"Then they should have said so, Sir." Caslet felt his smile grow even broader, felt the reckless surge of adrenaline, and raised one hand in a palm-up gesture. "Given what they did tell us, I don't see that we have an option. Our orders aren't discretionary, after all."

"They'll hang us both out to dry if you lose your ship, Citizen Commander."

"If we lose the ship, that will be the least of our worries, Sir. On the other hand, if we pull it off, I think Citizen Admiral Giscard and Citizen Commissioner Pritchart will turn a blind eye to any, ah, irregularities in our actions. Success, after all, is still the best justification."

"You're out of your mind," Jourdain said conversationally, then shrugged. "Still, I suppose we might as well be hung for sheep."

"Thank you, Sir," Caslet said quietly, and looked at MacMurtree and Foraker. "All right, people, let's do this smart. Deploy an EW drone, Shannon. Slave it to follow us in about a hundred thousand klicks back and set it to radiate another light cruiser signature. If they're only tracking us on pa.s.sive, they may figure our 'consort' was hiding her impellers in our shadow until we committed to the attack run."

"Aye, Skip," Foraker replied, and Caslet turned to his astrogator.

"Stand by to bring the wedge to full power, Simon, and plot a direct intercept. Then give me time and velocities at course merge."

"Aye, Skip." Lieutenant Houghton punched numbers that would alter Vaubon's course slightly and increase her acceleration radically, then studied his plot for a moment. "a.s.suming they don't break off, a direct intercept at max accel will cut their base course in eleven minutes and eighteen seconds. We'll come in on a converging vector, range a bit under seven hundred thousand klicks to the nearest bandit, with a relative velocity of plus one-five-niner-six KPS."

"How soon will we enter their missile envelope on that heading, Shannon?"

"Call it eight minutes, Skip."

"All right, people," Warner Caslet decided. "Let's do it."

"We've got a status change on Target Two!"

Commodore Jason Arner stiffened in his command chair on the light cruiser's bridge as his tac officer sang out.

"What kind of change?" he snapped.

"It's- Oh, s.h.i.t! It's not a merchie at all! It's a G.o.dd.a.m.ned light cruiser, and she's coming in full bore!"

"A cruiser?" Arner stabbed a glance at his plot. "Whose?" he demanded. "Is it a Manty?"

"I don't think so." The tac officer brought his active systems and computer support to bear, examining the oncoming ship closely, then shook his head. "Definitely not a Manty. And it's not Andy or Confed, either. d.a.m.ned if I know who it is, but she's coming in loaded for bear, and-" He paused, then spoke flatly. "I'm showing another cruiser astern of her."

"s.h.i.t!" Arner glowered at his display, and his mind whirred. His first a.s.sumption-that the cruiser was a Manty using the freighter ahead of him to suck in raiders-had just gone out the lock. But if the newcomers weren't Manties or Andies or Silesians, then who in h.e.l.l were they? Another pair of raiders? That happened from time to time, though rarely, but there were rules even for their profession, and poaching on another man's kill was against all of them.

"Where'd the second one come from?"

"I don't know," the tac officer replied frankly. "She's about a hundred-k klicks back, and I suppose she could have been hiding under her EW, but if she was, she's got d.a.m.ned good systems. I've been tracking Target Two on gravitics for over a half hour, and I never even got a sniff of another impeller source. Of course, if they worked it right, they could have kept Target Two between us and them. We wouldn't have been able to see her from here if they came in on exactly the right course."

"Or it might be a drone," Arner pointed out.

"It's possible. I just can't say from here."

"How long before you can confirm or deny?"

"Maybe six minutes."

"Can we still evade at that point if we have to?"

"Tight," the tac officer said. He worked at his console for a moment, then shrugged. "If we hang on that long then go to max accel on our best breakaway vector, they can bring us into missile range and keep us there for maybe twenty minutes, depending on their max accel, but they can't get into energy range unless we let them."

