Honor Harrington (№1) - On Basilisk Station

"I see." Honor glanced at McKeon. "Exec? Suppose we reconfigure a dozen or so survey sats and tie their weather radar into the air traffic control net?"

"We could." This time it was McKeon's turn to rub his nose and frown. "We're making a mighty big dent in our equipment list, Ma'am," he warned.

"I know, but I don't see an option ... and it's there to be used, Exec."

McKeon nodded, eyes slitted in thought, and Honor wondered if he even realized he'd said "we're" instead of "you're."

"Then I think we can do it, but their radar sets aren't going to get as good a paint off of an aircraft as standard ground radar would, and they're not set up for air traffic-quality doppler. They're intended more for radar mapping and weather observation, not real look-down capability, and air masses don't move that fast." He frowned some more. "If you'll give me a day or two with Santos and Cardones, I think between us we can come up with a fix to refine their target differentiation, and we should be able to work in a decent doppler and ranging capability, too, especially if we set them up in pairs. It'll be rough, but it should work."

"Good," Honor said. The survey satellites were standard issue and rarely used, since regular warships seldom pulled survey duty. They were also short-ranged and simple-minded, but they should suffice for this. Of course, McKeon was right about the carnage she was wreaking with her equipment list. Just her sensor network had cost the RMN somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million dollars, even assuming most of the probe heads were recoverable, and she'd personally signed for every penny of it. But there was no other way to get the job done, and if the Admiralty objected to the cost, they should have assigned either more ships or narrower mission parameters. Besides, the survey sats would "only" up the price tag by another half-million or so apiece.

"In that case," she went on to Isvarian, "I'd like to leave air-breathing traffic in NPA hands and set up a space traffic control center staffed by our people." She toyed with her cocoa cup for a moment while she considered. "Better make it a ground station, I think, in case something comes up out-system and we get called away. In fact, we might install it right next door to your air traffic people so they can coordinate better. What do you think, Exec?"

"I think we're going to be lucky if we're still at half-strength when the dust settles," McKeon replied, using the calculator mode of his memo pad to check figures. "By the time we crew those pinnaces and shuttles, we'll have another forty of our people on detached duty, Ma'am. We can probably use Marines to eke out the ratings in the inspection crews, but when you add enough Fleet people to man a control center on top of that—" He shrugged.

"Agreed, but I think it's necessary," Honor said quietly. She kept her gaze on McKeon's face, but her eyes cut sideways at Isvarian for a moment, reminding the exec of their audience, and McKeon nodded. It wasn't a happy nod, nor a very graceful one, but it was a nod.

"We've still got that recon head we reserved to cover Medusa in our absence," she continued after a moment. "Limited endurance won't be much of a problem if we can get at it for regular service, so we can go ahead and deploy it in high orbit to cover the far side of the planet and use our onboard instrumentation to feed the ground center from this side. If we have to pull out, the air-search radar we save with the survey sats can revert to covering space traffic in our sector."

"Who were you planning to put in command ground-side, Ma'am?" McKeon asked.

"Um." Honor drummed on the tabletop for a moment, pleased to see him engaged with the problem but wishing he'd made the next step in reassuming his responsibilities and suggested someone. He'd known most of her officers months—in some cases, years—longer than she had. But she decided to concentrate on what he was doing after their unpromising beginning and furrowed her forehead in thought.

"I think either Webster or Stromboli," she said finally. She felt McKeon start to protest, then stop himself as he ran through the possible candidates in his own mind. "I'd really rather use Webster," she went on, half to herself and half to him. "He's younger, but I think he's more aggressive and confident. Unfortunately, we need someone with a background in astrogation and traffic control, and that means Stromboli."

"What about Ensign Tremaine?" McKeon countered. Tremaine was Fearless's boat bay control officer and something of a prodigy in the management of his assets, but Honor shook her head.

"Not for the controller's slot. And we need someone senior enough to assume overall command of the detachment, ground-side and upstairs, if Fearless has to pull out. I'd prefer to kill two birds with one stone and make that our control officer. Besides, I think we'll need Tremaine to manage the actual inspection flights."

"That'll bump Panowski to acting astrogator," McKeon mused, tapping a fingertip on his memo pad. Then he surprised both Honor and himself with a grin. "Actually, I think that might be good for him, Ma'am. He's got a tendency to coast unless someone keeps after him, and Max has been too easy on him."

