They had their dinner and five hours of sleep, with Cardones on the large and comfortable bed while Sandler took the far less comfortable couch. Cardones had felt more than a little guilty about that, but Sandler had insisted. He had countered by insisting—with all due respect to a superior officer, of course—that he take the first watch after that.

He was two hours into that watch when the sensor pod made its first contact.

It was definitely a merchantman, looking alone and vulnerable as she lumbered along, and Cardones keyed a query pulse from the sensor pod to check the ID transponder. It was the Harlequin, all right, dead on the timetable Sandler had given him. For a civilian ship to hold so tightly to schedule was almost unheard of. Either Sandler was an incredibly lucky guesser, or else the Harlequin's skipper was the most anal retentive in the merchant fleet. With a mental shake of his head, he began a systematic quartering of the sky for other impeller signatures. There shouldn't be any, he knew: the rest of the convoy would be well out of his detection range by now, and Shadow was supposed to be skulking along invisibly on full stealth well behind Harlequin's current position, her own impellers shut down to standby.

And then, almost before he'd begun his search, another signature blazed into existence. A powerful signature, too strong to be that of a merchie or system patrol craft. Almost certainly a warship.

And it was burning along at four hundred gravities on an intercept course with the Harlequin.

"Captain?" he called toward the bedroom where Sandler had relocated when he began his watch. He keyed the computer for analysis, belatedly realizing he should have done that before waking her up. If this was nothing but an extra Manticoran escort laid on at the last minute, he was going to look pretty silly.

Too late. "What have we got?" Sandler said, fastening her tunic as she stepped into the living room.

"The Harlequin and a bogey," Cardones reported. "It's running a Silesian ID—"

He broke off as the analyzer beeped its results. "But the emission spectrum makes it a Peep warship," he finished. "From the impeller strength, probably a battlecruiser."

"Got to be our raider," Sandler said grimly, dropping onto the couch beside him and snagging one of the keyboards. "And a Peep, yet. Imagine my surprise."

"Look's like Harlequin's come to the same conclusion," Cardones agreed as the merchie's vector and emission numbers suddenly changed. "She's making a run for it."

"Watch carefully, Rafe," Sandler said quietly. "Come on, Peep. Do your stuff . . ."

Abruptly, the bogey's impeller emissions began to fluctuate, bouncing wildly up and down and up again. Cardones opened his mouth to say something—

And without any other warning, the Harlequin's impellers suddenly died.

Cardones exhaled his intended warning in a huff of stunned air instead. "They did it," he murmured. "They really did it."

"They sure did," Sandler agreed, her voice somewhere midway between awed and horrified. "Damn and a half. They actually knocked out her wedge."

With an effort, Cardones shifted his eyes to one of the other displays. "And from nearly a million kilometers away."

Sandler muttered something under her breath. "I've been hoping we were wrong, Rafe," she said quietly. "Hoping we were misinterpreting the data, or that this was some elaborate disinformation scheme. But this—" She shook her head.

"Unless there's a saboteur aboard," Cardones suggested hesitantly. They still had that single thread to grasp at.

But Sandler shook her head. "No," she said firmly. "Not on that ship."

Cardones frowned sideways at her. There'd been something in her tone . . .

"Is there something else I should know about this?" he asked carefully.

Sandler's lips compressed into a tight line. "That's not just a regular merchantman out there, Rafe. She's a Royal Navy supply ship."

"Ah," Cardones said as the whole thing suddenly came together. No wonder Sandler had known where to wait for the Harlequin, and when to start watching for her. Regular merchantmen might not be able to hold to a schedule worth treecat-chewed celery, but RMN ships most certainly could. "Who are they supplying?"

"The research station, for one." She smiled tightly at his expression. "Oh, yes, it is a research station, and it is doing some studies of Tyler's Star. But we also have a presence aboard for some . . . other work."

The smile vanished. "But mostly, they were on their way to Telmach to resupply the Provisioner."

Cardones blinked. Provisioner was a depot ship, designed to be home away from home for far-flung RMN forces. What was she doing in Silesia?

And then the full import of it hit him. "They've got high-tech military equipment aboard," he breathed. "Sensor modules, ECM—even missiles?"

"No, no missiles," Sandler said. "And she shouldn't have much in the way of ECM, either. This one's mostly carrying non-classified stuff."

"'This one'?"

"There's another ship on its way," Sandler said, the words coming out with the reluctance of pulled teeth. "The Jansci. She's due here in four days to join the Dorado and Nightingale at Quarre. They'll meet a new escort there and head to Telmach by way of Walther." Her lips compressed again. "That's the ship loaded with sensitive equipment."

