Tonkovic's jaw dropped in sheer disbelief. That wasn't a question, wasn't even a disguised policy position statement on Ranjina's part. It was an indictment. One delivered in an ambush such as no Planetary President of Kornati had walked into in well over two hundred T-years.
The hubbub behind her rose to a confused roar, and Gazi's gavel was finally hammering, pounding thunderously. But it was too late. The damage was done, and Aleksandra Tonkovic watched the solemn hearing disintegrate into a shouting match between her allies and her enemies within the Special Committee while the cameras watched every detail of the fiasco.
"Captain Terekhov, Mr. Van Dort, the Montana System owes the two of you a debt which I doubt we'll ever be able to repay," President Warren Suttles said. The President was a politician, but just this once, at least, there was nothing but sincerity in his face and voice. "Stephen Westman and the entire rank and file of the Montana Independence Movement have agreed to surrender to the Marshals Service and to turn in all their heavy weapons. The threat of guerrilla warfare and insurrection on this planet, with all of the damage and deaths that might have entailed, has just been removed thanks to your efforts."
Terekhov, Van Dort, and a still-subdued Helen Zilwicki sat in the President's office along with Chief Marshal Bannister. The captain waved one deprecating hand, but the President shook his head.
"No. You can't just wave it off, Captain. We do owe you an enormous debt. I wish there were something we could do to at least begin paying down some of the interest!"
"Actually, Mr. President," Terekhov said diffidently, "there is one little thing you could do for us."
"Anything!" Suttles said expansively, and Bannister closed his eyes in momentary pain. He'd helped craft this particular ambush himself, but it still hurt to see its intended prey walk into it with such utter innocence.
"Well, Mr. President," Terekhov said, "there's a Solarian-registry freighter, the Copenhagen , in Montana orbit, and…"
"My God, Aivars! What we just did to that poor man!" Van Dort shook his head, trying hard-and unsuccessfully-not to laugh as their pinnace returned to Hexapuma .
"What?" Terekhov replied innocently. "He did owe us a favor, Bernardus, you know."
Chapter Fifty
"You do realize, Skipper, that you're shooting craps with your career?"
"Nonsense, Ansten." Terekhov shook his head with a half-smile, but FitzGerald wasn't buying it.
"You told me, once, that you might need me to warn you that what you had in mind was a little risky," the XO reminded him. "Well, the Sollies're going to go ape-shit… and that may be the good news!"
The captain and his exec sat in Hexapuma's number two pinnace, and FitzGerald pointed out the viewport at the mountainous bulk of the Kalokainos Shipping-owned freighter Copenhagen .
"I think the admiralty courts call this 'piracy,'" he said.
"Nonsense," Terekhov replied airily. "This is a simple and obvious case of salvage of an abandoned vessel."
"Which you arranged to have 'abandoned' in the first place!"
Terekhov was gazing out the viewport, watching Copenhagen draw steadily closer. Privately, he was prepared to admit FitzGerald had a point. Several of them, in fact. But what he was prepared to admit to himself was quite different from what he was prepared to admit to anyone else.
"Another thing you might want to think about, Skipper," FitzGerald said, in the tone of the man looking for a telling argument, "is the amount of grief you may be buying for Montana when the Sollies find out the part Suttles agreed to play in this little charade."
"President Suttles is showing a perfectly reasonable and prudent concern, under the circumstances, Ansten." Terekhov's expression was that of someone widows and orphans could safely trust with their final penny. FitzGerald's expression, however, only got more skeptical, and Terekhov smiled again, a bit more broadly than before.
"Given the fact that a Solarian-registry vessel was apprehended in the very act of supplying illegal weapons to terrorists on his planet, President Suttles has every right to be concerned. Since there was a second Solarian-registry vessel in orbit at exactly the same time, and since Kalokainos Shipping and the Jessyk Combine are known to have coordinated their interests in several areas of the Verge, the discovery that Marianne belonged to Jessyk amply justifies his decision that Copenhagen merits investigation, as well. And since the entire Montanan navy consists of LACs, without a single hyper-capable unit, he obviously couldn't count on preventing Copenhagen from fleeing the system to avoid investigation if, indeed, her ship's company had been involved in this nefarious plot. So he clearly had no choice but to remove Copenhagen's crew for interrogation."
"And you think that… fairy tale is going to convince the League Suttles didn't have a thing to do with the rest of this?" FitzGerald gestured at Copenhagen again, as the pinnace decelerated to rest relative to the big freighter.
"I think that, either way, it isn't going to matter," Terekhov said much more seriously. FitzGerald looked at him, and he shrugged. "If the annexation goes through, the League won't be looking at a single, unsupported Verge system; it'll be looking at a member system of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. At which point, it will become our responsibility to protect Suttles from Frontier Security. And," his tone turned more serious still, almost grim, "if you people find what I'm very much afraid you're going to, Suttles and everyone else who ever favored the annexation are going to find themselves in much worse trouble than anything this could produce unless we do something about it."
The pinnace pilot was playing his maneuvering thrusters with a skill which reminded Terekhov of Ragnhild Pavletic. The memory sent a fresh stab of pain through him, but he allowed no trace of it to shadow his expression as he gazed back out through the port again. He watched as the pilot carefully aligned the pinnace's airlock with the freighter's emergency personnel hatch. A single skinsuited crewman stepped through the airlock's open outer hatch and drifted gracefully across to Copenhagen's hull, where he opened a small access cover and tapped a command sequence into the keypad behind it. The personnel hatch considered the command ("unofficially" acquired from Trevor Bannister after Copenhagen's crew accepted his invitation as involuntary guests of Montana) and obediently extruded its boarding tube to mate with the pinnace's lock.
FitzGerald sat studying the captain's profile and trying to think of a fresh argument which might bring Terekhov to his senses. It wasn't that he didn't understand what the other man had in mind, or even that he disagreed with Terekhov's suspicions or the captain's conviction that something had to be done to prove or disprove what he feared. It was the method Terekhov had selected… and, perhaps even more, what FitzGerald suspected the captain had in mind if his investigation confirmed his worst fears.