"In that case, let's definitely make it Stromboli," Honor said, "with Tremaine as his exec. We'll need a few good POs to command the small craft, and I'd like them to have some experience in customs work, if possible. Do we have anyone who does?"

McKeon turned to one of the conference table's full-sized terminals and tapped the query into it. Then he shook his head.

"Sorry, Ma'am. Chief Killian did a stint as the regular helmsman for an SD's boarding officer two commissions ago, but that's as close as we've got."

"And I am not going to give up Chief Killian." Honor frowned, then smiled. "I think I may have another idea, though." She depressed an intercom key.

"Officer of the watch," Lieutenant Stromboli's voice replied.

"This is the Captain, Lieutenant. Please ask the bosun to come to my briefing room."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am."

Honor released the button and leaned back, hiding her enjoyment behind a serene expression as Isvarian and McKeon looked first at her and then at one another. She hummed softly to herself, letting them wonder, until the hatch hissed open.

Senior Chief Boatswain's Mate Sally MacBride stepped through it and braced to attention. MacBride's left sleeve bore five gold hash marks, each representing three Manticoran years—over five T-years—of service, and she was just about due for a sixth. She was a sturdy, level-eyed woman, and the senior non-commissioned officer aboard Fearless.

"The Captain sent for me?"

"Yes, thank you, Bosun." Honor nodded for MacBride to stand easy. "I need some people with rather specialized talents, and I thought you might be able to help me out."

"Whatever the Captain requires, Ma'am." MacBride was a native of Gryphon, as were a surprisingly high percentage of the RMN's noncoms, given the planet's relatively sparse population. Manticore-B's single habitable planet was the least hospitable and last settled of the Manticore System's three Earth-like worlds, and native Manticorans and Sphinxians argued that Gryphons only joined the Navy to escape Gryphon's weather. For their own part, the Queen's Gryphon-born subjects seemed to feel a sort of divine mission to keep the sissies of Manticore-A in shape. The divergence of opinion led to occasional off-duty "discussions" that could make them a bit difficult to live with, but Honor was glad she had MacBride. The bosun was the indispensable link between the bridge officers and enlisted people aboard any warship, and MacBride had all the tough, professional confidence of her years of service.

"I'm not going to ask you to betray any secrets, Bosun," Honor said, "but what I'm looking for are people who—from their own experience, let us say—would be intimately familiar with the best way to hide contraband aboard a shuttle or a starship." MacBride's left eyebrow rose fractionally; otherwise there was no change in her expression at all. "I need them to form the core of the customs inspection party I'll be detailing to Medusa, so in addition to their, um, expertise, I need people with initiative and discretion. Can you find them for me?"

"How many people was the Captain thinking of?"

"Oh, let's say fifteen," Honor said, ignoring the atypical amusement glinting in McKeon's gray eyes. "We'll be running three pinnaces and two shuttles, and I'd like to have one in each watch aboard each of them."

"I see." MacBride thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, Ma'am. I can find them. Will the Captain require anything else?"

"No, Bosun. Let the Exec have a list by the end of watch."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am." MacBride braced back to attention, turned smartly, and disappeared through the hatch. It closed behind her.

"Excuse me, Captain," Major Isvarian said in a very careful voice, "but did I just hear you ask the bosun to find you fifteen smugglers to man our customs flights?"

"Of course not, Major. This is a Queen's ship. What would we be doing with smugglers on board? On the other hand, I'm certain that, over the years, certain of my personnel have observed other personnel who have attempted to conceal proscribed materials aboard ship. Sad to say, some may even have known individuals who engaged in black market activities aboard naval vessels. I simply asked the bosun to find me some of those observers."

"I see," Isvarian murmured. He took a large sip of coffee and put his cup back down. "I see, indeed."

"Captain?"

Honor looked up as Surgeon Commander Suchon stuck her head through the open briefing room hatch. Fearless's doctor looked even more sour than usual, and she carried a data chip in her right hand. She held the chip as if it were a small, dead animal, and Honor felt a stronger surge of distaste for her as she recognized it.

"Yes, Doctor?"

"May I speak with you a minute?" Suchon asked. Whined, really, Honor thought.