Cardones gazed at the displays. No wonder she'd been so reluctant to talk about this back aboard the Shadow. "And yet they knew right where to hit it," he said. "And they knew which ship of the convoy they wanted."

"Not necessarily," Sandler said. But the words were automatic, without any weight of conviction behind them. "It could have just been the luck of the draw."

The Peep warship had hit the midpoint of its vector and was starting its deceleration toward a zero-zero rendezvous with its helpless prey.

"Not a chance," Cardones declared. "They're getting information. They know exactly what they're doing."

He looked sharply at her as the last piece suddenly fell into place. "Just the way you do. This little hunch didn't fall out of some computer prediction program, did it? They knew what the Harlequin was carrying; and you knew that they knew it."

"Rafe—"

"There's a spy in the works somewhere," he cut her off. "ONI is feeding him all this information, letting him give it to the Peeps, all so we could get here ahead of time and be waiting for him."

"Get off the subject, Lieutenant," Sandler said, her voice soft but with a layer of warning laminated to it. "This is classified way over your head."

Cardones bit down hard against the retort trying to get out. "What about Harlequin's crew?" he asked instead. "Or are they part of the bait, too?"

"They're already out," Sandler assured him. "They would have had a pinnace waiting, just in case."

She lifted her eyebrows. "But even if they hadn't, we would have done it this way," she added coldly. "The only thing that matters is getting a handle on this weapon of theirs and figuring out how to counter it. To do that we need to see it work; and to do that we had no choice but to let them go into harm's way."

The corner of her lip twitched. "And really, is that so different from what you do in the regular Navy? You go into battle fully prepared to sacrifice some of your own. Certainly you know that a number of your screening destroyers and cruisers will die in order to take some of the heat off your ships of the wall."

Cardones looked away from her, wanting to argue the point but no longer certain he could. They did go into battle knowing some were going to die, after all. Was that really any different from what Sandler and ONI were doing here? He looked back at the displays, searching the universe for answers.

There weren't any. But because he happened to be looking at the displays, he saw something neither he nor Sandler had yet noticed.

The raider had spouted a dozen assault boats, as both of them had known it would. But only eight of the boats were converging on the Harlequin's paralyzed hulk.

The other four were headed straight toward the Sun Skater Resort.

 

"You had better be right about this, Captain," Dominick warned the image on his com screen. "We know Harlequin got a distress signal off, and we have a very limited number of minutes before the system forces respond."

"I am," Vaccares said confidently. As if, Dominick thought sourly, the thought of a third fewer boats available to collect Harlequin's booty didn't even bother him. "It was definitely a transponder query pulse; and it definitely came from the direction of that comet."

Dominick grimaced. But if Vaccares was right, there was indeed no choice. One of the mission's standing orders was that no one was to get a good look at the Crippler in action—or, at least, not to get that look and survive to tell the story—until Charles decided they were ready to take on all comers, Manty warships included.

And speaking of the devil— "I agree with Captain Vaccares," Charles spoke up. "A hidden query pulse may be accompanied by an equally hidden sensor array. If it is, you need to get rid of it before it can transfer data to anyone."

Dominick felt his lip twist. Personally, he didn't give a rat's backside anymore whether or not the Manties got to see their new toy in action. A healthy dose of panic would be good for the overconfident little royalists, in fact. All he could see was the four fewer boats' worth of top-grade Manty technology going into Vanguard's holds.

But the standing orders didn't care. "Fine," he growled. "Have them take a look. You sure you don't want to go along to supervise personally?"

"No, thank you, Commodore," Vaccares said, his voice grim. "If there's a Manty skulking by that comet, I want to be right here when he shows himself."

 

"No doubt about it," Sandler said tightly. "They're on their way. Must have spotted the pod."

"What do we do?" Cardones demanded, peering over the top of the displays at the window. Suddenly their spacious luxury suite was feeling downright claustrophobic.

As was the resort; and, for that matter, the whole damn comet. There were precious few places here to hide, and nowhere at all to run.

"First job is to get rid of the pod," Sandler said, crossing the room to an attaché case she'd earlier set unopened along the wall. "Maybe we can convince them that's all there is."

"Somehow, I doubt they'll be that gullible," Cardones said, watching in fascination as she settled the case on her lap and flipped it open. Inside was what looked like a miniature helm control board, complete with an attitude control stick and a set of compact display screens set into the lid.

