Shadow of Freedom

Anger smoked through Major John Pole like sea smoke as he listened to the playback of Kristoffersen’s conversation with the Manty lieutenant. Through an oversight (which Pole planned to correct as soon as this current business was resolved), he had no access to the surveillance systems outside Victor Seven when the Shona Station went to emergency com conditions, which meant he’d been unable to watch or listen to Kristoffersen’s conversation with the Manties until the captain had returned with his recording of the entire incident.

“Oversight’ my ass! Pole thought furiously now, remembering that bitch MacWilliams’ expression as she “apologized” so profusely for her “inability” to tap him into her systems. It was a purely technical problem, she’d assured him, and one Commander MacVey’s tech people would rectify the instant the current emergency let them stand down from their damage control duties.

Pole felt his teeth grate together in memory, yet there was nothing he could do about it at the moment. Besides, he had other things to be worrying about.

“She’s fucking crazy, Sir!” Kristoffersen said harshly. “She wanted me to go for my pulser and give that big son-of-a-bitch an excuse to blow me away!”

Pole’s grunt of agreement might have contained a modicum of sympathy for his subordinate’s frayed nerves, although, if pressed, he would have had to admit the universe would have survived quite handily if the Manties had taken Kristoffersen out. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean the captain’s estimate of this Hearns’ sanity was in error.

“Excuse me, Sir,” Captain Leonie Ascher, Charlie Company’s CO said respectfully, “but shouldn’t we consider the possibility that these people mean what they’re saying?”

“What? That they’ll come in here after us? Actually launch some kind of assault on a facility whose security is guaranteed by the Solarian Gendarmerie?”

Pole glared at her, and she shrugged ever so slightly.

“Sir, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should simply roll over for the first neobarb to start throwing his or her weight around. But she had a point; this Zavala has already taken out four battlecruisers. It may be that he’s out of control, as well as out of his mind—that he’s way outside what his superiors expected when they gave him his orders. All that could be true. Hell, it probably is true! But he’s still committed an outright act of war already, and I think we have to seriously consider the possibility that he’ll keep right on going. Let’s face it, Sir—at this point he’s got to get his spacers back.”

“You’re saying he’s painted himself so far into a corner he doesn’t have any choice but to keep going? He’s got to get what he came for if he’s going to have a prayer of covering his ass when his superiors find out he’s created this kind of incident with the League?”

“Something like that, Sir.” Ascher nodded.

Pole considered what she’d said. With Captain Myers and Captain Truchinski off commanding detachments elsewhere, she and Kristoffersen were the only company commanders currently aboard Shona Station. Although Ascher was junior to Kristoffersen and two of her company’s platoons were off-station at the moment, she was far and away the more valuable asset. She’d always been smarter—a lot smarter, actually—than the other captain, which was why Pole had sent Kristoffersen out to meet the Manties. If they really were as out of control as the destruction of Dubroskaya’s warships suggested, and if something went wrong and he had to lose one of them, he’d preferred for it to be Kristoffersen. All of which suggested he really should consider the possibility that Ascher had a point…and probably a damned good one.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Governor Dueñas had given him his orders in person in a com conversation he’d carefully recorded as part of the official record, and that left Pole very little wiggle room. If he surrendered the interned Manties, he’d be disobeying a direct order from his legal superior. The Gendarmerie would be furious enough with him for yielding to some neobarb navy’s threats, however hopeless his situation, given the disastrous precedent that would set. If he not only rolled over but did so in defiance of direct orders not to, he’d simply hand the inevitable board of inquiry—and the court-martial which would no doubt follow—an even bigger hammer with which to reduce him and his career to very tiny, well pulverized pieces. And he could be damned sure Dueñas would do his level best (and use every favor he was owed) to blame the disaster here in Saltash on anyone except himself.