"Come in, Doctor." Honor tried not to sigh and pressed the button by her terminal, closing the hatch behind Suchon as the commander crossed to the table and sat—without an invitation. That last action irritated Honor out of all proportion to the provocation, and she sat on her temper rather firmly.

Suchon sat silently, face screwed up in obvious indecision over how to proceed. Honor waited for a moment, then arched her eyebrows.

"What is it, Doctor?" she inquired.

"It's— Well, it's about these orders, Captain." Suchon raised her hand to display the data chip, and Honor nodded.

"What about them?"

"Captain, I don't think it's a good idea to— I mean, you've detached Lieutenant Montoya and all four of my best sick berth attendants to the customs parties, and I need them here in Fearless. I can't guarantee my ability to meet my medical responsibilities to the ship without them."

Suchon leaned back in her chair as she completed her sentence. There was a certain smugness in her expression, the look of someone who has just delivered an ultimatum to a superior officer, and Honor regarded her levelly for several seconds.

"I'm afraid you're just going to have to get along without them, Doctor," she said at last, and Suchon sat back upright with a jerk.

"But I can't! If I have to detach them, the sickbay workload will be impossible, and Montoya is my sole physician assistant!"

"I'm aware of that." Honor made herself maintain a level tone, but there was very little liking in her brown eyes. "I'm also aware that it's the Navy's responsibility to provide medical personnel to check the health and immunization records of any individuals visiting Medusa's surface. Every other department aboard this ship is contributing to those customs parties, Doctor. I'm afraid Medical will just have to carry its share of the burden, as well."

"But I can't do it, I tell you!" Suchon more than half-snapped. "Perhaps you don't quite understand the responsibilities Medical faces, Ma'am. We're not like oth—"

"That will be enough, Doctor." Honor's voice had not risen, but it carried such cold, quiet venom that Suchon jerked back in her chair in shock. Icy brown eyes surveyed her with deadly dispassion, and her dark face paled.

"What you mean, Doctor," Honor went on after a moment in that same cold voice, "is that if I detach your attendants—and especially Montoya, who's been carrying two-thirds of your load ever since I came aboard—you will be required to get up out of your comfortable chair and attend to your duties yourself."

Suchon's face darkened as flushed anger replaced the paleness of shock. She opened her mouth, but Honor stopped her with a raised hand and a thin smile.

"Before you explain to me that I don't understand the arcana of your profession, Commander," she said softly, "I should, perhaps, mention to you that both of my parents are physicians." Suchon paled once more. "In fact, my father was a surgeon commander himself before his retirement. Doctor Alfred Harrington—perhaps you've heard of him?"

Her smile grew even thinner as Suchon recognized the name. Alfred Harrington had been Assistant Chief of Neurosurgery at Basingford Medical Center, the Fleet's main hospital on Manticore, before his retirement.

"As a result, Doctor, I think you'll find I have quite an adequate grasp of precisely what your duties to this ship entail. And, I might add, since the topic has come up, that I'm not at all satisfied with the way you've discharged those duties since I assumed command." Her smile vanished, and Suchon swallowed.

"If, however, the five individuals you've mentioned are, indeed, indispensable to Fearless's Medical Department," Honor went on after a short, pregnant pause, "I'm certain I can make other arrangements to keep them aboard. Of course, in that eventuality it will be necessary to find some single individual with sufficient medical experience to replace all five of them to assign to the customs detachment. Someone like you, Doctor Suchon."

She held the surgeon commander's eyes with a cold, level stare, and it was Suchon who looked away.

"Was there anything else, Doctor?" Honor asked softly. The physician gave a choppy headshake, and Honor nodded.

"Dismissed, then, Doctor." She returned her attention to her terminal, and Commander Suchon rose and walked silently from the compartment.

Lieutenant Andreas Venizelos stood with his memo board under his arm and smiled politely at the red-faced Havenite merchant skipper.

"—so you can take yourself, and your mangy `customs party,' and go straight to hell!" The Havenite finished his diatribe and stood glaring at the slim officer before him.