"We'll see." Sandler flipped a pair of switches and the control board came to life, status lights starting to change from red to amber to green as the device ran its self-check. "Ever seen one of these before?"

"No," Cardones said. "I gather it's a remote control?"

"Best on the market," Sandler confirmed, settling her right hand into a grip on the stick and watching the last set of status lights with a patience Cardones could only envy. "Not that it's actually on the market, of course."

"Of course," Cardones said. "An ONI special, I presume?"

Sandler nodded. "We keep a couple aboard Shadow at all times," she said. "They're especially handy in that there's no hard-wiring needed. All you have to do is wrap the receiver pack around the control cables running between a ship's helm and auxiliary control and you're set."

"Really," Cardones said, looking at the case with new respect. "Even if someone else is trying to fly the ship at the time?"

"They're not quite that handy," Sandler said. "The induction signal's not nearly strong enough to override an actual control signal. At least," she added thoughtfully, "not yet. Maybe if you boosted the power enough you could even do that."

"All you'd have to do then would be find a way to smuggle a receiver pack and a spy aboard a Peep ship of the wall," Cardones said, trying to get into the spirit of the thing.

"You come up with the gadget and the technique and you'll retire rich," Sandler agreed. "Okay, here we go," she added as the last light turned green. "Cross your fingers."

She keyed the thrusters, and the relative-V numbers began to rise. Cardones shifted his gaze to the window, straining for a glimpse of the pod. It should be visible, he knew; the tail material wasn't all that dense.

There it was: a dark bubble in the tail, falling rapidly away from them. Sandler leaned the stick sideways, and the bubble moved left toward the edge of the tail—

And then, suddenly, the smooth stream of glowing gas was ripped apart as she kicked in the impellers. The pod darted away like a bat out of hell, turning straight into the sun and clawing for distance.

Two of the approaching boats responded immediately, breaking away from the others and charging off to the chase. "What are you going to do if they get close enough to grab it?" Cardones asked.

"They won't," Sandler said, concentrating on her controls. "I'll make sure to destroy it first."

"Okay," Cardones said slowly. "But won't that kind of ruin the illusion that there's a crew aboard?"

"They're not going to get hold of the pod intact," Sandler said tartly. "Other than that, I'm open to alternative suggestions. Here, make yourself useful."

She let go of the drive control long enough to dig a forceblade from her pocket and drop it into his lap. "Pull all the data chips from the recorders and put them in with the collection by the player over there."

"Right," Cardones said, standing up and slipping the forceblade into his own pocket.

"And then," Sandler added, "start cutting everything up."

Cardones froze in midstep. "You mean the recorders?"

"I mean everything." She glanced a thin smile up at him. "Yes, I know. Millions of dollars worth of equipment down the tubes." She nodded at the displays. "But two of those boats are still on the way, and I'm not expecting them to be satisfied with just looking in the windows. We're going to have company soon; and we'd better not have anything here the average honeymooning couple doesn't."

"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said, looking around the room. "Only, once we've shredded it all, how do we get rid of the pieces?"

"You'll see," Sandler said, her attention back on her controls again. "Get to work."

Manticoran law required a forceblade to emit a horrible, tooth-twisting whine whenever its invisible blade was activated. Sandler's version, ONI issue no doubt, gave out only a soft buzz instead. Cardones had retrieved all the data chips and hidden them as instructed—they had come prelabeled, he noted, with music and vid titles—and he was in the process of slicing up the receiver when Sandler abruptly straightened. "Well, that's it," she announced grimly. "The pod is officially history. How's it coming?"

"Not very quickly," he admitted, glancing back toward the windows. The approaching assault boats were still too distant to be seen, of course, but even that illusory safety wouldn't last much longer. "I hope you're not planning to dump everything into the disposal."

"That's the first place a suspicious mind would think to look," Sandler said, crossing to the orange-rimmed emergency suit locker door and pulling it open. "Here."

Cardones looked up in time to catch the vac suit she'd tossed to him. "Throwing it all outside isn't going to be much better," he warned as he closed down the forceblade and started climbing into the suit. "Besides, won't we set off decompression alarms if we start cutting open windows?"

"Not if we're careful," Sandler said, already halfway into her own suit. "Suit up, and I'll show you a trick."

The vac suit was designed to accommodate a wide range of body sizes and types, and was therefore bulkier and looser than the skinsuits Cardones was used to. Still, emergency equipment was fairly standardized, and he had it on and sealed in ninety seconds flat. "Ready," he called as the status bar went to green.

"Right," Sandler said, her voice coming over his helmet speaker from her own helmet. She had pried the cover off the air-pressure sensor on the wall and was fiddling at it with a screwdriver. "Come over here."

