Shadow of Freedom-eARC (26 page)

“I did indeed.” He smiled bleakly. “I think it’s entirely possible things are about to get really ugly.”

“Ugly as in right here aboard the station? Or as in getting even uglier in general?” MacWilliams asked.

“Maybe both, but I’m more concerned about Shona than anything else. I’ve just been informed by a reliable source that Governor Dueñas has no intention of meeting the Manties’ demand that their personnel be released to them.”

“Jesus,” MacGeechan muttered, then blushed and shook himself. “Sorry, Sir.”

“You’re not thinking anything I’m not, Lieutenant,” MacNaughtan assured him.

“Should I take it, Sir, that ‘a reliable source’
wasn’t
Governor Dueñas?” MacWilliams asked, her eyes shrewd.

“I think we should just move along quickly without getting into that particular point,” MacNaughtan told her with a tight smile. “What matters right this minute is that the Manties are going to insist we hand their people over and Dueñas is going to order us
not
to hand their people over. Under the circumstances, I could live with telling our esteemed Governor to suck vacuum, but I strongly suspect Major Pole would be disinclined to support us in that.”

MacWilliams’ blue eyes hardened. She and Major John Pole, the CO of the Solarian Gendarmerie intervention battalion OFS had stationed here aboard Shona Station, loathed one another. Pole’s people hadn’t enforced the kind of brutal reign of terror Frontier Security had imposed—or supported, at any rate—in all too many protectorate systems, but that didn’t make him a knight in shining armor. MacWilliams and her predecessor had been forced to deal with several complaints about Pole, most from women who hadn’t responded favorably enough to his advances. Any Saltashan would have been hammered hard over the same sort of accusations. At the very least, he would have been dragged in while they were thoroughly investigated. But local police forces didn’t go around investigating the commanders of intervention battalions. That was one of the facts of life in the Verge, and it stuck in Bridie MacWilliams’ craw sideways.

Worse, as the Gendarmes’ CO, Pole set the standard. Two or three of his troopers had gotten far enough out of line that the previous OFS governor had actually authorized their prosecution, and one of them had even been broken out of the Gendarmerie and sent away for ten T-years of hard time on the gas-extraction platforms orbiting Himalaya. Dueñas had promptly turned the clock back, however…which was how MacWilliams came to hold her present position, since one of the governor’s first actions had been to sack her predecessor precisely because of those prosecutions.

“Skipper,” she said now, “I think we have limited options here. I’ve got around five hundred cops for the entire Station, most with nothing heavier than side arms, and even after detachments, Pole’s got the better part of two
companies
of gendarmes on-station. I don’t have an up-to-the-minute count, but he’s got to have close to three hundred people up here, and they’ve got a lot heavier equipment than mine do.”

“Two hundred and seventy-three as of this morning, Ma’am,” MacGeechan put in. “Not counting three on sick call in the infirmary.” MacNaughtan and MacWilliams both looked at him with raised eyebrows, and he shrugged. “I just thought it was something I should be checking on, given the situation. Just so we could have a better feel for how we might…integrate our own people with his if we had to, you understand.”

“I believe I do, Eardsidh,” MacWilliams told him with an off-center smile. “I believe I do.”

Then her smile faded and she turned back to MacNaughtan.

“Sir, I think Major Pole will obey his orders—his
legal
orders, of course—from Governor Dueñas. And I can’t see anything aboard Shona Station which could reasonably be expected to prevent him from doing so.”

She’d chosen her words carefully, MacNaughtan noted. All of them could honestly testify that no one had even so much as suggested that they might attempt to resist the governor’s instructions.

“I don’t either,” he told her. “On the other hand, as you’ve pointed out, your people are much more lightly equipped than Major Pole’s gendarmes. Under the circumstances, I feel you and Lieutenant MacGeechan would be best employed using your personnel for crowd control, public safety, and to back up Commander MacVey’s damage control crews, in case they should be needed. My feeling is that we also ought to immediately begin evacuating civilian personnel from Victor Seven in order to facilitate any movements Major Pole may feel it’s appropriate for him to make.”

“Yes, Sir.” MacWilliams nodded.