Arner grunted and rubbed his clean shaven chin. Unlike many of his fellows in the squadron, he remembered having been something approaching a regular naval officer, and he kept himself presentable. Some hapless merchant skippers had seen that presentability and hoped it meant they were dealing with a civilized individual. They'd been wrong, but for all his other faults, Jason Arner seldom panicked, and the instincts of the naval officer he'd almost been were at work now. If those were other raiders-or regular warships-and they kept coming, he'd have to fight them. On the other hand, he had three ships to their two, even a.s.suming they were both really ships at all, and his vessels were heavily armed for their tonnage. He was likely to take some nasty knocks, and Admiral Warnecke would be p.i.s.sed off about that, which was not a cheerful thing to contemplate. But if he took the newcomers as well as the merchantman, he'd not only collect whatever cargo his original victim was carrying but quite possibly add another cruiser to the fleet-maybe even two. That should be enough to keep the Admiral happy, given his plans to return eventually to the Chalice.

"Maintain your pursuit profile," he told his helmsman, and looked back at the tac officer. "Keep on that second ship. Let me know the instant you're certain either way."

"They're not breaking off, Skip," Foraker reported, and Caslet nodded. A small voice of sanity was screaming somewhere inside him, because despite all he'd said to Jourdain, he knew what he was about to do was incredibly stupid. For that matter, he was sure Jourdain knew that as well as he did. If he had to fight three-to-one odds, Vaubon would be hammered into a junk pile even if he won, and if he lost, every man and woman of his crew was probably going to die. Looked at from that perspective, there was no logic at all in risking everything to protect an enemy vessel, yet he knew he was going to do it anyway.

Why, he wondered. Because it was the job of a naval officer to protect civilians from murderers and rapists? Because he truly believed it was his duty to his own Navy? That reducing the odds Citizen Admiral Giscard might have to face was worth it? Or was it his own insane gesture of defiance to the Committee of Public Safety? His own way of saying, just this once, "Look! I'm still an officer in a Navy whose honor means something, whatever you think"?

He didn't know, and it didn't matter. Whatever drove him, it drove the rest of his officers, as well. He could feel it in them-all of them, even Jourdain-and he smiled grimly at his plot.

Get ready, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, because we're about to rip you a brand new a.s.shole!

"The trailer's a drone," the tac officer said flatly. "Has to be. My radar return from it is lots stronger than from the leader-either it's augmenting its image, or its tac officer just doesn't give a s.h.i.t how good a lockup I can get for Missile Control."

"Is it, now?" Arner murmured with a wicked smile. The merchantman which had served as the unwitting trigger to the confrontation continued to plug desperately along, but his own ships were decelerating now to match velocity with it. Not that anyone was paying it much heed. The oncoming stranger was hopelessly outgunned, but he was armed. That made him the focus of attention. Besides, there'd be plenty of time to scoop up the merchie later.

"You know," the tac officer said slowly, "I think this bird might just be a Peep."

"A Peep?" Arner's tone was an objection. "What would a Peep be doing out here?"

"d.a.m.ned if I know, but it's not anybody else I can recognize, and I don't think another raider would want to take on all three of us. Besides, most of us don't waste tonnage on EW drones." The tac officer shook his head. "Nope. This is the kind of boneheaded thing a regular Navy officer might try. You know-honor of the Fleet, and all."

"Then we'll just have to show him the error of his ways," Arner said with an evil laugh.

"Entering missile envelope in one minute, Skip," Foraker said tensely. "They're hitting us hard with radar and lidar, but I think they're pretty much ignoring the drone. Doesn't look like they bought it."

"Understood." Caslet locked his shock frame, and a corner of his eye saw the rest of his bridge crew doing the same. He'd never had a lot of hope the drone would fool the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, he thought distantly, but it had been worth a shot.

He studied the enemy's formation intently, and his upper lip curled. They'd closed up some and turned away a bit, slowing his relative approach speed, but one of their smaller ships was a good half million klicks closer to Vaubon than either of her consorts. At their present rate of closure, that would put it inside his powered missile envelope six minutes before its friends could return the favor, and it was about time to start evening the odds.

