Timothy Zahn - Conquerors' Pride

"I see," Dazzler said, pushing himself gently away from the wall to drift toward Quinn. "You're the one who made all the noise that forced the Peacekeepers to reevaluate their screening procedure. Kept a lot of people out of the Copperheads. Including my brother."

"That's enough, Dazzler," Clipper said. "Get back to your position."

"No, that's all right," Quinn said, his voice sounding tired. "Let him have his say."

"Thank you, sir," Dazzler said, maneuvering to a stop directly in front of Quinn. "It was my older brother, sir. Charleston; four years older than me. He'd wanted to be a Copperhead since he was fifteen. The day after his eighteenth birthday he went down and enlisted. He went through the tests, the preliminary pilot training—the whole slate. He was two weeks from getting his Mindlink implant when the NorCoord hearings forced everyone to undergo new certification. He didn't make the new cut."

"I'm sorry," Quinn said.

Dazzler shook his head. "Don't be," he said. "It took him six months to get over it; but at that point he realized that going into the Copperheads would have been the worst mistake of his life. He wasn't anywhere near to having what it took to be a professional warrior."

And to Aric's surprise Dazzler held out his hand. "A long time ago he told me that if I ever ran into you, I was to thank you for saving him from the rashness of youth. His words."

For a pair of heartbeats Quinn didn't move. Then, looking as if he didn't quite believe it, he reached out and took the other's hand. "Thank you," he said quietly.

"No thanks needed," Dazzler said, releasing Quinn's hand and floating back toward his place in the group. "You helped take some of the glamour out of being a Copperhead. Speaking strictly for myself, I'd rather not fly with people who came in looking for glamour. I want the best. You helped make sure that's what we got."

For a long minute the room was silent. "You were going to tell us about the mission," Clipper said.

"Yes." Quinn took a deep breath, and Aric could see the effort in his face as he forced the ghosts of the past back down where they belonged. "You all know about the Conqueror attack on the Jutland task force," he said. "What you don't know is that the body count came up one short. Commander Pheylan Cavanagh, captain of the Kinshasa. "

"Cavanagh?" Harlequin asked, looking at Aric.

"My younger brother," Aric said.

"Ah," Augur said knowingly. "So that's why we're going off half-cocked this way?"

"It's nothing of the sort," Aric said, keeping his voice level. "We tried to get the Peacekeepers to mount a proper rescue mission. Admiral Rudzinski turned us down."

"All the more reason we shouldn't be here," Jaeger said. "This is well past just being unsanctioned, Maestro. It's been effectively forbidden."

"Is there any evidence Cavanagh's still alive?" Delphi asked.

"Nothing positive," Quinn said. "Just the fact of no body and no debris from his escape pod. And the reasonable assumption that the Conquerors would want to take at least one live prisoner for examination."

"I watched those recordings very carefully," Shrike said, his finger fidgeting through his beard. "It was my understanding that all pod emergency beacons had been silenced before the watchships left the scene."

"That's true," Clipper put in. "But there's been some speculation that the Conquerors were using the beacons to locate and destroy the pods. It's possible Commander Cavanagh figured that out and shut his off before they got to him."

"And had his prudence rewarded by being taken prisoner," Crackajack said. "Some deal. You have any idea where to start looking?"

"We have the incoming vector that the Jutland and Dorcas garrison computed," Quinn said. "My plan was to look for likely systems that direction and check them out."

"That will take time," Jaeger pointed out. "And meanwhile the worlds of the Commonwealth are open to enemy attack."

Crackajack snorted. "After what happened to the Jutland, I hardly think six Corvines are going to make a lot of difference."

"That's irrelevant," Jaeger said sharply. "Our job is not to decide whether our presence is important or not. Nor is it to take our ships wherever we ourselves think proper. Our job is to go where ordered and to do there whatever needs to be done." He looked at Quinn, then at Clipper. "We have no legitimate reason to be here, Commander. I respectfully but strongly suggest we turn around and go back."

A muscle in Clipper's cheek twitched. "Maestro?"

"You're welcome to go back, Jaeger," Quinn said. "All of you are, in fact, if you don't want to continue. El Dorado and I are going on, whether you stay or not."

"I'm staying," Dazzler said. "You're going to need a tail, anyway."

"Sorry, Dazzler, but you can't lose me that easily," his partner Paladin said. "Looks like you've got yourself a wingman, Maestro."

"Delphi and I are in, too," Clipper said. "Call me old-fashioned, but I don't much care for the idea of Command simply abandoning Cavanagh to the Conquerors. Our people deserve better than that."

"So do all the people of the Commonwealth," Wraith said. "We're wasting time, Jaeger."

"Yes," Jaeger said, looking around. "Who else is coming back with us?"

"And if you want to leave, this is the time to do it," Clipper added. "If you don't go now, you're in for the duration."

Aric looked around the group. None of them looked especially comfortable, but none of them spoke up, either. "I guess it's you two, then," Clipper said at last to Jaeger and Wraith. "You'd better get going before you lose any more distance. Maestro, you want to go back to control and mesh us in?"

"That won't be necessary," Wraith said, pushing off a wall toward the wardroom doorway, his partner Augur following him. "We can disengage in mesh." His lip twitched in an almost reluctant half smile. "Besides, right now you need all the distance you can get. The farther you are from Dorcas when we blow the whistle, the less likely they'll send someone chasing after you."

"You're probably right," Quinn agreed. "Thank you."

"Consider it our contribution to the cause." Wraith nodded to Clipper. "Good luck, sir. We'll see you at the court-martial."

"Thank you," Clipper said dryly. "We'll bring you back a piece of Conqueror ship as a souvenir."

The four men left the room, disappearing into the complex of small rooms between them and the hull. "All right, Maestro," Clipper said. "What's the plan?"

"As I said, it's going to have to be a physical search," Quinn said, floating over to the wardroom repeater board. A tactical star map was displayed there, with several colored lines, circles, and a slender cone superimposed on it. "Here's where the Conquerors hit the Jutland force," he said, indicating the tip of the cone. "Dorcas didn't have a baseline, so the incoming vector's a little vague. Clipper, I asked Bokamba to see if the lab people had come up with an estimate of how far the ships had come. Was there anything in his message about that?"

"No," Clipper said. "I've heard from other sources that they're still having trouble getting zero-point friction and heat-capacity readings from that piece of hull they found."

"Okay," Quinn said, studying the map. "In that case I guess we take potshots and hope for warrior's luck. With a twenty-degree uncertainty on the vector and assuming a hundred-light-year range, we wind up with eighteen systems to check out. If we don't find anything, we'll try expanding the cone."

"What happens when we find them?" Bookmaker asked.

"You four Corvines will fly cover while El Dorado and I go in for a closer look," Quinn told him. "I trust you haven't neglected your atmospheric combat work."

"The rust rubs off quickly," Clipper assured him. "I don't suppose this fueler is armed?"