"Ask for a bigger budget," Pampas murmured.
A slightly strained chuckle ran around the table. BuWeaps' appetite for money was legendary. "Right," Swofford said. "I meant after that."
"Well, obviously, they'd start a crash research project," Jackson said. "They'd first try to figure out what this theoretical weapon had done, then how to reproduce the effect, then how to devise a counter against it, and then how to build one for ourselves."
"All the while draining money and manpower from every other project in the pipeline," Damana said, nodding slowly. "It does make a certain amount of lopsided sense, doesn't it?"
"Especially when the whole thing drags on without anyone able to even figure out how the thing works," Sandler said. "A nice piece of distraction, especially with us in the process of gearing up for a war with the Peeps."
"I don't know," Pampas said, gazing down at the table. "Sounds too complicated for a Peep operation, and I can't see who else would bother. I'm still not convinced there really isn't something new out there."
"Neither am I," Sandler assured him. "But at this point it's worth brainstorming all possibilities."
"Well, in that case, you might as well throw this one into the hopper, too," Hauptman said. "It occurs to me that, along with creating a distraction for BuWeaps, this could also push the government into leaning even harder on the Sollies."
"Wait a minute," Jackson frowned. "Where'd the Sollies come into this?"
"No, she's right," Damana agreed. "I mean, where else could this superweapon have come from?"
"And pushing the Sollies any harder than we already have over the leaks in their embargo might goad them into getting their backs up," Hauptman said. "Maybe to the point of scrapping it altogether."
"Boy, there's a thought," Pampas muttered. "A Peep navy armed with Solly weapons."
"All the more reason to get this nailed down as quickly as possible," Sandler said. "Jack, did Arendscheldt Station send you a package while we were out?"
"Yes, Ma'am," Damana said. "I looked it over, and it looks like our next port of call will be Tyler's Star."
"Timing?"
"Seventeen days," Damana said. "A little tight, but we should be able to get there in time for the necessary preparations."
"Excuse me?" Cardones spoke up. "Is there something here I'm missing?"
"Sorry," Sandler apologized. "I forget sometimes that we've got uninitiated company aboard. We've now learned all we can—or at least we will have learned all we can once we get a full system map drawn up—from looking at the aftermath of an attack. What we'd really like next would be to actually witness the weapon in action so that we can get some real-time data on it."
"That would definitely be nice," Cardones agreed. "Are you telling me we have the raider's timetable?"
"In a sense, yes," Sandler said. "People tend to do things in patterns, though they're sometimes not even aware of it. It turns out that the ONI unit in our Arendscheldt consulate has a little computer program that tracks patterns like this."
"With only seven data points?" Cardones asked, blinking with surprise. "That's one amazing program."
"We like it," Sandler said dryly. "At any rate, it says the best guess for the next target is Tyler's Star in seventeen days. So that's where we go."
"Mm," Cardones said, turning to Damana. This still sounded wrong, somehow, but he was hardly in a position to argue the point. "And the preparations you mentioned?"
Damana smiled. "You'll see," he said. "And as a tactical man, I think you're going to like it."
"The last merchie just came out of hyper-space," Lieutenant Joyce Metzinger reported from Fearless's com station. "Reconfiguring her wedge now."
"Group's forming up nicely," Lieutenant Commander Andreas Venizelos added, peering at his monitors. "Looks like we've got a clear run straight in to Zoraster."
"Good," Honor said, looking over the bank of monitors deployed around her command chair. The six ships were indeed shambling into their positions in the designated formation: five merchantmen, plus the heavy cruiser HMS Fearless.
Which was currently pretending very hard to be a sixth merchantman. Honor had ordered their impeller wedge set to low power, imitating that of a civilian ship, and they were running with the ID transponder of a Manticoran merchantman. To anyone out there with prying eyes, they should look like just another small herd of nervous sheep huddling together for mutual protection against the wolves prowling the starways.
The question now was whether or not there were any prying eyes out there. "Commander Wallace?" she called, swiveling toward the tac station.
