"Um." Jackson Coulter scratched his jaw, then tossed a five-dollar coin out onto the table.

"Christ, what a big spender!" Steilman's laugh rumbled deep in his belly, and he glanced at Elizabeth Showforth. "How's about you, Sweet Cakes?"

"How'd you like a kick in the a.s.s?" Showforth had the jack of spades showing and tossed out a five-spot of her own. Illyushin, with the ten of diamonds, matched her, and Steilman shook his head.

"s.h.i.t, what a bunch of wimps." He himself had an eight of clubs showing, and he tossed ten dollars out without even checking his hole card, then looked at Al Stennis, the fifth and final player. Stennis had a lowly two of hearts, and he scowled at Steilman.

"Why do you always hafta push so hard, Randy?" he demanded plaintively, but he matched the dealer's raise. Steilman eyed the other three challengingly, and, one by one, each of them tossed another five dollars into the pot.

"That's the spirit!" Steilman encouraged with another laugh. He dealt the next card and c.o.c.ked an eyebrow as the queen of hearts landed in front of Coulter. "Looking good, there, Jackson! Let's see, possible royal straight to Jackson, nothing much to Sweet Cakes, a possible straight to Ed, jack s.h.i.t to Al, and-" He dropped the nine of clubs onto his own hand and beamed. "Well, well!" he chortled. "Possible straight flush to the dealer!."

He tossed another ten dollars out, and the others groaned. But they also followed suit, and he started around the table again.

The poker games in Berthing Compartment 256 were its inhabitants' second most serious occupation-a point which many of their fellow crewmen, who speculated ribaldly on just who did what with whom, would have found difficult to believe.

Traditionally, berthing a.s.signments aboard a Queen's ship were subject to adjustment by mutual consent. Initial a.s.signments were made as personnel reported aboard, but as long as divisional officers were kept informed, the Navy's people were free to swap around as long as the division between ratings, petty officers, and officers was maintained. The Navy had come to that arrangement long ago, though the Marines remained far more formal about the whole thing and required officer approval of changes.

The Navy had also concluded that attempting to enforce celibacy on its mixed crews would not only be a Bad Idea but also doomed to fail, and BuPers had adopted a pragmatic policy over five hundred T-years previously. The only relationships which were absolutely banned were those covered by Article 119: those between officers and or noncoms and any of their own subordinates. Aside from that, personnel were free to make whatever arrangements they chose, and all female personnel received five-year contraceptive implants which could be deactivated upon request. In peacetime, such requests were granted automatically; in wartime, they were granted only if personnel were available to replace the woman making the request. More than that, women who chose to become pregnant were immediately pulled from shipboard duty and a.s.signed to one of the s.p.a.ce stations or ground bases, where they could be promptly replaced and transferred to duty without radiation hazards if they did become pregnant. It wasn't fair-women's procreation was more limited, though women could also use a decision to have children to avoid shipboard duty-but biology wasn't fair, either, and the practice of tubing children took a lot of the sting out of it. In fact, BuPers both provided free storage for sperm and ova to its personnel and covered seventy-five percent of the cost for tubed offspring in an effort to even the possibilities still further. Despite periodic complaints, the policy was understood-and, in the main, accepted-as the best compromise a military inst.i.tution could come up with.

The policy also meant a wise captain and executive officer generally kept their noses out of who was sleeping with whom as long as no one violated Article 119. It was, however, unusual for a single member of one s.e.x to bunk with four members of the other s.e.x, which was precisely what Elizabeth Showforth had done. Her choice was all the more remarkable in that Showforth's s.e.xual interests didn't include men . . . but, then, she wasn't bunking with Steilman, Coulter, Illyushin, and Stennis for that particular form of social intercourse. On the other hand, the tradition of not interfering provided a handy cover for the reason she had chosen to bunk here.

"I wish to h.e.l.l you'd slow down a little, Randy," Stennis grumbled as Steilman dealt.