Victor Seven was the station habitat module which had been assigned to the gendarmes ever since their original dispatch to Saltash. Actually, they’d assigned it to themselves, since it had originally been intended as the station’s VIP habitat and was still the largest, most luxuriously appointed module Shona Station boasted. It had also been refitted to contain the Gendarmerie’s brig facilities, which were separate from those of the Saltash Space Service’s police forces. No one had been especially happy about the notion of confining the Manticoran merchant spacers in Victor Seven; the general feeling had been that Saltash was already on thin ice, and the Gendarmerie was not famous for the consideration with which it treated individuals in its custody. Under the circumstances, however, MacNaughtan couldn’t pretend he was unhappy to have them in Victor Seven, because aside from a few dozen service personnel with duty stations in the area, the only people in Victor Seven were going to be gendarmes and the Manties.

“It’s a pity,” MacNaughtan continued, “that our own lack of personnel and equipment means your available manpower’s going to be fully employed maintaining security throughout the rest of the station. But while we won’t be able to reinforce or support the Major, I want every effort made to at least guarantee the integrity of the station in general and to ensure that he and
his
people are relieved of any responsibility which might distract them from Governor Dueñas’ orders. I trust that’s clear, Commander MacWilliams.”

“Yes, Sir.” MacWilliams smiled thinly at him. “Lieutenant MacGeechan and I will get right on that.”

* * *

“Let’s raise the station, Abhijat.”

“Yes, Sir,” Lieutenant Wilson replied, and Jacob Zavala sat back, watching the tactical plot while he waited.

DesRon 301 had settled into orbit around the planet Cinnamon. Traffic control hadn’t assigned them a parking orbit, for some reason, but HMS
Kay
’s astrogator had managed to find one. It wasn’t as if there was an enormous amount of orbital traffic to pick a way around, after all.

Captain Myau’s destroyers remained in orbit around Cinnamon’s moon, and Zavala was perfectly content to leave them there. A handful of civilian vessels had moved nervously away from the planet as the squadron entered orbit, but aside from that things seemed reasonably calm. Maybe that was because the majority of the star system’s shipping was out rescuing the survivors of Oxana Dubroskaya’s squadron.

Zavala’s lips tightened again at that thought, but it wasn’t one he was prepared to dwell upon. Right now, he had to concentrate on other things, and he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t grateful for the distraction. On the other hand, the “other things” had the potential to turn into an even more horrendous mess than the massacre of Dubroskaya’s battlecruisers. After all, there’d been only eight thousand or so human beings on those warships; there were a
quarter million
human beings on Shona Station.

Which is the reason—as that pain in the ass Dueñas clearly understands—we can’t use Mark 16s as door knockers this time around
, he thought grimly.
And if there really is an intervention battalion in there, it’s going to be one hell of a trick to pry our people loose without getting a lot of other people a lot more personally killed
.
Unless the station CO’s another Myau, at any rate. And what’re the odds of that if he’s got a stack of gendarmes breathing down his neck?

“I’ve got the station commander for you, Sir,” Lieutenant Wilson said, and Zavala looked up from the plot.

“Thanks,” he said, and turned to his com.

* * *

“I’m Captain Jacob Zavala, Royal Manticoran Navy,” the smallish, dark-skinned man on the com display said. He was quite unlike the dominant genotype here in Saltash, but despite his diminutive stature and polite tone, no one was likely to take any liberties with him once they got a good look at his eyes, MacNaughtan thought.

“Am I addressing the commanding officer of Shona Station?” the Manticoran continued in that same courteous yet unyielding voice.

“I’m Captain Valentine MacNaughtan,” MacNaughtan replied. “I’m the senior Saltash Space Service officer aboard.”

That weasel-worded evasion of responsibility shamed him, but there was no point pretending otherwise, and this Zavala no doubt understood that. For purposes of shifting blame, Governor Dueñas would be delighted to embrace the legal fiction that MacNaughtan genuinely commanded Shona Station. If MacNaughtan had ever been foolish enough to forget he simply reigned over the station administratively while OFS actually
ruled
everything in the star system, he would have been replaced with dizzying speed.

Zavala’s eyes flickered, and MacNaughtan felt his face try to heat at the other man’s obvious awareness of that reality. But the Manticoran simply nodded.

