It had taken Steilman weeks to identify the people he needed to make it all work, and the number was higher than he liked. The more people involved, the greater the chance of something going wrong, after all. Nor had he been able to get everything in place in time to put his plan into operation in Walther. But he was ready now. All they needed was to enter orbit around the proper planet, Schiller wouldn't do; its original colonists had come from Old Earth's continent of Africa, and all five of them would stand out like sore thumbs when Harrington demanded the local authorities help track them down, and they were off and free.
But before he left, he was going to square accounts with Wanderman and Lewis. It would be not only his parting gift to the Navy, but to that sanctimonious bitch MacBride, as well. Yes, and to Captain Honor Harrington, damn her!
"Look," he said finally, "I'm willing to lie low for a while. Let the Old Bitch think she's put the fear of God into me, hell, it's no skin off my nose! But don't any of you tell me what I can and can't do." He saw the fear I in their eyes, and the ugliness at his core basked in its reflection. "I am going to fix Lewis' ass, and I'm gonna kill that fucker Wanderman with my own two hands, and there's nobody gonna stop me, least of all you." He bared his teeth and slammed one meaty fist down on the table for emphasis. "I don't want to hear any more shit about it, and if I decide I need one of you to help, then you'd better by God believe you're gonna give me that help. 'Cause if you don't, there's gonna be less people in that pod when it lands, you hear me?"
Stennis swallowed and his eyes fell. Then he nodded jerkily, the fear radiating off him in all but visible waves. Steilman let his eyes sweep the others, and, one by one, they nodded as well. All but Coulter, who simply looked back with a thin, cold smile of agreement.
"Good." The single word fell into the background silence like a stone, and then Randy Steilman picked up the deck and began to deal once more.
Chapter TWENTY-SIX
Citizen Commander Caslet heaved a profound sigh of relief as his pinnace docked. His orders to remain covert at all times made sense, he supposed, but they were also an unmitigated pain, especially since not even the Republic's own diplomatic corps knew Citizen Admiral Giscard had been dispatched to the Confederacy. The ambassadors and trade attachs threaded through Silesian space were integral parts of the Republic's intelligence chain, but most were also holdovers from the old regime. The Committee of Public Safety had applied the new broom theory to the diplomats dispatched to places like the Solarian League, but Silesia was a backwater, too far from the critical arenas of diplomatic maneuvering to give the same housekeeping priority. As a result, State Security trusted its own embassy staffs no further than it had to, which, Caslet conceded, was probably wise of the SS. Six senior Legislaturalist ambassadors had defected to the Manties... after StateSec executed most of the rest of their families for "treason against the people."
That sort of predictable cause and effect was one of the more egregious examples of the lunacies of revolutionary ardor, in Caslet's estimation, and it made his own life difficult. He couldn't tap directly into the diplomatic service's intelligence conduits without revealing his presence and, probably, something about his mission, and that was forbidden, since those very intelligence sources were suspect in the eyes of his superiors. Citizen Admiral Giscard could use any information they turned up, but only after it had been funneled to one of the ambassadors sent out since the coup attempt, and Jasmine Haines, the Schiller System trade attach, was much too far down the food chain for that. Caslet could use Haines to send encrypted dispatches to Giscard via diplomatic courier, but he could neither tell her what those dispatches said, nor who he was, nor even ask her for specific data which might "in any way compromise the operational security of your mission," as his orders succinctly, if unhelpfully, put it. At least he had the authentication codes to require her assistance, but he'd been forced to skulk into Schiller and hide behind the system's largest gas giant while he sent a mere pinnace in with his dispatches. He'd hated that. Hated being stuck at the rendezvous point until his pinnace returned and, even more, hated sending his people into danger when he couldn't go with them. But Allison seemed to have handled the contact as discreetly as he could have hoped, and he watched from the boat bay gallery as the docking tube ran out to the pinnace's lock.
MacMurtree swam the tube, and he felt a twinge of annoyance at the twinkle in her eyes when he returned her salute just that tiny bit too impatiently. She knew him too well, knew he was itchy, eager to get back to trolling for pirates. Of course, he knew her pretty well, too. Neither of them had ever said so, but they shared the same contempt for the Committee of Public Safety and its minions, except, perhaps, for the handful like Denis Jourdain. And neither of them really liked the concept of commerce raiding.
Which is pretty silly of us both, Caslet reflected. The entire purpose of having a navy is to deny the use of space to an enemy while securing it for yourself, isn't it? And how can you deny it to someone else if you're not willing to kill his merchantmen? Besides, merchant tonnage is just as important to the Manties as warships, probably even more so, right?
He shook off the thought and nodded towards the lifts. MacMurtree fell in beside him, and he punched the bridge code into the panel. "How'd it go?" he asked.
"Not too badly," she said with a small shrug. "Their customs patrols really aren't worth a damn. No one even closed to make an eyeball on us."
"Good," Caslet grunted. He'd been unhappy about the "asteroid mining boat" cover his orders specified, since a pinnace didn't look the least bit like a civilian craft. But what had once been NavInt insisted that what passed for a customs patrol out here would settle for a transponder read, and damned if they hadn't been right. Well, that makes a nice change, he thought dryly.
"Anyway, we handled it all by tight beam from orbit," MacMurtree went on. "Haines didn't like sending her dispatch boat off, but she accepted her orders. Our dispatches should reach Admiral Giscard," there were no people's commissioners here to overhear her use of the prerevolutionary rank, "within three weeks." She grimaced. "We could've cut a good ten days off that by sending her straight to the rendezvous, Skipper."
"Security, Allison," Caslet replied, and she snorted with a grumpiness he understood perfectly. To keep StateSec happy, they had to send their dispatches to the Saginaw System, from which another dispatch boat (this one under the orders of an ambassador the Committee of Public Safety trusted) would carry them to Giscard. Even at the high FTL velocities dispatch boats routinely turned out, that was going to take time.
"At any rate," he went on, "we can be sure he'll know everything we do, and what we're up to. Which means we can go trolling again with a clear conscience." "True," MacMurtree agreed. "Anything turn up while I was away?"
"Not really. Of course, we're sort of out of the way here. I figure we'll clear the planetary hyper limit, pop into h-space and move a couple of light-weeks out, then come back in the same way we did for Sharon's Star."
"What if we run into somebody else?"
"You mean a 'regular' pirate instead of Warnecke's happy campers?" MacMurtree nodded, and Caslet shrugged. "We've pulled enough out of their computers to recognize their emissions. We should be able to ID the ones we want if we see them."