Worlds of Honor

They slowly stepped back to arm's length. Chung patted her cheek. "You are getting to be a habit with me, you know."

"Better a habit than a vice."

"Yes, but a habit is harder to give up."

"I will—I'll think about ways of not—of our not having to give up. Fair enough?"

"Completely."

They hadn't gone more than fifty meters down the slope toward the waiting boats, when several torches glowed, each held under a thermal umbrella to hide the heat signature. Then Sea Fencibles by the dozens and scores stepped out of the trees, applauding and cheering.

Ryder flushed. It was hard to see what Chung was doing, but he did glare, when Bexo joined the crowd. Ryder now saw among the audience some of the Sea Fencibles who'd come north to work on the boats in the hope of earning a slot in the raiding force, or even offered hefty bribes.

"Thank you," she said. "But let's not tempt fate. Hold the applause for when we come back. Then we can have a proper torchlight ceremony."

"By then it will be autumn," Bexo said, "then it rains even harder."

FOUR

If autumn meant rain, then it had already come to this stretch of the Central Sea two hundred klicks south of the Strathspey Archipelago. Fortunately the half-gale that had blown the past two days had died as the rain came to take its place. Ryder would not have cared to transfer twenty-odd Sea Fencibles from a sinking turtleback with the waves sending green water over the cockpit forward.

She braced herself against the cockpit coaming and gripped the back of the helmsman's seat with one aching wrist, the windscreen with the other. She thought that the windscreen might as well be blown away, considering that it was opaque with caked salt.

A thud and a clatter rose from below as somebody opened the port hatch. A familiar sound followed, fortunately not accompanied by a familiar smell. The rain drowned it, and the seasick Fencible's stomach was quickly empty anyway.

Not as many people were seasick as she'd feared, but enough, and enough of those badly, that Bexo had issued the antinausea pills wholesale. It would not do for fifty Fencibles to reach their target so weak that they couldn't even carry their loads, let alone run, climb, or shoot.

The rain wrapped Ryder's command boat and the other three visible ones in a gray murk, relieved only by the dim riding lights. In this weather, nobody would see them from above; the problem would be finding their way to the rendezvous.

The hatch had stayed open, to let in fresh air. Over the hiss of the rain and the rumble of the diesel, Ryder heard someone reading aloud from Chung's manual on Peep weaponry. He'd digested his files into a printed manual of enemy weapons, one copy for each squad, even though he'd acquired some of the knowledge on an exchange tour with the Technical Section of Solarian League Intelligence.

Ryder wondered if he'd done that for personal reasons, as well as professional. Did he want to be tossed out of the Erewhonese forces on his ear, for revealing confidential material, so that he could then freely emigrate to the Star Kingdom?

It would be pure Hell all around, if Chung did on his own something Ryder would never have dared ask him to do, then couldn't emigrate because the Sollies or the Erewhonese would put pressure on the Star Kingdom not to accept him! Then, when both adviser groups got shipped out from a (hopefully) neutral Silvestria, where could she and Fernando be—other than many light-years apart?

There was much wisdom in the old saying about not playing where you worked. It was just as true that she and Fernando were no longer playing.

The last tank whined and rattled into the sprawling warehouse complex that was now the vehicle park and supply dump for the armored battalion and infantry carriers. Four of Euvinophan's Field Police presented arms to Jean Testaniere and Citizen Sergeant Pescu, and the door closed behind the tank.

Thanks to the last few days' work on the tanks and rain on the door, the door made more noise than the tank. It hadn't been that way before the Peep advisers took in hand all the Euvinophan troops that they could talk to.

"One regrets the absence of the live firing practice," Testaniere said. "But I will not criticize you for being unable to control the weather."

"No, and this gives us a few days to screen the rounds. Corporal—Citizen Corporal Randall used to work for a chemical company. He's built a testing set and some tools for stripping the charges out of dud rounds. He thinks we can get maybe fifty to eighty extra satchel charges for house-to-house work, allowing for the usual percentage of duds."

"Citizen Corporal Randall can look for a commendation. And so can you, and everyone else you think deserves one."

"Thank you, Citizen Commissioner. But I'd be even more grateful for an easing up in this soggy weather. As long as it lasts, Euvinophan's pets aren't going to move out of their cozy barracks and start soldiering."

The two fish-factory ships would have looked i

Ryder stood in the cockpit and waved across a hundred meters of heaving, oily sea to Chung, whom she hadn't seen or spoken to in a week. Radio silence had been complete, which hadn't kept the fishing boat skippers from navigating the Sea Fencibles to the rendezvous.

The only problem was that it was two hours after the pla

Ryder put a hand on the wheelman's shoulder. He twitched it irritably, as if to say I know my job without Manties pawing me.

The wind to the west seemed to gust harder as Ryder's boat and Chung's approached one another. Looking over the side, Ryder expected to see a fluff of whitecaps sprouting from the waves, but the swell was as modest, even monotonous, as ever.

Then it came into sight—six dark-painted air freighters, all flying just above the wave tops.

Six, when there should have been seven.

The first one overflew the more distant factory ship, circled the second, then went to vertical lift and descended on the handling deck amidships. The crew lowered the booms out of the way just in time. Three more made equally smooth landings in quick succession. The pilots had all done this scores or hundreds of times; getting fresh fish to the markets or frozen fish to the container ports depended on their skill. But the fifth one faced trouble that went beyond the pilot's skill.

As it shifted to vertical flight, the counter-gravity failed. The pilot had enough altitude that even with a full load, he didn't plummet straight onto the factory ship. He even managed to claw the nose up before the tail smashed into the water.

Explosive bolts flung hatches away from both sides of the cockpit area, and the people aboard the freighter erupted into the open. Ryder managed to draw about three deep breaths before the water around the up-thrust nose of the freighter was dotted with bobbing black heads.

Then with a rumble and a hiss, the freighter sank.

Two down, including God knew how much equipment and how many people.

Ryder was glad that she hadn't endorsed the notion of this being a mission from God. If it was, He was definitely having an off day.