by David Weber
"Thank you, Sir. I will," she said.
"And after you do that," Einarsson added grimly, "go back there and kick those people's a—butts up between their ears."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Lieutenant Abigail Hearns said, without even a trace of amusement for his self-correction. "I think you can count on that one."
* * *
Hawk-Papa Flight continued decelerating hard. The pinnaces' velocity fell by almost six kilometers per second every second, slowing their headlong plunge towards the Nuncio System's Oort Cloud and the endless interstellar deeps beyond. Their sensors continued to hold Bogey Three, and Abigail's grimly satisfied estimate that the freighter had been successfully lamed hardened into virtual certainty as the freighter's position and emissions signature alike remained unchanged.
"Excuse me, Ma'am."
She turned and looked at the midshipwoman in the pilot's seat. Ragnhild's expression was calm enough, but there was a shadow behind her blue eyes. Blue eyes which saw not merely her current mission commander or Hexapuma's JTO when they looked at Abigail, but also her officer candidate training officer—her teacher and mentor.
"Yes, Ragnhild?" Abigail's tone was calm, unruffled, and she returned her own gaze to the console before her.
"May I ask a question?"
"Of course."
"How many people do you think we just killed?" Ragnhild asked softly.
"I don't know," Abigail replied, infusing just a hint of cool consideration into her tone. "If there was a standard station-keeping watch in both compartments, there would have been two or three people in the hyper generator room, and four or five in the after impeller room. Call it eight." She turned and looked the younger woman levelly in the eye. "I don't imagine any of them survived."
She held the midshipwoman's gaze for a three-count, then returned her attention once more to her displays.
"It's possible the number's higher than that," she continued. "That estimate assumed a station-keeping watch, but they may've had full watches in both compartments, especially if they were at standby for a quick escape. In that case, you can double the number. At least."
Ragnhild said nothing more, and Abigail watched her unobtrusively from the corner of one eye. The midshipwoman looked unhappy, but not surprised. Sad, perhaps. Her expression, Abigail thought, was that of someone who had just realized that she'd come much more completely to grips with the possibility of her own death in combat than with the possibility that she might kill someone else. It was a moment Abigail herself remembered only too well, from a cold day on the planet Refuge, two T-years past. The moment she'd squeezed the trigger of a dead Marine's pulse rifle and seen not the sanitized electronic imagery of distant destruction but the spray patterns of blood from shredded human flesh and pulverized human bone.
But you were in command then, just like now, she reminded herself. And the people you killed were the ones who'd just killed one of your Marines . . . and fully intended to kill all of you. You had other responsibilities, other imperatives to concentrate on. Ragnhild doesn't—not right now, this instant, at least.
"However many we've already killed," she continued into the midshipwoman's silence, "it's less than are going to die aboard Bogey Three one way or the other before this thing's done." She turned her head to look at Ragnhild again. "If they're smart, they'll surrender and open their hatches the instant we get back. But even if they do, the odds are at least some of them—possibly all of them—will die anyway."
"But if they're Peep raiders, they're covered by the Deneb Accords!" Ragnhild protested.
"If they're Peeps operating under the legal orders of their own government, yes," Abigail agreed. "Personally, I think that's unlikely."
"You do . . . Ma'am?" Ragnhild was obviously surprised, and Abigail shrugged. "But the Captain's message said we have to assume they are," the midshipwoman protested diffidently.
"I realize the other two bogeys have been identified as Havenite designs, and I'm not saying I have any intention of ignoring the Captain's instructions and acting on the assumption that their crews aren't also Havenite. But neither of those ships is new-build, and we're an awful long way away from any star system in which the Republic would have any legitimate strategic interest."
Ragnhild looked as if she wanted to protest, and Abigail smiled slightly. No doubt the midshipwoman felt trapped between her Captain's apparent certainty and the skepticism of her own OCTO. Who, she was undoubtedly remembering at this particular moment, was a very junior officer, herself.