"I'm afraid that won't be possible, Captain Merker," the lieutenant replied with punctilious courtesy. "According to Basilisk Control, you transshipped cargo at—" he consulted his memo board "—Orbital Warehouse Baker-Tango-One-Four. As I'm certain you're aware, Sir, that constitutes a materials transfer in Manticoran space. As such, under Paragraph Ten, Subsection Three, of the Commercial Regulations as amended by Parliament in 278 A.L., the senior customs officer is required to inspect your cargo before passing you for transit to the Junction's central nexus. Accordingly, I'm afraid I must insist on carrying out my duties before I can clear you for transit. I am, of course, extremely sorry for any inconvenience this may cause."

Captain Merker had turned an alarming shade of puce and sputtered incoherently. Venizelos simply cocked his head and waited with undiminished courtesy while he got his vocal apparatus unjammed.

"Goddamn it! I've been making this run for five T-years," the captain finally roared, "and this is the first time some tight-assed little faggot in a pretty uniform's boarded my ship and ordered me to heave to for inspection! I'll see you damned first, by God!"

"Perhaps, Sir," Venizelos said, allowing his smile to fade, "but if you choose to refuse inspection, you will be denied transit rights."

"And how the fuck do you think you're going to stop me, pretty boy?" Merker sneered.

"By firing into your ship if you attempt to transit," Venizelos said, and there was no give at all in his ice-cold voice.

The merchant skipper stopped in mid-sneer and gave the slightly-built lieutenant an incredulous stare.

"That would be an act of war!"

"On the contrary, Sir, it would be a simple exercise of the municipal police power in Manticoran space in strict accordance with recognized interstellar law."

"You wouldn't dare," Merker said in a more conversational tone. "You're bluffing."

"I am an officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, Sir—" Venizelos felt an undeniable rush of adrenalin and pleasure as he faced the burly captain squarely "—and the Royal Manticoran Navy does not `bluff.'"

He held the Havenite officer's eye steadily, and the captain's choler cooled visibly. He dropped his eyes to scowl at the deck for just a moment, then shrugged angrily. "Oh, suit yourself!"

"Uh, Captain Merker?" The freighter's purser, who had stood silent throughout the exchange, looked undeniably anxious.

"Well, what is it?" Merker growled.

"Well, Sir, it's just that I think— That is, I'm afraid there may be a few, um, errors in our manifest." Sweat dotted the purser's forehead as his harassed captain turned his scowl on him. "I'm, ah, certain they were, er, simple oversights," he continued. "I can— I mean, my staff and I can clear them up and be ready for inspection in, um, two or three hours? Sir?"

He stared at his captain appealingly, and Merker's face began to congest with fury once more. Venizelos observed its color with interest and cleared his throat.

"Ah, excuse me, Captain Merker?" The captain whirled on him with clenched fists, and the lieutenant shrugged apologetically. "I can certainly understand how these little accidents happen, Sir, and I'm entirely willing to allow your purser time to straighten out his records. Unfortunately, that will mean that your ship will lose its place in the outbound queue, and I'm afraid we probably won't be able to get back around to you until sometime tomorrow morning."

"Tomorrow morning!" Merker exploded. "You mean I have to cool my heels in this misbegotten rat hole of a—!" He chopped himself off and gave the hapless purser a deadly glare, then turned back to Venizelos with a snarl. "All right! If I have to, I have to, but my embassy on Manticore is going to hear about this, Lieutenant!"

"Of course, Sir." Venizelos clicked to attention, nodded pleasantly, and marched smartly back down the tube to his pinnace. The hatch slid shut, the tube disengaged, and his pilot hit the thrusters to carry them beyond their impeller wedge's safety perimeter before lighting off the main drive.

Venizelos deposited his memo board on his pull-out desk, flopped back into his chair, and whistled a popular ditty as the pinnace turned towards the next ship on his list, a big, battered Silesian freighter. His second pinnace hovered respectfully off the Havenite ship's flank like a pointed reminder until Merker lit off his own drive and headed back beyond the departure threshold.

"Jesus, Andreas!" Hayne Duvalier, Captain Reynaud's liaison to Venizelos's customs party, stared at him in patent disbelief. "You wouldn't really have fired into him... would you?"

"Yep," Venizelos said.

"But—"

"I'm only doing my job, Hayne."

"I know, but for Chrissake, Andreas! We haven't enforced the com regs out here in— Hell, I don't think they've ever been enforced! ACS never had the manpower for it."

