Shadow of Freedom

MacWilliams’ blue eyes hardened. She and Major John Pole, the CO of the Solarian Gendarmerie intervention battalion OFS had stationed here aboard Shona Station, loathed one another. Pole’s people hadn’t enforced the kind of brutal reign of terror Frontier Security had imposed—or supported, at any rate—in all too many protectorate systems, but that didn’t make him a knight in shining armor. MacWilliams and her predecessor had been forced to deal with several complaints about Pole, most from women who hadn’t responded favorably enough to his advances. Any Saltashan would have been hammered hard over the same sort of accusations. At the very least, he would have been dragged in while they were thoroughly investigated. But local police forces didn’t go around investigating the commanders of intervention battalions. That was one of the facts of life in the Verge, and it stuck in Bridie MacWilliams’ craw sideways.

Worse, as the Gendarmes’ CO, Pole set the standard. Two or three of his troopers had gotten far enough out of line that the previous OFS governor had actually authorized their prosecution, and one of them had even been broken out of the Gendarmerie and sent away for ten T-years of hard time on the gas-extraction platforms orbiting Himalaya. Dueñas had promptly turned the clock back, however…which was how MacWilliams came to hold her present position, since one of the governor’s first actions had been to sack her predecessor precisely because of those prosecutions.

“Skipper,” she said now, “I think we have limited options here. I’ve got around five hundred cops for the entire Station, most with nothing heavier than side arms, and even after detachments, Pole’s got the better part of two companies of gendarmes on-station. I don’t have an up-to-the-minute count, but he’s got to have close to three hundred people up here, and they’ve got a lot heavier equipment than mine do.”

“Two hundred and seventy-three as of this morning, Ma’am,” MacGeechan put in. “Not counting three on sick call in the infirmary.” MacNaughtan and MacWilliams both looked at him with raised eyebrows, and he shrugged. “I just thought it was something I should be checking on, given the situation. Just so we could have a better feel for how we might…integrate our own people with his if we had to, you understand.”

“I believe I do, Eardsidh,” MacWilliams told him with an off-center smile. “I believe I do.”

Then her smile faded and she turned back to MacNaughtan.

“Sir, I think Major Pole will obey his orders—his legal orders, of course—from Governor Dueñas. And I can’t see anything aboard Shona Station which could reasonably be expected to prevent him from doing so.”

She’d chosen her words carefully, MacNaughtan noted. All of them could honestly testify that no one had even so much as suggested that they might attempt to resist the governor’s instructions.

“I don’t either,” he told her. “On the other hand, as you’ve pointed out, your people are much more lightly equipped than Major Pole’s gendarmes. Under the circumstances, I feel you and Lieutenant MacGeechan would be best employed using your personnel for crowd control, public safety, and to back up Commander MacVey’s damage control crews, in case they should be needed. My feeling is that we also ought to immediately begin evacuating civilian personnel from Victor Seven in order to facilitate any movements Major Pole may feel it’s appropriate for him to make.”

“Yes, Sir.” MacWilliams nodded.

Victor Seven was the station habitat module which had been assigned to the gendarmes ever since their original dispatch to Saltash. Actually, they’d assigned it to themselves, since it had originally been intended as the station’s VIP habitat and was still the largest, most luxuriously appointed module Shona Station boasted. It had also been refitted to contain the Gendarmerie’s brig facilities, which were separate from those of the Saltash Space Service’s police forces. No one had been especially happy about the notion of confining the Manticoran merchant spacers in Victor Seven; the general feeling had been that Saltash was already on thin ice, and the Gendarmerie was not famous for the consideration with which it treated individuals in its custody. Under the circumstances, however, MacNaughtan couldn’t pretend he was unhappy to have them in Victor Seven, because aside from a few dozen service personnel with duty stations in the area, the only people in Victor Seven were going to be gendarmes and the Manties.