Christopher Nuttall - Barbarians at the Gates

“I doubt they’ll be that willing to take anything on faith,” Admiral Mason said slowly. “Three years of war will have weeded out the incompetents on his side…still, it might work. And dare I assume that you have an operational plan already drawn up?”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said. He accessed his implants and shunted the encrypted file into the admiral’s desktop processor.

“I will review it with my staff and consider it.” Admiral Mason leaned back in his chair, apparently relaxed. “And now that that’s over, perhaps you could give me your verbal impressions of our area of operations.”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said.

He sat back and started to outline his thoughts. Midway’s probes had identified several convoy routes through the border space, although there was no way to know if they were serving the warlords or merely civilians trying to survive as the Federation tore itself apart. Roman’s sensor section had identified one patrolling warship as actually belonging to a mercenary company out of Hobson’s Choice, presumably hired to guard the freighters from pirate attacks—or even one or both of the warlords. The fleet would have good pickings, at least until the warlords started patrolling the sector more aggressively.

“Not too bad,” Admiral Mason said after Roman was done. “One other thing, captain?”

Roman looked up.

“What do you intend to do with the pirate prisoners?” the admiral asked casually.

Roman scowled. He hadn’t bothered to check on the prisoners he’d abandoned in the wreck of the Harmonious Repose . They had enough supplies to last them for several weeks without rescue, assuming they were careful. He wasn’t going to shed any tears if they killed themselves instead, or if they were just never able to recover them. Besides, there was the issue of just how to deal with them. He’d given the pirates his word.

“I was going to have them interrogated to learn the location of their bases and other information, then transfer them to a penal colony,” he said. “I gave them my word.”

“So you did,” Admiral Mason agreed. He leaned forward coldly. “Regulations are clear on this point, captain . Pirates captured in the act are to be executed once interrogated—no exceptions.”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said. “On the other hand, if I’d tried to storm the pirate vessel—or put a missile into her hull—there would have been a bloodbath. And we would have been denied the intelligence windfall I collected from the pirate ship. And we wouldn’t have recovered the pirate ship. I think we could probably put that to use, sir.”

“I’m sure.” Admiral Mason sneered again. “You seem to have a knack of falling headfirst into a bucket of shit and coming out covered in diamonds. It won’t last, and the first time your luck fails you will be the day your universe collapses. Don’t disobey orders again, or even your mentor won’t be able to stop you being busted down to Ensign and assigned to an isolated mining colony so far from Earth that they think FTL travel is a joke.”

“Yes, sir,” Roman said.

“Now get back to your ship,” Admiral Mason ordered. “I’ll read your plan and inform you of my decision.”

It wasn’t common for starships—even the superdreadnaughts and carriers—to have more than a handful of cells in the brig. If the starship did need, for whatever reason, to restrain more than a handful of prisoners, it was easy to seal off a section and use it as a makeshift jail. Without power tools or weapons, the prisoners couldn’t hope to escape. Roman had turned one of Midway’s holds into a prison for most of the prisoners—and they had complained non-stop about the accommodation, even though they weren’t in danger of being tortured and raped—but he’d kept Henrietta separate. He’d have to transfer the other prisoners to Golden Hind and they couldn’t be allowed to learn that she was still alive.

Midway’s brig consisted of two sections. A Marine guard stood outside one section, under strict orders not to enter the brig or allow anyone else to enter without Roman’s permission. Inside, there was a force field hemming the prisoner into a small cell, allowing visitors a chance to speak to the prisoner in private. Unlike a civilian jail cell, every moment in the brig was recorded by hidden sensors, but Roman had used his command authority to deactivate them. There would be no record of this prisoner.

Henrietta was lying on the bunk when he walked through the hatch and stopped outside the force field. She looked as if she had been sleeping, but her eyes were hollow when she pulled herself upright and stared at him. Elf had checked her thoroughly and reported that she was in good health, yet it would have surprised Roman if she wasn’t a little traumatized. Her life had turned upside down several times since the war began. And she knew that if a senior officer learned of her presence on the ship, she’d be executed. She was completely at his mercy and she knew it.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. Her voice was soft and weak, vulnerable. “I was running out of books.”

Roman nodded. A prisoner, even a crewman placed in the brig for a brief spell, could not be allowed to access the ship’s computers, even the recreational files open to all. In earlier days, he’d been told, computer-skilled personnel had hacked into the security systems and made their escape. That was supposed to be impossible now, but the regulation still remained in force.

“Tell me something,” he said suddenly. “Did your father give you a choice when he sent you to marry Hartkopf?”

“What do you think?” She sneered. “My father is ambitious, and my mother is as bad as he is, if not worse. Girls are pawns to them, to be sold on the marriage market in order to improve their social position. I was told that I was going to marry him, and nothing I said changed their minds. Do you think I wanted to marry a man who’s over ninety years old?”

“I don’t know if you’re any better off here.” Roman shrugged. “I may have to quietly ship you elsewhere before the shit hits the fan.”

“It’s better than waiting for an old bastard to deflower me, just because Daddy wants access to his starships,” she said. “You need to watch my father. He will do anything to satisfy his ambitions.”

“I see,” Roman said. He wished for a trained interrogator, but that wasn’t a possibility. “And what does your father actually want from all this?”

“Empire, of course,” Henrietta said. “He wants to be Lord and Master of All.”

Her face twitched. “Compared to that,” she added, “what is the happiness of a single daughter? He has four more.”

Marx System, 4095

“Commodore?”

Commodore Joseph Truing turned to face the young officer and—barely—refrained from rolling his eyes. Joseph was over a hundred years old, thanks to anti-aging treatments he’d accepted when he’d joined the Federation Navy, and Lieutenant Harwich looked as if he’d barely started to shave. He was eager enough, anyway, even if he did have a habit of reporting every random flicker on the detectors as an incoming enemy attack. It was hard to believe, Joseph thought to himself from time to time, that he had ever been that young.