Shadow of Freedom

“It’s a pity,” MacNaughtan continued, “that our own lack of personnel and equipment means your available manpower’s going to be fully employed maintaining security throughout the rest of the station. But while we won’t be able to reinforce or support the Major, I want every effort made to at least guarantee the integrity of the station in general and to ensure that he and his people are relieved of any responsibility which might distract them from Governor Dueñas’ orders. I trust that’s clear, Commander MacWilliams.”

“Yes, Sir.” MacWilliams smiled thinly at him. “Lieutenant MacGeechan and I will get right on that.”

* * *

“Let’s raise the station, Abhijat.”

“Yes, Sir,” Lieutenant Wilson replied, and Jacob Zavala sat back, watching the tactical plot while he waited.

DesRon 301 had settled into orbit around the planet Cinnamon. Traffic control hadn’t assigned them a parking orbit, for some reason, but HMS Kay’s astrogator had managed to find one. It wasn’t as if there was an enormous amount of orbital traffic to pick a way around, after all.

Captain Myau’s destroyers remained in orbit around Cinnamon’s moon, and Zavala was perfectly content to leave them there. A handful of civilian vessels had moved nervously away from the planet as the squadron entered orbit, but aside from that things seemed reasonably calm. Maybe that was because the majority of the star system’s shipping was out rescuing the survivors of Oxana Dubroskaya’s squadron.

Zavala’s lips tightened again at that thought, but it wasn’t one he was prepared to dwell upon. Right now, he had to concentrate on other things, and he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t grateful for the distraction. On the other hand, the “other things” had the potential to turn into an even more horrendous mess than the massacre of Dubroskaya’s battlecruisers. After all, there’d been only eight thousand or so human beings on those warships; there were a quarter million human beings on Shona Station.

Which is the reason—as that pain in the ass Dueñas clearly understands—we can’t use Mark 16s as door knockers this time around, he thought grimly. And if there really is an intervention battalion in there, it’s going to be one hell of a trick to pry our people loose without getting a lot of other people a lot more personally killed. Unless the station CO’s another Myau, at any rate. And what’re the odds of that if he’s got a stack of gendarmes breathing down his neck?

“I’ve got the station commander for you, Sir,” Lieutenant Wilson said, and Zavala looked up from the plot.

“Thanks,” he said, and turned to his com.

* * *

“I’m Captain Jacob Zavala, Royal Manticoran Navy,” the smallish, dark-skinned man on the com display said. He was quite unlike the dominant genotype here in Saltash, but despite his diminutive stature and polite tone, no one was likely to take any liberties with him once they got a good look at his eyes, MacNaughtan thought.

“Am I addressing the commanding officer of Shona Station?” the Manticoran continued in that same courteous yet unyielding voice.

“I’m Captain Valentine MacNaughtan,” MacNaughtan replied. “I’m the senior Saltash Space Service officer aboard.”

That weasel-worded evasion of responsibility shamed him, but there was no point pretending otherwise, and this Zavala no doubt understood that. For purposes of shifting blame, Governor Dueñas would be delighted to embrace the legal fiction that MacNaughtan genuinely commanded Shona Station. If MacNaughtan had ever been foolish enough to forget he simply reigned over the station administratively while OFS actually ruled everything in the star system, he would have been replaced with dizzying speed.

Zavala’s eyes flickered, and MacNaughtan felt his face try to heat at the other man’s obvious awareness of that reality. But the Manticoran simply nodded.