"Take the near one, Shannon," he said coldly. "Hammer the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Like the PN's smaller Breslau-cla.s.s destroyers, the Conqueror-cla.s.s light cruisers were missile-heavy. They were also twenty thousand tons heavier than the RMN's Apollos, with a broadside of nine tubes to the Manticoran cla.s.s's six. Against an Apollo, Vaubon's throw weight advantage was canceled out by Manticore's superior missiles, EW, and point defense, but her birds were better than those the raiders carried, and Citizen Commander Caslet and Shannon Foraker had spent hours discussing the best way to use them even against Manties.

Vaubon came tearing down on her enemies spinning on her central axis like a dervish. The pirates might be forgiven for a.s.suming that was simply a move to gain maximum cover from the roof and floor of her wedge, but it wasn't-as they discovered when Foraker pressed her firing key. Nine missiles spat from her port tubes, but their drives were set for delayed activation. They coasted outward at the velocity imparted by their tubes' ma.s.s drivers, and then the cruiser's starboard broadside rolled onto the target bearing and fired. It was a complicated evolution, but Foraker had worked it out to perfection, and her careful orders to the first broadside's drives sent all eighteen missiles shrieking down on her target in a single, finely coordinated salvo.

The pirate destroyer had never expected that much fire. Counter missiles raced to meet it, but she didn't have enough missiles-or time-to stop all of them, and five laser heads broke through to attack range. They came in on individual runs, slashing down on her while she rolled frantically to interpose her wedge, and three of them reached attack position. Bomb-pumped x-ray lasers clawed at her sidewalls, and the ship lurched and bucked as they tore into her unarmored hull. Air and debris belched into s.p.a.ce, and Warner Caslet's eyes blazed.

"Close us up! Close us up!" Arner shouted. G.o.d! Where did a single CL get that kind of firepower? He glared at his readouts, pounding on one arm of his command chair, and snarled as Tactical gave him the answer. No wonder the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was spinning that way! But it wouldn't help the son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h in energy combat.

The follow up broadsides were already in s.p.a.ce, tearing down on the isolated raider even as Vaubon's own counter missiles and laser cl.u.s.ters disposed of the incoming fire. The Silesian Navy was a second-rate fleet, and the Chalice's "revolutionary government" had used its ships for models. The raider destroyer had a heavy energy armament for her size, but she mounted only four missile tubes in her broadside, and her point defense was grossly sub-par. She lurched again as two more warheads from the second double broadside gouged at her, her impeller wedge fluctuated as drive nodes were wiped away, and shattered hull plating trailed in her wake as she accelerated frantically towards the support of her consorts.

But she'd left it too late, Caslet gloated. He'd take his lumps from the other two, but this b.a.s.t.a.r.d wouldn't be around by then. Or if she was, she wasn't going to be good for much.

"Entering the envelope for the rest of them in three minutes, Skip," Foraker warned, and he nodded as yet another salvo of laser heads slashed at his victim. This time they got something important, and her wedge dropped abruptly to half strength as her after ring went into shutdown. There were only two missiles in her next broadside, and her point defense was weaker, as well, and Caslet bared his teeth. Two more broadsides should settle her hash, and then it would be time for the main event.

He stole a glance at the merchantman and nodded. The merchie didn't know what the h.e.l.l was going on-perhaps she'd thought Vaubon was simply another pirate coming in to join the attack on her-but her skipper had done the smart thing. She was well within range of all the combatants, any one of which might suddenly decide to throw a missile or two her way, so she'd altered her heading by ninety degrees in the same plane and rolled up on her side, presenting only the belly of her wedge to the warships. It meant the range was closing even more quickly-she'd be in energy range, not just missile range, in a very few minutes on her present heading-but it was her only logical move, and Caslet spared a moment to pity her captain. Whoever won out here, his ship was still dead meat for the victor, and he wondered which side he was pulling for.

