Free A Rising Thunder-ARC by David Weber Page A

for two or three months himself while his construction crews worked on Parmaley Station, but he’d been able to confirm that as far as active operations between Haven and Manticore were concerned, a hiatus of mutual exhaustion had set in following the Battle of Manticore. Both Anton and Victor had been vastly relieved to discover that no one had been actively shooting at one another any longer, given what they’d learned on Mesa, but it had been obvious the good captain was less than delighted at the notion of finding himself involved in the sort of shenanigans which seemed to follow the team of Zilwicki and Cachat around. He’d apparently suspected that his Erewhonese employers wouldn’t have approved of his stepping deeper into the morass he was pretty sure Hali Sowle and her passengers represented. They might have convinced him to change his mind if they’d told him what they’d discovered on Mesa, but they weren’t about to break security on that at this point. Which meant the best he’d been willing to do was to take his own ship to Erewhon (which, to be fair, was the next best thing to twenty light-years closer to Hainuwele than Torch was) to fetch back a replacement generator for Hali Sowle . In the process, he was willing to take an encrypted dispatch from Victor to Sharon Justice, who’d been covering for him as the Republic’s senior officer in the Erewhon Sector, but that was as far as he was prepared to go.
    Zilwicki didn’t try to pretend, even to himself, that he hadn’t found the captain’s attitude irritating. Fortunately, he was by nature a patient, methodical, analytical man. And there were at least some upsides to the situation. Neither he nor Cachat wanted Simões out of their sight, and while they had no particular reason to distrust Custis ’ captain or crew, they had no particular reason to trust them, either. If even a fraction of what Jack McBryde and Herlander Simões had told them proved true, it was going to shake the foundations of star nations all across explored space. They literally could not risk having anything happen to him until they’d had time for him to tell his tale—in detail—to their own star nations’ intelligence services. Much as they might begrudge the month or so it would take Custis to make the trip to Erewhon, they preferred to stay right where they were until Justice could arrange secure transport to Torch. They’d both breathe an enormous sigh of relief once they had Simões safely squirreled away on Torch and could send discreet dispatches requesting all of the relevant security agencies send senior representatives to Torch.
    No one expected it to be easy, and he knew Cachat was as worried as he was over the possibility that the Star Empire and the Republic might resume combat operations while they waited, but both of them were aware that they’d stumbled onto the sort of intelligence revelation that came along only once in centuries. Assuming it wasn’t all part of some incredible, insane disinformation effort, the Mesan Alignment had been working on its master plan for the better part of six hundred T-years without anyone’s having suspected what was happening. Under those circumstances, there were quite literally no lengths to which Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki wouldn’t go to keep their sole source of information alive.
    Which was why they were all still sitting here aboard Parmaley Station’s moldering hulk while they awaited transportation elsewhere.
    “You know,” Yana said a bit plaintively, “nobody told me we were going to be gone on this little jaunt for an entire year.”
    “And we haven’t been,” Zilwicki pointed out. “Well, actually, I suppose we have, depending on the planetary year in question. But in terms of T-years, it’s been less than one. Why, it’s been barely ten T-months, when you come down to it!”
    “And it was only supposed to be four,” Yana retorted.
    “We told you it might be five,” Zilwicki