In Enemy Hands

Flechette guns were designed for shipboard combat. The modern descendants of pre-space shotguns, their grav drivers punched out masses of knife-edged flechettes. With much lower velocities than pulser darts, they were less prone to dangerous ricochets or punching holes in important pieces of equipment, but they were lethal against any unarmored target. Their projectiles dispersed into deadly patterns, controllable by the "choke" setting on their pistol grips. They could be set to cover a cone over a full meter wide at a range of five meters from the muzzle, or as little as fifteen centimeters across at a range of fifty meters, and flesh and bone meant very little to the razor-cruel flechettes.

LaFollet and Candless had set their weapons to maximum dispersion and full automatic. The cycle time on a flechette gun was much slower than that of a pulser, but that hardly mattered given their wide area of effect. The guns coughed rhythmically, belching death and destruction, and the waiting SS guards exploded in a bloody mist.

"We're under attack! We're under attack!" Timmons screamed into his com even as he flung himself down behind the security console. Flechettes slammed into it like deadly sleet, and he scuttled down the passage on his elbows and belly. A single flechette, licking through the gap between the console and bulkhead, caught him just as he rounded the bend, and he screamed as it chewed into his thigh. Slower than a pulser dart or not, it was still traveling at three hundred meters per second, and it sliced the back of his leg like a high-velocity axe. The lieutenant dropped his com involuntarily to clutch at the bloody wound with both hands, and the communicator slithered away across the deck. He heard the shouted questions from the other end even through his own sobs of anguish, but he had no time to worry about answering them. Most of his people were down already, but the two he'd posted as formal guards outside Harrington’s cell had been shielded by the bend in the corridor. That pair had been intended as window-dressing for the formal transfer of the prisoner, but stationing them here had had the effect of giving him a reserve, and he bared his teeth in a pain-stretched snarl. "Get ready!" he gasped at them, and took his right hand from his gashed leg. His fingers were slimy with his own blood, but he drew his pulser and covered the bend as he shoved himself along the deck on the seat of his trousers and his wounded thigh left a bright red blood trail behind him.

"Go!" LaFollet snapped, and Robert Whitman vaulted from the lift shaft into the brig passage. "At least one got around the turn!" LaFollet warned him.

The other armsman nodded, but he never slowed in his dash for the security console. He went down on one knee, weapon ready, and stiffened as he heard a voice.

"Timmons! Timmons! What the fuck is going on down there?"

He realized instantly what he was hearing, and that whoever was on the other end of that com link would be sending help as quickly as he could. Time had just become an even more deadly foe, and he looked back over his shoulder at LaFollet and Candless, just starting to climb out of the shaft.

"Open com link!" he shouted, and then, before anyone could stop him, rolled out of his cover with the flechette gun on full automatic.

Timmons heard the shout and gri

His thoughts broke off as someone rolled out into the very middle of the passage. His sudden appearance took Timmons totally by surprise, and he gaped at the apparition in shock, unable to believe anyone would deliberately throw himself into what he knew had to be a deathtrap. But that was because he'd never encountered a Grayson armsman whose Steadholder was in danger. Robert Whitman had only one purpose in life, and his very first shot tore Citizen Lieutenant Timmons to bloody rags.

The two men further up the passage poured fire back, but the bare bulkheads and deck offered no cover... for anyone. Deadly clouds of flechettes shrieked past one another, intermingling and then separating, all of them set for maximum dispersion, and there was no place to hide.

"Citizen Admiral?" Lester Tourville looked up quickly, for there was something very odd about Sha

"What?" he asked, and the ops officer frowned.

"I think you'd better look at this, Sir," she said. "Tepes' active sensors just went down."

"What?" Tourville said again, in a very different tone, and Foraker nodded.

"Every one of them, Sir." Foraker had gotten even more careless, or deliberate, about her "elitist" vocabulary over the last month, but this time Tourville was certain she'd used "Sir" without even thinking about it. "They shouldn't have done that," she went on. "They're through the main minefields and into orbit, but nobody in her right mind would shut down her radar."

Tourville nodded and walked quickly across the deck towards her station, for she was right. Tepes might be in her designated parking orbit, but with so many mines floating around the possibility of one having strayed into her orbital path could never be completely ruled out.

"Anything from her at all, Harrison?" he demanded.

"Negative, Citizen Admiral," the com officer replied. "I don't, Just a second, Citizen Admiral." Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser listened to his earbug intently, then turned to Tourville. "Citizen Captain Hewitt reports that he was receiving a message from Citizen Captain Vladovich, Citizen Admiral. Apparently the transmission was interrupted in the middle of a sentence."

Tourville and Bogdanovich looked at one another, then turned as one to Everard Honeker. The People's commissioner looked back at them, as confused as either of the naval officers but not as immediately concerned. Unlike them, he didn't fully understand just how massive an interruption Tepes' systems had just apparently suffered.

Tourville saw Honeker’s incomprehension and started to speak, then stopped himself and looked back down at Foraker. The tac officer was bent over her display with focused intensity, and he glanced at it himself rather than disturb her.

The relative orbital positions of Hades and Cerberus-B-3 were such that Count Titty had passed within less than two light-minutes of the former on her vector for the latter. Hades now lay almost exactly three and a half light-minutes off her starboard bow, moving away from her at a little over 26,000 KPS as she continued to decelerate towards Cerberus-B-3, and he glanced back up at Citizen Commander Lowe.

"Assume we go to maximum military power. How soon could we reach Tepes?"

Lowe punched numbers into her panel quickly, then looked back up.

"We'll need a little over eighty-three minutes to decelerate to rest relative to Hades, Citizen Admiral. If we go for a least-time flight from that point, we can reach the planet in another hundred and seventeen minutes, call it three hours and twenty minutes total, but our relative velocity would be over thirty-six thousand KPS. If we go for a zero-velocity intercept, it'll add almost another hour to the flight profile."

Tourville grunted and turned back to Foraker's panel. He drew a cigar from his pocket and unwrapped it slowly, never taking his eyes from the data on the display. He had the cigar half-way to his mouth when Foraker sucked in an audible breath and his own hand froze.

"Citiz..."

"I see it, Sha