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Chapter Twenty-Seven
"What do you think will happen to them?" Ragnhild asked -quietly.
"To the Peeps? Or Baranyai's people?" Helen asked in reply.
All of Hexapuma 's midshipmen sat around the commons table in Snotty Row. Two local days had passed since the destruction of Commodore Henri Clignet's "People's First Liberation Squadron" and the recapture of Emerald Dawn .
There'd been enough left of Anhur 's impellers to get her under way under a mere fifty gravities' acceleration, and the savagely battered wreck now lay in a parking orbit around Pontifex. Emerald Dawn 's helpless hulk had been towed in by a half a dozen LACs and occupied an orbit not far from her erstwhile captor. Baranyai had been able to confirm that one of the freighter's heavy shuttles was missing, but no one had found any trace of it, so far. Eventually, Helen felt sure, it would turn up somewhere. Probably someplace on the surface of Pontifex, abandoned by whoever had used it to get there. Exactly how the Peep escapees thought that they were going to blend into such an isolated local population was more than she could say, but she supposed they figured that making the attempt beat the alternatives.
"All of them, I guess," Ragnhild said. "But I was thinking mostly about the Peeps."
"Fuck the Peeps," Aikawa said, so harshly Helen glanced at him in some surprise. "You talked to Baranyai, just like me, Ragnhild. Do you think for a minute they don't deserve whatever they get?"
"I didn't say I felt sorry for them, Aikawa," Ragnhild responded. "I just said I wondered what would happen to them in the end."
"Whatever it is, it'll be better than they have coming," Aikawa muttered, staring down at the hands clenched before him on the tabletop.
"I heard the Exec talking to Commander Nagchaudhuri this afternoon," Leo Stottmeister said. "He said the Captain's going to ask President Adolfsson to hold them here, at least temporarily."
"Makes sense to me," Helen said. "We sure don't have the space aboard ship for them!"
"No, we don't," Leo agreed. "But I don't think that's all the Captain has in mind." He looked around the table and saw all of them looking back at him. "The Exec told the Commander that the Captain's going to recommend to Admiral Khumalo that Clignet and Daumier and all of their people be handed over to the Peeps, along with all the evidence we've been able to collect about their activities."
"Oh, my!" Helen sat back in her chair, her lips half-parted in a sudden smile. "That's... evil," she said admiringly.
Clignet, as part of the megalomania which had driven him to dream-apparently sincerely-of someday restoring the People's Republic in all its malevolent glory, had kept a detailed personal log of his "squadron's" activities. He'd lovingly detailed each prize they'd taken, by name, registry, and cargo. Listed the profits they'd earned by disposing of them, the star systems where they'd been sold, even the names of the brokers through whose hands they'd passed. He'd recorded the other rogue Peep units he'd been in contact with, and the "Liberation Force in Exile" organization which had grown up among them. He'd also meticulously listed the names of those he'd ordered executed for "treason against the People"... including at least forty people who'd never been citizens of the People's Republic in the first place. And he'd kept an equally thorough list of his perso
That information alone would have been enough to get most of them hanged in the Star Kingdom. But there was a cool, deliciously vicious elegance in the thought of handing them back to the restored Republic of Haven. Not even the most virulent Manticoran patriot could doubt for a moment what sort of welcome President Eloise Pritchart's government and Admiral Thomas Theisman's Navy would extend to Henri Clignet and his homicidal band.
And they'll just hate the thought of being executed by the counter-revolutionaries as garden variety rapists, thugs, and murderers. And-oh, my-when Pritchart and Theisman have to admit these people are out there and that they came originally from the Republic-! I wonder just how many birds we would hit with that stone? Daddy and Web would love it!
"I agree that it's appropriate," Paulo d'Arezzo said quietly. "And don't get me wrong, I don't feel a gram of sympathy for them on that score. But I've got to tell you, Aikawa, after what I saw in Anhur , it's hard not to feel at least a little... I don't know. Not sorry , but-"
He shrugged uncomfortably, and the others all looked at him. He looked back, not exactly defiantly, but... stubbornly. As if he expected them to jump down his throat for daring to say anything smacking of even the tiniest sympathy for the StateSec survivors.
But they didn't. Not at once, at any rate, and Helen realized she felt an odd sort of respect for him for having dared to say what he just had. And, as her mind went back over the horrors she'd seen aboard Anhur , she also realized she felt at least a trace of agreement with him.
"I know what you mean." She hadn't realized she was going to say anything until the words were already out, and d'Arezzo seemed even more surprised than the others to hear them. "It was... pretty bad," she told Aikawa and Ragnhild, and Leo nodded in sober agreement. "I know you guys must've seen plenty of bodies and blood aboard Emerald Dawn , but there was this one stretch of passageway in Anhur . Couldn't have been more than fifteen, twenty meters-twenty-five, max. We counted seventeen dead in that one space. Took one of Commander Orban's forensic sniffer units to do it, too. The... parts were so mixed up together, and so... chopped up and burned we couldn't even tell for sure which bits went with which, so we DNAed the whole heap of scraps to see how many people were in it. And that was just one stretch, Aikawa. So far, we've confirmed over two hundred dead."