Cardones stepped to her side. "See this little lever?" she asked, pointing with the screwdriver. "Hold it down. And don't let it up."

"Right." Gingerly, Cardones took the screwdriver and wedged the blade against the lever. "What does it do?"

"It tells the sensor that we're all breathing just fine in here," she said, stepping to the couch and retrieving the forceblade from where Cardones had left it. "It also keeps the ventilator system shut down, which means it won't try to add more air once we evacuate the suite."

"Handy lever," Cardones commented. "How come you know about these things? I thought you were a command officer, not a tech."

"You don't get to command a tech team without first having been a tech," Sandler said, crossing the room to the far corner, which sported a large potted plant on a low wrought-iron stand. Moving the plant and stand aside, she knelt down and set the business end of the forceblade against the wall. "Here goes."

She activated it; and suddenly Cardones felt a stirring of air around him. He shifted his attention to the window, wondering what would happen if someone aboard the approaching boats noticed the telltale plume of leaking air.

But of course they wouldn't, he realized suddenly. Not with all the ice crystals and other gases already flowing past the suite. The perfect cover. "I think it's working," he said.

"Thank you for that update," Sandler said dryly. Shifting position, she eased the tip of the forceblade into the narrow gap between the wall and the thick carpet pressed up against it. A little cutting, a little probing with her gloved fingertips, and she was able to pry up a corner. "Okay," she muttered, getting to her feet and pulling on the loosened carpet until she'd exposed a square meter of flooring. "Now comes the tricky part."

"What's tricky about it?" Cardones asked, understanding the plan now. Instead of throwing the incriminating evidence out the window for everyone to see, she was instead going to bury it beneath their suite.

"The need to cut a hole in the floor without shorting out the grav plates down there," she said tartly. "Or don't you think they'd notice if they wandered into this corner and bounced off the ceiling?"

Cardones swallowed. "Oh. Right."

He watched in silence as Sandler carefully cut a rough circle in the floor, beveled so that it could be seated solidly in place once it was put back. Lifting it out, she set it aside and peered down into the opening. From his vantage point across the room, all Cardones could see was that there were pipes and cables laid out against a metal grid. "How's it look?" he asked.

"Tight, but doable," she said, kneeling down and starting to dig into the opening with the forceblade. "And there's nothing but open comet head underneath the support grid. Should work just fine."

A fresh cloud of white was beginning to boil out now as her slashing movements and the rapidly decreasing air pressure combined to sublimate the ice beneath the suite into vapor. "Provided we have enough time," Cardones warned.

"We should," Sandler said, stretching out on the floor as she dug deeper. "Keep an eye toward the main complex—that's where the boats will probably land. And no talking from now on. I've cranked down the gain on these radios, but we don't want them accidentally stumbling over our frequency when they get closer."

Nodding inside his helmet, Cardones shifted his attention to the view out the side window.

The minutes crawled past. The breeze in the room faded away as the last of the air vanished out into the passing mists. Faint white clouds continued to drift up out of Sandler's pit as she dug, until finally she straightened, gave him a thumbs-up, and crossed to the table and their equipment.

And as she did so, across the frozen landscape, the two assault boats touched down beside the main complex.

Cardones opened his mouth to speak, remembered in time, and waved his free arm instead. Sandler looked up, and he pointed out the window. She took a moment to glance that direction, nodded to him, and got back to work.

For the next few minutes Cardones alternated his attention between her and the window, the frustration of his situation welling up in his throat like excess stomach acid. At least aboard Fearless he had work to do, duties that could theoretically make a difference. Here, there was nothing for him to do but stand around and watch Sandler work.

That, and maybe think.

Okay, he thought, trying to clear his mind. The boats carried no markings that he could see—big surprise there—but they looked to be fairly standard Peep issue. A maximum of thirty troops, fifteen if they were paranoid enough to put them in full armor, and they would probably go through the whole of the main complex before they tackled the outlying buildings.

That still didn't give them a tremendous amount of time, but Sandler was a lot faster at this kind of demolition work than he had been. She carried each piece of expensive hardware in turn to the hole she'd dug, slicing it up and dropping the pieces down the pit as if she'd done this sort of thing a hundred times before.

Maybe she had. The kind of budget ONI was rumored to have probably wouldn't even have winced at having the odd million dollars' worth of equipment turned into metallic cole slaw.

