Requiem

[Jane Hartman]

Inch-high letters on the corridor outside identified the room as ENG WORKSHOP #02. If Glendale’s converted interrogation cell retained any other relics of its former purpose, Hartman couldn’t see them.

The Gallic pilot was the only person inside the cramped room. Two empty chairs sat opposite him, across an unmarked composite table. The Gallic was resting, helmeted head settled awkwardly on the table, slumped as far forward in the chair as his bindings permitted. Faded acne scars pockmarked what Hartman could see of his face, and his brown hair had grown out beyond reg. No surprises there. Prisoners didn’t get issued razors. He had the knife-thin build of a lifelong runner, and there was an ugly bend to his nose where it rested on the table, as though it had been broken long ago and never set right. Combined with the creased uniform and the scraggly beard, it made him look older than the twenty-one years Seller’s file flagged him at.

If Seller’s voice in her ear had not said otherwise, Hartman would have thought he was sleeping. Thick straps snaked around his ankles and wrists, fastening him to the metal and plastic frame of the chair. Glendale’s marines had not been gentle with their restraints. Red lines creased the prisoner’s wrists around the straps, and the back of his neck bore a pair of ugly purple bruises that Hartman recognised from a dozen ejection drills. He didn’t stir when Hartman sealed the hatch behind her.

Clusters of surveillance equipment hung from the walls and ceiling like electronic wasps’ nests, lenses that were at least twice as large as they needed to be fixing dozens of unblinking eyes on the Gallic. Wherever Hartman looked her eyes found another camera, lens glinting like a sniper’s scope. It was a distinctly unnerving sensation, and Hartman had a sudden inkling of how a fly caught in a web must have felt, trapped under a legion of eyes.

The only illumination came from the strip lighting in the ceiling, dialled a few increments brighter than any sane person would have found comfortable. How the Gallic maintained even the illusion of sleep under it was a mystery all by itself. Hartman added it to her rapidly-growing list.

”Lieutenant Plourde.” Hartman settled into one of the chairs opposite the Gallic. The discordant grind of metal on metal drifted through the room as she slid the chair under the table. ”My name is Admiral Hartman. Your squadron killed one of my ships four days ago.”

It was not an accusation. Only a statement of fact. The Gallic did not move.

”I know that you’re awake, Lieutenant, and I’m fully aware that you can understand every word I’m saying.” Hartman said. ”I’m also aware of the carrier your squadron used to hit my transports.”

That got a response. Plourde slid into apparent wakefulness with entirely more grace than his situation warranted and fixed her with the lazy stare that of a theatregoer that had seen the movie before and hadn’t liked it the first time. His eyes were the colour of polished sapphire, the sort of piercing blue that drew modelling agencies and casting teams like flies to honey. If there hadn’t been a war, it would have been easy to imagine those eyes showing up on vids. The nap was a good act, and without Seller’s all-knowing commentary Hartman would have probably believed it. He raised a single eyebrow, and when he spoke it was in the crisp, unaccented tone of an academic speaker. Someone who’d learned the language without ever hearing it spoken. ”Lieutenant Michael Plourde, la Marine Royale, M954371.”

Hartman continued as though he hadn’t spoken. ”And, as of two days ago, so is the rest of the First Fleet. Third Battlecruiser squadron’s already en-route. They’ll be matching orbit with the Magellan jumphole in a little over sixty hours.”

Plourde’s chin bobbed in a fractional nod. An acknowledgement of her words without a jot of agreement implied.

”Lieutenant, when they get there they’ll find that carrier.” It was a lie so blatant Hartman had to wonder if the Gallic wouldn’t pick up on it. Davies didn’t have ships to spare on a hunch but, right now, the lie was the best she had. ”Granted, they might not find it immediately. Your boys have been playing possum since the fleet arrived, haven’t you? Gotten good at it too. So, I figure, six hours, maybe eight, after they arrive before the battlecruisers pull together enough data to get a fix on that ship. Longer if no-one gets twitchy and tries to run. But they know what they’re looking for. They’ll find it.”

The Gallic’s shoulders rose and fell in what would have been a shrug if his hands hadn’t been secured to the chair. Instead, it was more a suggestion of motion than the thing itself. ”Lieutenant-”

”I know your rank. I’m not here to interrogate you, so you can stop acting as though I am. If I wanted to hear you talk fleet intelligence would’ve had you spilling your guts before I finished my morning coffee.” Another lie. Torture had faded from military intelligence’s toolbox centuries ago, when the ancient precursors of Seller’s lie detectors rolled off the production lines. There was no sentimentality behind the decision. Information gained under torture was about as reliable as asking your own intelligence section, and several orders of magnitude messier. The tortured tended to repeat whatever it was they thought you wanted to hear, and damn the truth of the thing. That hadn’t stopped several organisations without access to military-grade equipment trying it anyway, and SERE was still a dreaded part of any would-be pilot’s course. A sharp knife appealed to something universal in the human psyche. ”I’m here to offer you a deal.”