"Nothing, Ma'am," Wallace reported, an edge of frustration lurking under the even tones of his voice. This was the third stop the convoy had made, and they had yet to see even an ordinary pirate, let alone their alleged Andermani raider.
Honor could understood Wallace's frustration, and could even sympathize with it. But if the fish weren't biting, the fish weren't biting, and there wasn't anything she could do about it. She swiveled back toward the helm display—
"We've got a wedge!" Wallace snapped suddenly. "Coming up from standby; bearing one-one-eight by oh-one-five."
"Confirmed," Venizelos said. "And he's definitely hauling—" he broke off, glancing at Wallace "—he's pulling some serious acceleration," he said instead. "I make it four hundred ten gees."
Four hundred gees, with the slowest member of their convoy able to pull barely two hundred. "I presume he's on an intercept course?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma'am," Lieutenant Commander Stephen DuMorne called from the astrogator's station. "Vector's firming up . . . okay. At present course and speed, he'll hit the edge of our missile envelope in seventeen minutes."
Honor studied the plot DuMorne had sent over to her astrogation screen. The bogy was coming in hard, all right. But given the relative positions and vectors, he still had time to break off without engaging if he got spooked.
They would just have to make sure that didn't happen. "Joyce, signal the other ships on whisker," she ordered. "Plan Alpha. Then sound battle stations."
"Yes, Ma'am," Metzinger said, and got busy at her board.
And now came the really crucial question. "Mr. Wallace?" she asked.
The other was hunched stiffly over his board, and Honor found herself holding her breath. If they really had found their Andy raider, first time out of the box . . .
But then Wallace straightened up, and even before he spoke she could tell from his body language that they'd come up empty. "According to the Silesian emission spectrum," he said, just slightly emphasizing the word Silesian, "it looks like we've got something on the order of a small destroyer."
"Convoy's breaking apart," Venizelos reported. "Alpha looks good."
Honor nodded. Plan Alpha had been carefully tailored to give any approaching pirates the one thing that invariably spurred them to greater effort: signs of panic among their victims. The faster merchantmen were starting to pull away from the group, pushing their impellers and inertial compensators to the limit as if trying to beat the pirate to his planned intercept point. Running for it, and to hell with the slower and more vulnerable members of the convoy.
It was, unfortunately, an all-too-common response, despite the fact that it was ultimately self-destructive. Not only did splitting up ruin any chance for a convoy to use their wedges for mutual protection, but it also strung the ships out into a space-going shish kabob, presenting the raider with a series of bite-sized morsels from which he could choose whichever looked the tastiest.
And as the convoy reacted exactly as the pirate expected, the pirate now unknowingly returned the favor. His vector shifted slightly to try to outrun the lead merchies, and he pulled out another fifteen gees of acceleration he'd been holding in reserve. He smelled fresh blood, all right, and he was charging full-bore in for the kill.
Unfortunately for him, the whole thing was a fraud. Some of the merchies were indeed pulling ahead in response to Honor's order, but
it was a carefully plotted and controlled maneuver, one that would let them drop back into their original formation with only a few minutes' notice.
"Update," Venizelos called. "Bogy will now hit the edge of our envelope in twelve minutes. Point of no escape in fourteen."
"Chief Killian, ease us through the pack toward him," Honor ordered the helmsman. "Mr. Wallace, give me a targeting solution, but keep the active sensors off-line. All crews, stand by ECM and point defense, and be ready to bring the wedge to full strength."
A watchful silence descended on Fearless's bridge. Honor listened to the quiet updates and watched as the red area on her tactical display shrank steadily toward nothingness. It was already nearly gone; and when it disappeared, so would any chance the pirate would have to evade contact. She checked her readiness status boards, feeling the usual slight pre-action quiver in her stomach and thankful she'd taken the precaution of putting Nimitz into his life-support pod in her quarters before they'd dropped out of hyper. With a pirate lurking this close to their exit point, she wouldn't have had time to run him down to her quarters by the time they'd spotted him.