"In range!" the tac officer shouted, and Arner felt his ship buck as she threw her first broadside at the attacking light cruiser. His face was pale as he watched the missile traces speeding towards his opponent. One of his ships had already taken critical damage, and Vaubon's fire only seemed to be intensifying. But he still had twenty tubes to her eighteen, and she had to be weak in energy range to pack in that many launchers.

Caslet watched Shannon's fire slash at the incoming missiles. Point defense was doing well, but some of those birds were going to get through, and he gripped the arms of his command chair as Vaubon lurched to a direct hit. The laser blasted through her starboard sidewall and deep into her hull, shattering plating and blowing away one of her laser mounts, but her tubes were untouched, and they spat back in maximum rate fire.

One more broadside tore down on the destroyer she'd already mangled, but Shannon had switched to the raider CL without orders, and he nodded in approval. Besides, there was no more need to fire at Vaubon's first target. The last salvo took down her entire port sidewall, and then a secondary explosion-not her fusion bottle; the flash wasn't big enough-broke her back just forward of her aft impeller ring. She spun away, whipsawed wildly as her forward impellers ran wild before the fail-safes cut power, and he winced. If her compensator had gone with the explosion, that ma.s.sive surge of acceleration had just killed everyone aboard her forward hull.

But he didn't have time to worry about dead men; the living ones required his full attention, and Vaubon lurched again as another hit got through. And another. Gravitic One vanished into a chaos of smashed plating and bodies, and Missile Seven and Nine went with it. Another hit breached Number Three Magazine and took it out of the feed queue for her remaining launchers, yet another blew three beta nodes out of her forward ring, and she staggered again as the first shipboard laser smashed at her sidewall. Damage alarms screamed and her drive power dropped, but her own lasers were snarling back and she was getting good hits on the raider CL. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d's emissions signature flickered and danced as he took damage, and- "Jesus Christ!"

Foraker's shocked exclamation burned across the bridge like a buzz saw, and Caslet's mouth fell open as his plot suddenly changed. One instant, his ship was charging into the teeth of two opponents' fire; the next instant, there were no opponents. The warships' acceleration had carried them within less than three hundred thousand klicks of the Manty merchantman, which had suddenly rolled back down to present her own broadside to them. Eight incredibly powerful grasers smashed out from the "unarmed freighter" like the wrath of G.o.d, and the second raider destroyer simply vanished. A single pair of hits on the light cruiser burned through her sidewall as if it hadn't even existed, and her after third blew apart in a hurricane of splintered and vaporized plating. Three of Shannon's shipboard lasers added their own fury to her damage, chewing huge holes in what was left of her hull, but they were strictly an afterthought, for that ship was already a helpless hulk.

"We're being hailed, Skipper," Lieutenant Dutton said shakenly from Communications. Caslet just looked at him, unable to speak, then looked back down at his plot and swallowed as the unmistakable impeller signatures of a full dozen LACs drifted up from the "freighter's" gravitic shadow and locked their weapons on his ship.

"Speaker," he rasped.

"Unknown cruiser, this is Captain Honor Harrington of Her Majesty's Armed Merchant Cruiser Wayfarer," a soprano voice said quietly. "I appreciate your a.s.sistance, and I wish I could offer you the reward your gallantry deserves, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

Honor stood in the boat bay gallery and watched with mixed feelings as the pinnace docked. She'd spent two hours sucking the raiders into going after Wayfarer, and she'd been more than a little concerned over how to handle all three of them. She'd had the firepower to take them, but unless they'd come in ma.s.sed tight, at least one would have had an excellent chance to rip Wayfarer up before she or her LACs could nail him. Then a light cruiser-and a Peep, at that-had come tearing in out of nowhere to "rescue" her. Despite all the scenarios she and her tac people had gamed out, this one had never occurred to them, and she'd felt both dishonest and guilty as she let the Peep sail straight into her trap and take a hammering in the process. That skipper had lost some of his people-over fifty of them, if Susan Hibson's and Scotty Tremaine's initial reports were accurate-to save an enemy merchantman, and it seemed cruelly ungrateful to "reward" him by taking his ship away from him.

