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CHAPTER FORTY

Xing Xuefeng sat quietly in the shuttle seat, eyes fixed straight in front of her while she watched the Federation Marine at the forward end of the passenger compartment. The Marine wore an armored vac suit, helmet visor raised, and carried an assault rifle on a single-point sling. Her hand curled around the rifle’s pistol grip and her forefinger tapped the side of the receiver gently. Blond hair was just visible in the open-fronted helmet, clipped close to the scalp, no more than a centimeter or two in length, and her gray-green eyes were cold and hard.

The guard’s position had been carefully chosen. She was between the prisoners—all commissioned officers—and the flight deck. From where she stood, she could see the entire passenger compartment. She could also kill everyone in it, if the urge struck her. She wouldn’t even have needed her rifle. The button on the forward bulkhead at her back blinked a bright, ominous red, indicating that it was armed. All she had to do was flip down her helmet visor with her left hand, hit that button with the heel of her right hand, and watch every one of the sixty-four League POWs strapped into their seats try to breathe vacuum as she blew the emergency hatch seal.

The significance of that blinking button had been carefully explained to the prisoners as they boarded. Not that any of them had really needed the explanation.

Xing swallowed unobtrusively as she felt the vibration of braking thrusters and realized the shuttle was about to dock.

So far, her disguise had held up better than she’d dared to hope. Altering the surgeon’s log to show that Second Admiral Xing had died of wounds on the passage back to Diyu had been simple, given her command code access. Doctoring the command log would have been much more difficult, but she’d covered that by simply deleting and shredding all operational data in Nüwa’s and Pangu’s files. Murphy hadn’t specifically prohibited that when he stipulated that the ships had to be surrendered in operable condition. There might be repercussions for the command crew, but since Xing was safely “dead,” they wouldn’t fall on her.

She didn’t see how the Feds could have accurate biometric data on her, but she couldn’t exclude the possibility, and it was entirely possible that there’d been imagery of her in the wreckage left behind in New Dublin. So she’d used a rinse to change her eyes to an even darker brown, almost black. The cosmetic was guaranteed for only a couple of weeks, but hopefully that would be long enough for her to get through initial in-processing and disappear into the anonymity of just one more POW. It only had to hold long enough for her to be sent to one of the sublight ships Murphy had stupidly agreed to leave intact behind him.

The long, crownlike braid which had been her trademark for so long was a thing of the past for the same reason. Her hair was almost as short as the cold-eyed Marine’s, and it had become brown instead of sable. She’d considered something more gwáimūi, just to get as far away from her natural appearance as possible, but she’d decided against it. Red or blond hair was so rare in the League that it would automatically draw the Feds’ eyes, even if they weren’t actively looking for her.

She carried her splinted left arm in a sling and wore the uniform of a lieutenant. Lieutenant Nguyễn Khánh Thủy no longer required it—she truly had died at New Dublin—and she’d been tall, almost exactly as tall as Xing’s hundred-seventy-five centimeters. The second admiral was a little nervous about using the real Nguyễn’s ID chip, but she didn’t have a lot of choice about that. She’d substituted her own image in place of Nguyễn’s in the ship’s personnel files—a flag officer’s command codes were a wonderful thing to have—but she couldn’t do anything about the DNA code locked into the real Nguyễn’s chip. It was unlikely the Feds had a genetic sample for her or Nguyễn, but if they checked her DNA against the chip for some reason…

The braking thrusters’ vibration ceased. Then the shuttle’s nose thumped into a docking collar, and she felt a moment of vertigo as up and down reestablished themselves. They must have docked with one of the Fed FTLCs’ spin sections. The subjective vertical axis wasn’t quite perpendicular to the shuttle’s. Indeed, it was off by a good fifteen degrees, and her seat shifted to accommodate it. A minute or so later, the boarding tube had run out and mated with the portside hatch.

“Everyone up,” the Fed Marine commanded in truly execrable Mandarin. She gestured at the port hatch with the muzzle of her rifle. “Time to go.”