"I don't know which assumption Captain Terekhov is operating under, Ragnhild," she admitted. "He may not have come to an actual conclusion himself yet. Or he may have access to information to which I'm not privy that provides an additional reason to believe these are official Havenite commerce raiders. In either case, he's got a responsibility to bear even unlikely possibilities in mind.
"But I do remember the ONI reports I saw aboard Gauntlet on my own snotty cruise. One of the possibilities Captain Oversteegen had to consider was that the pirates we were looking for in Tiberian might be StateSec holdouts from the Saint-Just Regime who'd taken their ships and gone rogue when he got himself shot. Admittedly, Tiberian was a lot closer to the Republic than the Talbott Cluster is. But if I were the commander of a shipload of StateSec goons who'd refused to surrender, I'd have wanted to get as far away from Thomas Theisman and Eloise Pritchart as I possibly could. On balance, I think it's more likely we're looking at something like that than that Theisman would consider sending two obsolescent ships the next best thing to a thousand light-years from his main combat zone to harass us in an area the Star Kingdom hasn't even formally annexed yet."
Ragnhild's expression was suddenly much more thoughtful, and Abigail smiled again, a bit more broadly.
"I suppose that analysis could be the result of the fact that I'm a Grayson, not a Manticoran. I've noticed—no offense, -Midshipwoman—that you Manties think of the current government of the Republic, whoever it happens to be at the moment, as the font of all evil in the known universe. Not surprising, I suppose, given your experiences with them over the last, oh, sixty or seventy T-years.
"We Graysons, on the other hand, spent as long as your entire Star Kingdom's existed thinking that way about Masada. We're less fixated on governments and more fixated on ideologies, you might say—religious ones in our own case, of course. And we've seen more than enough evidence of displaced Masadans turning to freelance thuggery and atrocities and popping up in the most peculiar places after being run out of Endicott by the Occupation, like those so-called 'Defiant' fanatics who attacked Princess Ruth and Helen's sister in Erewhon last year. So, with all due respect, even if the Captain does think these are probably official Havenite naval units under officially sanctioned orders, I'm not so sure. And if they aren't," her smile disappeared, and her gray-blue eyes were suddenly very, very cold, "then the Deneb Accords don't come into it at all, do they?"
"No, Ma'am," Ragnhild said, slowly. "I don't suppose they do."
"In which case, and speaking as someone with more personal experience with pirates than I ever wanted to have," Abigail continued from behind those frozen eyes, "I would be extremely surprised if quite a few of the people aboard that freighter haven't thoroughly qualified themselves for the death penalty. In which case, that's precisely what they're going to receive, isn't it?"
"Yes, Ma'am," Ragnhild agreed soberly, and Abigail nodded in response and returned her attention to her instruments.
"May I ask another question, Ma'am?" Ragnhild said after a moment, and Abigail's chuckle dispelled some of her eyes' lingering chill.
"Ragnhild, you're on your middy cruise. You're expected to ask questions."
"Well, in that case, Ma'am, do you think Bogey Three got off a signal to Bogey One?"
"I don't know," Abigail admitted, "but the only reason I can think of for their not getting one off would be that we did enough collateral damage to take out their main communications array. That's distinct
ly possible, of course. Merchies don't have the communications redundancy of a warship, and all their command and control systems, including communications, are bunched a lot more tightly. I don't think we should go around counting on Divine Providence to have arranged that for us, though. The Tester probably wouldn't like it."
This time, her smile was actually a grin, although neither of them really found the probability that the freighter had sent a warning to her armed consorts especially amusing.
"No, Ma'am, I imagine not," Ragnhild replied, after a moment, with a smile of her own. She'd been a bit surprised, initially, by the fact that Lieutenant Hearns showed absolutely no inclination to proselytize for the Church of Humanity Unchained. But if the Lieutenant made no attempt to recruit active converts, she also made no effort to disguise her own religious beliefs—which appeared, truth to tell, to be far less rigid than Ragnhild had always assumed most Graysons' convictions must be—even surrounded by a secular lot of Manticorans.
