"Are you sure, Jamie?" he asked quietly.

"I'm sure." Candless' reply was almost serene, and he turned his head to smile at LaFollet. "We've had some good times, Major. Now go get the Steadholder out of this."

"I will," LaFollet told him. It wasn't just a promise; it was an oath, and Candless nodded in satisfaction.

"You'd better be going then, Andrew," he said much more gently. "And later, when you've got her out of here, tell her..." He paused, unable to find the words he wanted, and LaFollet nodded.

"I will," he said again, and put one arm around his fellow armsman, hugging him tight. Then he turned and followed McGinley back down the shaft.

It took him only a few minutes to reach Honor and Venizelos. They stood where McGinley had already passed them, gazing up the shaft as a flechette gun coughed again in rapid fire, and he stepped brusquely past them.

"This way, My Lady," he said, gesturing for them to follow him, but Honor didn't move.

"Where’s Jamie?" she asked, and he stopped. He stood for a moment, staring after McGinley, then sighed.

"He's not coming, My Lady," he said as gently as he could.

"No! I can't..."

"Yes, you can!" He rounded on her fiercely, and she flinched before the mingled pride and anguish in his face. "We're armsmen, My Lady, and you're our Steadholder, and you can do whatever the hell it takes!"

She stared at him for a breathless moment, unable to speak, and then her shoulders sagged and her personal armsman took her by the hand, almost as if she were a child.

"Come on, My Lady," he said softly, and she followed him down the shaft while Jamie Candless' flechette gun coughed behind them.

Chapter Thirty

Scotty Tremaine crawled out of the pinnace’s electronics bay and scrubbed sweat out of his eyes. He'd never even imagined doing what he'd just done, and the ease with which he'd accomplished it was more than a little chilling. There were many better small craft flight engineers than he, Horace Harkness, for one, but it hadn't taken a genius to carry out the modifications, and that was scary. Of course, there hadn't been any security features to stop him, since no one in his right mind would have considered that someone might do such an insane thing on purpose.

But it was done, now, and he hoped to hell that Harkness was as right about this as he'd been about everything else. His track record had been perfect so far, or as far as they knew, at any rate, but it seemed unfair to dump so much responsibility on one man.

But we didn't "dump" it on him, did we? He volunteered himself for it from the get-go. All we did was sit around and think he'd really deserted.

Tremaine felt a fresh, dull burn of shame at the thought, even though there was no logical reason he should. Harkness had played his role well enough to fool the Peeps, and no doubt the reactions of the rest of the POWs had contributed to his success. Yet despite all that, Tremaine couldn't quite forgive himself for having believed even for a moment that Harkness could truly turn traitor.

He made himself shake that thought off and closed the bay hatch. He stood up in the pinnace's passenger compartment and nodded to Chief Barstow.

"This bird's ready," he said. "Now let's go see about ours."

"Base, I have Tepes on visual."

Geraldine Metcalf cupped her palm over her earbug as if that could help her hear better. Not that she really needed to; the voice from the lead cargo shuttle was clear and crisp, and she watched the three crimson dots creep closer on her targeting display and wished the assault shuttle's controls felt a bit more familiar. For that matter, she would have traded three fingers from her left hand for the ability to bring her active sensors on-line. The assault shuttle was well concealed, more than half hidden in the visual and radar shadow of Tepes' flared bow, and its passive systems seemed to have a good lock on the cargo shuttles, but that sense of being in someone else’s bird, of not quite having everything under perfect control, continued to jab at her like a sharp stick.

She'd logged thousands of hours in small craft, and if she wasn't as hot a natural pilot as Scotty Tremaine, she was immensely experienced. That was one reason she'd drawn this assignment, and intellectually she felt confident of her ability to carry it out. But that didn't keep her from wishing she'd had a month or two to familiarize herself with this big brute of a boat. She felt heavy and clumsy, which was purely an illusion but felt no less real because of it. And the truth was that she and DuChene would have been hopelessly outclassed in any sort of maneuvering dogfight. Their lack of experience with their craft would have shown quickly under those circumstances... but, then, the entire point of this operation was to keep it from ever turning into a dogfight, now wasn't it? Besides, those trash haulers over there weren't even armed.

"Any sign of external damage, One?" another voice asked over her earbug.

"Negative at this time, Base. I have some debris scatter, but no sign of hull ruptures. I'm assuming they must have blown a boat bay, maybe more than one, but I don't see any indication of anything worse than that. They're certainly not leaking any more air, and I don't have any life pod beacons. It's gotta be some sort of internal electronics failure."

"Yeah?" Charon Base sounded dubious. "I never heard of an electronics failure taking out a ship's whole com net and causing her boat bays to blow up, have you?"

"No, but what the hell else can it be? If they were in any kind of serious trouble, we'd have life pods and small craft evacuating all over the place up here!"

Metcalf smothered a chuckle at the Peep's exasperated tones. She couldn't fault the logic on either side, but that was only because neither of them had ever heard of an "electronics failure" named Horace Harkness.

"Can't argue with that, One," Charon Base admitted after a moment. "What's your ETA for rendezvous?"

"I make it just under fifteen minutes, Base. Maybe a little longer. I want to do a low pass and get a look at her bays before we try to dock at one of the external points."

"Your call, One. Let us know if you see anything interesting."

"Will do, Base. One, clear."

The voices died, and Metcalf watched the shuttles drift slowly closer. A soft, musical tone sounded, and she turned to look at DuChene.

"Acquired and locked," her weaponeer said, and looked up to meet her eyes. It no longer really matter how good the shuttle's passives were, because the seekers in the missiles themselves had the Peeps now. They were locked on and ready to track, and the smile Geraldine Metcalf shared with Sarah DuChene could have frozen a star.

"Still nothing from Tepes?" Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville demanded.

"No, Citizen Admiral," Fraiser replied so patiently that Tourville blushed. He let one hand rest lightly on the com officer shoulder for a moment by way of apology, then crossed back over to Shannon Foraker's station to glare down at the tac panel.

Count Tilly had reduced her velocity relative to Hades to 10,750 KPS, but she would need another thirty-five minutes to reduce it to zero, and by then she would be over seven light-minutes from the planet. To achieve even that much Citizen Captain Hewitt was running his ship flat out, with zero margin for error on her compensator. Tourville supposed many people would question the wisdom of doing that when there was a planetary base available to investigate, but no professional spacer could ignore a ship he suspected was in trouble. And as the minutes ticked away, each of them left him more and more confident that something was wrong, probably seriously. Too many systems must have failed simultaneously to produce this total silence, and he smothered another curse at the dilatoriness of Camp Charon's efforts. Damn it to hell, that was one of their ships up there! What the hell did those StateSec idiots think they were doing?