Of course, James MacGuiness, her loyal steward, was perfectly capable of handling that job himself, and she could certainly have entrusted the 'cat to his care. But it was better all around that she'd been able to do it herself—
"Missile away!" Venizelos barked abruptly.
"Where?" Honor demanded, searching her displays. There it was, scorching away from the pirate.
"Well away forward," Venizelos said. "It's going to pass a hundred thousand kilometers in front of Flagstad's bow."
Honor felt her eyebrows lifting as she confirmed the missile's vector for herself. Most pirates didn't bother with anything as civilized as warning shots. "Are you getting anything from his ID transponder, Joyce?" she asked.
"Nothing useful," Metzinger said. "It reads out as the Locksley, with a Zoraster registry, but there's no ship of that name in our files." She paused for a moment, listening to her earbud. "He's calling on us to drop our wedges and prepare to be boarded," she added. "He claims to be with the Logan Freedom Fighters, and pledges we won't be harmed if we cooperate."
Venizelos snorted. "Cute. And, of course, your average merchie wouldn't know the Logan group doesn't operate in the Zoraster system."
"Actually, they may have just started," Wallace spoke up. "One of Logan's top lieutenants has been talking with the Zoraster Freemen about an alliance. They may have cut a deal."
"You're kidding," Venizelos said, frowning at him. "Where did you hear that?"
Wallace gave him a wry smile. "Try reading the ONI dispatches sometime," he said. "It's all in there."
Venizelos's mouth twitched. "I guess I'll have to start skimming them a little slower," he conceded. "I don't know, though. Boarding merchies sounds more like a pirate maneuver than something freedom fighters would do."
"Especially when their fight is supposed to be with the Silesian Navy, not Manticoran merchantmen," Honor agreed. "Joyce, has he given any explanation for his demand?"
"Yes, Ma'am," Metzinger said, her voice suddenly grim. "He says they're looking for a shipment of shredder pulser darts. Apparently there's a special order on its way to the Ellyna Valley government."
"Yuck," Venizelos muttered under his breath.
"Agreed," Honor said with a disgusted feeling of her own. Pulser darts were lethal enough without adding in the shredding capability that could take out whole clusters of people with a single shot. All civilized nations, including the Star Kingdom, had banned them long ago. So, for that matter, had the Silesian Confederacy, at least on paper.
Unfortunately, there were still people out there who had no qualms about using them, which was why there were still people out there manufacturing the damned things.
"Tell them we don't have anything like that aboard any of our ships," she instructed Metzinger.
"Yes, Ma'am." Metzinger turned back to her board.
"I guess you can't blame them for not wanting to end up on the receiving end of shredders," Venizelos commented.
"Next question being whether they plan to destroy them if they find them, or simply load 'em in their own guns," DuMorne pointed out.
"They'll destroy them," Wallace told him. "The Logan group has consistently denounced the use of street-sweeper weapons, and there's never been a report of their own people using them. Any deal they made with the Freemen would have required that same restraint."
"So what exactly is our official stance toward these people?" Venizelos asked. "The usual hands-off thing, unless and until they threaten our shipping, at which point we can slap them down as hard as we want?"
"Basically," Honor said, turning back to Metzinger. "Joyce?"
"He apologizes, but says they have to check for themselves, Ma'am," the com officer reported. "He again promises we won't be harmed unless we do something foolish."
"He's certainly a polite sort of fellow," Venizelos commented. "So how hard are we going to slap him, Skipper?"
Honor studied her displays. The Locksley was well within the no-escape area now, and apparently still unaware that he was facing anything other than six helpless merchantmen. At this point, Fearless could basically do whatever she wanted to him.
And yet . . .
"Mr. Wallace, do you happen to know how well-supplied Logan's group is?" she asked.
"I don't know the numbers, Ma'am," Wallace said slowly. "A little better than the average Silesian rebel, probably, but not that much better."