"In any case," Abigail said, indicating the time display which showed just over sixteen minutes had passed since they began their deceleration, "we should be finding out just who these people really are for ourselves in another hundred and four minutes or so."
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Update the tactical log, if you please, Ms. Zilwicki," Commander FitzGerald said.
"Aye, aye, Sir," Helen acknowledged crisply.
Her hands flicked across her panel, entering the proper commands, even though she and the Exec both knew the AuxCon computers had already updated the tac log backups automatically, just as they did every five minutes whenever the ship was at General Quarters. Despite that, The Book called for a manual doublecheck every half-hour. The tactical logs were the detailed record of every sensor datum, every helm change, every order or computer input which affected Hexapuma's tactical stance in any way. On ships like Hexapuma, which boasted an Auxilliary Control position, they were maintained by AuxCon personnel in order to free the primary bridge personnel from that distraction. On ships without an AuxCon, their maintenance was overseen by the tactical officer's senior petty officer. Their purposes were manifold, but especially included analysis by BuWeaps and Operational Research, the Navy commands charged with evaluating and updating tactical doctrine. And, in the event that any court of inquiry was ever called, the logs would form the crucial body of evidence for all concerned. Which was why The Book was just a tad paranoid about making certain those logs were properly backed up.
And, in this case, she suspected FitzGerald also saw it as a way to keep at least one of his snotties' minds occupied doing something besides fretting. Which wasn't necessarily a bad idea.
In a way, Helen found her present assignment immensely satisfying. It wasn't often a mere midshipwoman was allowed to assume the position of a heavy cruiser's tactical officer, even if only as backup. For the next few heady minutes or hours, Auxiliary Control's entire tac section was hers—all hers. Well, hers and the Exec's. And, she conceded with just a hint of sourness, Paulo d'Arezzo's, too, if she counted the electronic warfare subsection. The keypads and computer links at her fingertips controlled all the sleek, deadly firepower of an Edward Saganami-class cruiser, and for the first time it was as if she could actually feel all that power, all that potential for maneuver and combat, as if it were an extension of her own muscles and nerves.
It was odd, really, she reflected. She'd participated in—and performed well in—training simulations in which she'd been the tactical officer of everything from a Shrike- or Ferret-class LAC to a Medusa-class pod superdreadnought. Others in which she'd been not the tactical officer, but the "Captain" herself. Many of those scenarios had been intensely, even terrifyingly, lifelike, and some had been conducted right here, aboard Hexapuma, using AuxCon as a simulator. And yet not one of them had given her the same sense of fusion with a warship's power as the one she found herself experiencing now, in the hushed, cool quiet of Hexapuma's fully manned Auxiliary Control.
Probably, because this time I know it really is real.
Which, she admitted to herself, was also why her satisfaction wasn't unalloyed. Because it was real . . . exactly as her responsibilities would be if anything happened to the bridge. And that was more than enough, however unlikely it might be, to send icy butterflies cavorting through the stomach of even the hardiest midshipwoman.
Unless, of course, the snotty in question is a complete and utter idiot. Which I hope I'm not . . . Daddy's occasional observations to the contrary notwithstanding.
"Ms. Zilwicki, I have something," Sensor Tech 1/c Marshall said quietly, and Helen turned towards the tracking rating responsible for monitoring the outermost shell of Hexapuma's remote sensor arrays. All of them were reporting only via relayed, light-speed channels to prevent the bogeys from realizing they were out there, so whatever was coming in was at least thirty minutes out of date, but naval personnel got used to skewed information loop timing.
Now a data code strobed brightly on Marshall's display. It hadn't been there a moment before, and even as the sensor tech tapped it with her fingertip, the single code turned into a spilling stream of data.
Helen leaned closer, and her eyes widened.
"Good work, Marshall," she said, and turned her chair to face FitzGerald. "Commander, we've just received confirmation that Lieutenant Hearns and Captain Einarsson have executed their attack on Bogey Three. The outer shell picked up their impeller signatures right on the projected time chop and detected at least two heavy bursts of laser fire approximately thirty seconds later. According to the emissions data Marshall is pulling in from the array, the pinnaces and the Nuncian LACs are all went to maximum decel approximately thirty seconds before the attack . . . and Bogey Three was still sitting exactly where she was after it."