"What, the pot too rich for your blood?"

"I wasn't talking about poker," Stennis said much more quietly, and eyes lifted from cards to meet other eyes all around the table.

"Then what the f.u.c.k were you talking about, Al?" Steilman asked ominously. Stennis swallowed, but he didn't look away.

"You know what I'm talking about." He did look away then, gaze sweeping the others in an appeal for support. "I know Lewis p.i.s.sed you off, but you're gonna queer the deal for all of us if you keep this s.h.i.t up."

Randy Steilman set down the deck of cards and pushed his chair back a few centimeters, turning to face Stennis squarely, and his eyes were ugly.

"Listen, you little f.u.c.k," he said softly. "'The deal' you're talkin' about was my idea. I'm the one who set it up, and I'm the one who's gonna say when we do it. And what I do in the meantime is none of your G.o.dd.a.m.ned business, now is it?"

The sudden silence in the compartment was profound, and sweat beaded Stennis' forehead. He glanced nervously at the closed hatch before he leaned even closer to Steilman, and he chose his words very carefully, but there was a stubborn edge to his tone.

"I'm not trying to say any different. You thought of it and you set it up, and as far as I'm concerned, you're in charge. But, Jesus, Randy! If you keep going after Wanderman or picking fights with POs, you're gonna land us all in the c.r.a.pper. And then what happens to the whole deal? All I'm saying is that we're all in this together, and if anybody finds out what we're planning, we're all gonna go away for a long, long time. If we're lucky."

Steilman's mouth twisted and his eyes smoldered, but he sensed a certain agreement from the others. They were all more than a little afraid of him-a state which afforded him considerable pleasure-but he needed each of them to make his plan work. And, he conceded, if any of them got scared enough, he-or she-might just blow the whistle on all of them in an effort to buy a little clemency from the court martial.

But that didn't mean he was going to put up with anyone telling him what he could and couldn't do, and that little p.r.i.c.k Wanderman and his girlfriend were going to get everything they had coming. Randy Steilman was used to captain's masts and to being busted. He was no stranger to brig time, for that matter, and, by and large, he accepted it as a condition of his life. But n.o.body got in his face and enjoyed the consequences. That was his one inflexible rule, the mainstay of his existence. He was a man who throve on his own brutality and the fear it evoked in others. It was that fear which gave him his sense of power, and without it he was forced to see himself as he truly was. He'd never reasoned it out, yet that made it no less true, and he could no more have allowed Wanderman and Lewis to get away with not being afraid of him than he could have flown without a counter-grav collar.

A part of him knew he'd pushed too far with the business in Impeller One. He'd learned years ago-courtesy of the beating then Chief Petty Officer MacBride had given him one night-that there were limits, even for him. But he'd been bored, and the efficiency Maxwell had been getting out of his people had irritated him, not to mention making him work harder himself. Besides, he'd heard how Lewis was pushing Wanderman . . . and whatever else the incident had produced, he knew he owed the b.i.t.c.h something special for the tongue lashing her high and mightiness Lady Harrington had given him.

Somewhere deep inside, he felt a shiver of fear as he remembered the Captain's icy voice and colder eyes. She hadn't screamed, hadn't ranted like some officers he'd p.i.s.sed off over the years. She hadn't even sworn at him. She'd simply looked at him with frigid, disdainful loathing, and her tongue had been a precision instrument as she flayed him with her contempt. The shiver of fear grew stronger, and he suppressed it quickly, trying to deny its existence, but it was there, and he hated it. The only other person who'd ever put that fear into him was Sally MacBride, which had been a factor in why he'd finally taken the step from thinking about his plan to putting it into action. He wanted to be as far away from her as he could get, but he knew now that MacBride had been right. Harrington was more dangerous than any bosun. There was a limit to the c.r.a.p she would put up with, and Steilman felt ominously certain that if it got deep enough, she might choose to forget about procedures and proof. And if she did, he wanted to be even further away from her than from MacBride when the consequences came down.