But she had no choice. The mere presence of a Peep CL in Silesia demanded investigation, and that ship was an enemy man of war. Yet she could at least do everything in her power to a.s.sist with the wounded it had taken in its uneven battle, and Angela Ryder, both her a.s.sistant surgeons, and a dozen sick berth attendants had gone over in the first pinnace.

Now Honor stood back as grim-faced SBAs swam the tube with the most critical of those wounded. Wayfarer's Marines were very much in evidence in the gallery, but they cleared a path to the lifts, and the SBAs charged down it with Lieutenant Holmes running at their head.

The rush of broken bodies continued for an agonizingly long time, and then Honor drew a deep breath as another group came down the tube. The man at their head wore a Peep skinsuit with a commander's insignia, and she stepped in front of him as he swung into Wayfarer's internal gravity.

"Captain," she said very quietly. The wiry, dark-haired man looked at her for a moment, face white, eyes still shocked, then saluted with painful precision.

"Warner Caslet, Citizen Commander, PNS Vaubon." He spoke in the mechanical tones of a nightmare. He cleared his throat, then gestured to the man and women behind him. "People's Commissioner Jourdain; Citizen Lieutenant Commander MacMurtree, my exec; and Citizen Lieutenant Commander Foraker, my tac officer," he said hoa.r.s.ely.

Honor nodded to each of the others in turn, then held out her hand to Caslet. He looked down at it for several seconds, then squared his shoulders and reached out to take it.

"Commander," she said in that same quiet voice while Nimitz sat very still on her shoulder, "I'm sorry. You showed both courage and compa.s.sion in aiding an enemy-flag vessel. The fact that you didn't know we were armed only makes your action in taking on such odds even more remarkable, and I truly believe you would have taken all three of them. I deeply regret the necessity of 'rewarding' you by taking your ship. You deserve better, and I wish I could give it to you. For what it's worth, I can only extend my own and my Queen's thanks."

Caslet's mouth twisted, and he bobbed his head. There was very little else he could do, and she felt his bitter sense of loss through Nimitz. There was a deep, searing anger in that loss-less at Honor than at the universe's ghastly practical joke-and there was also fear. That puzzled her for a moment, and then she kicked herself. Of course. He wasn't afraid of what she might do to him or his people; he was afraid of what his own government would do to them-or their families-and she felt a fresh, bitter anger of her own. This man had taken a dreadful chance to do the honorable thing, and she hated what it was going to cost him.

He stood a moment longer, then drew a deep breath.

"Thank you for your prompt medical a.s.sistance, Captain Harrington," he said. "My people-" His voice faded, and she nodded compa.s.sionately.

"We'll take care of them, Commander," she promised him. "I guarantee it."

"Thank you," he said again, and cleared his throat once more. "I don't know if you've been told, Captain, but we have two Manticoran nationals on board. We took them off another pirate, and they've had a pretty bad time."

"Manticorans?" Honor's eyebrows rose, and she started to ask more questions, then stopped. Caslet and his companions were on the ragged edge, and the least she could do was give them time to compose themselves. No doubt some hard-boiled ONI type would have argued that catching them while they were still in shock was the best way to get information out of them, but that was too bad. The war between the People's Republic and the Star Kingdom was an ugly one, yet Honor Harrington would treat these people with the respect their actions demanded.

"Commander Cardones, my exec," she said, gesturing Rafe forward, "will escort you to your quarters. I'll have your personal gear brought across as soon as possible so you can get out of those skinnies. We can talk later, over dinner."

"My people-" Caslet began, then stopped. They were no longer "his" people. They were POWs and her responsibility now, not his. But at least he'd already seen that their captors intended to treat them properly, and he nodded. Then he and his companions followed Cardones from the gallery while two Marines fell in behind, and Honor watched them go with a sad smile.