"I know." Venizelos turned his chair to face him. "In fact, since I got here, I've started to realize that a lot of things that should have been done never have. I'm not faulting Captain Reynaud and your people, either. It's not your job—it's ours, and we haven't been doing it. Well, we're doing it now."

"Somehow I sort of doubt your captain's going to thank you for all the ruckus it's going to raise," Duvalier said dubiously.

"Maybe not, but she gave me my orders, and one thing I can tell you about Commander Harrington, Hayne—when she gives an order, she expects it to be obeyed. Period."

"Sounds like a real hardass to me," Duvalier grumbled.

"Oh, she is," Venizelos said with a smile. "In fact, I'm just starting to realize how hard a hardass she is. And you know something, Hayne? I like it."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lieutenant Max Stromboli straightened with a bone-deep sigh and racked his tools neatly. Other members of his minute staff were busy elsewhere, mounting the transmission dishes on the tower roof, but there were too few of them for him to stand back and leave it all to the techs. Besides, he still installed a pretty mean circuit board himself, he thought, regarding the console with proprietary pride.

Not that pride was the first thing he'd felt on arriving on Medusa's surface. He'd just started to feel himself slipping back into the groove aboard Fearless after the shock of being banished to Basilisk Station, when he'd found himself banished yet again. This time clear out of the ship!

He dropped into the cushioned bucket seat and brought his panel on line, punching into the new space control data net fed by Fearless's sensors and the deployed recon probe, and smiled as the transplanted holo display came alive. It looked perfect, but he set up a complete systems test just in case and leaned back while the computers ran it.

The Captain, he reflected, didn't do things by halves—and she didn't have much patience with anyone who did. Like a certain Lieutenant (Senior Grade) Maxwell Artois Stromboli who'd been dragging his ass and feeling sorry for himself ever since the Fleet exercise, he admitted. Max Stromboli didn't consider himself the most brilliant officer the planet of Manticore had ever produced, but he knew he was better than he'd let himself become. He'd been slacking off like a sulky kid, and when Captain Harrington asked him for that course to Medusa he didn't have—

He shuddered in memory. God, he'd expected her to bite off his head and shi—spit down his neck! And, he knew, he would have deserved it. But she hadn't. She'd only sat there, waiting patiently, and he'd felt about a centimeter high while he figured the course, mostly because she wasn't jumping his shit in front of the entire bridge watch.

And this job wasn't the slap in the face he'd first thought, either. He admitted that, too. Medusa's atmosphere might smell like the downwind side of a chemical refinery with buggered filtration, and the natives might look like some sort of circus freaks, but his assignment was more important than he'd thought. He'd realized that the moment he saw the jury-rigged lash-up with which the NPA had been trying to watch the high orbitals. They'd greeted him and his people with all the fervor of a relieved garrison, and they'd had only good things to say about the Captain, but the very way they said them made him uncomfortably aware of how badly—and for how long—the Fleet had let them down.

He sighed and swiveled his chair to check the first test printouts. They looked good, and he let the hardcopy spill into the printer tray and looked out the window.

Lord, what a piss-poor excuse for a planet! His newly installed control center was on the upper floor of one of the government compound's corner towers, and he had an appallingly good view of klicks and klicks of gray-green, mottled moss. It stretched down to the bank of something the natives called a river. The greasy-looking, turgid flow, heavy with silt, was one of hundreds of channels cutting through the swampy delta, and the walls of a Stilty city rose beyond it.

He lifted a pair of electronic binoculars from a console and peered through them at the distant curtain wall fronting the river. The binocs brought it to arm's length, and he marveled at the size of its stones. That rock had been quarried far upstream and ferried down, and the smallest single hunk of it must be a meter on a side. That was damned impressive engineering for a muscle-powered civilization, even in this gravity. And especially for something as stalky and ungainly looking as a Stilty.

He zeroed in on one of the natives, still unable to believe, deep down inside, that they could have built that massive wall. As on Sphinx, what passed for mammals on Medusa (there were no birds) were hexapedal, but the similarity ended there. Sphinxian beasties tended to the sturdy and blocky, aside from arboreals like the treecats, because of their native gravity. Medusans were tall and slender and trilaterally symmetrical, to boot. The natives were undeniably warm-blooded and bore living young, but they reminded Stromboli far more of a holo he'd seen of an Old Earth insect called a praying mantis than of anything he would have called a mammal. Except, of course, that no Solarian bug ever had its limbs arranged equidistantly about its body that way.