But Randy Steilman was also convinced he could get away with whatever he chose to do. Perhaps he shouldn't have been, given the number of times he'd been busted or brigged, yet he was. And the reason was simple enough, actually. None of the punishments he'd ever received even approached what he liked to do to others, and so some elemental part of him a.s.sumed they never would. It wasn't an intellectual a.s.sumption. It was deeper than that, where it was never questioned because it was never even considered, and that was what made him so dangerous. He'd never killed anyone yet, but he was convinced he could . . . and this time he intended to.

In point of fact, he looked forward to it. It would be the ultimate proof of his power-and it would also be his valedictory, his final "gift" to the Navy he'd come to hate. He was only four years into his current enlistment, and he would never have reupped if he'd thought a shooting war might actually break out. He wasn't really certain why he'd signed up again, anyway, except that it was the only life he knew, and he hadn't stopped to wonder why the Navy had even allowed him to reenlist. His discipline record had gotten worse, not better, in the preceding ten years, and under normal conditions, the Navy would have declined his services with alacrity. But Steilman didn't think about things like that, and so it had never occurred to him that the only reason he'd squeaked through was that, unlike him, the Navy had known war was coming and lowered its screening standards where experienced personnel were concerned because it knew how badly it would soon need them.

What had occurred to him, was that he might get himself killed. The RMN's casualty lists were far shorter than the Peeps', but they were getting steadily longer, and Randy Steilman saw no reason to get his a.s.s shot off for Queen and Kingdom.

Given all that, the decision to desert had come easily, but there was one enormous. .h.i.tch. The sentence for desertion in peacetime was not less than thirty years in prison; in wartime it was the firing squad, and he didn't particularly want to face that either. Worse, wartime deployment patterns made jumping ship more difficult. Steilman wasn't the sort any captain wanted aboard a destroyer or light cruiser, whose smaller companies meant every individual had to pull his weight, but the heavier ships had been pulled from peacetime cruising patterns and concentrated into fleets and task forces. It was only the light combatants which could be spared for convoy escort or anti-piracy operations, which meant they were the only ones likely to touch at foreign ports where a man might manage to disappear into the local population.

Until now. He'd been horrified when he first learned he was being a.s.signed to Honor Harrington's ship. The rest of his stupid crewmates could worship the deck "the Salamander" walked on and gas away about what a great combat commander she was. All Randy Steilman cared about was the casualty lists she'd compiled over the years, starting with Basilisk Station. Others could carry on all they liked about how no one else could have done better, about how much worse the casualties could have been. They could even point out the amount of prize money her crews-or their heirs-had ama.s.sed. Steilman liked money even more than most, but a dead man couldn't spend it, and learning MacBride was Wayfarer's bosun had only made a bad situation worse . . . until he'd learned where Task Group 1037 was to be deployed.

Of all the places in the galaxy, Silesia was the best for a man who wanted to disappear. Especially a trained s.p.a.cer unburdened by anything resembling a scruple. Randy Steilman was on the wrong side of the war against the pirates. He looked forward to joining the one he belonged on, and sooner or later Wayfarer had to touch at a Silesian port.

Steilman had planned carefully for that moment. He'd kept his eyes and ears open to a.s.semble all the information he could on Harrington's ships and their operational patterns. He knew far more about their strengths-and weaknesses-than even the people around this card table suspected. He'd also made bootleg copies of as many tech manuals as he could-it was strictly against regulations, but not that hard for someone with his training, and Showforth's slot in computer maintenance had helped-and he wondered how much a Peep naval attache would pay him for some of that material. The chips were in his locker, and getting them dirtside when the time came shouldn't pose any problems. Or not, at least, compared to the problem of getting himself dirtside in the first place.