"Very good, Ms. Zilwicki," Ansten FitzGerald replied. And it was very good, he reflected, watching the com display which tied him to the bridge. Marshall and Zilwicki had spotted, evaluated, and passed on the data a good ten seconds faster than CIC's highly trained and experienced personnel had managed to get the same information to Naomi Kaplan. And, almost equally as good, Zilwicki had seen to it both that he knew Marshall had brought the information to her attention and that Marshall knew Zilwicki had made certain he did. Of course, one reason they'd been quicker off the mark than CIC was that they hadn't wasted any time double-checking their information before reporting it to him. But it was still excellent work, and he was about to say something more to them when Captain Terekhov spoke over the AuxCon-to-Bridge com link.
"CIC reports that Lieutenant Hearns has executed her attack, Ansten."
"Yes, Sir." FitzGerald nodded to the visual pickup. "Ms. Zilwicki just brought that information to my attention."
"She did, eh?" Terekhov smiled. "It sounds as if you have a fairly competent team over there, XO."
"Oh, not too shabby, I suppose, Skipper," he said, glancing up to give Helen and Marshall a quick wink. Then he returned his full attention to Terekhov. "I don't suppose we have direct confirmation from Lieutenant Hearns, Sir?"
"No, but that's not surprising," Terekhov replied, and FitzGerald nodded. The question had been worth asking, but neither Abigail's pinnaces nor Einarsson's LAC could possibly have hit Hexapuma direct with a communications laser at that range—certainly not without Bogey One knowing they had. Still, she might have tried relaying through one of the other arrays.
"The sensor data was picked up by one of the epsilon arrays and relayed around the periphery to one of the delta arrays via grav-pulse," Terekhov continued, as if he'd read at least part of his XO's thoughts. "The delta array was far enough out on the flank to have a com laser transmission path to us that cleared the bogeys by a safe margin. All of which, by the way, means it took just over forty minutes for the information to reach us."
He looked expectantly at the exec, and FitzGerald nodded again.
"Which happens to be five minutes longer than it would've taken for a transmission direct from Bogey Three to
Bogey One," he said.
"Indeed it is. And Bogey One hasn't so much as blinked. So there's at least a chance Hearns managed to knock out Three's communications."
"Or just to do enough damage to knock them back temporarily, Skipper," FitzGerald pointed out. Terekhov grimaced, but he didn't disagree. Nor was his grimace aimed at FitzGerald; it was one of an executive officer's responsibilities to present every reasonable possible alternative analysis to his CO.
"At any rate," Terekhov continued, "they're continuing on, and if they keep it up for another forty minutes or so, they're ours."
"Yes, Sir." FitzGerald nodded again. Actually, the bogeys were already "theirs." Their overtake velocity was down to under sixteen thousand KPS, and the range was down to less than fifty-two light-seconds. Given that Hexapuma's maximum powered missile range from rest was over twenty-nine million kilometers and that the range was less than sixteen million, both those ships were already within her reach . . . and probably doomed, if Aivars Terekhov had been prepared to settle for simple outright destruction. Which, of course, he wasn't.
"I have to admit, Skipper," the exec said after a few seconds, "when you first came up with this idea, I had my doubts. Mind you, I couldn't think of anything better, given all the balls you had in the air. I was still afraid this one was tailor-made for Murphy, but it looks like you've outsmarted him this time."
"That remains to be seen," Terekhov cautioned, although an eager light flickered deep in his blue eyes. Then his expression sobered. "And whatever happens here, there's still a damned good chance we've already killed some of the good guys, if there were any left aboard Bogey Three."
"We probably have," FitzGerald agreed unflinchingly. "And if so, I'm sorry. But if I were a merchant spacer aboard that ship, Skipper, I'd damned sure want us to at least try to retake her, even if there was a chance I'd be killed!"