The Service of the Sword

'Yes, Ma'am,' Petty Officer First Class Hoskins replied. She gestured at her maneuvering plot, which was currently configured to display the entire system. The small display was too tiny to show much detail on such a large scale, but it was more than enough to show Gauntlet's friendly green icon speeding rapidly away from the pinnace towards the two unknowns. ''Bout to get kind of lonely, Ma'am,' she observed.

'I think I feel sorrier for whoever that is, assuming they're bad guys, than I do for the Captain,' Abigail said, and realized she wasn't just preserving a confident front for Hoskins' benefit. 'But in the meantime, I suppose we should do what we were told. Let's turn it around, PO.'

'Yes, Ma'am. Should I head for Zion, or just for planetary orbit?'

'I think we'll want to stay away from Zion, whatever happens,' Abigail said slowly. 'For right now, plan on sliding us back into orbit when we reach the planet. We can always change our minds later, if we have to.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Hoskins said, and Abigail nodded and turned to make her way back to the passenger compartment.

Sergeant Gutierrez looked up alertly, and she parked herself back in her own chair, across the aisle from the Marine.

'Gauntlet has picked up a couple of unknown hyper footprints,' she told him. 'She's moving to investigate them now.'

'I see, Ma'am.' Gutierrez considered her with neutral eyes. 'And what about us, if I can ask?'

'The Captain wants us to head back towards Refuge. We can't match Gauntlet's acceleration rate, and he doesn't want to delay to pick us up.'

'I see,' Gutierrez repeated.

'He doesn't want us to involve the Refugians if anything . . . unexpected happens,' Abigail continued.

'Do we have some reason to expect that something will happen, Ma'am?'

'Not that I'm aware of, Sergeant,' Abigail replied. 'On the other hand, there are two of them. That we know of,' she added, and Gutierrez looked at her for a moment.

'Do you really think there could be more of them hiding out there, somewhere, Ma'am?' The sergeant's tone was respectful enough, but that didn't keep him from sounding just a little incredulous.

'I think that, as far as we know, the Alliance has the best sensor technology in space, Sergeant,' Abigail told him, keeping her own voice serene. 'I also think a star system represents a very large volume of very empty space, and we don't have a system-wide surveillance net in place. So while I don't necessarily think it's likely there are more of them around, I also don't think it's impossible. Which is why I'd like to be prepared for the possibility.'

'Yes, Ma'am.'

It was plain to Abigail that Gutierrez was humoring her, however respectfully he was doing it. Obviously, he was of the opinion that a midshipwoman who left her Marine bodyguards behind while she wandered off into the middle of an unknown settlement without a qualm and then worried about invisible bogeymen ambushing a Queen's ship had certain problems rationally ordering threat hierarchies. Not that he would ever dream of saying so, of course.

'What sort of preparations did you have in mind, Ma'am?' he asked after a brief pause.

'Well,' Abigail said in a thoughtfully serious tone, moved by a sudden visitation from the imp of the perverse, 'as I said, the Captain doesn't want us to involve the Refugians. So that seems to me to rule out a return to Zion. In fact, it would probably be a good idea for us to stay as far away from any of the Refugians' settlements as possible. After all, if there are other pirates in the system, they might decide to send one of their other ships after us, as well.'

Gutierrez didn't say a word, but Abigail found it difficult not to giggle at his expression. Clearly, he was becoming even more convinced the midshipwoman with whom he'd been saddled was a dip. Now she thought pirates confronted by a Royal Manticoran Navy heavy cruiser would worry about chasing down a single pinnace?It must have been all he could do to not shake his head in disbelief, she reflected, but she kept her own expression completely serious.

'PO Hoskins is a very good pilot,' she continued, 'but there's no way a pinnace could avoid a regular warship in space. So if someone does come after us, I'm going to have her set us down somewhere on the planet —preferably clear on the other side of it from the closest Refugian settlement. Of course, if they track us in, they'll be able to find the pinnace without too much difficulty, whatever we might do to conceal it. So, in a worst-case scenario like that, we'll have to abandon the pinnace and seek to evade any pursuers groundside until Gauntlet can return to pick us up.'

Gutierrez's eyes were almost bulging by now, and Abigail smiled at him with an expression of becoming earnestness.

'Bearing all of that in mind, Sergeant,' she told him, 'I think it would be a good idea for you to make a complete survey of the survival gear we have on board. Decide what would be useful to us and get it organized into man-portable packs in case we do have to abandon.'

Gutierrez hovered on the brink of protest, but he was a Marine. He couldn't quite bring himself to explain to Abigail that she was a lunatic, so instead he swallowed all of the many arguments which must have presented themselves to him and simply nodded.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. I'll . . . get right on it.'

'You know, Captain,' Commander Blumenthal said thoughtfully, 'these guys seem to have really good EW.'

'What d'you mean, Guns?' Captain Oversteegen asked, turning his command chair to gaze in Blumenthal's direction.

'It's really more of a feeling than anything else at this point,' Blumenthal said slowly. 'But I'm having a lot more trouble getting a lock on their emissions signatures than I ought to be.' He gestured at his display. 'The recon platforms are less than two million klicks out, and they still aren't getting as much as they ought to. If they were still under stealth, that would be one thing, but they aren't. Instead, they seem to be doing some sort of weird jingle-jangle on our drones' passives. I haven't seen anything quite like it before.'

Oversteegen frowned thoughtfully. The possibility that the newcomers might have a legitimate reason for visiting Tiberian had become increasingly less likely. Without the RMN's FTL com capability, there'd been an inevitable light-speed transmission delay of just over thirty-two minutes built into any challenge/response com loop. But they'd passed that point some time ago, and the fact that the unknowns had completely ignored all of Gauntlet's challenges and efforts to establish communications was certainly a bad sign. Unfortunately, neither the current RMN rules of engagement nor interstellar law gave him the right to preemptively attack someone simply because they refused to talk to him.

Normally, Oversteegen had no particular problem with that restriction. In this instance, however, he had quite a large problem with it. Although Gauntlet was only a heavy cruiser, without the magazine space or the launch tubes for the all-up multi-drive missiles which had given the Manticoran Alliance such a decisive advantage over the People's Navy during the final phases of the war, the missiles she did have were significantly longer ranged than those any other cruiser-sized vessel was likely to carry. But the unknowns were already inside his own theoretical envelope for a maximum-range engagement, and they were continuing to close. At the present rate of closure, in fact, he'd be inside their engagement range within less than another twelve minutes.

Which meant this was not a moment at which he wanted to discover that whoever they were had better hardware than they ought to have.

'We still don't have even a national ID, Sir,' the tactical officer continued, 'and I'm not happy about that.'

'It's not just a class we haven't seen before?' Oversteegen's voice was more that of a man thinking aloud than that of someone actually asking a question, but Blumenthal replied anyway.

'Definitely not, Sir. I cross-checked what we do have against everything in the database. Whoever these people are, we don't know them. Not, at least, based on the emissions we've been able to pick up so far, even with the Ghost Rider platforms. That's what worries me. We ought to be able to make some stab at IDing them, and we can't.'

Oversteegen nodded. The RMN's long-range, real-time reconnaissance drones gave it an enormous tactical