But he'd figured that out, too, and that was where Stennis and Illyushin came in. Them were in Environmental, and Environmental was responsible for maintaining Wayfarer's escape pods. The number of people who could expect to get out of a ship lost to battle damage would be low, but someone almost always made it-unless the d.a.m.ned ship blew up, of course-and ships could be lost to other causes. That was what the pods were for. In deep s.p.a.ce, they were little more than life support bubbles fitted with transponders which both sides were supposedly duty bound to pick up after an engagement, but they were also designed to be capable of independent atmospheric entry if there should happen to be a habitable planet handy when disaster struck.

At Steilman's direction, Showforth had built and Stennis and Illyushin had installed an un.o.btrusive little box in the circuits which monitored Pod 184. When the time came, that box would be turned on, and it would continue to report that the ten-man pod was exactly where it was supposed to be, with every system at standby, when, in fact, it was somewhere else entirely. The trick would be to create conditions that produced enough confusion to keep everyone too preoccupied to notice any outbound radar traces, and Steilman had worked that out, as well. He and Coulter had already built the bomb for Impeller One. It wasn't a huge thing, but it would be enough to completely cripple two of the alpha node generators. The energy released when the generator capacitors blew would wreak additional havoc, both on the ship and on anyone unfortunate enough to be in Impeller One at the time, and in the ensuing confusion and panic, five people who all happened to be off duty would quietly descend on Pod 184 and depart for greener pastures.

It had taken Steilman weeks to identify the people he needed to make it all work, and the number was higher than he liked. The more people involved, the greater the chance of something going wrong, after all. Nor had he been able to get everything in place in time to put his plan into operation in Walther. But he was ready now. All they needed was to enter orbit around the proper planet-Schiller wouldn't do; its original colonists had come from Old Earth's continent of Africa, and all five of them would stand out like sore thumbs when Harrington demanded the local authorities help track them down-and they were off and free.

But before he left, he was going to square accounts with Wanderman and Lewis. It would be not only his parting gift to the Navy, but to that sanctimonious b.i.t.c.h MacBride, as well. Yes, and to Captain Honor Harrington, d.a.m.n her!

"Look," he said finally. "I'm willing to lie low for a while. Let the Old b.i.t.c.h think she's put the fear of G.o.d into me-h.e.l.l, it's no skin off my nose! But don't any of you tell me what I can and can't do." He saw the fear in their eyes, and the ugliness at his core basked in its reflection. "I am going to fix Lewis's a.s.s, and I'm gonna kill that f.u.c.ker Wanderman with my own two hands, and there's n.o.body gonna stop me, least of all you." He bared his teeth and slammed one meaty fist down on the table for emphasis. "I don't want to hear any more s.h.i.t about it, and if I decide I need one of you to help, then you'd better by G.o.d believe you're gonna give me that help. 'Cause if you don't, there's gonna be less people in that pod when it lands, you hear me?"

Stennis swallowed and his eyes fell. Then he nodded jerkily, the fear radiating off him in all but visible waves. Steilman let his eyes sweep the others, and, one by one, they nodded as well. All but Coulter, who simply looked back with a thin, cold smile of agreement.

"Good." The single word fell into the background silence like a stone, and then Randy Steilman picked up the deck and began to deal once more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

Citizen Commander Caslet heaved a profound sigh of relief as his pinnace docked. His orders to remain covert at all times made sense, he supposed, but they were also an unmitigated pain, especially since not even the Republic's own diplomatic corps knew Citizen Admiral Giscard had been dispatched to the Confederacy. The amba.s.sadors and trade attaches threaded through Silesian s.p.a.ce were integral parts of the Republic's intelligence chain, but most were also holdovers from the old regime. The Committee of Public Safety had applied the new broom theory to the diplomats dispatched to places like the Solarian League, but Silesia was a backwater, too far from the critical arenas of diplomatic maneuvering to give the same housekeeping priority. As a result, State Security trusted its own emba.s.sy staffs no further than it had to-which, Caslet conceded, was probably wise of the SS. Six senior Legislaturalist amba.s.sadors had defected to the Manties . . . after StateSec executed most of the rest of their families for "treason against the people."

