Эрик Флинт - The Service of the Sword

Abigail felt her cheekbones heat, but she made herself sit very upright in her own chair, her head high, meeting the exec's gaze unflinchingly. Watson returned her regard for several seconds, then smiled with what might have been an edge of approval.

"I'd like you to consider both of those possibilities, Ms. Hearns," she said. "As I say, I've been impressed by your intelligence. I think you'll appreciate that I might just have a point."

She held the midshipwoman's eyes for a moment longer, then nodded her head towards the hatch.

"And now, Ms. Hearns," she said pleasantly, "I believe you have a landing party waiting for you in Boat Bay Two. Dismissed."

Abigail did consider the exec's points as Gauntlet 's pinnace sliced downward through Refuge's atmosphere and steadied on its course towards the city of Zion, the planet's largest settlement. And as she considered them, she was forced, however grudgingly, to admit that they might have some validity.

She remained convinced that the captain had, indeed, pigeonholed her in his own mind as the product of a religion-blinkered, backward society. And that it was possible, even probable, that he had allowed that view of her to predispose him towards selecting her for her present mission. But however irritating she might find his accent, or his mannerisms—or even his tailoring—she had to admit that he'd never, in any fashion, engaged in the sort of snide, implied sniping Grigovakis and some of her other Saganami classmates had practiced. Neither had he, so far as she could tell, ever allowed any preconception about her on his part to affect the way he evaluated her performance. Nor was he the sort to risk the failure of a mission by assigning anyone to command it but the person he thought best qualified to carry it out.

Even if his prejudices might have inclined him towards selecting her in the first place, he wasn't the kind of officer to make his final decision without careful consideration. And Commander Watson had been right about another thing, as well—Abigail hadn't considered the fact that her assignment to make contact with the Refugians might just as well have reflected his faith in her capability as his prejudice against her own background.

She grimaced as she recognized the truth in the exec's analysis. Whatever Captain Oversteegen might or might not have been guilty of, Abigail had definitely been guilty of allowing her own prejudices and preconceptions to color her view of him. That was humiliating. It was also a failure of her responsibility to Test, and that was even worse.

She gazed out the viewport as the pinnace dipped down below the cloudbase and the untidy sprawl of Zion came into sight. The fact that she'd failed to Test didn't necessarily mean she'd been wrong , but she resolved firmly that before she continued to accept her original conclusions, she would consider all the evidence.

That, however, would have to wait until she returned aboard Gauntlet . For now, she had other things to consider, and whatever the captain's reasons for assigning her to her present task, it was her responsibility to discharge it successfully.

"Five minutes to touchdown, Ms. Hearns," the flight engineer told her, and she nodded.

"Thank you, Chief Palmer," she said, and glanced over her shoulder at Platoon Sergeant Gutierrez. Gutierrez was a San Martino. Quite a few San Martinos had enlisted in the Star Kingdom's military since the planet's annexation, but Gutierrez had joined the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps long before that. Like General Tomas Ramirez, Gutierrez had arrived in the Star Kingdom as a child when his parents managed to escape the Peep occupation of San Martin. In the Gutierrezes' case, they'd done so by stowing away aboard a Solarian League freighter which had dropped them on the planet Manticore with only the clothes on their backs. And like many refugees from tyranny, Sergeant Mateo Gutierrez and his (many) brothers and sisters were unabashed patriots, fiercely devoted to the star nation which had taken them in and given them freedom.

He was also the next best thing to two meters in height and must have weighed somewhere around two hundred kilos, all of it the solid bone and muscle only to be expected from someone born and bred to the heavy gravity of San Martin. Standing next to him in the boat bay, Abigail had felt as if she were five years old again, and his weathered, competent appearance had only emphasized the feeling.

But if he made her feel like a child, his was also a reassuring—one might almost say fearsome—presence. She felt reasonably confident that the pacifistic Fellowship of the Elect was unlikely to attempt to ambush and assassinate her landing party. But after considering all the possibilities, Commander Watson had decided to send not one, but two squads of Marines down with her, and Major Hill, the CO of Gauntlet 's Marine detachment, had picked the first and second squads of Sergeant Gutierrez's platoon. Abigail felt moderately ridiculous as the lowly midshipwoman escorted and guarded by no less than twenty-seven armed-to-the-teeth Marines, but she supposed she should take it as a compliment. Apparently, even if the exec had decided to whack her over the head for her sullen attitude, Commander Watson still wanted her back in one piece.

She chuckled quietly at the thought, then looked back out the viewport as the pinnace settled onto the "pad." It wasn't much of a pad. In fact, it was nothing more than a wide stretch of flat, more or less pounded-down dirt. Muddy water from a recent rain covered parts of it in a thin sheet that exploded upwards as the pinnace's vectored thrust hit it, and she shook her head.

Her aerial view had already made it painfully clear that the "city" of Zion wasn't much more than a not-so-large town of single and double-story wooden and stone buildings. From the air, it had appeared that the very oldest portions of the settlement had ceramacrete streets, but the rest of the streets were either paved in cobblestones or simple dirt, like the "landing pad." She'd seen cobblestones enough in the Old Town sections of Owens, but not dirt, and the sight—like that of the landing pad—emphasized just how primitive and poverty stricken Refuge really was.

She drew a deep breath, unbuckled, and climbed out of her seat while Sergeant Gutierrez got his Marines organized. One six-man fire team headed down the ramp and took up positions around the pinnace at Gutierrez's quiet command, and Abigail frowned slightly. They weren't exactly being unobtrusive about their watchfulness. She started to say something about it to Gutierrez, then changed her mind. Commander Watson wouldn't have sent the Marines along if she hadn't wanted them to be visible.

A trio of men stepped out of the neatly painted, thatched-roofed stone cottage which, judging from the aerials and satellite communication array sitting in front of it, was probably the settlement's com center as well as the "control room" for what there was of the landing field. She studied them carefully, if as unobtrusively as she could, as she followed Gutierrez himself down the landing ramp.

The greeting party had timed things pretty well, she thought, because they reached the foot of the ramp almost simultaneously with her.

"I am called Tobias," the oldest-looking of the bearded, brown and gray-robed threesome said. There was a certain watchful wariness in the set of his shoulders and the stiffness of his spine, but he smiled and inclined his head in greeting. "I greet you in all the names of God, and in accordance with His Word, I welcome you to Refuge and offer you His Peace in the spirit of godly Love."

"Thank you," Abigail replied gravely, even as somewhere inside she winced at how someone like Arpad Grigovakis would have responded to that greeting. "I am Midshipwoman Hearns, of Her Manticoran Majesty's Ship Gauntlet ."