"What do we do with Vaubon?" Cardones asked. He and Honor stood on Wayfarer's bridge, gazing at the plot and wondering what the Schiller authorities made of it all. Even Silesian system surveillance sensors must have picked up the emissions of the short, savage battle, but no one was coming out to ask any questions. That might indicate the Schiller governor, like Hagen, had an "understanding" with the local raiders, but it might also be simple prudence, especially if they'd gotten good reads on the weapons employed. According to Honor's intelligence files, Schiller's heaviest unit was a corvette, and nothing that small would want to irritate anything which mounted a ship of the wall's grasers.

"I don't know," she said after a moment. Nimitz chittered softly from the back of her command chair, and she reached out to stroke him without taking her eyes from the plot.

Caslet had followed the proper protocols for surrendering his ship. If a captain had time, she was supposed to take her crew off in her own small craft, then fire her scuttling charges, but the rules of war established different standards if she found herself in a hopeless tactical position. The enemy was supposed to give her a chance to surrender, and she was supposed to take it rather than get her crew killed for nothing. There were, after all, few survivors from a ship destroyed by point-blank fire, and the quid pro quo for getting them off alive was that her ship, once surrendered, stayed surrendered as the intact prize of the victor.

But before her ship was boarded, she was also supposed to purge her computers and destroy cla.s.sified equipment, and Caslet had. No doubt ONI would still want to examine the ship in detail, and Honor's search parties would ransack her for any hardcopy doc.u.ments. Yet there would be precious little data to be recovered, and by now the RMN had taken enough Peep ships to be fully conversant with their technology. Honor expected no treasure trove from Vaubon, but she still had to decide what to do with her prize . . . and her prisoners.

"The most important thing," she said after a moment, as much to herself as to Cardones, "is to keep the Peeps from knowing we've got her. The loss numbers in Posnan probably explain what she's doing out here, but if she was part of a commerce-raiding operation, she wasn't alone. So the first thing is to make sure our people know about this before their people realize we do."

"Makes sense, Ma'am. But what about notifying the Peeps?"

"There's that," Honor agreed unhappily. The Deneb Accords required combatants to report the names of prisoners-and KIAs-to the other side, usually through the Solarian League, since it was almost always the most powerful neutral around. Though the Peeps were traditionally sloppy about that, the Star Kingdom wasn't, yet telling the Peeps Caslet and his people were prisoners would also tell them his ship had been taken.

"We can hold off for a while," she decided. "We're required to notify their government in 'a reasonable time period', not as soon as physically possible. Given our own operational security requirements, I'm going to interpret that a bit liberally." Cardones nodded, and she brooded down at the display for a few more moments, then nodded in decision.

"She's still hyper-capable, so we'll put a prize crew aboard-Lieutenant Reynolds can take command-and send her in to Gregor Station for return to Manticore. On the way, she can call at the Andy naval station in Sachsen and again at New Berlin. I think this is something we need to pa.s.s on to Herzog Rabenstrange, and we can ask our Sachsen amba.s.sador to relay the information to our stations in the Confederacy. We'll drop dispatches with our naval attache here in Schiller for the rest of the squadron as they rotate through, too. That's probably the fastest way to get the word out without blowing security."

"Yes, Ma'am. And the prisoners?"

"We don't have brig s.p.a.ce to hang onto them," Honor murmured, rubbing the tip of her nose, "and I'd like to get their wounded into a proper hospital as soon as possible. We owe them that." She scooped Nimitz off her chair and cradled him in her arms while she considered, then nodded once more. "Vaubon's sickbay is undamaged, and her life support's in good shape. We'll strip out the officers and send most of her enlisted personnel-and all the wounded-off in her, and I'll have Reynolds ask the IAN to take her casualties off in Sachsen."

Cardones nodded back. He understood the logic in stripping out Vaubon's officers; they were the ones most likely to instigate some effort to retake their ship during the voyage ahead. "I'll ask Major Hibson to detail a suitable security detachment," he remarked, and Honor nodded.