”And, if we were to entertain the possibility that there was anything at all to be gained from making a deal with you, what would that be?” The tone of his voice didn’t waver from polite, tired, indifference. A party guest whose speech was as much a part of the furnishings as the wallpaper. If Hartman had closed her eyes, she wouldn’t have heard a thing in it to suggest that he was doing anything other than making conversation.

”I figure this goes one of three ways. One, someone on that carrier sees the battlecruisers and gets nervous. Hits the thrust and tries to run. Shows up on every sensor in the fleet doing it. If they’re not carrying a lot of excess mass, they make it a quarter, maybe a third, of the way back to your fleet before the battlecruisers get them in range.” Hartman said. It wasn’t a fair fight, even as a hypothetical. The fleet’s battlecruisers were like hunting dogs; bred to chase down and kill anything slow enough for them to catch, and a stealthed-up carrier, the bastardised result of a hundred compromises to heat management and fuel efficiency, sure fit that definition. ”Then our ships open up and everyone on that carrier dies. Ship like that, running that far from home, I figure most of your mass is going to be life support and internal sinks to keep that cloak going. Not much left over for armour and guns, and sure as hell not enough to stand up to one battlecruiser in a fight. I’ve got three.

”Option two.” Hartman raised a finger. ”Your friends out there hold their nerve. No-one gets twitchy, no-one runs. They just sit there, sucking up air and fuel and watching the temperature creep up. Somehow, the battlecruisers miss them, and it’s all right dandy for them until they have to dump heat. If they do, my ships pick it up, and we’re right back at scenario one. Or they get heroic and keep holding their breath until the life support gives out altogether. Either way, we’re back at ‘everyone dies’ and I still find that ship in a few days when the systems overheat.

“Three.” Hartman let the finger drop. ”You tell me where that ship is and how she’s laid out, and I send a boarding team instead of the battlecruisers. They go in ballistic, radar-absorbent pods. No-one on that carrier knows a thing until they start knocking on the hull, and my people are in the CiC before anyone gets to the armoury. I’m not going to lie to you, maybe a couple of folks get unlucky, try to shoot back. Maybe they catch a few bullets. Fewer casualties than a battlecruiser’d cause. End result, I still get that carrier off my back, and most of your friends’ll be spending the rest of the war alive in a camp instead of sucking vacuum. You might even get to see them again.”

”This is your idea of a negotiation?” The Gallic almost laughed. Hartman expected to hear nerves behind it, but the sound was genuine. That was almost as jarring as the smile on his face. ”Tell you what you want to know or everyone dies?”

”Sure looks that way.” Hartman forced a shrug. Taking the ship intact would have been preferable. Would’ve meant a shot at pulling the Royal Navy’s encryption keys off the computer, and that was the sort of thing that turned the tide of wars. But beyond that, Hartman was a little surprised to find that she meant every word. She didn’t hate the Gallics, didn’t want them dead any more than she did anyone who put themselves between the Navy and its objectives, but the thought of blasting that ship to ash didn’t discomfort her any more than the notion of capturing it whole. If it happened, it happened. She wouldn’t lose sleep either way. ”However it happens, that carrier’s off the board. Doesn’t matter to me whether we do that with a boarding team or a warhead.”

”Do you honestly believe that we would give you that information, even if the squadron had it?” Plourde’s smirk hadn’t shifted. It was the sort of expression a teacher wore while explaining the concept of personal space to some particularly dense child.

”That’s the notion, yes.” Hartman matched his tone. Calm, conversational even. Old friends discussing the deaths of a few hundred people half a solar system away. That it was all bluff didn’t do a thing to change the absurdity of it. ”Think about it. You change your mind in the next forty eight hours, you let intelligence know. That’s our window. I’ll have the ship post a countdown to your cell. After that, that ship’s scrap.” She let the silence gather for a long minute, until it was almost a physical presence. The Gallic didn’t break it. Finally, Hartman glanced towards the cell wall.

”We’re done, Lieutenant.” She turned to the closest wall-mounted lens and nodded to Sellers. The intelligence officer was a room over, watching the feed. An acknowledgement crackled in her earpiece a moment later, and she heard boots moving in the hallway outside.

”Do you know what we think, Admiral?” Plourde was still smiling to himself, as though at some private joke. ”You’re full of sh-t. You’re full of sh-t, and you’re scared. You don’t have a clue where the carrier is. You wouldn’t risk talking to us if you did. You don’t even know if it exists. We can hit your ships whenever and wherever we like, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. And that scares you.”

He leant forward a degree, half a dozen bindings groaning in protest. ”It should. Just like it scares her. ” The gallic paused, eyes lingering on the cameras. ”She thinks you’re all going to die. Smart woman.”

Plourde gave the hatch behind her a knowing nod. Half a second later, the steel slid aside with a cheerful ring that was as out of place as a balloon at a morgue, and Plourde slid back into his seat like a snake retreating to its burrow. Sellers stepped into the room, a pair of armed marines at her side. The honey-blonde officer didn’t speak until they were both out of the cell – Hartman found she couldn’t think of it as the workshop any longer – and halfway back to the intelligence section.

”Well.” Sellers ventured. ”That could have gone worse.”

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