David Weber - The Service of the Sword

He leaned back in his chair and gazed at Abigail for a few seconds, then shrugged.

"You may believe I'm overly concerned with tiptoein' around the Refugians' sensibilities, Ms. Hearns. It's certainly possible that I am. However, as my mother has always been fond of sayin', you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. It will cost us very little t' avoid stepping on any exaggerated sensibilities these people may have. And t' be honest, given the fact that they've deliberately sought isolation in this system, I feel we have an added obligation not t' intrude any more deeply upon them than we must."

Abigail managed not to blink in surprise, but it was difficult. He seemed completely sincere. She would never have expected that out of him, and his apparent sensitivity to the Refugians' attitudes and concerns only seemed to underscore his insensitivity to her own reaction at being so casually shuffled off into a stereotyped niche in his brain.

"At any rate," he went on more briskly, "as soon as the Exec has briefed you and selected your landin' party, we can get you down there t' begin talkin' t' these people for us."

"Oh, shit. Are you serious? A cruiser ?" Haicheng Ringstorff stared at George Lithgow, his sensor officer and second-in-command.

"That's what it looks like," Lithgow replied. "We can't be positive yet—all we really have is the hyper footprint and an impeller signature, but both of them are consistent with a single heavy cruiser or battlecruiser."

"A heavy cruiser is bad enough to be going on with, George," Ringstorff said sourly. "Let's not borrow trouble by thinking any bigger than we have to!"

"I'm only telling you what the sensor data says." Lithgow shrugged. "If whoever it is is headed for Refuge—and it looks like they are—our inner-system platforms should get a positive ID for us. In the meantime, what do we do about it?"

Ringstorff smiled thinly. Lithgow had said "we," but what he really meant was "you." Which was fair enough, he supposed, given that Ringstorff was the man officially in charge of the four-ring circus the entire Tiberian operation had turned into.

He leaned back in his chair and ran irritated fingers through his thick, dark hair. Ringstorff was tall for an Andermani, with broad shoulders and a powerful physique, and there were still traces of the Imperial Marine colonel he once had been. But that had been long ago, before certain minor financial irregularities in his regiment's accounts had come to the IG's attention. In light of his excellent record in combat and numerous decorations, he'd been allowed to resign without prosecution or even an official investigation, but his career in the Empire had been over. Which had worked out for the best, perhaps, because for the past twenty-five T-years, Haicheng Ringstorff had found much more profitable employment for his skills.

In many ways, his present mission promised to be the most profitable yet. Which it damned well ought to be, given the monumental pain in the ass it seemed determined to turn into!

"What's the schedule on Tyler and Lamar?" he asked Lithgow after a moment.

"Schedule? For these lunatics?" Lithgow snorted.

"You know what I mean," Ringstorff said irritably.

"Yeah, I guess I do," Lithgow admitted. He pulled a memo pad out of his pocket and punched keys, obviously refreshing his memory, then shrugged. "Tyler is due back sometime within the next seventy-two standard hours," he said. "If he and Lamar stayed in company with each other, we can expect both of them in that same window. If they split up, Lamar could be up to another full standard day behind him."

"Shit," Ringstorff muttered. "You know, the whole reason for picking this system was that nobody ever came here."

"That was the theory, anyway," Lithgow agreed.

"Yeah. Sure!" Ringstorff made a disgusted face and thought some more.

"The Four Yahoos might be a little easier to control if we could tell them why we're here and why we're supposed to lie so low," Lithgow pointed out rather diffidently after a moment.

"Not my decision," Ringstorff grunted. Not that Lithgow didn't have a point. But Manpower of Mesa was not in the habit of taking "captains" who were little more than common Silesian thugs into its confidence. For that matter, Ringstorff and Lithgow were the only two members of the hidden depot ship's Mesan crew who knew exactly why they were here. There were times the information restrictions made Ringstorff want to strangle people with his bare hands, but over all, he had to agree that they made better sense than usual in this case.

If everything went well with the main Manpower operation, the captains and crews of the four ex-Solarian heavy cruisers operating out of the carefully hidden base in Tiberian's outer asteroid belt would never know the real reason they'd been here. In that case, both they and the ships might well be useful to Manpower again, somewhere down the road. But if they were needed to support the current operation, then the odds were that once they'd performed their required function, Ringstorff would be instructed to use the remote-controlled nuclear scuttling charges carefully hidden aboard their ships to be sure there were no embarrassing witnesses.

Personally, Ringstorff would shed no tears if he got those orders. The universe would be a better place without Tyler, Lamar, or their two colleagues. Blowing up the ships would be wasteful, however, so preserving their crews' blissful ignorance—and thus obviating the need to eliminate them—was clearly the better option. But still...

"It was just a thought," Lithgow said. "Not a very good one, maybe, but a thought."

"I know." Ringstorff sighed. "It probably would have helped if the home office hadn't ordered me to let them play, for that matter."

"I think the geniuses who dreamed up this entire op probably figured there was no point even trying to keep the Four Yahoos from getting back up to their old tricks," Lithgow muttered. "And they were right. It'd make more sense to try to arm-wrestle entropy!"

"You're probably right," Ringstorff agreed. "I think HQ may have thought they could keep them on a leash initially, but after that transport blundered right into us—"

He threw both hands into the air with a grimace of disgust.

"It wasn't like we really had a choice with that one," Lithgow rejoined.

"I know. I know!" Ringstorff said irritably. "But you know as well as I do that that's what really started this entire mess."

Lithgow nodded. The original plan had been for the depot ship and all four of the converted cruisers to remain very quietly on station here in Tiberian until and unless they were required elsewhere. Unfortunately, there'd been some serious slippage in other parts of the schedule, and after four T-months of sitting here doing absolutely nothing, the cruisers' crews of Silesian outlaws had been so bored that Ringstorff had authorized a series of maneuvers and war games to let them play with and familiarize themselves with the capabilities of their vessels. It had made plenty of sense from a readiness viewpoint, after all, and the pirate captains and crews Manpower had recruited for the operation had been delighted by the sophistication of their ships. Most of their ilk had to make do with, at best, castoffs and obsolete units of the Confederacy Navy. The opportunity to trade in their old junkers and replace them with Solarian League technology that was no more than a few T-years out of date was one of the main reasons they'd signed on with Manpower in the first place.

But what Ringstorff hadn't known was that that goody-goody two-shoes Pritchart was going to send a damned transport full of colonists to Tiberian , of all places!

The inhabitants of Refuge had so little interest in contact with the rest of the galaxy that their total orbital infrastructure consisted of one primitive communications station that was probably the better part of a T-century out of date. Tiberian was one of the very few inhabited star systems in this entire region which had absolutely no surveillance platforms of any sort. For that matter, the Refugians had embraced their aggressively nonviolent, pastoral, agrarian lifestyle on their miserable little dirt ball of a planet with such enthusiasm that the system didn't even support a single asteroid resource extraction platform!