Christopher Nuttall - Barbarians at the Gates

“Pardon?” Roman blinked. “What the hell was she doing there?”

Over three hundred hostages had been rescued from the pirate ship The Black Knife , creating an immediate humanitarian crisis for Roman and his crew. Most of the hostages hadn’t been injured or mistreated, but they did want to go home as soon as possible, particularly the ones who suspected that ONI wanted a few words with them. They couldn’t all be accommodated on Midway , creating a minor problem until the engineering crew re-activated some of the space liner’s passenger compartments. The Harmonious Repose might have been disabled, but she made an adequate passenger space—and a prison for the pirates. Roman wasn’t about to leave them on their own vessel.

He looked through the monitor into the holding cell. Henrietta Beauregard-Justinian had been separated from the other hostages on the pirate ship—clearly, the pirates had known who she was—and Roman had ordered her kept in isolation. She was a remarkably pretty girl, barely out of her teens, with long blonde hair and an utterly perfect face. Her file stated that she had been engineered to fit the fashion of her birth time, a technique rarely available to anyone outside the upper class. The RockRats rarely engineered their children for looks.

And she was under sentence of death.

Roman scowled as he studied the oddly composed girl. The Senate had passed decrees ordering that anyone related to Admiral Justinian and the other warlords was to be killed on sight, with their properties seized and their personal effects confiscated. If he handed her over to Admiral Mason, Henrietta would be executed before she had a chance to beg for her life—indeed, Roman knew that his orders suggested that he should execute her himself. And yet, she was too young to be involved in her father’s treachery. It wasn’t right that she should die for his actions.

He looked over at Elf, to see her looking at him speculatively.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. There was no one else in the compartment. Henrietta was guarded by an armoured female Marine, but she was alone in the holding cell. Roman understood how she must feel. “You want to save her.”

“Am I that predicable?” Roman snorted.

“You’re a decent person,” Elf said. She leaned forward until her lips were almost touching his lips. “Now tell me; are you willing to risk everything you’ve earned since you set foot on Enterprise to keep her alive?”

And that was the nub of it, Roman thought numbly. Refusing to execute her—or hand her over to Admiral Mason to be executed—would break the Senate’s decree. The Senate would not be charmed with this challenge to their authority. It was true that starship commanders had wide latitude to decide how to interpret regulations, but Senatorial decrees left no room for maneuver. He swallowed, hard. Professor Kratman had warned them that there might be times when they had to choose between following orders blindly or risking court martial, but he’d never considered, even in his worst nightmares…he’d thought about choosing to refuse orders to bombard an inhabited planetary surface, not refusing to execute a slip of a girl. Bombarding an entire planet would be wrong.

And that was the answer, wasn’t it?

“Yes,” he said. He closed his eyes for a long moment, thinking hard. “How many people know that we took her alive?”

“Only you and I,” Elf said. “The others don’t know her identity. Her fellow travelers were separated from her as soon as the pirates figured out who she was.”

“Good,” Roman said. “We keep her here as a prisoner. No one is to know anything about her.”

“As a pet?” Elf asked dryly. “What do you intend to do with her in the long run?”

“I’ll figure something out.” Roman shook his head slowly. At the moment, he didn’t have the slightest idea what, though. Keeping her alive was bad enough, but should he report her death? The admiral would be furious if he knew that Roman had signed a lie into the ship’s log, with good reason. “You never know. Having her alive might come in handy.”

“We could always sell her back to her father,” Elf said mischievously.

Roman gaped at her.

“Just kidding, but you do have to admit that it is an interesting point. What would his father do to get his daughter back?”

“That’s one question,” Roman agreed. “And here is the other. What was she doing on that ship in the first place?”

FNS Golden Hind /FNS Midway , FAS-48237892, 4095

“I assume, young man,” Admiral Mason said coldly, “that you have some kind of explanation for this?”

Roman kept his expression blank. The flight to the rendezvous point had been fraught with tension. A single assault cruiser might slip through an unguarded Asimov Point without anyone detecting its passage, but a star carrier was far larger—and Golden Hind was supported by seventeen older-model starships. The admiral had known the risks of detection and chosen to brave the passage anyway, even though it would put them out of direct contact with the loyalists for several months. He couldn’t blame the admiral for feeling a little concerned. He had overstepped his orders, after all.

“Yes, sir,” he said carefully. “I have a very good explanation.”

“Really?” Admiral Mason said. His tone suggested that he didn’t believe a word of it. “Let me see now, shall we? You were ordered to scout out enemy convoy routes and attempt to determine their numbers and strength in our area of operations. You were not ordered to engage their ships, or engage pirate ships. By doing so, you have imperilled the operation’s chances of success. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Roman bit down on his temper. Shouting at a superior officer wouldn’t help.

“The civilian ship was attacked by pirates and I chose to rescue her, knowing the risks,” he said. “The pirate ship was nearby and I chose to engage her, capturing the crew and rescuing the hostages.” Including one he wasn’t going to mention to the admiral. “My actions were in line with the Federation Navy’s very reason for being.”

“An interesting argument,” Admiral Mason said with a sneer. “And do you think that your mentor will accept it?”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said.

“Oh,” Admiral Mason said. “I know that captains have wide latitude in carrying out their orders, but very few captains have ever been granted the authority to rewrite their own orders—and I can assure you, Garibaldi, that you are not one of them. Please tell me, exactly, why you feel that this little bout of disobedience will not result in a court martial for gross insubordination in the face of the enemy?”

Roman gathered himself. “Because, as I stated in my report…”

“I am asking you, captain,” Admiral Mason said. “I want to hear the answer from your own mouth.”

“The pirates didn’t board, storm and loot any old commercial ship,” Roman said. “They boarded a White Swan -class liner with a very strange passenger manifest. The passengers we were able to identify, sir, were all from Admiral Justinian’s government. We took the liberty of carrying out preliminary interrogations, and they sang like canaries under truth drugs.”