In Enemy Hands

But there was no answer... and he was still an hour and twenty minutes away.

"I don't like it," Honor said flatly, crouching to look at the memo board with the others. "It's too exposed."

"I'm not denying that it's exposed, Ma'am," Venizelos replied in an equally flat voice, "but we're ru

"What about detouring through these service ways?" Honor demanded, tapping one edge of the display.

"I don't think it'll work, Ma'am," McGinley replied before Venizelos could. "At least someone knows some of us are crawling around in the lift shafts and ducting. If they've managed to pass the word, the bad guys would expect us to go that way from our last point of contact with them. Besides, Andy's right; we're ru

Honor frowned, kneading the dead side of her face with her fingertips and wishing she could feel it. She was closer to Nimitz now, and the 'cat's emotions crackled in their link. The dark shadows of his physical pain were stronger, but so was his excitement. She could get no clear picture of what was happening, but certainly Nimitz seemed to feel things were going according to plan, and she clung to that hope.

But whatever was happening in the boat bay, Venizelos and McGinley were right; they still had to get there somehow, and their options were narrowing. It was just that the route Venizelos had picked ran straight for the nearest lift co

"Andrew?" she asked, looking at her armsman, and LaFollet shrugged.

"I think they're right, My Lady. Certainly it's a risk, but not as big a one as going the long way 'round. If we take too long, Captain McKeon will either have to leave us behind... or, worse, wait for us until the Peeps get all of us."

"All right," she sighed, and the right side of her mouth managed a wry smile. "Who am I to argue with the lunatics who pla

"Here they come..." DuChene murmured, and Metcalf nodded. The Peep cargo shuttles were getting so close they'd have to spot the assault shuttle shortly, hiding spot or not. Besides, they were begi

She watched for another five seconds, then punched the button.

The range was less than sixty kilometers to the furthest shuttle as her impeller drive missiles kicked free of the racks and brought up their wedges. They couldn't match the eighty or ninety thousand gravities of acceleration all-up shipboard weapons could crank, but they could accelerate at forty thousand gravities. The longest missile flight lasted barely .576 seconds, and that was much too short a time for anyone to get a transmission off or even realize what was happening.

"What the...?"

Sha

"What?" he demanded.

"Those three shuttles from Charon just blew the hell up, Sir," she said quietly.

"What do you mean?" Bogdanovich demanded from behind Tourville.

"I mean they're gone, Sir. Their drive strengths peaked, and then they blew."

"What the hell is going on over there?" Bogdanovich fumed.

"Well, Sir, if I had to make a guess, I'd say each of those shuttles just ate itself an impeller head missile," Foraker told him. "And they must've been fairly small birds, or I'd have seen their impeller signatures from here, and I didn't."

The chief of staff stared at her, as if unable or unwilling to believe what she'd just said, then wheeled to Tourville.

If he'd expected the citizen rear admiral to reject the ops officer's diagnosis, he was disappointed. Instead, Tourville simply nodded and walked slowly back to his command chair. He parked himself in it, and spoke very calmly.

"Sha

"Aye, Citizen Admiral," Foraker replied, and Tourville looked up as Bogdanovich and Honeker arrived on either side of his chair.

"It would seem," he said in a quiet voice accompanied by a tight smile, "that Committeewoman Ransom is being hoist by her own petard."

"Meaning what?" Honeker asked flatly.

"Meaning that the only thing I can think of to explain what's going on over there is that her prisoners are up to something."

"But that's even crazier than any other explanation!" Bogdanovich protested, less, Tourville suspected, because he truly disagreed than because he felt someone had to do it. "There are only thirty of them, and Vladovich has over two thousand people!"

"Sometimes quantity means less than quality," Tourville observed. "And whatever they're doing, they seem to have completely paralyzed that ship. I wonder how they got to her computers...?"

He frowned, in thought, then shrugged. At the moment, how they'd done it was less important than the fact that they had, and he sighed unhappily as he realized what he had to do. He suspected he would spend a lot of time avoiding mirrors for the next several weeks, or months, but his duty left him no choice.

"Harrison, com Warden Tresca." He looked up and met Honeker's eyes. "Tell him I think the prisoners aboard Tepes are trying to take the ship... or destroy it."

"Here they come again!"

McKeon wasn't certain who'd shouted the warning this time, but it came not a moment too soon. The Peeps had finally gotten reorganized, and they came storming down the crippled lift shaft behind a curtain of grenades. Pulsers snarled and ripped and flechette guns coughed from the shaft, and McKeon swore bitterly as Enrico Walker took a pulser dart that blew his head apart. The surgeon lieutenant’s body went down with the bonelessness of the dead, and he saw Jasper Mayhew thrown backward as a burst of flechettes slammed into his chest. But like all of them, Mayhew had found time to climb into unpowered body armor from one of the assault shuttles, and he dragged himself back up to his knees and his launcher hurled grenades down the Peeps' throats. Another of McKeon's petty officers went down, dead, he was grimly certain, as a Peep grenade bounced out of the open lift doors and exploded directly behind her, but then Sanko and Halburton got their plasma rifle turned around, and a packet of white hot energy went roaring up the shaft. Anyone who got in its way never had time to realize he was dead, but those on the fringe of its area of effect were less fortunate. Shrieks of agony and secondary explosions as ammunition cooked off rolled from the lift shaft like the voices of the damned, and then Sanko fired a second round and the screams cut off instantly.

No more shots were fired from the shaft, and McKeon heaved a sigh of relief. But he knew the respite would be brief. There were limits on the weapons the Peeps would willingly use against them as long as they held the boat bay, the explosions in the other bays had been a pointed reminder that there were things in here which didn't take kindly to combustion, but there were a lot more of them than there were of his people. And there were fewer of his than there had been, he thought, looking at Walkers body.

He pushed up and walked over to Harkness. The senior chiefs face was drawn and soaked with sweat, but his hands were no longer busy on the keyboard, and he looked up at McKeon’s approach.

"Looks like they finally kicked my butt out, Sir," he said, and bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. "But by the time they did, just about everything but life support got slagged right down to glass. Even if we don't make it, they're go