“If you know that, we don’t need him,” the killer said, and caught the smaller man by the collar, half-choking him. “We’d rather . . . work . . . with you.”
“No!” The woman lunged, but one of the others caught her. She tried to fight free, but she had no skill, and no strength to make up its lack. “No, let him—please—”
The killer laughed. “We heard what you said about the Bloodhorde . . . how you taunted our agent.”
She turned even whiter.
“You dared to bind him . . .” He twisted the man’s collar until the man’s face purpled. “You threatened. You had a noose around his neck . . . and now you have a noose around your neck. Even barbarians, as you call us, understand poetic justice.”
Barin could not look away; there was a fascination in this that disgusted him with himself. The killer twisted . . . twisted . . . and horribly, slowly, the dapper little man about whom Barin knew nothing died, his struggles weaker and weaker until they ceased.
“We pay our debts,” the killer said to the woman. “All of them, the ones you know about and the ones you don’t. Do we think size is everything? I believe that was your complaint, was it not? Then I believe you should have a chance to experience size in a way suitable to you in particular.”
The woman gave Barin a frantic glance, and the killer laughed. “You think he could help you? This boy with a broken nose, that we captured as easily as we took you?”
He had to do something. He couldn’t just lie here doing nothing . . . but no matter how he struggled, he couldn’t loosen the very efficient bindings they’d taken from ship security. Through all that followed, he struggled, rasping his wrists raw, earning a random cuff now and then from men more amused than concerned with his efforts. The woman struggled too, but it did her no good; one after another they took her, in ways that Barin’s inexperience had not imagined. Finally her struggles, her gasps and moans, died away, and she lay still. He couldn’t tell if she was dead, or just unconscious. She had been some kind of traitor apparently . . . he had gotten that much from what they’d all said . . . but no one deserved what had happened to her.
One of the men spoke to the other in their language, something Barin could tell was meant as a joke. The one on her pushed himself up, laughing, and then turned to Barin. He grinned even wider.
“The boy’s upset,” he said. “Maybe she was his girl?”
“Too old,” said one of the others. “A nice boy like him wouldn’t have a woman like that.”
“I’m sure he has a girl somewhere on this ship,” the first one said. “We’ll have to be sure we find her.”
He would have heaved again if he’d had anything left.
“What I don’t understand is how they found the self-destruct so fast,” Captain Hakin said. “Not that many people know where it is . . .”
“They grabbed those civilian contractors,” Admiral Dossignal said.
“But how would they know? They’re weapons specialists; they’ve been busy recalibrating the guidance systems . . . oh.”
“If someone suborned the civilians, then they could have disabled the self-destruct—they could have found it while appearing to be working on weapons in inventory. I see . . .”
“What I don’t understand is why they were snatched, if they’d already done their job.”
“They hadn’t,” the captain said. “Remember—until an hour ago, all the signals were secure.”
“Considering the quality of work they did on the weapons, if they’d done it, I’d expect it to be undetectable,” said Commander Wyche. “I’d bet they were snatched simply for their weapons expertise . . . with the data wands the intruders got from the three we know they killed, they’d have high enough access to find that out.”
“So now the self-destruct is out of my control.” Hakin glared at the admirals. “I should have used it.”
“No,” Dossignal said. “It was the handiest way, the easiest and least obvious way, for you to have the power of destruction, but it wasn’t the only. On this ship, with what we’ve got in inventory, and the expertise in the 14th alone, we can prevent capture. We will.”
“I hope so,” the captain said. “I sincerely hope so, because if you don’t we are not the only ones who will suffer for it.”
“Wraith gives us another possibility,” Commander Wyche said.
“Wraith?”
“She still has a third of her weapons, all in portside mountings. And she still has ample firepower to blow Kos. Not from the repair bay—the way she’s locked into the cradles, even if she blew herself, there’s a 72 percent chance that most of Kos would survive. We’d have to reposition her mounts, which would take days. But if we can get her into a position to fire on the core area—”
“She can’t maneuver!” Commander Takkis, head of Drives and Maneuver. “We dismounted the drives when she first came in, and it would take days to remount them. Besides, I have everyone working on the FTL drive for this ship.”
“I was thinking of the drives test cradle. She doesn’t have to maneuver to be slung on there and then towed into position . . . even, if you wish, at the extremity of the lines. The test cradle’s own drive would be sufficient, if necessary, to move her into the best firing position for Kos . . . or she could get some shots off at the Bloodhorde.”
A moment of silence, as they thought it over. Dossignal and Livadhi both nodded. “It could work—certainly, as far as destroying Kos is concerned, and quite probably she could do a fair bit of damage to the Bloodhorde ships.”
Captain Hakin was nodding too. “If those weapons have not been taken off Wraith, and we’re absolutely sure they haven’t been tampered with, then we’ve got our fail-safe back . . . as long as they’re not depleted taking potshots at the enemy.”
“No . . . I can see that there’d have to be strict limits of use, but that should leave enough to do some damage. Especially if we had something else. One of the shuttles, maybe. In the Xavier action, the planetary defense used a couple of shuttles to good effect.”
“They used them for mine-laying . . . I don’t think that would work here.”
“If only we could Trojan-horse them, the way they did to us.” Livadhi smiled briefly. “It would be so satisfying.”
“Get aboard a Bloodhorde ship? I don’t see how. Since they do it, they know it can be done—they’d be watching. And our people would be trying a hostile boarding, against resistance.”
“I was thinking . . . if we had any native speakers of their language, if we could locate one of these intruders and sweat some recognition codes out of him, then our people could pretend to be their own team coming back.”
“Won’t work.” Admiral Livadhi scowled in surprise at the lieutenant commander two seats down. “Sorry, sir, but—we shouldn’t waste time with schemes bound to fail. The Bloodhorde special operations teams—which is what we have aboard—are all members of one lineage. Each team is, I mean. They train together for years, and develop their own distinctive argot. Commander Coston, who went back to Rockhouse recently, had been doing a special study on Bloodhorde special ops. Our people can’t imitate a Bloodhorde pack—not without a lot of training we don’t have time to give. As well, we have only thirteen people aboard who speak the language with anything like sufficient fluency, and their accents indicate different origins.”
“We don’t need negativism now, Commander Nors,” Livadhi said. “We’re at the stage of thinking up possibilities.”
“Sorry, sir. Well . . . suppose one of the Bloodhorde ships were close in . . . and empty or nearly empty of its crew. We’ve developed a fairly good model of a Bloodhorde ship’s control systems, working from the commercial models they’re built on, and information from scavenge. It wouldn’t take long to train our experienced warship crews to use it—or for that matter, import our own scan equipment.”