Changer of Worlds

kind of entertaining to watch the Captain and Commander Layson—not to mention Commander Hirake—kicking your poor, innocent butt in the simulator every day. Not, of course, that I would for one moment allow the fact that you systematically annihilated Nassios and me in that sim last week—or me and Basanta last Tuesday, now that I think about it—to affect my judgment in any way.”

“You are a vile and disgusting person,” Honor informed her, “and God will punish you for abusing me in this fashion when I am too weak and exhausted to properly defend myself.”

“Sure He will,” Audrey replied. “As soon as He stops laughing, anyway!”

Honor made a rude sound and then closed her eyes and buried her face in the pillow once more. She was relieved that Audrey and the other middies had decided to take her acting promotion without jealousy, but there was an unfortunate edge of accuracy to Audrey’s teasing. More than one edge, in fact.

Honor had been more than a little appalled when Commander Layson called her into his day cabin to inform her that the Captain had decided to elevate her to the position of acting assistant tactical officer. However good a tactician she might consider herself as a midshipwoman, and however exciting the notion of such a promotion might be, there was no way in the universe that she could consider herself ready to assume the duties of such a position. Nor had the Exec’s blunt explanation of the situation which had impelled Captain Bachfisch to elevate her to such heights done much for her ego. It wasn’t so much that Commander Layson had said anything at all unreasonable, as it was that his analysis had made it perfectly plain that the Captain had had no one else at all to put into the slot. If they had had anyone else, the Exec had made clear enough, then that someone else would undoubtedly have been chosen. But since Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington was all they had, she would have to do.

And just to see to it that she did, Commander Layson had informed her with an air of bland generosity, he, Commander Hirake, and the Captain himself would be only too happy to help her master her new duties.

She’d thanked him, of course. There was very little else that she could have done, whatever she’d sensed waiting in her future. Nor had her trepidation proved ill founded. None of them was quite as naturally fiendish as Captain Courvoisier, but Captain Courvoisier had been the head of the entire Saganami Island Tactical Department. He hadn’t begun to have the amount of time that Honor’s trio of new instructors had, and he’d certainly never been able to devote his entire attention to a single unfortunate victim at a time.

As Audrey had just suggested, Honor wasn’t used to losing in tactical exercises. In fact, she admitted to herself, she had become somewhat smugly accustomed to beating the stuffing out of other people, and the string of salutary drubbings the tactical trinity of HMS War Maiden had administered to her had been a chastening experience. Just as they had been intended to be. Nor had her lordly new elevation altered the fact that this remained her snotty cruise. When she took her tac watch on the bridge (although, thank God, no one was prepared to even suggest that she be given the bridge watch itself!) she was indeed the ship’s duty tactical officer. But when she was off watch, she was still Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington, and no one had seen fit to excuse her from all of the other “learning experiences” which had been the lot of RMN snotties since time out of mind.

All of which meant that she was running even harder now than she had during her final form at Saganami Island. Which seemed dreadfully unfair, given how much smaller a campus War Maiden was!

“You really are bushed, aren’t you?” Audrey asked after a moment, and the amusement in her voice had eased back a notch.

“No,” Honor said judiciously. “ ‘Bushed’ is far too pale and anemic a word for what I am.”

She was only half-joking, and it showed.

“Well, in that case, why don’t you just kick off your boots and stay where you are for a while?”

“No way,” Honor said, opening her eyes once more. “We’ve got quarters inspection in less than four hours!”

“So we do,” Audrey agreed. “But you and Nassios covered my posterior with Lieutenant Saunders on that charting problem yesterday, so I guess the three of us could let you get a few hours of shut-eye while we tidy up. It’s not like your locker’s a disaster area, you know.”

“But—” Honor began.

“Shut up and take your nap,” Audrey told her firmly, and Nimitz bleeked in soft but equally firm agreement from beside her head. Honor considered protesting further, but not for very long. She’d already argued long enough to satisfy the requirements of honor, and she was too darned exhausted to be any more noble than she absolutely had to.

“Thanks,” she said sleepily, and she was already asleep before Audrey could reply.

“There she is, Sir,” Commander Amami said. “Just as you expected.”

“There we think she is,” Anders Dunecki corrected meticulously. Whatever Bajkusa might have thought, the commodore was far from blind to Amami’s tendency to accept his own theories uncritically, and he made a conscious effort to keep that in mind at times like this. “She could still be a legitimate merchantman,” he added, and Amami rubbed gently at his lower lip in thought.

“She is on the right course for one of the Dillingham supply ships, Sir,” he conceded after a moment. “But according to our intelligence packet, there shouldn’t be another Dillingham ship in here for at least another month, and there really isn’t a lot of other shipping to the system these days.”

“True,” Dunecki agreed. “But the flip side of that argument is that if there isn’t much other shipping in the first place, then the odds are greater that any additional merchies that come calling are going to slip through without our intelligence people warning us they’re on their way.”

“Point taken, Sir,” Amami acknowledged. “So how do you want to handle this?”

“Exactly as we planned from the beginning,” Dunecki said. “I pointed out that this could be a merchantman, not that I really believed that it was one. And it doesn’t matter if it is, after all. If we treat it as a Confed cruiser from the outset, then all we’ll really do if it turns out to be a merchie is to waste a little caution on it. But if it turns out to be a cruiser and we assume otherwise, the surprise would be on the other foot. So we’ll just close in on the contact all fat and happy—and dumb. We won’t suspect a thing until it’s got us exactly where it wants us.”

He looked up from his plot to meet Amami’s eyes, and their thin, shark-like smiles were in perfect agreement.

“The contact is still closing, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Hirake reported from the com screen at Captain Bachfisch’s elbow.

War Maiden’s senior tactical officer was once again in Auxiliary Control with Commander Layson, but Honor was on the command deck. She would have liked to think that she was there while the lieutenant commander was in AuxCon because the Captain had so much faith in her abilities. Unfortunately, she knew it was exactly the other way around. He wanted her under his own eye, and if something happened to the bridge, he wanted to be sure that Layson would have the more experienced tactical officer to back him up.

“I noticed that myself,” Bachfisch replied to Hirake with a small smile. “May I assume that your latest report is a tactful effort to draw to my attention the fact that the contact seems to be an awfully large and powerful ‘pirate’?”

“Something of the sort, Sir,” Hirake said with an answering smile, but there was a hint of genuine concern in her expression. “According to CIC, she outmasses us by at least sixty thousand tons.”

“So she does,” Bachfisch agreed. “But she obviously doesn’t know that we aren’t just another freighter waiting for her to snap us up. Besides, if she were a Peep or an Andy, I’d be worried by her tonnage advantage. But no regular man-of-war would be closing in on a merchie this way, so that means whoever we have out there is a raider. That makes her either a straight pirate or a privateer, and neither of them is likely to have a crew that can match our people. Don’t worry, Janice. I won’t get cocky or take anything for granted, but I’m not scared of anything short of an Andy that size—certainly not of anything armed with the kind of crap available from the tech base here in the Confederacy! Anyway, pirates and privateers are what we’re out here to deal with, so let’s be about it.”

“As you say, Sir,” Hirake replied, and Honor hid a smile as she gazed down at her own plot. The lieutenant