But she'd a.s.sembled all the information she required for that part of the operation, and there were plenty of other pirate vessels out there. It was time to be about dealing with them, she thought, reaching up to rub Nimitz's chest, and glanced at Lieutenant Kanehama.

"Plot a course for Schiller, John," she said. "I want to pull out within the next two hours."

Ginger Lewis watched Electronics Mate Second Cla.s.s Wilson's section run through the drill. It still felt a bit strange to be supervising, though no one could have guessed it from her expression. Just a few weeks ago, she'd been in Wilson's section; now, as chief of the watch, she was the second-cla.s.s petty officer's boss. But at least she didn't have to put up with the crowd Bruce had down in Impeller One.

She bared her teeth at the thought. Ginger's own people here in DCC were at least civilized, and the fact that she knew her job forward and backward seemed sufficient for most of them. The way Wilson had made it quietly clear he had no problems taking orders from her was an enormous help, as well, and her watch's efficiency was climbing steadily.

That should have been a source of unflawed satisfaction. She had, after all, made something like a fifteen T-year jump in seniority in less than three months, and the fact that Lieutenant Commander Tschu and his officers knew she was pulling her weight in her new slot meant she'd probably get to keep her new grade. And she was satisfied in that respect. Yet worry over Aubrey gnawed at her, and her own experience with Steilman only made her even more certain somebody had to jerk the son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h up short and hard.

Of course, it was possible that same experience was making her paranoid, she told herself as Wilson's people completed their drill well within parameters. Wilson looked up, and she nodded her approval, then moved to the central station to call up the duty log. Her watch ended in another twenty minutes, and she busied herself annotating the log entries for her relief, but even as she worked, her brain kept worrying at the problem.

By now, it was an open secret that it was Steilman who'd beaten Aubrey up, and the way the power tech seemed to have gotten away with it had added to his stature. The Captain had come down on him like a hammer over the drive room incident-she'd busted him to third-cla.s.s and given him five days' brig time, about the maximum punishment for his official offense, and the icy talk which came with it would have terrified any reasonable soul into walking the straight and narrow. But Steilman wasn't reasonable. The more Ginger learned about him, the more convinced she became that the man was barely even sane. He'd taken his demotion and brig time not as a warning but as proof that he'd gotten away with arranging Kirk Dempsey's "accident." Worse, his apparent immunity not only won envious respect from the other bad apples but also made those he frightened even more nervous about crossing him. Ginger knew Lieutenant Commander Tschu had delivered his own short, coldly pointed lecture, but the lack of an official follow through for the two acts which should have bought him a crash landing had blunted the chief engineer's warning just as it had the Captain's. Steilman had protested his innocence of all charges-except the insolence, for which he'd actually "apologized" to Ginger-and sworn he was purer than the driven snow, and all the time, Ginger knew, he'd been laughing at what he'd gotten away with. He and his cronies were being circ.u.mspect for the moment, yet she was grimly certain they were only biding their time.

She sighed mentally as the formalities of the change of the watch flowed about her. Sooner or later, Steilman and his crowd were going to screw up and the entire universe was going to come down on them. It was as inevitable as entropy, and Ginger knew it. Yet that wasn't going to make whatever damage they did first any less ugly. No, she thought. They needed to be slapped down-hard-and the sooner the better, but without any official accusation from Aubrey. . . .

She watched Lieutenant Silvetti turn over to Lieutenant Klontz and nodded to Senior Chief Jordan, her own relief, then headed down the pa.s.sage towards her quarters. Somehow, some way, she had to get Aubrey to open up, but he'd turned into a clam, and he no longer wandered around the ship, exploring its pa.s.sages and access ways. She was both relieved and saddened by his obvious wariness, how hard he worked on never being alone anywhere someone else might be lurking. But he wouldn't even talk to her, and she'd caught one or two echoes of Steilman's gloating delight at Aubrey's caution. They sickened her, yet there was nothing she could do about it.

