David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"Of course, Ma'am."

'Technical problem,' is it? Harahap snorted mentally behind his expressionless eyes. And just how much would that have to do with all those battlecruisers which have miraculously appeared here in Monica?

The Gendarmerie captain was beginning to suspect that the scale of Anisimovna's plans was considerably more audacious than he'd believed possible. It all seemed extraordinarily risky, assuming he was starting to get it figured out correctly. But somehow he doubted even Manpower would have been prepared to make the investment that many hundreds of thousands of tons of battlecruiser represented unless it was pretty damned sure of success.

In any case, that part of the operation wasn't his responsibility.

"While I was gone," he began, "I contacted Westman in Montana, Nordbrandt in Split, and Jeffers in Tillerman. The quick overview is that, of the three, Nordbrandt's definitely the best suited to our needs. Jeffers talks a good fight, but my impression is that he's actually too shy to come out of the woodwork without a great deal of additional encouragement. Westman's the big question mark. I suspect that in terms of capability, he leaves both the other two in the dust. And my impression is that he's deeply committed to his beliefs. But he's also much more opposed to inflicting casualties. In terms of representing a serious threat to his own government, or to OFS, he's probably the most dangerous. But in terms of our need for a threat which is spectacular, however genuine it may or may not be, his disinclination to kill people is definitely a strike against him."

He looked back and forth between the two women. Both of them were listening intently, and Bardasano had a memo pad in front of her. They weren't going to interrupt him with questions until he'd finished his basic presentation, he realized. That was nice. Too many of his uniformed superiors were too in love with demonstrating their own insightful intelligence to keep their mouths shut until people who knew what was really happening could finish explaining it to them in short sentences of single-syllable words.

"I'd like to discuss each of these three possibilities in increasing order of value, if that's acceptable?" he asked. Anisimovna nodded, and he smiled.

"Thank you. In that case, let's get Jeffers out of the way. First of all, Jeffers doesn't have a very good grasp of operational security," Harahap began. "In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he's already been pretty thoroughly penetrated by local counterintelligence types. When I spoke to him, he said he…"

"Damn, I hate this kind of shit," Captain Duan Binyan muttered as the Jessyk Combine's armed freighter Marianne decelerated towards Kornati orbit.

"Why they pay us the big money," Annette De Chabrol, Marianne 's first officer said philosophically. The tension around her brown eyes gave the lie to her calm tone, though, and Duan snorted.

He kept his eyes on the maneuvering plot as the freighter's velocity dropped steadily. So far, so good, he thought. And at least they'd been able to grease a few useful palms at this stop. Marianne 's false registry and collection of bogus transponder codes could get them in and out of most star systems, especially out here in the Verge. In fact, she spent at least half her career pretending to be another ship entirely, especially when she had "special consignments" on board. But in many ways, Duan would have felt better transporting a cargo of slaves than running this particular load in through Kornatian customs.

Unfortunately, when you commanded one of Jessyk's "special units" and Ms. Isabel Bardasano personally explained that your mission was Priority One, you nodded, saluted, and went off and did whatever it was she'd requested. Quickly and well.

He'd made his rendezvous with the local Jessyk cargo agent a full light-year short of the Split System and precisely on time, despite having been diverted to drop off that load of technicians in Monica. No one had told him what that was all about, but he was used to that. He had his suspicions, anyway, and he'd been rather amused by the technicians' uneasy expressions when they discovered what their accommodations aboard Marianne usually housed.

Still, only Marianne 's superior speed had let him make the rendezvous on schedule, and he was glad it had. That far out in interstellar space, he and the agent's dispatch boat could be confident of remaining unobserved while last-minute instructions were passed. The good news was that it meant that this time, at least, he was coming in with a complete local background brief and knew the arrangements to receive his cargo at least appeared to be in place and secure. The bad news was that the agent had also brought them up to date on the local political situation, and Duan didn't much care for what he'd heard about one Agnes Nordbrandt.

No one had told him specifically that he was delivering weapons to the FAK, but it didn't take a hyper-physicist to figure it out. He didn't have a clue why he was, other than the fact that Isabel Bardasano thought it was a Good Idea. Given Bardasano's reputation, that was more than enough for Duan Binyan.

But there was obviously only one group on Kornati who could possibly require the better part of four thousand tons of small arms, unpowered body armor, encrypted communicators, -stealthed counter-grav surveillance sats and drones, and military-grade explosives. And given the local authorities' ugly attitude, Duan Binyan didn't even want to think about what would happen to anyone caught running modern weapons into the hands of the "Freedom Alliance of Kornati."

Of course, he thought glumly, they can't kill us any deader than the frigging Manties would if they caught us with a special consignment. They've made that clear enough.

"Are there any Manty transponders out there?" he asked, prompted by unpleasant thoughts of the Royal Manticoran Navy.

Zeno Egervary, Marianne 's communications officer-and also her chief security officer-glanced at his own display for a moment, then shook his head.

"Nothing. Not even a merchie."

"Good," Duan muttered, and slouched a bit more comfortably in his command chair.

Even without a special consignment aboard, Marianne had obviously been designed as a slaver, and she carried all of the necessary equipment. Which meant, under the Manticorans' "equipment clause" interpretation of the Cherwell Convention, she was a slaver, and her crew was guilty of slaving, even if there were no slaves physically present. And since the Manties seemed determined to move into the area, their nasty habit of executing slavers gave Duan Binyan a rather burning desire to be certain there were none about.

Fortunately, Marianne 's sensor suite was good enough for Egervary to be sure there weren't. In fact, her sensors were far more capable than any legitimate merchantship-especially one that looked as decrepit as she did-ever carried. Nor was that the only unusual thing about her. The four-million-ton freighter might look like a tramp whose owners routinely skimped on maintenance, but she had a military-grade hyper generator and particle screening. Her acceleration was no greater than that of other merchantmen her size, but she could reach the Epsilon Bands and sustain a velocity of.7 c once she got there, which gave her a maximum apparent velocity of over 1,442 c , thirty-two percent faster than a "typical" merchie. He would have liked to have military-grade impellers and a military-grade compensator, as well, but those would have been almost impossible to disguise and would have cut massively into her cargo capacity. And if he couldn't have those, at least her designers had provided her with eyes and ears as good as most military vessels boasted, which was at least equally important to a ship which had to operate covertly.