"Can they afford to throw away missiles just for the fun of it?" she asked, though she was pretty sure she knew the answer.
"Not a chance," Wallace said firmly. "Not even the relatively piddling one he tossed across our vector."
Honor nodded, her mind made up. The Locksley had spent a valuable missile trying to get the convoy to stop without any further fighting. That meant he was either exactly who he said he was, with the more or less peaceful intentions he claimed to have, or else a pirate with the kind of chutzpah even a politician might envy.
"All right," she said. "Joyce, get a camera ready on me. Andy, when I cue you, bring up the wedge and sidewalls and paint him with the active sensors."
She settled herself in her chair and made sure her uniform tunic was straight. This should prove interesting. "He's hailing again, Ma'am," Metzinger said.
Honor nodded. "Put him through."
The screen before her cleared, and the face of a young man appeared, his cheeks tired and sunken, his eyes blazing with the fire of zealots and True Believers everywhere. "—one last time, Manticoran ships," he was saying. "If you don't drop your wedges—"
He broke off abruptly, his bright eyes goggling as he belatedly recognized her uniform. "This is Captain Harrington of Her Majesty's Ship Fearless," Honor said calmly into the stunned silence coming from the com. "I'm sorry; I didn't catch that?"
And with her final word she flicked a finger at Venizelos.
All around her, the bridge displays altered as Fearless suddenly surged to full combat readiness. The young man on the com display jerked like he'd been stung, his eyes darting to his own off-camera monitors, and Honor could hear the faint sounds of gasped consternation coming from the command deck around him.
"I've made my half of the introductions," she prompted. "Your turn."
With what appeared to be a supreme effort of will, the man pulled his gaze back to the com screen. "My name is Iliescu," he said, his cheeks looking more sunken than ever. "I—all right, Captain, you've got us. What now?"
"You've threatened my convoy, Mr. Iliescu," Honor reminded him coolly. "Verbally, as well as by putting a missile into space against us."
She watched his face as he opened his mouth, probably to protest that that had been a warning shot. But he subsided with the words unsaid. She knew that, and he knew that she knew it.
"All of which means that I would be within my legal rights to blow you to scrap," she continued. "Or do you see it di
fferently?"
Iliescu took a deep breath. "I see that the use of shredder darts is an attack on all civilized human beings," he said. "I see that they're illegal, but that they're still being used by petty tyrants desperate to hold onto their power and their privileges. What would you do, Captain, if they were being used against your people?"
"We're not talking about me," Honor reminded him. "Do you have any evidence that there are Manticoran ships carrying these things?"
His lip twitched. "We don't know who's bringing them," he admitted. "All we know that they're supposed to be coming in soon, from a supplier on Creswell."
Honor nodded. Creswell had been the convoy's last port of call. So that was why Iliescu had been lying in wait in this particular spot. "So what are you planning to do? Stop every convoy coming from that direction until you find the shredders?"
Iliescu drew himself up. "If necessary," he said with stubborn dignity.
"All by yourself?"
"We have three other ships on loan from the Logan Freedom Fighters," he said. "We're running this in shifts."
"Who's your contact with Logan?"
The question seemed to take Iliescu off guard. "What?"
"I want the name of your contact," Honor repeated. "The one who negotiated the alliance with your Zoraster Freemen."
Iliescu's eyes were bulging again. "You're very well informed, Captain," he said. "I don't know if I should . . ."
"There's no deal possible unless you convince me, Mr. Iliescu," Honor warned quietly. "As far as I can tell from here, you could still just be another pirate with a gift for glib."
Iliescu swallowed hard. "His name is Bokusu. Simon Bokusu."
Honor glanced at Wallace, caught the other's fractional nod. "All right," she said, looking back at Iliescu. "Under the circumstances, I'm going to give you this one free pass. But from now on you leave Manticoran ships alone, or there will be trouble. Is that understood?"
"Understood," the other said. "What about the shredders?"
"None of the ships in my convoy are carrying them," Honor told him. "You have my word on that."