That sort of predictable cause and effect was one of the more egregious examples of the lunacies of revolutionary ardor, in Caslet's estimation, and it made his own life difficult. He couldn't tap directly into the diplomatic service's intelligence conduits without revealing his presence and, probably, something about his mission, and that was forbidden, since those very intelligence sources were suspect in the eyes of his superiors. Citizen Admiral Giscard could use any information they turned up, but only after it had been funneled to one of the amba.s.sadors sent out since the coup attempt, and Jasmine Haines, the Schiller System trade attache, was much too far down the food chain for that. Caslet could use Haines to send encrypted dispatches to Giscard via diplomatic courier, but he could neither tell her what those dispatches said, nor who he was, nor even ask her for specific data which might "in any way compromise the operational security of your mission," as his orders succinctly, if unhelpfully, put it.

At least he had the authentication codes to require her a.s.sistance, but he'd been forced to skulk into Schiller and hide behind the system's largest gas giant while he sent a mere pinnace in with his dispatches. He'd hated that. Hated being stuck at the rendezvous point until his pinnace returned and, even more, hated sending his people into danger when he couldn't go with them. But Allison seemed to have handled the contact as discreetly as he could have hoped, and he watched from the boat bay gallery as the docking tube ran out to the pinnace's lock.

MacMurtree swam the tube, and he felt a twinge of annoyance at the twinkle in her eyes when he returned her salute just that tiny bit too impatiently. She knew him too well, knew he was itchy, eager to get back to trolling for pirates. Of course, he knew her pretty well, too. Neither of them had ever said so, but they shared the same contempt for the Committee of Public Safety and its minions-except, perhaps, for the handful like Denis Jourdain. And neither of them really liked the concept of commerce raiding.

Which is pretty silly of us both, Caslet reflected. The entire purpose of having a navy is to deny the use of s.p.a.ce to an enemy while securing it for yourself, isn't it? And how can you deny it to someone else if you're not willing to kill his merchantmen? Besides, merchant tonnage is just as important to the Manties as warships-probably even more so, right?

He shook off the thought and nodded towards the lifts. MacMurtree fell in beside him, and he punched the bridge code into the panel.

"How'd it go?" he asked.

"Not too badly," she said with a small shrug. "Their customs patrols really aren't worth a d.a.m.n. No one even closed to make an eyeball on us."

"Good," Caslet grunted. He'd been unhappy about the "asteroid mining boat" cover his orders specified, since a pinnace didn't look the least bit like a civilian craft. But what had once been NavInt insisted that what pa.s.sed for a customs patrol out here would settle for a transponder read, and d.a.m.ned if they hadn't been right. Well, that makes a nice change, he thought dryly.

"Anyway, we handled it all by tight beam from orbit," MacMurtree went on. "Haines didn't like sending her dispatch boat off, but she accepted her orders. Our dispatches should reach Admiral Giscard"-there were no people's commissioners here to overhear her use of the pre-revolutionary rank-"within three weeks." She grimaced. "We could've cut a good ten days off that by sending her straight to the rendezvous, Skipper."

"Security, Allison," Caslet replied, and she snorted with a grumpiness he understood perfectly. To keep StateSec happy, they had to send their dispatches to the Saginaw System, from which another dispatch boat (this one under the orders of an amba.s.sador the Committee of Public Safety trusted) would carry them to Giscard. Even at the high FTL velocities dispatch boats routinely turned out, that was going to take time.

"At any rate," he went on, "we can be sure he'll know everything we do-and what we're up to. Which means we can go trolling again with a clear conscience."

"True," MacMurtree agreed. "Anything turn up while I was away?"

"Not really. Of course, we're sort of out of the way here. I figure we'll clear the planetary hyper limit, pop into h-s.p.a.ce and move a couple of light-weeks out, then come back in the same way we did for Sharon's Star."

