Эрик Флинт - The Service of the Sword

" That should go without saying. No, if you ever get that screwed up on a mission again, authorized or un authorized, I will personally strap you to a missile and fire you out the tube. Do I make myself clear?"

"Clear, Ma'am," they both chorused.

"Captain Covilla?" Givens said. "Do you have anything?"

"No, Ma'am," the captain said. Her voice was gravelly; she'd either spent a lot of time shouting at some point or she'd had a bad experience with death pressure. "I'd like a moment of Captain Mullins' time."

"Very well," Givens said, pointing to the door. "Dismissed."

All three found themselves out in the corridor, looking around at the busy scurrying of NavInt.

"Confirmation," Gonzalvez muttered. "We put our butts on the line for confirmation !"

"Typical," Covilla growled. "Captain Mullins, if you could step down to my office, please?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Mullins said. "What about Captain Gonzalvez?"

"Well, he can get started on the paperwork."

"Paperwork?" Gonzalvez said suspiciously.

"Your unauthorized adventure was expensive," Covilla said. "We're going to have to sort out which part was duty and which part was not. And you're going to be paying back the non-duty portion. Come on, Captain."

He followed her to her office, noting that she had a decidedly un-ladylike gait that bespoke significant time in small-craft. He came to attention as she walked around her desk and sat in the room's sole chair.

"Do you have anything you want to add to the debrief?" she asked, flipping a pad across the desk. "You can stand at ease."

"I just have a question," Mullins said, spreading his feet apart and placing his hands behind his back in a position closer to parade rest.

"If it doesn't violate your need to know," Covilla responded with a thin smile.

"How was the rest of your trip back?" he asked. "I mean, after the scene at the shuttle-port, Rachel."

Covilla leaned back and steepled her fingers in a manner identical to Admiral Givens. "How long have you known?" she asked, swinging her chair back and forth. Her voice was now honey smooth.

"I wasn't sure until just now," Mullins said. "But the blonde at the shuttleport smoothed her hair back in a manner identical to the way you do. And her pushing into line was a bit too coincidental. As soon as I'd made that connection, backing up and finding all the places where you'd managed us was easy. So what really happened?"

"I was the backup for the defection," she said. "I had figured out that the Chinese laundry was compromised, doubled, but I couldn't abort the Admiral. So I blew up the laundry."

"When you said you had 'something to do' that first evening, you were serious," Mullins said with a chuckle.

"And I drove the Admiral to you," she continued. "I couldn't get him out and spoof StateSec at the same time."

"And the apartment?"

"Oh, that was really my boyfriend's," she replied, tiredly. "You use the weapons that God gives you, John. One of my weapons is my body."

"And it's one hell of a weapon," he said with a smile. "So where does this leave us?"

"I'm not sure," she replied. "I'm not in your chain of command, exactly, but we're close. If we continue it could be construed as fraternization."

"You know what?" John replied. "I really could give a rat's ass."

"Same here," she said with a smile, reaching up and peeling off the mask. She picked at a few pieces of plasflesh and rolled them on her finger. "I'm due about a year's leave. How about you?"

"I'm not sure I can get any ever again," Mullins replied with a shrug. "And I'm not going to be able to afford it."

"Don't worry about Patricia, I know where the bodies are buried," Rachel said. "As for the charge issue, I just told Gonzalvez that to get him out of our hair. Where should we go?"

"Anywhere but Prague," Mullins said with a shudder.

"I hear Gryphon is beautiful in the winter," she said with a grin.

Citizen Rear Admiral Genevieve Chin stared at the holopic on her desk. Without even realizing it, she was perched on the edge of her chair.

Citizen Commodore Ogilve, slouched in a nearby chair in her office, put her thoughts into words:

"He looks like a real piece of work, doesn't he?"

Glumly, Chin nodded. The holopic on her desk was that of a State Security officer whose face practically shrieked: fanatic. The fact that it was the image of a young man did not detract from the impression in the least. Coarse black hair loomed over a wide, shallow brow; the brow, in turn, loomed over eyes as dark as the hair. The eyes themselves were obsidian flakes against an ascetic-pale, hard-jawed, tight-lipped, square-chinned and gaunt-cheeked face. Genevieve had no difficulty at all imagining that face in the gloom of an Inquisition dungeon, tightening the rack still further on a sinner. Or shoving the first torch into the mound of faggots piled under a heretic bound to a stake.

Chin couldn't detect any traces of the leering cruelty that had not been hard to find on the face of the officer's predecessor. But she took no great comfort from the fact. Even assuming she was right, that cold-blooded part of her which had enabled a disgraced admiral to survive for ten years through Haven's Pierre–Saint-Just–Ransom regime would have preferred an outright sadist to a sheer fanatic as the effective new head of State Security in La Martine Sector. One could at least hope that a sadist would be careless or lazy, too often distracted by his vices to pay full attention to his official assignment. Whereas this man . . .

"Is he really as young as he looks, Yuri?" she asked quietly.

The third person in the room, who was leaning against the closed door to her office, nodded his head. He was a somewhat plump middle-aged man of average height, with a round and friendly looking face, wearing a StateSec uniform.

"Yup. Just turned twenty-four years old. Three years out of the academy. Unfortunately, he seems to have done splendidly on his first major field assignment and caught Saint-Just's eye. And now, of course . . ."

Citizen Commodore Ogilve sighed. "Since all the casualties State Security suffered in Nouveau Paris when McQueen launched her coup attempt—what in Hell what was she thinking?—Saint-Just is throwing every young hotshot he's got left into the breaches." He wiped his face with a thin hand. "If we'd had any warning . . ."

"And what good would that have done?" demanded Chin. "Sure, we could have seized this sector, and so what? As long as Nouveau Paris stayed under Saint-Just's control, he'd have the whip hand." Chin leaned back in her chair wearily. "God damn Esther McQueen and her ambitions, anyway."

She glanced at her desk display. It was dark, at the moment, but she had no difficulty imagining what it would have shown if she'd slipped it to tactical mode. Two State Security superdreadnoughts keeping orbit close to her own task force circling the planet of La Martine.

Admiral Chin's task force was much bigger in terms of ships, true—fourteen battleships on station, along with an equivalent number of cruisers and half a dozen destroyers. And so what? Chin was fairly confident that under ideal conditions she could have defeated those two monsters—though not without suffering enormous casualties. She had the advantage of handpicked officers and well-trained Navy crews, whereas the officers and crews of the StateSec superdreadnoughts had no real battle experience. They'd been selected for their political reliability, not their fighting skills.

But it was all a moot point. The StateSec warships had their impellers and sidewalls up and she didn't. They'd gotten word of Esther McQueen's failed coup attempt in Nouveau Paris before she had, and had immediately gone to battle stations . . . and stayed there. By the time she'd realized what was happening, it had been too late. Any battle now would be a sheer massacre of her own forces.