Honor Among Enemies

of the exec's pickup, looking over her shoulder at Caslet. MacMurtree glanced back at the newcomer, but her face showed no concern, despite the fact that many a people's commissioner considered 'Skipper' or 'Skip' almost as 'disloyally elitist' as daring to call anyone but another commissioner 'Sir.'

'How far back?'

'Right on nineteen million klicks, Skip. Call it a tad over one light-minute. We're not getting any active...' She broke off and looked away from her pickup. Caslet heard Shannon Foraker's voice, and then MacMurtree looked back out of the display with a chilling smile. 'Tactical just confirmed it, Skipper. Active light-speed emissions are coming in now, and they match our boy's signature across the board.'

'And he's definitely coming after us?'

'Absolutely. We're the only other people out here, and he just lit off his drive two minutes ago,' the exec confirmed, and Caslet gave her an equally icy smile.

'I'll be up immediately. You and Shannon know what to do till I get there.'

'Aye, Skipper. We'll play fat, dumb, and happy.'

'Good.' Caslet nodded, killed the circuit, and crossed to his suit locker. One of the many privileges the Republic's officer corps had been required to give up under the new regime was its stewards, but that had never bothered Caslet particularly, and it certainly didn't bother him now. He made a quick visual inspection of his skinsuit telltales before he dragged it out, yet his mind wasn't truly on them. For all the assurance he'd projected for Jourdain's benefit, the chance of finding a single, specific raider was always slim. Now he'd pulled it off, and he wondered if he could manage the next step on his agenda. According to the sensor logs they'd pulled from Erewhon's computers, the raider was much lighter than Vaubon, and Caslet seriously doubted any batch of pirates could match the efficiency of his well-drilled, veteran crew. He had no doubt that he could destroy these people, but what he really wanted was to capture their ship, and its computers, reasonably intact, and that promised to be considerably more difficult.

He climbed into the suit, suppressing a familiar wince as he made the plumbing connections, and sealed it. He wanted that ship, and he was prepared to run a certain degree of risk to capture it, but he was not prepared to endanger his own people. If it looked problematical, he was perfectly willing to settle for blowing it away. Indeed, a part of him wanted to do just that, and he bared his teeth as he picked up his helmet and headed for the hatch.

'Looks like we've got him suckered, for now, at least,' MacMurtree greeted Caslet as he stepped onto the command deck. She gestured at the main plot and followed him across to it. 'He's coming in from almost directly astern, one-seven-seven, but he's high, so all he can see is our roof. No way he can get any kind of radar return or optical on us.'

'Good.' Caslet handed his helmet to a yeoman, who racked it on his command chairs arm for him, and stood gazing into the plot. The raider had closed to just over eighteen and a half million kilometers, and it was accelerating at almost five hundred gravities. Vaubon’s current velocity was 13,800 KPS, and she was accelerating towards the F6 sun called Sharon's Star at a hundred and two gravities, but the raider was already up to 15,230 KPS, an overtake of over fourteen hundred kilometers per second. Caslet considered the vector projections for a moment, then looked at Citizen Lieutenant Simon Houghton. 'Time to intercept?'

'At present accelerations, call it forty-five minutes,' the astrogator replied, 'but his overtake would be over twelve thousand KPS.'

'Understood.' Caslet studied the plot a few seconds longer, then walked to his command chair. Jourdain already sat in the matching chair next to it and raised his eyebrows as the citizen commander seated himself. 'You're confident these are the people you want, Citizen Commander?'

'If Shannon says it's them, then it's them, Sir. And so far, they seem to be doing exactly what we want. The problem is to keep them doing it.'

'And just how will you do that?' Jourdain's question could have been ironic, but it was honestly curious, and Caslet smiled briefly.

'None of their sensors can see through our wedge, Sir. At the moment, all they have to go on are its apparent strength and our active emissions, and Shannon and Engineering have gone to some pains to make both of them look like a merchantman's. We couldn't fool a regular warship for very long if it was suspicious, but these people expect to see a merchie. They should go right on assuming that's what we are until and unless we do something to change their minds or they get a look at our hull. Fortunately, they're well above us, which means they're headed directly towards the roof of our wedge right now. We can't count on that lasting all the way to intercept, but they should give us plenty of excuse to react before then. And if we time it right, the geometry when we finally decide to 'see' them and respond to the threat should keep them from seeing up the rear of our wedge.'

'So they won't get that look at our hull,' Jourdain said, nodding slowly, and Caslet nodded back.

'That's the idea, Citizen Commissioner. If this is their max acceleration, which seems likely, we've got about a ten-gee edge, but that's not enough unless we can get them in closer. At the moment, their overtake is still so low they could easily evade and get back across the hyper limit before we overhauled if we simply turned and went in pursuit. But if we act like a properly terrified freighter, they should keep coming in, and slowing to board or engage us, as well, until we've got them right where we want them.'

'And then we blow them out of space,' Jourdain said with undisguised satisfaction. The people's commissioner had spent hours reviewing Citizen Captain Branscombe’s visual records of the carnage aboard Erewhon, and he'd clearly overcome any lingering reservations about decreasing pressure on the Manties. It was one more indication that he had too much decency to make a proper spy for the Committee of Public Safety, but Caslet had no intention of complaining about that. Still, it was time to give Jourdain's thoughts a slightly different direction.

'And then we can blow them out of space, Sir,' he said. 'But satisfying as that would be, I'd rather take them more or less intact.'

'Intact?' Jourdain's eyebrows rose again. 'Surely that would be far more difficult!'

'Oh, it would, Sir. But if we can get our hands on their database, we'll be in a far better position to tell just how numerous this particular nest of vermin may be. With luck, we may even find enough data to ID some of their other ships if we stumble across them, or find out where they're based. Information is the second most deadly weapon known to man, Sir.'

'The second? And what, pray tell, is the first, Citizen Commander?'

'Surprise,' Caslet said softly, 'and we already have that one.'

The raider continued to close, and Vaubon let it come. The light cruiser forged steadily towards Sharon's Star, plodding along on a routine approach to turnover, and Caslet and Shannon Foraker watched the pirates sweep nearer and nearer. Thirty-four minutes ticked past, and the range fell to just over seven million kilometers.

The raider's overtake velocity was up to almost ten thousand kilometers per second, which seemed excessive to Caslet. Even at the low acceleration Vaubon had so far revealed, a sudden reversal of power on her part would force the raider to overrun her at a relative velocity of over six thousand KPS in fourteen and a half minutes. Assuming the 'freighter' survived the overrun, the raider would need another twenty- six minutes just to decelerate to zero relative to its target, by which time the range between them would have opened to nine and a half million kilometers once more, and the pirates would have to chase her down all over again. Of course, that would still be an ultimately losing game for the 'freighter,' given the higher acceleration the raider could pull, but a gutsy merchant skipper might go for it. Useless as it would probably prove in the long run, he might be able to spin things out long enough for someone else to turn up, and even in the Confederacy, it was possible that someone else might be a warship. The odds against any such happy outcome were literally astronomical, but the fact that the bad guys hadn't allowed for it was one more indication of professional sloppiness.

On the other hand, not even this bunch of yahoos were likely to keep pouring on the accel much longer, particularly since even a merchantman was bound to pick them up in the next million klicks or so. They'd be making their presence known pretty soon, and...

'Missile separation! I've got two birds, Skip, spreading out to port and starboard!'

'All right, Helm,' Caslet said calmly. 'You know what to do.'