"What if we run into somebody else?"

"You mean a 'regular' pirate instead of Warnecke's happy campers?" MacMurtree nodded, and Caslet shrugged. "We've pulled enough out of their computers to recognize their emissions. We should be able to ID the ones we want if we see them."

He paused, rubbing an eyebrow, and MacMurtree nodded again. Painstaking a.n.a.lysis had proved that Citizen Sergeant Simonson had gotten more out of the computers of the pirate they'd already knocked out than they'd expected. Which was fortunate, since they'd gotten even less than hoped for out of their prisoners. But that, in its own way, had been highly satisfactory. With no need to make deals, all of the raiders had been given a fair trial before they went out the lock. The People's Navy didn't get its sick kicks the way the prisoners had, however, so Brans...o...b..'s Marines had executed each of them before he or she hit vacuum.

But among the bits and pieces Simonson had retrieved there was more than enough to confirm Captain Sukowski's claims about Andre Warnecke, and some sobering stats on other units of the "privateer squadron." Most were at least as powerful as the one Vaubon had destroyed, and they had four ships which looked to be more heavily armed than most of the Republic's heavy cruisers. The good news was that an examination of their capture's weapons systems had shown some glaring deficiencies. The Chalice's "revolutionary government" had built its ships to kill merchantmen, which couldn't shoot back, or engage Silesian Navy units, which were hardly up to the standards of major navies, and it showed. They seemed to have insisted in cramming in as heavy an offensive punch as possible, which wasn't an uncommon mistake in the navies of weaker powers. Heavy throw weights were impressive as h.e.l.l, but it was just as important to keep the bad guys from scoring on your ship, and they were under-equipped for that.

Which wasn't to say they wouldn't be dangerous if they were handled properly, but there were no indications of anything that could go toe-to-toe with Giscard's battlecruisers. Still, if Warnecke's people managed to ma.s.s two or three of their ships against one of his, things could get iffy. And if that was true for battlecruisers, it was far more true for light cruisers.

That was a sobering thought, but the computers had also coughed up the fact that all of Warnecke's ships had been built in the same yard and fitted with the same derivative of the standard Silesian Navy sensor and EW systems. So far as Foraker had been able to determine, their radar was a unique installation, so all they needed was a good read on it, and they'd know they had the murderous b.a.s.t.a.r.ds they wanted.

"I guess if we run into somebody else we'll just have to warn them off and send them on their way," he sighed finally. He hated the very thought. Pirates were the natural enemy of any man of war, but he knew he really had no choice. Jourdain was a good sort, but he'd balk at killing off regular pirates who might be expected to help put more pressure on the Manties.

"It's not going to feel right," MacMurtree murmured, and he laughed without humor.

"Just between you and me, Allison, I've felt that way quite a few times in the last three years," he said. She looked at him for a moment, eyes momentarily wide, then smiled and thumped him on the shoulder. Very few officers in the People's Navy would have dared to speak that frankly to anyone, however long they'd served together, and she started to reply, then closed her mouth with another smile as the lift reached its destination. The doors whispered open, and Caslet led the way out onto Vaubon's bridge.

"All well, Citizen Exec?" Jourdain asked MacMurtree, and she nodded.

"Yes, Sir," she said crisply. "Citizen Haines has already sent her dispatch boat off."

"Excellent!" Jourdain actually rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. "In that case, Citizen Commander, I think it's time we went looking for these people, don't you?"

"I do, indeed, Sir," Caslet said, and smiled. When Jourdain had first come aboard, Caslet would have wagered five years' pay that he would never be more than a pain in the a.s.s. Now Caslet was only too well aware how fortunate he'd been, and his smile turned genuinely warm for a moment. Then he shook himself and looked at his astrogator.

"All right, Simon. Let's do it."

