Honor Among Enemies

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 bastards 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 bastards hit, 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 anticipating 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 space 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 her '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 midword. 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 radars 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, shit.' 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 commanders 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 passive, 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 assistance, yet the odds were daunting. He was prepared to back his people against anything in space 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, damn 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.'

'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 passive, 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. 'Assuming 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.'