The Service of the Sword

weapons.'

'All the more reason to get this nailed down as quickly as possible,' Sandler said. 'Jack, did Arendscheldt Station send you a package while we were out?'

'Yes, Ma'am,' Damana said. 'I looked it over, and it looks like our next port of call will be Tyler's Star.'

'Timing?'

'Seventeen days,' Damana said. 'A little tight, but we should be able to get there in time for the necessary preparations.'

'Excuse me?' Cardones spoke up. 'Is there something here I'm missing?'

'Sorry,' Sandler apologized. 'I forget sometimes that we've got uninitiated company aboard. We've now learned all we can—or at least we will have learned all we can once we get a full system map drawn up—from looking at the aftermath of an attack. What we'd really like next would be to actually witness the weapon in action so that we can get some real-time data on it.'

'That would definitely be nice,' Cardones agreed. 'Are you telling me we have the raider's timetable?'

'In a sense, yes,' Sandler said. 'People tend to do things in patterns, though they're sometimes not even aware of it. It turns out that the ONI unit in our Arendscheldt consulate has a little computer program that tracks patterns like this.'

'With only seven data points?' Cardones asked, blinking with surprise. 'That's one amazing program.'

'We like it,' Sandler said dryly. 'At any rate, it says the best guess for the next target is Tyler's Star in seventeen days. So that's where we go.'

'Mm,' Cardones said, turning to Damana. This still sounded wrong, somehow, but he was hardly in a position to argue the point. 'And the preparations you mentioned?'

Damana smiled. 'You'll see,' he said. 'And as a tactical man, I think you're going to like it.'

'The last merchie just came out of hyper-space,' Lieutenant Joyce Metzinger reported from Fearless's com station. 'Reconfiguring her wedge now.'

'Group's forming up nicely,' Lieutenant Commander Andreas Venizelos added, peering at his monitors. 'Looks like we've got a clear run straight in to Zoraster.'

'Good,' Honor said, looking over the bank of monitors deployed around her command chair. The six ships were indeed shambling into their positions in the designated formation: five merchantmen, plus the heavy cruiser HMS Fearless.

Which was currently pretending very hard to be a sixth merchantman. Honor had ordered their impeller wedge set to low power, imitating that of a civilian ship, and they were running with the ID transponder of a Manticoran merchantman. To anyone out there with prying eyes, they should look like just another small herd of nervous sheep huddling together for mutual protection against the wolves prowling the starways.

The question now was whether or not there were any prying eyes out there. 'Commander Wallace?' she called, swiveling toward the tac station.

'Nothing, Ma'am,' Wallace reported, an edge of frustration lurking under the even tones of his voice. This was the third stop the convoy had made, and they had yet to see even an ordinary pirate, let alone their alleged Andermani raider.

Honor could understood Wallace's frustration, and could even sympathize with it. But if the fish weren't biting, the fish weren't biting, and there wasn't anything she could do about it. She swiveled back toward the helm display—

'We've got a wedge!' Wallace snapped suddenly. 'Coming up from standby; bearing one-one-eight by oh- one-five.'

'Confirmed,' Venizelos said. 'And he's definitely hauling—' he broke off, glancing at Wallace '—he's pulling some serious acceleration,' he said instead. 'I make it four hundred ten gees.'

Four hundred gees, with the slowest member of their convoy able to pull barely two hundred. 'I presume he's on an intercept course?' she asked.

'Yes, Ma'am,' Lieutenant Commander Stephen DuMorne called from the astrogator's station. 'Vector's firming up . . . okay. At present course and speed, he'll hit the edge of our missile envelope in seventeen minutes.'

Honor studied the plot DuMorne had sent over to her astrogation screen. The bogy was coming in hard, all right. But given the relative positions and vectors, he still had time to break off without engaging if he got spooked.

They would just have to make sure that didn't happen. 'Joyce, signal the other ships on whisker,' she ordered. 'Plan Alpha. Then sound battle stations.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' Metzinger said, and got busy at her board.

And now came the really crucial question. 'Mr. Wallace?' she asked.

The other was hunched stiffly over his board, and Honor found herself holding her breath. If they really had found their Andy raider, first time out of the box . . . 

But then Wallace straightened up, and even before he spoke she could tell from his body language that they'd come up empty. 'According to the Silesian emission spectrum,' he said, just slightly emphasizing the word Silesian, 'it looks like we've got something on the order of a small destroyer.'

'Convoy's breaking apart,' Venizelos reported. 'Alpha looks good.'

Honor nodded. Plan Alpha had been carefully tailored to give any approaching pirates the one thing that invariably spurred them to greater effort: signs of panic among their victims. The faster merchantmen were starting to pull away from the group, pushing their impellers and inertial compensators to the limit as if trying to beat the pirate to his planned intercept point. Running for it, and to hell with the slower and more vulnerable members of the convoy.

It was, unfortunately, an all-too-common response, despite the fact that it was ultimately self-destructive. Not only did splitting up ruin any chance for a convoy to use their wedges for mutual protection, but it also strung the ships out into a space-going shish kabob, presenting the raider with a series of bite-sized morsels from which he could choose whichever looked the tastiest.

And as the convoy reacted exactly as the pirate expected, the pirate now unknowingly returned the favor. His vector shifted slightly to try to outrun the lead merchies, and he pulled out another fifteen gees of acceleration he'd been holding in reserve. He smelled fresh blood, all right, and he was charging full-bore in for the kill.

Unfortunately for him, the whole thing was a fraud. Some of the merchies were indeed pulling ahead in response to Honor's order, but it was a carefully plotted and controlled maneuver, one that would let them drop back into their original formation with only a few minutes' notice.

'Update,' Venizelos called. 'Bogy will now hit the edge of our envelope in twelve minutes. Point of no escape in fourteen.'

'Chief Killian, ease us through the pack toward him,' Honor ordered the helmsman. 'Mr. Wallace, give me a targeting solution, but keep the active sensors off-line. All crews, stand by ECM and point defense, and be ready to bring the wedge to full strength.'

A watchful silence descended on Fearless's bridge. Honor listened to the quiet updates and watched as the red area on her tactical display shrank steadily toward nothingness. It was already nearly gone; and when it disappeared, so would any chance the pirate would have to evade contact. She checked her readiness status boards, feeling the usual slight pre-action quiver in her stomach and thankful she'd taken the precaution of putting Nimitz into his life-support pod in her quarters before they'd dropped out of hyper. With a pirate lurking this close to their exit point, she wouldn't have had time to run him down to her quarters by the time they'd spotted him.

Of course, James MacGuiness, her loyal steward, was perfectly capable of handling that job himself, and she could certainly have entrusted the 'cat to his care. But it was better all around that she'd been able to do it herself—

'Missile away!' Venizelos barked abruptly.

'Where?' Honor demanded, searching her displays. There it was, scorching away from the pirate.

'Well away forward,' Venizelos said. 'It's going to pass a hundred thousand kilometers in front of