At least he was back up and around, but he'd developed a talent for disappearing whenever he had free time. Ginger had tried to figure out where he was vanishing to, but without success . . . which didn't make a lot of sense. Wayfarer was a big ship, but her outsized crew packed her life support s.p.a.ces. It shouldn't be possible for Aubrey to simply turn invisible this way, and the thought that he might have been so frightened that he'd found some isolated hiding hole and scurried straight into it the instant he went off duty tore at her heart.

But if she couldn't find him, Steilman probably couldn't do it either, she told herself. That had to count for something.

Aubrey Wanderman grunted in anguish as the training mat hit him in the face again. He lay there for a second, gasping for breath, then levered himself up on his hands and knees and shook his head. Everything still seemed to be attached in more or less the right places, and he shoved further up to kneel and look up at Gunny Hallowell.

"Doing better there, Wanderman," Hallowell said cheerfully, and Aubrey dragged his exercise suit's sleeve across his sweat-soaked face. Every bone and sinew ached, and he had bruises in places where he hadn't realized he had places, but he knew Hallowell was right. He was doing better. The combination he'd just attempted had almost gotten through the sergeant major's guard, and he suspected he'd landed so hard because Hallowell had been forced to rush his own counter and thrown him with rather more energy than he'd intended.

Aubrey came back into a set position, still panting, but Hallowell shook his head.

"Take five, kid," he said, and Aubrey collapsed gratefully back onto the mat. The Marine grinned and dropped down cross-legged beside him, and Aubrey suppressed a familiar stab of envy when he realized Hallowell wasn't even breathing hard.

Aubrey rolled onto his back and stared up at the deckhead while Wayfarer's off-watch Marines continued to work out around him. Until he'd started training here, he hadn't realized the degree to which the Marines formed a separate community within the ship's company. Oh, he'd known about the traditional rivalry between the "jarheads" and "vacuum-suckers," but he'd been too immersed in the close-knit world of his own watch section to recognize that Wayfarer's crew actually consisted of an entire series of unique worlds. A man knew the others in his branch of the ship's duty structure, and while he might have a few friends scattered in other departments, those friends had their own concerns. In most ways that counted, he had less in common with them than he did even with people he disliked from his own organizational niche.

And if that was true where fellow Navy personnel were concerned, it was ten times as true for Marines. Marines might man weapon stations at GQ, but they had their own mess, their own berths, their own exercise areas, their own officers and noncoms. They had different traditions and rituals which didn't make a lot of sense to a naval rating, and they seemed perfectly content to keep it that way.

All of which left him wondering just why Gunny Hallowell had agreed to help one Aubrey Wanderman, who had absolutely no ambition ever to become a Marine.

He lay there for another moment, then gathered his nerve and shoved up on an elbow.

"Sergeant Major?"

"Yeah?"

"I, uh, I'm grateful for the trouble you're taking, but, well-"

"Spit it out, Wanderman," Hallowell rumbled. "We're not sparring now, so you probably won't get hurt even if you say something really stupid," he added with a grin when the younger man paused, almost wiggling in obvious embarra.s.sment. Aubrey blushed, then grinned back.

"I was just wondering why you're doing it, Gunny."

"I could say it's because someone has to," Hallowell replied after a moment. "Or I could say it's because I don't like b.a.s.t.a.r.ds like Steilman, or even that I just don't want some kid who barely shaves yet on my conscience. And I guess, all things considered, just about any of those reasons would do. But to be honest, the real reason is that Harkness asked me to."

"But I thought-" Aubrey paused, then shrugged. "I appreciate it, Sergeant Major, but I, uh, I thought the Senior Chief didn't exactly get along with Marines, and, well-"

"And vice-versa?" Hallowell finished for him with a subterranean chuckle, then shrugged. "Once upon a time you probably wouldn't have been too far wrong, kid, but that was before he saw the light and married a Marine." Aubrey's eyes opened wide at that, and the sergeant major laughed out loud. "You mean he didn't tell you about that?"

