Honor Among Enemies

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

'Call it eight minutes, Skip.'

'All right, people,' Warner Caslet decided. 'Lets do it.'

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

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

'What kind of change?' he snapped.

'It's, Oh, shit! It's not a merchie at all! It's a goddamned 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. Damned 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.'

'Shit!' Arner glowered at his display, and his mind whirred. His first assumption, 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 hell 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 damned 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 assuming 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 pissed 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 bastards, because we're about to rip you a brand new asshole!

'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 shit 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?'

'Damned 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 bastards, 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 bastard.'

Like the PN's smaller Breslau—class destroyers, the Conqueror—class 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 class'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