War Of Honor

think we've sat here in orbit for the last four days, piling up penalty fees for late delivery?' or 'What in the galaxy do you think is going on in your captain's putative mind?'

Bachfisch's lips hovered on the edge of a smile as the thought passed through his brain, but it was a fleeting one.

'One of them is staying exactly where she's been ever since we got here,' Gruber continued. 'But the other one is headed out-system.'

'She is, is she?' Bachfisch moved a bit closer to the exec and gazed down at the tac plot himself. The bright icon representing one of the Havenite tin cans was, indeed, headed for the hyper limit at a leisurely hundred gravities of acceleration. He watched it for a few seconds, then looked up and met Gruber's eye.

'I think it's time we were getting underway, Jinchu,' he said calmly. 'Take us out of orbit and put us on a heading of—' he glanced back down at the plot again '—one-zero-seven two-three-niner at one hundred gees.'

Gruber looked back at him for perhaps three seconds, then nodded.

'Yes, Sir,' he said, and turned from the tactical section towards the helmsman.

* * *

Bachfisch tipped back comfortably in his command chair, crossed his legs, and contemplated the spectacular beauty of the main visual display. Pirate's Bane rode the tangled force lines of a grav wave, sliding through hyper-space on the wings of her Warshawski sails. The huge disks of focused gravity stress radiated outward for the better part of three hundred kilometers at either end of her hull. They glowed and flickered with an ever shifting pattern of gorgeous radiance in an almost hypnotic rhythm which never ceased to amaze and humble him.

This time, however, his attention wasn't on the vision before him. It was on something else entirely, something he couldn't see at all . . . unless he looked back at his tactical repeater.

The Havenite destroyer loped steadily onward with the lean, greyhound grace of her breed, apparently oblivious to the cart horse of a freighter rumbling stolidly along behind her. It was unlikely that she was genuinely unaware of Pirate's Bane's presence. On the other hand, grav waves were the broad, gleaming highways of the ships which plied the depths of hyper-space. Given the sheer immensity of the universe, it was unusual for two ships not actively in company to find themselves within sensor range of one another even in a grav wave, but it was scarcely unheard of. After all, if two ships were headed in the same direction, they were bound to chart their courses to use the same grav waves. And some freighter skippers made it a point to ride the coattails of a transiting warship, whatever navy it belonged to, as a way to acquire a sort of jury-rigged escort through dangerous space.

If the destroyer had noticed Pirate's Bane behind her, she might be wondering where the freighter was bound. Which was fair enough, since Bachfisch was busy wondering where she might be bound. For that matter, he'd felt a lively curiosity about her and her sistership from the moment the Bane made port in the Horus System. Havenite warships had always been rare in Silesia. Most of those currently in the Confederacy, unfortunately, were crewed by fugitives who had turned to an unauthorized life of crime now that the officially approved brigandage which StateSec had waged against the People's Republic's own citizens had come to a screeching halt.

But those outlawed vessels wouldn't normally have been found in a system like Horus. Unlike altogether too many other star systems in the Saginaw Sector, Horus had that rarest of Silesian phenomena: an honest system governor. The sector had enjoyed more than its share (even for Silesia) of corrupt and venal sector governors, and the current holder of that office was no exception to the rule. But Horus had lucked out somehow in the man sent to administer its internal affairs. Pirates, smugglers, and slavers found a most unpleasant welcome in Governor Zelazney's jurisdiction. Besides, these two ships—obviously operating in company—were much too new to be pirates. Neither of them could have been more than one or two T-years old, at most, which meant they'd been launched and commissioned only after Thomas Theisman overthrew the Committee of Public Safety.

So what were a pair of brand spanking new destroyers of the Republican Navy doing in a parking orbit around the planet of Osiris?

Fortunately, Bachfisch had excellent contacts in Horus. None of them had been able to answer his question for him, but they'd been able to tell him that the Havenite tin cans had arrived less than three days before Pirate's Bane. And they'd also been able to point out to him that because of its reputation as a law-abiding star system, Horus was one of the handful of Confed systems which boasted a Havenite trade legation and diplomatic mission.

To Bachfisch's naturally suspicious mind, there had to be a connection between the existence of that diplomatic mission and the presence of the two destroyers. Given the fact that the destroyers in question seemed to be doing absolutely nothing beyond orbiting the planet, he'd come to the conclusion that he must be looking at some sort of communications rendezvous. But that raised another interesting question. Why in the world would the Republican Navy, which everyone knew was girding for a possible confrontation with the RMN closer to home, be wasting a pair of modern destroyers as courier vessels rather than using a normal, unarmed, and much cheaper dispatch boat?

He hadn't been able to come up with an answer for that question, but he'd had an unpleasant suspicion that if he had been able to, he wouldn't have liked the explanation. Still, that hadn't meant he wasn't determined to discover what was going on if he possibly could, which was why Pirate's Bane had diverted from her planned course and schedule.

Thomas Bachfisch was fully aware that Gruber wasn't the only member of Pirate's Bane's company who wondered what in hell their captain was playing at. All of them knew where the ship was supposed to be by now, just as they were aware of the astronomical late delivery penalties Bachfisch was busy piling up for himself. And most of them had to be at least a little leery of getting themselves involved with warships of foreign powers—especially of foreign powers so recently at war with their captain's birth nation.

Yet not a one of them had questioned him. They might not have a clue about what he was up to, but they were obviously prepared to go along with him even in the absence of any explanation.

He looked up as someone walked by his command chair. It was Gruber, and Bachfisch smiled and beckoned for his executive officer to step a little closer.

'Yes, Skipper?' Gruber said quietly.

'Where do you think this fellow is headed?' Bachfisch asked, waving a hand at the single icon glowing on the tactical repeater plot.

'I haven't got the faintest idea,' Gruber admitted. 'There are a lot of places he could be headed to out this way. The only problem is that I can't think of a single reason for a Peep to be going to any of them. Or not any reasons I'd like, anyway.'

'Um.' Bachfisch rubbed his chin for a few moments, then reached out and punched a command into the touchpad on the arm of his chair. The tactical repeater reconfigured to a navigational display, and he punched another key, shifting it from maneuvering to astrographic mode.

'Look here,' he invited, and his index finger tapped the bright green line of the Havenite destroyer's projected course. Gruber leaned over the plot, and Bachfisch tapped the course line again.

'You pointed out that there were a lot of places he could be headed,' the captain said. 'But he started changing course about an hour ago, and on his new heading, there don't seem to be any.'

'Skipper, he's got to be going somewhere,' Gruber objected.

'Oh, he's going somewhere, all right. Only I don't think it's to any of the settled systems out here.'

'What?' Gruber blinked, then looked up from the plot to meet his CO's eyes. 'Why not? And where do you think he's headed?'

'First,' Bachfisch said reasonably, 'like you, I can't think of a single reason for a Havenite warship to be headed for any of the inhabited systems out this way. Second, he's angling steadily across this grav wave, heading roughly southwest. If he maintains his present course, he's going to separate from the wave in the middle of nowhere, Jinchu. He's not headed to pick up another wave, and according to our charts, there's not an inhabited system within a good seven or eight light-years of where he'll leave this one. Which suggests to me that he's probably headed right about here.'

He tapped another light code on the display. It was the small red-orange starburst that indicated a K-class main sequence star, but it lacked the green circle which denoted an inhabited system, and no name appeared