"No," Aubrey said in a shaken voice.

"Well, he did, and she's an old friend of mine; we went through Basic together. But I doubt most of us jarheads ever really held his habits against him. You see, Wanderman, Harkness never meant it personally. He just liked to fight, and picking on Marines was a way to keep it in the family without getting too close to home."

"You mean all those fights, all the times he got himself busted, were for the fun of it?"

"I never said he was smart, Wanderman," Hallowell replied with another grin, "and the way I hear, about half the times he got busted had to do more with black markets than fights. But, yeah, that just about sums it up." Aubrey stared at him, and the sergeant major shook his head. "Look, kid, by this time you should be starting to grasp how my people go about it when they're serious, and you've worked out almost as much with Harkness as with me. Much as it pains me to admit it, he's pretty d.a.m.ned good himself, for a vacuum-sucker. Not much into science, mind you, but a h.e.l.l of a brawler. D'you think somebody like him could spend twenty years picking bar fights without getting killed-or killing someone else-if he wasn't doing it for the fun of it? I mean, think about it. If he'd meant it seriously, somebody would've gotten med-evaced, and aside from the occasional contusion or a few st.i.tches here and there-"

Hallowell shrugged, and Aubrey blinked. The notion of picking fights with big, tough, well-trained strangers for fun was more than alien to his own thinking; it was incomprehensible. Yet he knew the sergeant major had put his finger on the truth. Senior Chief Harkness simply liked to fight-or had before he reformed. And apparently the Marines had known it all along. In fact, Hallowell sounded obscurely pleased Harkness had chosen to fight Marines rather than fellow Navy types, as if it were some sort of compliment.

And as he considered it, Aubrey realized the idea was more understandable than he'd first thought. It wasn't like Steilman. The power tech didn't like to fight; he liked to hurt people. And he didn't pick people who were likely to fight back; he picked victims. But Harkness loved the challenge. For him, it was all about compet.i.tion, a desire to match himself against someone just as tough as he was. Aubrey suspected the senior chief would deny any such ambition-probably vehemently and colorfully-but that wouldn't make it untrue.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, Aubrey was beginning to see how someone could feel that way. He'd always been pretty good at team sports, but he'd never contemplated trying anything like the martial arts. Nor would he have now, he admitted, if Steilman hadn't . . . motivated him. Yet now that he was beginning to figure out how it worked, he was more than a little surprised by how much he enjoyed it. For one thing, he was probably fitter than he'd ever been in his life, but it went further than that. There was a sense of discipline, the important kind that came from within, and of competence. Everything he'd learned so far only showed him how much more there was to learn, and it was harder work than anything he'd ever done before, yet that only made his progress even more satisfying. And one thing Gunny Hallowell and Senior Chief Harkness had managed, he thought wryly, was to reteach him that the occasional bruise or sprain wasn't the end of the world. Whereas Hallowell was working with him on technique and att.i.tude, Harkness had an even simpler teaching style, which probably had something to do with the fact that, unlike the sergeant major, he was entirely self-taught. His methodology was to teach Aubrey how to pound on Steilman by pounding on him with every trick he'd learned in his colorful career until Aubrey got fast and tough enough to pound back, and it was working.

"The thing you've got to remember here," Hallowell said after a moment, in a different tone, almost as if he'd been reading Aubrey's thoughts, "is that what you and I are doing, or even what you and Harkness are doing, isn't what you're going to have to do when it comes down to you and Steilman."

Aubrey pushed up into a sitting position and nodded, eyes dark and serious, and the sergeant major smiled thinly.