Xing rose with the rest of the passengers, bracing herself against the seat in front of her with her good arm as she leaned against the angled gravity, reminding herself yet again that she was a humble lieutenant, the most junior officer on the shuttle, not an admiral. She stood in place, allowing commanders and lieutenant commanders to debark before her. So far as she could tell, none of the others had recognized her through her disguise, and she’d disappeared into Nüwa’s junior officers’ quarters before the FTLC’s command crew and her own staff had been removed from the ship. So—

It was her turn, and she drew a deep, unobtrusive breath, and stepped into the boarding tube, feeling the gravity gradient shift back into conformity with the tube deck. She followed it to its inboard end and stepped out of it into a cavernous compartment.

Two other boarding tubes, connected to airlocks on either side of the one to which Xing’s shuttle had docked, disgorged their own streams of sullen-faced League officers and enlisted. Nüwa and Pangu had suffered twenty-three percent casualties in New Dublin, but they’d gone into battle with ship’s companies of over a thousand apiece. That left enough still-living personnel to fill thirty of those shuttles, and she wondered if all of them were processing through the same FTLC. She doubted it. Where would they put that many additional people in any sort of secure condition? Of course, they only had to hold them until they were transferred to one of the sublight prison ships, didn’t they?

A small group of senior Fed officers stood on a broad catwalk, three meters above the compartment’s deck. One of them was taller than any of the others, and a pair of the Feds’ heavy-armor Marines—“Hoplons,” they called them—stood at his back. That had to be Murphy, she thought. Come to gloat, no doubt. Well, let her get a flag deck back under her feet again, and they’d see who gloated last! As soon as she finished nailing Than for his treasonous desertion of his post, at least. First things first, after all. But just as soon as Than was taken care of, she’d be—

A hand fell on her shoulder.

“Stop,” someone said, this time in almost perfect Mandarin, and her heart spasmed.

She turned her head and found herself looking up and into the green eyes of a tall, auburn-haired gwáilóu TFN captain. Another Marine, this one young, female, and thirteen centimeters shorter than Xing stood beside him, right hand wrapped around the butt of the pistol holstered at her side. Her hair was as blond as that of the Marine in the shuttle, there was a mark of some sort above her right eyebrow, and her pale blue gwáimūi eyes were even harder than the naval officer’s.

“Yes, Sir?” Xing said in Standard English. Her voice quivered a bit around the edges, but she told herself that would be a natural reaction for anyone, especially an officer as junior as “Lieutenant Nguyễn,” when she was singled out in a crowd of POWs.

“English,” the captain said. “Good.” His lips twitched in a smile that never reached his eyes. “Come this way…Lieutenant Nguyễn.”

“I beg your pardon?” Xing said, trying to ignore the way the Marine’s hand was wrapped around the pistol grip. “I thought—” she raised her right hand and pointed along the length of the queue which had halted behind them “—in-processing was that way, Sir?”

“It is,” the captain replied. “Admiral Murphy has a couple of questions for you, though.”

Xing’s racing heart seemed to freeze. It plummeted into the pit of her stomach, and she shook her head.

“There must be some mistake, Sir.” She tried to smile back at him, and knew she’d failed. “I’m only—”

“Trust me, this won’t take long,” the captain said. “Unless, of course, you want to make it take longer,” he added in a colder voice, and something seemed to flicker in the Marine’s ice-blue eyes.

“No, Sir!” Xing said quickly.

“Good,” he said again. “This way.”

The hand on her shoulder turned her, pointing her at the latticework stairs up to the catwalk. He stood to her left, his right hand on her left shoulder, and she was acutely aware of the way that not only put him on her weak side but took him out of a direct line between her and the silent, hard-faced Marine following at their heels.

They reached the stairs. She climbed them steadily, a little surprised her knees supported her. They felt too frail, too shaky, for that, and her breathing was harder and faster than the climb could explain.

She stepped out onto the catwalk, and the captain released her shoulder and walked across to stand beside the even taller admiral who had to be Murphy.

