Страница 124 из 142
"It was just a thought," Lithgow said. "Not a very good one, maybe, but a thought."
"I know." Ringstorff sighed. "It probably would have helped if the home office hadn't ordered me to let them play, for that matter."
"I think the geniuses who dreamed up this entire op probably figured there was no point even trying to keep the Four Yahoos from getting back up to their old tricks," Lithgow muttered. "And they were right. It'd make more sense to try to arm-wrestle entropy!"
"You're probably right," Ringstorff agreed. "I think HQ may have thought they could keep them on a leash initially, but after that transport blundered right into us—"
He threw both hands into the air with a grimace of disgust.
"It wasn't like we really had a choice with that one," Lithgow rejoined.
"I know. I know!" Ringstorff said irritably. "But you know as well as I do that that's what really started this entire mess."
Lithgow nodded. The original plan had been for the depot ship and all four of the converted cruisers to remain very quietly on station here in Tiberian until and unless they were required elsewhere. Unfortunately, there'd been some serious slippage in other parts of the schedule, and after four T-months of sitting here doing absolutely nothing, the cruisers' crews of Silesian outlaws had been so bored that Ringstorff had authorized a series of maneuvers and war games to let them play with and familiarize themselves with the capabilities of their vessels. It had made plenty of sense from a readiness viewpoint, after all, and the pirate captains and crews Manpower had recruited for the operation had been delighted by the sophistication of their ships. Most of their ilk had to make do with, at best, castoffs and obsolete units of the Confederacy Navy. The opportunity to trade in their old junkers and replace them with Solarian League technology that was no more than a few T-years out of date was one of the main reasons they'd signed on with Manpower in the first place.
But what Ringstorff hadn't known was that that goody-goody two-shoes Pritchart was going to send a damned transport full of colonists to Tiberian, of all places!
The inhabitants of Refuge had so little interest in contact with the rest of the galaxy that their total orbital infrastructure consisted of one primitive communications station that was probably the better part of a T-century out of date. Tiberian was one of the very few inhabited star systems in this entire region which had absolutely no surveillance platforms of any sort. For that matter, the Refugians had embraced their aggressively nonviolent, pastoral, agrarian lifestyle on their miserable little dirt ball of a planet with such enthusiasm that the system didn't even support a single asteroid resource extraction platform!
That was precisely what had attracted Manpower's attention to Tiberian in the first place. It was the closest star to the real objective, which meant it was ideally located to support the operation at need, and it might as well have been totally uninhabited in terms of the locals' ability to realize anyone was wandering around the outer reaches of their system. So it should have been totally safe to let the pirates play.
Except that the stupid damned transport had dropped out of hyper right on top of them. Not even a merchie's sensor suite could have missed them at that range, which had left Ringstorff no option but to order Tyler to capture it before it could translate back out with the word of their presence.
The elimination of the ship's entire crew and its passengers had been an unpleasant necessity, but one which Manpower's Silesian hirelings had protested. Not out of squeamishness, of course, but because dead passengers couldn't be ransomed by living relatives. They were being paid well for their services, but no self-respecting pirate was going to turn down the opportunity to enhance his profits, and they'd objected to losing this one.
Ringstorff hadn't liked it, but he'd passed on their complaints to the home office, at which point some REMF genius had come up with the notion of placating the pirates by allowing them to dispose of the transport itself through their own contacts in Silesia. At a little over two million tons it hadn't been all that large, but it was still worth the odd billion Solarian credit or two, and the pirates' credit accounts had done well out of it.
Which, unfortunately, had suggested to their stellar intellects that there was no reason why they shouldn't add a few more prizes to the list while they waited for whatever it was their employers had in mind. The same home office genius who had authorized the disposal of the transport in the first place had signed off on their new request, as well. Ringstorff wasn't certain whether that had been solely to keep the hired help happy or if there might not be a more devious motivation. It had occurred to him that the authorizer might have decided that if, indeed, it became necessary to eliminate "the Four Yahoos" and their crews after the main operation's conclusion, it could be convenient to have them identified as common, garden variety pirates. If it was handled correctly, it might even be possible to get the Erewhonese Navy, or the Manticoran Alliance, or even the Havenites to eliminate the "pirates" for Manpower.
It was the sort of complicated, theoretically neat and tidy plan that a certain variety of armchair strategist was fond of. Personally, Ringstorff had no intention of letting anyone else eliminate the Four Yahoos. If they had to go, he was doing it himself, before some half-way competent naval intelligence sort decided to wonder how a batch of "typical" Silesian pirates had gotten their hands on such powerful and modern vessels.
But in the meantime, he felt like a man juggling hand grenades. He was virtually certain that "his" captains had taken at least some prizes they hadn't mentioned to him at all. Certainly enough ships had disappeared in the area to begin attracting an unpleasant amount of attention . . . like the Erewhonese destroyer which had literally stumbled across the depot ship on its way out-system. Fortunately, the destroyer had already informed the Refugians that it was leaving Tiberian, and the Erewhonese appeared to believe that whatever had happened to it had happened somewhere else.
"You don't suppose that this cruiser is here because someone in Erewhonese intelligence has figured out their ship never got out, do you?" Lithgow asked, and Ringstorff grunted in amusement at the way his subordinate's thought processes had paralleled his own.
"The thought did occur to me," he admitted. "But if they had any serious evidence that we popped their ship here, they wouldn't have sent a single cruiser to check it out. They'd have responded in force, even if they didn't realize how much firepower we have, if only to give themselves some tactical flexibility if we tried to run for it."
"So you think they just happen to have turned up?"
"I didn't say that. Actually, I think they probably are here because of the Yahoos' operations. I'll bet you they've been jumping ships they've never bothered to mention to us. And if they have, the Erewhonese—or even the Havenites—could be turning up the heat trying to shake the 'pirates' out of the woodwork. In fact, it's more likely to be Haven than Erewhon, now that I think about it. Erewhon's already checked Tiberian out; Haven hasn't. It would make more sense for the Peeps to follow up their transport's loss here if they're just getting started on their own investigation than it would for the Erewhonese to backtrack through Tiberian for a third time."
"Good point," Lithgow conceded. "Still leaves us the problem of what we do about it, though."
"What I'd like to do would be to pull the hell out of here and take Maurersberger and Morakis with us. Unfortunately, we can't. Oh," he waved one hand, "we could sneak even farther out-system without whoever this is spotting us. I'm not worried about that. But if Tyler and Lamar come back before our visitor leaves, he's hardly going to fail to notice their hyper footprint, now is he? If that happens, it's the Erewhonese destroyer all over again, and in that case, I want all the firepower we've got right where I can put my hands on it in a hurry."