"You're quicker than he is, but he's bigger and stronger. From his record, he's a brawler, not a fighter. He'll probably try to surprise you and drag you in close, so the first thing you've got to do is stay alert, especially any time you think you're alone. If he does get his hands on you, you're in trouble, so if it happens, break fast, back off, and come in again. Whatever you do, don't fight his way, because he can take more punishment. What you've got to do is take him out quick and however dirty you have to be. Don't go looking for him, and don't start it-you don't want to get brought up on charges yourself-but the instant he takes a swing, drop his a.s.s, and don't worry too much about how you do it. As long as you don't kill him outright, Doc Ryder should be able to put him back together, and given the difference in your sizes and the fact that he started it, I don't think you'll catch any flak for putting him down. But to do it, you've got to remember he is tough. You try to match him punch for punch or let him set the limits, and he wins. Go in hard, fast, and like you mean it, and when he goes down, you don't back off. You keep going until you're sure he'll stay down, you hear me?"

"Yes, Gunny," Aubrey said very seriously, and if the thought that he might possibly be able to do what Hallowell had just described still seemed unlikely, it no longer seemed absurd.

"Good! Then back on your feet, kid, and this time try not to come at me like my old pacifist aunt."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Margaret Fuchien was not a happy woman as she stood in the gallery of RMMS Artermis' Number Two Boat Bay and watched the VIP shuttle dock. As a rule, people aboard Artemis went to some lengths to prevent Fuchien from becoming unhappy, for her cuffs carried four gold bands, and she had the no-nonsense, hard-nosed att.i.tude one might have expected from the skipper of one of the Star Kingdom's crack liners. She'd earned every promotion she'd ever had, and she was used to doing things her way. It was a privilege she'd earned along with her rank. But the man and woman aboard that shuttle weren't simply two more pa.s.sengers; they were the ones who wrote-or at least authorized-her paychecks. Worse, they owned her ship.

She wasn't at all pleased to see them, for she'd run Artemis back and forth on the Silesian run for over five T-years, and she didn't need the latest Admiralty advisories to tell her the situation in the Confederacy was going steadily to h.e.l.l. She most emphatically did not need to find herself responsible for both members of the Hauptman clan just now . . . not that what she needed seemed to be of particular importance to her employers.

The docking tube cycled, and she pasted a smile on her face as Klaus Hauptman walked down it. Artemis was a pa.s.senger liner; unlike a warship or freighter, her outsized docking tubes generated their own internal gravity to keep ground-grippers' lunches where they belonged, and the magnate stepped easily across the interface into the shipboard gravity. He paused there, waiting until his daughter joined him, then crossed to Fuchien.

"Captain," he held out his hand, and Fuchien gripped it.

"Mr. Hauptman. Ms. Hauptman. Welcome aboard Artemis." She got it out without even gritting her teeth.

"Thank you," he replied, and watched another woman stepped out of the tube. Fuchien and Ludmilla Adams had met on one of the trillionaire's previous voyages, and they exchanged nods and brief smiles. Adams' face was too well trained to say anything she didn't want it to, but Fuchien felt obscurely comforted by the look in the other woman's eyes. Clearly Adams was no happier about this trip than the captain was.

"I've had the owner's suite prepared for you and Ms. Hauptman, Sir," Fuchien said. "At least we've got plenty of room on board."

Hauptman flashed a brief, tight smile at her oblique warning. Her objections had been more explicit when he first informed her of his plans, and, despite his equally explicit order to terminate the discussion, she wasn't going to give in without one last try. Not, he admitted, that she didn't have a point. Pa.s.senger loads for Silesia had dropped radically in the last five or six months, to a point at which Artemis and Athena were barely breaking even. Of course, they'd never been exactly cheap to operate, given their out-sized crews and armaments. At barely a million tons, Artemis wasn't much bigger than most battlecruisers, but she carried three times the crew of a multimillion-ton freighter like Bonaventure, most of them ex-Navy personnel who looked after her weapons systems. She needed to run with almost full pa.s.senger loads to show a profit, which wasn't normally a problem, given the security her speed and those same weapons systems offered. Now, however, the situation was so bad even she was badly under booked, and the captain's reference to the fact was as close as she would let herself come to suggesting-again-that her boss stay the h.e.l.l home where it was safe.

