But it would be suicide. Alley would never do anything like that. I know her."
"You knew her," Ben Belkassem corrected grimly. He folded his hands tightly and stared down at them, choosing his words with care. "She's not crazy the way you thought she was, but—" He paused and inhaled deeply. "Major Cateau, Sir Arthur, there's something else going on inside her now. It wasn't there at Soissons. There's a . . . fanaticism. I saw it after Wyvern. She was fine before she found out about Alexsov and Brinkman, but then—"
"What are you saying, Ferhat?" Keita asked quietly.
"I'm saying she doesn't care about anything but destroying the 'pirates.' Nothing else is real to her anymore. She'll kill herself to get them . . . and she'll kill anyone else who stands in her way."
"Not Alley," Tannis whispered, but it wasn't a protest. She was pleading, and Ben Belkassem hated himself as he nodded. Keita stared at the inspector, and his mouth tightened.
"If you're right—I'm not certain you are, but if you're right—there are nine thousand other people on that fortress."
"I know."
"But could she even get through the defenses?" Suarez asked.
"She already got through them once," Ben Belkassem said. "She cut right through the middle of Howell's entire squadron. I don't know if she can get through the forts again. I wouldn't bet against it . . . but I doubt she could get back out alive."
"She wouldn't want to." Tears sounded in Tannis's voice. "Not Alley. Not after killing nine thousand innocent people." A sob caught in her throat. "If she could do that, she's turned into something she wouldn't want to live."
"She'll ram," Keita said softly. "She'll take the fort out with her Fasset drive. It's all she's got that could do the job."
"We have to warn them," Suarez said. "If we have Treadwell taken into custody, removed from the fortress, and tell her so—"
"We can't." Ben Belkassem smiled bitterly. "We don't have a starcom, and nothing we've got is as fast as Megaira."
"No," Keita said slowly, "but . . ." His voice trailed off, then he nodded decisively and stood. "We do have a dispatch boat. That's almost as fast, and she wormholed out of here almost directly away from Franconia. I doubt she had time to pre-plot it, either, so God only knows where she'll come out. I'll have Admiral Leibniz run the figures, but she's got to decelerate and reorient herself before she can even start for Soissons. If we leave immediately, we should beat her there with time to spare."
"And do what, Uncle Arthur?" Tannis asked in a tiny voice.
"I don't know, Tannis." He sighed. "I just don't know."