"Congratulations," added Baz. "That was the most remarkable tactical maneuver I've ever seen. Beautifully calculated trajectory—your impact point was perfect. You hung him up royally, but without structural damage—I've just been over it—with a few repairs, we've captured ourselves a working dreadnought!'
"Beautiful?" said Mayhew. "Calculated? You're as crazy as he is—" he pointed at Miles. "As for damage—look at it!" He waved over his shoulder in the direction of the RG 132.
"Baz says they have the equipment to rig some sort of hull repairs at this station," Miles soothed. "It'll delay us here for a few more weeks, which I don't like any more than you do, but it can be done. God help us if anybody asks us to pay for it, of course, but with luck I should be able to commandeer—"
"You don't understand!" Mayhew waved his arms in the air. "They're bent. The Necklin rods."
The body of the jump drive, as the pilot and his viral control circuitry was its nervous system, was the pair of Necklin field generator rods that ran from one end of the ship to the other. They were manufactured, Miles recalled, to tolerances of better than one part in a million.
"Are you sure?" said Baz. "The housings—"
"You can stand in the housings and look up the rods and see the warp. Actually see it! They look like skis!" Mayhew wailed.
Baz let his breath trickle out in a hiss between his teeth.
Miles, although he thought he already knew the answer, turned to the engineer. "Any chance of repairing?"
Baz and Mayhew both gave Miles much the same look.
"By God, you'd try, wouldn't you?" said Mayhew. "I can see you down there now, with a sledgehammer—"
Jesek shook his head regretfully. "No, my lord. My understanding is the Felicians aren't up to jump ship production on either the biotech or the engineering side. Replacement rods would have to be imported—Beta Colony would be closest—but they don't manufacture this model any more. They would have to be specially made, and shipped, and—well, I estimate it would take a year and cost several times the original value of the RG 132."
"Ah," said Miles. He stared rather blankly through the plexiports at his shattered ship.
"Couldn't we take the Ariel?" began Elena. "Break through the blockade, and—" she stopped, and flushed slightly. "Oh. Sorry."
The murdered pilot's ghost breathed a cold laugh in Miles's ear. "A pilot without a ship," he muttered under his breath, "a ship without a pilot, cargo not delivered, no money, no way home …" He turned curiously to Mayhew. "Why did you do it, Arde? You could have just surrendered peaceably. You're Betan, they'd have to have treated you all right …"
Mayhew looked around the docking bay, not meeting Miles's eyes. "Seemed to me that dreadnought was about to blow you all into the next dimension."
"True. So?"
"So—well—it didn't seem to me a, a right and proper Armsman ought to be sitting on his ass while that was going on. The ship itself was the only weapon I had. So I aimed it, and—" he mimed a trigger with his finger, and fired it.
He then inhaled, and added with more heat, "But you never warned me, never briefed—I swear if you ever pull a trick like that again, I'll, I'll—"
A ghostly smiled tinged Bothari's lips. "Welcome to my lord's service—Armsman."
Auson and Thorne appeared at the other end of the docking bay. "Ah, there he is, with the whole Inner Circle," said Auson. They bore down upon Miles.
Thorne saluted. "I have the final totals now, sir."
"Um—yes, go ahead, Trainee Thorne." Miles pulled himself to attentiveness.
"On our side, two dead, five injured. Injuries not too serious but for one bad plasma burn—she'll be needing a pretty complete facial regeneration when we get to proper medical facilities—"
Miles's stomach contracted. "Names?"
"Dead, Deveraux and Kim. The head burn was Elli—uh, Trainee Quinn."
"Go on."
"The enemy's total personnel were 60 from the Triumph, Captain Tung's ship—twenty commandos, the rest technical support—and 86 Pelians of whom 40 were military personnel and the rest techs sent to re-start the refinery. Twelve dead, 26 injured moderate-to-severe, and a dozen or so minor injuries.
"Equipment losses, two suits of space armor damaged beyond repair, five repairable. And the damages to the RG 132, I guess—" Thorne glanced up through the plexiports; Mayhew sighed mournfully.
"We captured, in addition to the refinery itself and the Triumph, two Pelian inner-system personnel carriers, ten station shuttles, eight two-man personal flitters, and those two empty ore tows hanging out beyond the crew's quarters. Uh—one Pelian armed courier appears to have—uh—gotten away." Thorne's litany trailed off; the lieutenant appeared to be watching Miles's face anxiously for his reaction to this last bit of news.
"I see." Miles wondered how much more he could absorb. He was growing numb. "Go on."
"On the bright side—"
There's a bright side? thought Miles.
"—we've found a little help for our personnel shortage problem. We freed 23 Felician prisoners—a few military types, but mostly refinery techs kept working at gunpoint until their Pelian replacements could arrive. A couple of them are a little messed up—"
"How so?" Miles began, then held up a hand. "Later. I'll—I'll be making a complete inspection."
"Yes, sir. The rest are able to help out. Major Daum's pretty happy."
"Has he been able to get in contact with his command yet?"
"No, sir."
Miles rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and squeezed his eyes shut, to contain the throbbing in his head.
A patrol of Thorne's weary commandos marched past, moving a batch of prisoners to a more secure location. Miles's eye was drawn to a squat Eurasian of about fifty in torn Oseran grey-and-whites. In spite of his battered and discolored face and painful limp, he maintained a hard-edged alertness. That one looks like he could walk through walls without space armor, Miles thought.
The Eurasian stopped abruptly. "Auson!" he cried. "I thought you were dead!" He towed his captors toward Miles's group; Miles gave the anxious guard a nod of permission.
Auson cleared his throat. "Hello, Tung."
"How did they take your ship without—" the prisoner began, and stopped, as he assimilated Thorne's armor, Auson's—in light of his immobilized arms, decorative—sidearm, their lack of guards. His expression of amazement changed to hot disgust. He struggled for words. "I might have known," he choked at last. "I might have known. Oser was right to keep you two clowns as far away from the real combat as possible. Only the comedy team of Auson and Thorne could have captured themselves."
Auson's lips curled back in a snarl. Thorne flashed a thin, razor-edged smile. "Hold your tongue, Tung," it called, and added in an aside to Miles, "If you knew how many years I've been waiting to say that—"
Tung's face flushed a dark bronze-purple, and he shouted back, "Sit on it, Thorne! You're equipped for it—"
They both lunged forward simultaneously. Tung's guards clubbed him to his knees; Auson and Miles grabbed Thorne's arms. Miles was lifted off his feet, but between them they managed to check the Betan hermaphrodite.
Miles intervened. "May I point out, Captain Tung, that the—ah—comedy team has just captured you?"
"If half my commandos hadn't been trapped by that sprung bulkhead—" Tung began hotly.
Auson straightened, and smirked. Thorne stopped flexing on its feet. United at last, thought Miles, by the common enemy … Miles breathed a small. "Ha!", as he spotted his opportunity to finally put the disbelieving and suspicious Auson in the palm of his hand.