"So?" Aikawa looked at her almost angrily-not so much at her personally, as at the suggestion that anything should make him feel the slightest trace of sympathy for the people who'd done what had happened to Emerald Dawn 's crew.
"She and Paulo have a point, Aikawa," Leo said somberly. "I don't know about anyone else, but I'll admit it-I puked my guts up when we finally got into their after impeller rooms. Jesus. If I never see that kind of mess again, it'll be twenty years too soon. And the Skipper did it all with one salvo from our bow chasers. Can you imagine what would have happened with a full broadside?"
"Okay, okay," the smaller midshipman said. "I admit it was pretty horrible. I could tell that much from the visual imagery. But a lot of people who never murdered anyone, or raped anyone, or tortured anyone just for the hell of it, have had equally terrible things happen to them in naval combat. You guys're trying to tell me that makes up for everything they did to helpless prisoners in cold blood?"
He sounded almost incredulous, and Helen shook her head.
"No, of course not. It's just, well-"
"It's just that we feel guilty, too," d'Arezzo said softly. Helen turned her head, staring at him in surprise as he put his finger unerringly on the concept she'd been fumbling towards.
"Yes," she said slowly, looking into those gray eyes as if, in some way, she were seeing their owner for the first time. "Yes, that's exactly what I meant." She turned to look at the others, especially Aikawa. "It's not that I don't think they deserve whatever horrible thing happens to them, Aikawa. I just don't want us to turn into them giving it to them. What we did to that ship ought to constitute sufficient punishment for anything anyone could ever do. I don't say it does, I said it ought to. And if I'm going to like myself, I don't want to turn into someone who wants to personally punish even someone like Clignet even more terribly. I'll pull the lever myself, if they sentence the bastard to hang. Don't get me wrong. But if we can hand them over to someone else-someone who has every bit as much justification and legal jurisdiction as we do, who will proceed after due legal process to punish them further-then I say let's do it."
"Why?" Aikawa demanded. Much of the belligerence had gone out of his tone, but he wasn't quite prepared to give up the fight yet. "Just so we can keep our hands clean?"
"Not our hands, Aikawa," d'Arezzo said. "They're already dirty, and I think Helen and I are both equally willing to get them even dirtier, if that's what our duty requires." He shook his head. "It's not our hands we're worried about; it's our souls."
Aikawa had opened his mouth. Now he shut it again very slowly. He looked back and forth between Helen and d'Arezzo, then at Leo.
"He's got a point," Leo repeated, and Helen nodded in slow, emphatic agreement. Aikawa frowned, but then he shrugged.
"Okay," he said. "Maybe you all do, Leo. And maybe I'll feel differently in a few weeks, or a few months. If I do, I guess it'd be better not to've done a lot of things I'll start wishing I could undo. Besides," he managed an expression far closer to his normal grin, "what really matters is that the bastards get the chop, not that we give it to them. So I guess if the Captain wants to be generous and give Pritchart and Theisman a present, I can go along with that, too."
"Geez, Aikawa, your saintly compassion and kindliness leave me breathless," Helen said dryly, and joined the general chuckle that ran around the table after her sentence. Yet even as she chuckled, she was thinking about the unsuspected depths Paulo d'Arezzo had just revealed. And the even more disturbing thought that perhaps those depths had been unsuspected only by her...
"It feels good to get back to a routine, Skipper," Ansten FitzGerald said frankly as he and Terekhov sat in the captain's quarters drinking Chief Steward Agnelli's delicious coffee. The desk between them was littered with paperwork and record chips as they caught up on all of the routine details of Hexapuma 's day-to-day existence.
"Yes. Yes, it does." Terekhov heard the profound satisfaction in his own voice. He didn't know if the vicious pounding he'd given Anhur had finally laid to rest the demons of Hyacinth. Frankly, he doubted it. But he knew he'd at least made some progress against them, and the demonstration that he hadn't lost his touch after all had been, in his humble opinion, pretty damned convincing. Best of all, he hadn't given in to the almost overwhelming compulsion to hang or space Clignet and his surviving oficers-that cold-blooded, murdering, sadistic bitch Daumier, at the very least-himself. He would never have doubted for a moment that they'd had it coming; but the question of whether he'd done it for justice's sake or simply to slake the fires of his own vengeance in blood was one he never wanted to have to answer. And not just for himself. It would have been one he had to answer for Sinead, as well, even if she never, ever asked him.