The Marine had stopped behind her, she realized, as she came to attention and saluted Murphy sharply.

He didn’t return the salute. He only looked at her.

The silence dragged out, twisting her nerves like pincers, and she felt herself beginning to sweat. She tried to wait him out, but she couldn’t. She just…couldn’t, and she licked her lips.

“You…wanted to speak to me, Sir?”

“Oh, I’ve wanted to speak to you for a long time.” His voice was deep and very, very cold. “You might say I’ve been looking forward to it.”

“I…I beg your pardon?” She heard the fear in her voice, and it shamed her, but she couldn’t prevent it. “I don’t understand?”

“Oh, I think you do…Admiral Xing.”

Her pulse galloped in her own ears, and she shook her head.

“There’s…there’s some mistake!” she said. “I’m no admiral! I’m only a lieutenant!”

“Really?”

Murphy raised an eyebrow. Then he stepped to one side and Xing saw who’d been hidden behind him by his own height and the massive bulk of the Hoplons. Xie Kai and Captain Geng stood there, looking back at her expressionlessly.

“You look an awful lot like the League propaganda footage of Admiral Xing, Hero of Inverness.” Murphy’s voice could have frozen the heart of hell.

“What?” Xing shook her head. “No!” She tapped the name tape on her uniform. “I’m Nguyễn—Nguyễn Khánh Thủy! Xing…she’s dead! She died in New Dublin! I’m…I’m not—” She looked pleadingly at Xie and Geng. “Tell him!

“You were in command in Scotia,” Murphy said flatly. “Three quarter million dead of exposure and starvation and disease. Three quarters of a million civilians who watched their children freeze to death in front of them.”

“No, never!” Xing raised her hands. “You’ve got the wrong person, Admiral! I’m just…just a prisoner of war. Nguyễn Khánh Thủy, serial number…serial number—” She stared at Xie. “Tell him Admiral Xing’s dead, Commander!” she implored desperately.

Xie said nothing.

Xing’s terrified gaze darted to Geng, and her soul shriveled as she saw the cold, hard contempt in the captain’s eyes.

“And now, Admiral,” Murphy said, snatching her attention back to him, “it’s time.”

She heard a faint sound behind her, realized it was the sound of a weapon coming out of a holster, and swayed as the blood seemed to drain into her feet.

“Turn around,” the Marine said. It was the first time she’d spoken, and Xing had never before heard such frozen, distilled hate in a human voice.

Her legs obeyed that voice, not her own will, and she shuffled around to find herself staring into the muzzle of a rock-steady pistol.

“Commander Xie and Captain Geng didn’t identify you for us, Admiral,” Murphy said. “They’re here solely as witnesses.”

Xing’s wide eyes rolled to the side, looking at her subordinates, then darted out over the compartment. Every person in it had paused, frozen in place, looking up at her, and Murphy stepped to the catwalk railing.

“This woman is a criminal,” he told them all, raising that deep voice so that it boomed out over all the other prisoners, as well. “A monster. She fought without honor. She deserves none, and she will receive none. But those in the League who fight as warriors instead of butchers—openly, honorably, without befouling the uniform they wear, remembering who they are—those people will be treated with respect, allowed honorable surrender. I am Admiral Terrence Murphy, Terran Federation Navy. Someday, you will go home. When you do, remember my words.”

He held those massed, silently watching eyes for a long, still moment, then stepped back again and turned to the Marine.

“Eira,” he said. Just that, nothing more.

Xing’s eyes snapped back to the Marine.

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dead,” Eira said. “But I only cared about one.”

“Please,” Xing whispered. “Please!”

“I watched the light go out of my brother’s eyes,” Eira told her, the muzzle six centimeters from Xing’s forehead. “There in the bunker, before the lanterns died. I watched it. And now I’ll see it again.”

Please!

“This is for Sam,” Eira said very, very quietly.

The pistol shot was deafening in the cavernous compartment.


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