Harold Sukowski dropped into the chair beside Chris Hurlman's bed and smiled at her. It was easier than it had been, for she no longer looked like a trapped animal. Dr. Jankowski had kept a close eye on Chris, but the surgeon had decided to leave counseling for later and restricted herself to cleaning her up and treating her physical injuries. The fact that Jankowski was a woman had helped, no doubt, but Sukowski suspected it was the sense of safety which had made the real difference. For the first time since Bonaventure's capture, Chris felt genuinely safe, among people who not only didn't threaten her or her skipper but actually wished them well.

The first day or two had been little more than waiting. He'd sat beside her bed virtually every waking hour, and Chris had only lain there, staring at the deckhead. The hysterics hadn't started until the third day, and they'd been mercifully brief. Now she had her good days and her bad ones, but this seemed to be one of the former, and she managed an answering smile as he sat down beside her. It was only a shadow of her previous, infectious grin, and his heart ached at the courage it must take to project even that lopsided effort, but he only patted her hand gently.

"Looks like they do pretty good work here," he observed in a deliberately light tone. Her smile wavered but didn't disappear, and she cleared her throat.

"Yeah," she husked. Her voice sounded rusty and broken, but his aching heart leapt as she spoke, for she hadn't said a single word during their nightmare stay aboard the "privateer." "Maybe I should've obeyed orders," she rasped, and a single tear trickled down her cheek.

"You should've," he agreed, reaching out to wipe the tear with a gentle finger, "but if you had, I'd be dead. Under the circ.u.mstances, I've decided not to write you up for mutiny."

"Gee, thanks," she managed, and her shoulders shook with a chuckle that was next door to a sob. She closed both eyes, then licked her lips. "They going to dump us in a POW camp?"

"Nope. They say they'll send us home as soon as they can." Chris turned her head on the pillow, both eyes popping open in disbelief, and Sukowski shrugged. "n.o.body's said so, but they've got to be out here to raid our commerce. That's going to give them a heap of merchant s.p.a.cer POWs. Sooner or later, they'll have to admit they've got them, and the civilian prisoner exchange conventions are pretty straightforward."

"As long as they bother to take prisoners," Chris muttered, and Sukowski shook his head.

"I'm no fonder of the Peep government than the next man, but these people seem pretty decent. They've certainly taken good care of us"-he meant "you," and she nodded in agreement-"and they seem as determined to get the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who hit us as any of our skippers could be. I've had a chance to look at their visual records from another ship the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. .h.i.t, and I think I understand why they're so hot to get them," he added with a slight shiver, then shrugged again. "Anyway, that's what they're doing right this minute, and that suggests they intend to follow the rules where civilians are concerned."

"Maybe," Chris said dubiously, and Sukowski squeezed the hand he still held. He couldn't blame her for antic.i.p.ating the worst-not after what she'd been through-yet he was convinced she was doing Caslet and Jourdain a disservice.

"I think-" he began, but he never finished the sentence, for it was chopped off by the sudden howl of Vaubon's GQ alarm.

"Talk to me, Shannon!" Caslet said urgently while he watched the ugly picture developing on his plot. A whale-like merchantman wallowed desperately through s.p.a.ce on a vector roughly convergent with Vaubon's own while no less than three smaller barracudas raced after it. They were all inside Foraker's radar envelope-or would have been, if she'd been able to go active without blowing their "merchantman" disguise, and their impeller signatures burned clear and sharp in the display on vectors which could mean only one thing.

"Just a-" Foraker chopped off in mid-word. She bent over her readouts, fingers stroking her console like a lover as she worked the contacts, then straightened.

"It's our boys, Skip," she said flatly. "Looks like two a bit smaller than the one we already killed and a third a bit bigger-maybe our size. Hard to say from here without going active, but we're catching some scatter off the merchie, and the radar's right. I'd say it's them . . . and from their maneuvers, they're definitely pirates. Only one hitch, Sir." She turned her chair to look at him, and her smile was grim. "That's a Manty they're chasing."