Not that he intended to . . . and not that Stacey had shown any inclination to listen to his arguments that she should. He sighed with a mental headshake and wondered if Captain Fuchien had any idea how thoroughly he sympathized with her.

"Well," he said, "at least that means first-cla.s.s dining won't be too crowded."

"Yes, Sir," Fuchien replied, and waved at the lifts. "If you'd follow me, I'll escort you to your quarters before returning to the bridge."

"You're not serious," Sir Thomas Caparelli said.

"I'm afraid I am," Patricia Givens replied. "I just found out this morning."

"Jesus." Caparelli ran both hands through his hair in a harried gesture he would have let very few people see. ONI's latest update on losses in Silesia had come in just two days ago, and those losses were considerably higher than they'd been when Task Group 1037 was dispatched. One thing the First s.p.a.ce Lord definitely didn't need just now was for the wealthiest man in the Star Kingdom-and his only child-to go haring off into the middle of a mess like that.

"There's no way we can stop them," Givens said quietly, as if she'd read his mind. Which, he reflected, wasn't all that difficult just now. "If private citizens want to take pa.s.sage through what's for all intents and purposes a war zone, that's up to them. Unless, of course, we want to issue orders to hold Artemis."

"We can't," Caparelli sighed. "If we start holding liners, people are going to ask why we're not holding freighters, too. Or, worse, the freighters'll start holding themselves. And we can't very well admit we're only worried about two of her pa.s.sengers, now can we?"

"No, Sir."

"d.a.m.n." Caparelli gazed at his blotter for a long moment, then punched a code into his terminal. Less than a minute later, his screen lit with the face of an RMN lieutenant.

"System Command Central, Lieutenant Vale."

"Admiral Caparelli, Lieutenant," the First s.p.a.ce Lord growled. "Let me speak to Captain Helpern, please."

"Yes, Sir." The lieutenant vanished, to be replaced by a chunky, heavy set four-striper.

"What can I do for you, Sir?" he asked politely.

"RMMS Artemis is pulling out for the Silesian run in eleven hours," Caparelli said, coming quickly to the point, "and Klaus and Stacey Hauptman are on board." Helpern's eyes widened, and Caparelli nodded grimly. "That's right. We can't stop them, but I don't need to tell you what kind of c.r.a.p we'll be in if anything happens to them." Helpern shook his head, and Caparelli sighed. "Since we can't stop them, we'd better send along a gunslinger. Can you shake loose a destroyer or a light cruiser?"

"Just a second, Sir." Helpern looked down, and Caparelli heard him punching a query into his own data terminal. Perhaps thirty seconds trickled past, and then Helpern's eyes met the First s.p.a.ce Lord's once more.

"I don't have any cruisers available within that time frame, Sir. If you can hold them for another fourteen hours or so, I could pull Amaterasu for the duty, though."

"Um." Caparelli rubbed his jaw, then shook his head. "No. We need this to look casual. If we make a big production out of it, people are going to ask why we can suddenly spare a special escort for this particular ship and not for all of them, and one thing I don't want to do is explain that some of Her Majesty's subjects are more important than others."

"Understood, Sir. In that case, though, the best I can do is a tin can. Hawkwing is at Hephaestus right now, taking on stores. She's due to clear her mooring in thirteen hours for a departure to Basilisk. If I instruct Commander Usher to expedite, he can clear within the window for Artemis' scheduled departure."

"Do it," Caparelli decided. "Then have one of your people-someone junior-contact Captain Fuchien. Inform her that Hawkwing's due for routine deployment to Silesia and that she just happens to be ready to depart now. Then ask her if Artemis would like a little company."

"Yes, Sir. I'll get right on it."