“I believe I understand your position, Captain MacNaughtan,” he said. “Unfortunately, you and I are in something of a difficult situation at the moment. There are illegally detained Manticoran nationals aboard your station. I fully realize they were detained—I’m sorry, ‘
quarantined
’—on the orders of Governor Dueñas, not those of the Saltash Space Service. The problem is that I’ve been ordered to retrieve them, and Governor Dueñas has been…less than cooperative, shall we say? In fact, he’s flatly refused to release them. And the reason this is unfortunate is that I’m going to have to insist on recovering them. In fact, my orders are to do precisely that…by whatever means may be necessary. I’m afraid Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s squadron has already discovered what that means.”

If those blue eyes had flickered before, they were rock-steady and laser-sharp now, MacNaughtan observed with a sinking sensation.

“I informed Governor Dueñas I would be sending a boarding party aboard your station within fifteen minutes of making Cinnamon orbit,” Zavala continued. “My pinnaces are en route now. I have no desire to inflict additional casualties—especially not
civilian
casualties—but my orders are clear and I intend to follow them. That means my personnel will be coming aboard Shona Station very shortly. I don’t suppose Governor Dueñas has instructed you to release the people I’ve come to reclaim into my custody?”

“I’m afraid he hasn’t,” MacNaughtan replied.

“May I ask what instructions, if any, he has given you?”

“I’ve been informed that he declines to release your people from quarantine,” MacNaughtan responded in a very careful tone. “Aside from that I have no specific instructions in regard to this matter.”

“Should I assume that means you intend to refuse to cooperate with my boarding party?” Zavala’s voice was noticeably colder, and MacNaughtan drew a deep breath.

“Your personnel aren’t in the Saltash Space Service’s custody,” he said. “Their security and medical treatment are an Office of Frontier Security responsibility under the terms of OFS’ management of traffic here in Saltash. Governor Dueñas made that point to me rather firmly when his medical staff determined that a quarantine was appropriate. As a consequence, I can’t release them to you, however cooperative I might otherwise wish to be.”

Zavala gazed at him for a moment, lips pursed thoughtfully. Then the Manticoran tipped back in his command chair and cocked his head to one side.

“May I assume, then, that you’re as desirous as I am to avoid any unfortunate incidents aboard your station, Captain?”

“I’m administratively responsible for the safety and well-being of the better part of a quarter million civilians, not to mention a major portion of my star system’s industrial infrastructure, Captain Zavala,” MacNaughtan said flatly. “I think you can assume no one in the entire galaxy could be more desirous of avoiding ‘unfortunate incidents’ than I am.”

“I can appreciate that. I trust
you
can appreciate that my people
are
coming aboard, one way or another. I would vastly prefer for my pinnaces to dock with Shona Station like any other small craft and for my personnel to come and go with the minimum disturbance of your routine, your civilians’ well-being, or the operation of your industrial nodes. Since both of us would obviously prefer that outcome, will you be good enough to issue docking clearance?”

“I suspect Governor Dueñas would prefer for me to refuse you clearance, Captain Zavala. Unfortunately, he hasn’t specifically told me that, and it seems evident you have more than sufficient firepower available to compel me to at least allow you access to the station. That being the case, yes, your pinnaces are cleared to dock, although I feel constrained to point out that it’s only under official protest. Understand, however,” he looked very steadily into Zavala’s eyes, “that I
am
responsible for those civilians’ safety. Should they be endangered, it will be my duty to intervene.”

He spoke firmly, crisply, and Zavala nodded.

“I understand, Captain MacNaughtan, and I assure you my people will have no intention of endangering your civilians. Of course, once they board, they
will
have to make contact with the Frontier Security personnel responsible for maintaining the medical quarantine aboard your station. Would it be possible for you to provide them with a guide or a map board to direct them to the quarantine facilities when they come aboard?”

“I can certainly see to it that they have directions,” MacNaughtan replied. “And in order to minimize the possibility of any of those incidents you and I both want to avoid, I’ve taken the precaution of evacuating both civilian and Saltash Space Service personnel from the module supporting the quarantine facilities.”