"Oh, s.h.i.t." MacMurtree's whispered curse was almost a prayer, so soft only Caslet heard her, and his own face tightened. A Manty. Wonderful-just wonderful! The odds sucked to start with, and the "privateers'" intended victim had to be a Manticoran merchantman.

He turned his head and looked at Jourdain as the people's commissioner crossed the bridge to him. Jourdain's expression was as troubled as Caslet's own, and the older man leaned over to speak very quietly into the citizen commander's ear.

"What now?"

"Sir, I don't know," Caslet said simply, watching the doomed Manty continue to run at her best, feeble acceleration. The pirates were spread in a cone off her port quarter, on the far side of her base course from Vaubon, but they were closing quickly. They'd be into missile range within the next twelve minutes, and it was already impossible for the freighter to evade them.

Caslet bent and punched a query into his own plot, then frowned as the numbers flickered and the various vectors projected themselves across the display. If everyone maintained his or her current heading, the bad guys were going to overtake their prey less than a million kilometers in front of Vaubon, which was much too close for comfort. Worse, given the way their courses were folding together and allowing for the raiders' inevitable deceleration to board the freighter, they'd be moving no more than a few hundred KPS faster than Vaubon at intercept, which would extend the time on any engagement and make things even dicier.

"Are we taking any radar hits?" he asked.

"Negative, Skip. They seem to be concentrating on the Manty." Foraker sniffed in eloquent contempt for the privateers' sloppiness. "Of course, they must have us on gravitics, and they may just not see any reason to look closer our way," she allowed. "We've got them on pa.s.sive, after all. They're probably tracking us the same way, and we look like another merchie. Maybe they're even hoping we haven't seen them yet. If they are, they wouldn't want to knock on the hatch with their radar."

Caslet nodded and frowned down at the display. That freighter was an enemy vessel. Not a warship, no, but still under an enemy flag. And given his mission orders, that made it his duty to attack it. His superiors had certainly never contemplated a situation in which he might even consider rescuing it, but he knew too much about the psychopaths manning those raiders. Every instinct cried out to go to the Manty's a.s.sistance, yet the odds were daunting. He was prepared to back his people against anything in s.p.a.ce ton for ton-always allowing for the Manty tech advantage, he amended sourly-and he doubted the pirates had faced anyone who could shoot back since they set up as independents. More than that, his weapons were better than theirs . . . which made a nice change from being on the short end all the time. He was confident he could take the two smaller ships; it was the larger vessel that worried him. That, and the fact that if he engaged at all, he could be pretty sure someone up the line would want his head. But, d.a.m.n it, he couldn't just sit here and watch these barbarians murder another crew!

"I want to engage, Sir." He could hardly believe his own words, and he saw the shock in Jourdain's face as he listened to his own voice go on speaking in calm, level tones which must have belonged to someone else. "They're pirates, and they'll know that even if they take us out, we can hurt them badly first. If we come in openly, they'll probably break off."

"And if they don't?" Jourdain asked flatly.

"If they don't, they can take us if we get unlucky. But not until we hammer them so hard they won't be any threat to Citizen Admiral Giscard's operations. And if we don't intervene, they're going to do to this ship exactly what they did to Captain Sukowski and Commander Hurlman-or to Erewhon's crew."

"But it's a Manticoran vessel," Jourdain pointed out quietly. "We're out here to raid their commerce ourselves."

"Well," Caslet felt himself smile, "in that case, we'll have to convince these other people to let us have her, won't we?" Jourdain blinked at him, and Caslet shrugged. "It'll be a bit hard on her crew if we 'rescue' them and then take their ship ourselves, Citizen Commissioner, but once they've had a chance to talk it over with Captain Sukowski, I think they'll agree they're better off with us than with Warnecke's people. And, as you say, we are supposed to capture any Manty merchie we run into. It says so right in our orders."

"Somehow," Jourdain said in bone-dry tones, "I doubt the people who drafted those orders expected us to engage pirates at three-to-one odds first."