The dominant life form had freed its upper limbs for manipulation just as Man had, by standing upright on its rearmost limbs, but the legs were impossibly long and slender by human standards. Of course, that tripod arrangement did give them extraordinary stability once they locked all six knee joints, but those knees were another thing that bothered Stromboli. Neither they nor the hip joints above them bent; they swiveled, and watching a Stilty walk made the lieutenant's stomach vaguely uneasy. God only knew what they looked like when they ran!

The computer burped softly to announce the end of the systems check, and Stromboli laid his glasses aside and turned back to his panel. It was a miserable excuse for a planet, but its orbit traffic was all his, and he felt an unexpected eagerness to be about it.

The mammoth counter-grav cargo shuttle looked like an insect as it nuzzled alongside its Manticoran-registry mother ship. The customs pinnace tubed to it looked more like a microbe, and two of the shuttle crew stood stiffly, flanking the shuttle end of the access tube like surly sentries. Ensign Scotty Tremaine was not quite thirteen Manticoran years old, on his first deployment after graduation, but something about the way they stood there wasn't right. He knew it wasn't, and they'd looked mighty unhappy when he first came aboard, so he turned to watch PO Harkness with casual interest.

PO Harkness was, Tremaine suspected, A Character. He'd had a peek at Harkness's personnel jacket before they left the ship (the Academy instructors had always insisted an officer should do that before taking command of a detachment), and he wished he'd had more time to peruse its fascinating reading. Harkness had been in the RMN for over twenty years, almost thirty-five T-years, and he'd been up for chief twelve times by Tremaine's count. He'd actually made it, once. But PO Harkness had a weakness—two of them, in fact. He was constitutionally incapable of passing a Marine tunic in an off-duty bar without endeavoring to thump the living daylights out of its wearer, and he labored under the belief that it was his humanitarian duty to provide his shipmates with all the little things the ship's store didn't normally carry.

He was also one of the best missile techs in the service, which perhaps explained why he was still in the service.

But what interested Tremaine just now was what Bosun MacBride had told him before he left the ship. Tremaine liked the bosun. Even if she did regard him as a none-too-bright puppy, she seemed to feel that someday, with proper training by the bosuns whose bounden duty it was to wipe ensign's noses and bottoms and generally keep them from tripping over their own two feet, he might, possibly, make a worthwhile officer. In the meantime, her infinitely respectful suggestions usually managed to stop him just when he was about to put his foot in it.

"The ensign might want to give PO Harkness his head, Sir," MacBride had said quietly. "If anyone in the detachment can recognize a crook cargo setup, it's him. And—" she'd given him one of her deadpan smiles "—I've ... discussed the importance of his assignment with him."

So now Tremaine shifted position slightly, moving aside to lean his elbow on a freight conveyer where he could watch Harkness and still keep the corner of his eye on the crewmen.

Harkness was prowling around the neatly stacked counter-grav cargo pallets with a copy of the manifest, checking canister labels. The weight of a magnetic tape reader bulged the thigh pocket of his coveralls, but the flap was still sealed. Now he slowed his label checks and bent a bit closer to a pallet, and Tremaine noted the way one of the crewmen by the tube tensed.

"Mr. Tremaine?" Harkness called without turning.

"Yes, PO?"

"I think you might find this interesting, Sir." It was amazing what a fatherly voice could come out of those battered, prize-fighter features. Harkness sounded like a teacher about to demonstrate a classroom experiment for a favored pupil, and Tremaine crossed the cargo bay to stand beside him.

"What is it, PO?"

"This, Sir." A blunt finger with scarred knuckles indicated the shiny silver customs tape running around the canister and, in particular, the Royal Customs Service seal with its small starship surmounted by the crowned Manticore and flanking, rampant Sphinx and Gryphon of the Kingdom's arms. It looked perfect to Tremaine.

"What about it?"

"Well, Sir," Harkness said ruminatively, "I can't be certain, but—" The broad fingertip flipped the seal, and Tremaine blinked as it popped right off the tape it was supposed to be an integral part of. He bent closer and saw the clear plastic tape bridging the gap where the original seal had been sliced away.