Commander Gene Usher, CO HMS Hawkwing, swore softly as he read the message. Hawkwing wasn't the RMN's newest destroyer, but she was a most satisfactory billet for a brand new commander, and Usher was proud of her. He hadn't been looking forward to a six-month deployment to Basilisk Station, even if Basilisk was no longer the punishment station it had been, but he'd adjusted to that . . . and he hated last minute order changes.

He reread the dispatch again, and swore a bit louder. Artemis. At least playing nursemaid to a single ship was easier than sheepherding an entire convoy, and the Atlas-cla.s.s liners were fast enough to make the pa.s.sage mercifully short, but Usher had been around. He could read between the lines, and there was only one reason SysCom had appended a copy of her pa.s.senger manifest. Two names fairly leapt off the screen at him, and the thought that a vindictive old b.a.s.t.a.r.d like Klaus Hauptman had the juice to pull in a desperately needed destroyer just to watch his a.s.s was enough to upset anyone.

He sighed, then handed the board back to the com officer and looked at his astrogator.

"Change of orders, Jimmy. We're going to Silesia."

"Silesia, Sir?" Lieutenant James Sargent frowned in surprise. "Skipper, I don't even have the latest shipping updates on Silesia, and my cartography's all loaded for Basilisk and the Republic."

"Get hold of Hephaestus Central, then. Pull the downloads ASAP, then put in a call to RMMS Artemis-Com knows where she is. Talk to her astrogator and coordinate with her. We're going to be playing nursemaid."

"All the way to Silesia?"

"All the way to wherever the h.e.l.l she's going, unless we can find someone in-sector to hand her off to," Usher sighed, "but don't tell her astrogator that. As far as Artemis is concerned, we just happen to be going her way."

"Wonderful," Sargent said dryly. "Okay, Skipper. I'm on it."

Usher nodded and crossed to his command chair. He sat down and gazed moodily at his blank plot for a moment while his brain ticked off the things he had to do. Rewriting a starship's movement orders on less than twelve hours' notice was never easy, but he'd leave it to SysCom to notify the Basilisk Station commander of his impending nonarrival. He had problems of his own to worry about-like expediting the loading of his ship's stores. He nodded to himself and punched an intra-ship com stud.

"Get me the Bosun," he said.

". . . so if you'd like the company, Hawkwing will be happy to tag along as far as Sachsen."

"Why, thank you, Lieutenant," Captain Fuchien told the face on her com screen. She tried very hard to hide a grin which she knew would infuriate the commander, but it wasn't easy. The notion of hauling both Hauptmans into Silesia still didn't appeal to her in the least, but having a destroyer for company couldn't hurt. And she knew how tight stretched the Navy was . . . which also meant she knew which of her pa.s.sengers had prompted this "coincidental" generosity.

"Of course," the lieutenant added, "you'll be guided by Lieutenant Commander Usher if anything should happen along the way."

"Naturally," Fuchien agreed. It was only fair, after all. The Navy might not want to call it a one-ship convoy, but that was what it would be. Artemis's speed meant Fuchien wasn't used to sailing under escort. In fact, she usually tended to take the suggestion that her ship required escorting as something of an insult, but she could stand it just this once.

"Very well, then, Captain. Commander Usher will be in touch with you shortly, I'm sure."

"Thank you again, Lieutenant. We appreciate it," Fuchien said with complete sincerity, then leaned back in her command chair and grinned widely as the screen blanked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

The rippling sound of shuffled cards hovered in the berthing compartment as Randy Steilman's thick fingers manipulated the deck. He'd shed his work uniform for shorts and a T-shirt, and the dense hair on his heavily muscled arms looked like dark fur under the lights. He offered the deck to Ed Illyushin to cut, but the environmental tech-a first-cla.s.s, which made him the most senior person in the compartment-only rapped it with a knuckle, declining the cut, and coins thumped as the players anted up for the next hand.

"Seven card stud," he announced, and the deck whispered as he dealt the hole cards, then the first face up. "King of diamonds is high," he observed. "What'cha gonna do there, Jackson?"