Finally, it was done. The last piece of the last console disappeared down the rabbit hole, and Sandler laid aside the forceblade and began setting the section of flooring back into place. She got it down and rolled the carpet back over it, tamping down the edges with her fingertips until it looked more or less the way it had before. An emergency patch from one of her suit pockets took care of the hole in the wall; and then she was at his side, taking the screwdriver from him at last and fiddling again with the sensor. He felt air begin to flow around him, and tensed for the scream of the low-pressure warning.

But again Sandler had done her job right, and there was no fuss or bother as the suite began to repressurize. Catching his eye, she nodded back toward the patched hole in the wall. He nodded understanding and crossed to the potted plant that had been sitting in that corner. Sitting around in vacuum that way couldn't have done it any good, but at least it shouldn't show any obvious signs of damage until after the raiders were long gone.

He got the stand back into place with the pot neatly hiding the patch, and stepped back to examine his handiwork. Like the carpet, the wall wouldn't hold up to a determined search, but people looking for a full data retrieval setup probably wouldn't be interested in tearing the room apart.

His suit indicator was showing adequate pressure now. Taking his first relaxed breath since those boats had started their direction, he reached up and twisted the helmet seal. It came loose with a gentle pop, and he glanced around the room as he pulled it off—

And froze.

Sandler had eliminated all the electronics, all right.

But she'd forgotten the empty suitcases.

Sandler had popped her own helmet and was starting to unseal her suit. "Captain!" he bit out. "The suitcases!"

She looked around at the damning evidence, her throat going visibly tight as she realized—too late—how suspicious those empty cases would look to even the most casual searcher. And she knew better than Cardones that neither the wall nor the floor would stand up to any real examination.

And then, even as the first rumblings of panic started to surge up Cardones's throat, he had the answer. Maybe. "I've got an idea," he said, stripping off the rest of his suit and tossing it and the helmet to Sandler. "Here—put these away."

They had barely three minutes to work before the suite's pressure door abruptly slid open to reveal a nervous-looking woman and two hulking, combat-suited men.

But three minutes was enough.

"Please excuse the interruption, Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan," the woman said, her voice quavering only slightly as the two troopers bulled their way into the suite, their momentum carrying her in ahead of them. She was wearing the burgundy-trimmed gray suit of the hotel management and seemed to be sweating profusely. "These . . . gentlemen . . . would like permission to search your suite."

"What?" Cardones demanded, letting his genuine tension add a matching quaver to his own voice. "What do you mean? What do you want?"

The performance was mostly wasted; one of the troopers had already disappeared into the bedroom, and the other had turned his head to study the kitchenette area. "I'm sorry," the woman said. "They arrived a few minutes ago and—"

"What's all that?" the second trooper demanded, his voice coming out hollow and slightly distorted from his suit speaker.

"What's what?" Cardones asked quickly.

"Those." The trooper strode past the manager straight toward Cardones. Cardones hurriedly backed up at his approach; and then the trooper planted himself in the middle of the room and swept a gloved finger over the half dozen cases scattered around. "That's a hell of a lot of suitcases," he amplified, his voice darkening with suspicion. "Way too many for two people on a four-day trip."

Cardones worked his mouth and throat. "Uh . . . well . . ."

"Open them," the trooper said flatly. "All of them."

Cardones threw a helpless look at Sandler, whose eyes were wide with guilty panic. She really was a good actress, he decided. "It's just that—"

"Open them!"

Cardones jumped. "Yes, Sir," he mumbled. Kneeling down, he popped the catches of the nearest suitcase and lifted the lid.

The manager inhaled sharply. "Are those—?"

"We were going to put them back," Sandler insisted, her voice coming out in a rush, all scared and miserable. "Really we were."

"We just wanted to see . . ." Cardones let his voice trail off.

"How they looked in your luggage?" the manager suggested coldly.

Shamefaced, Cardones dropped his eyes to the open suitcase. To the open suitcase; and the towels, wine glasses, and plates he'd packed inside, all of them proudly bearing the Sun Skater emblem. "They were just . . ." he mumbled. "I mean, it's so expensive here . . ."

Again, his voice trailed off. The trooper made a little snort of contempt and turned as his partner emerged from the bedroom. "Come on," he said. "Nothing here but a couple of small-timers."

They lumbered toward the door. The manager gave Cardones a look that promised this wasn't over, then turned and hurried to catch up with them.

The pressure door slid shut behind them, and Sandler exhaled in carefully controlled relief. "Congratulations, Commander, and brilliantly done," she said. "I didn't think we were going to pull that one off."

"Neither did I," Cardones said honestly. "But I guess when you go around robbing merchies, petty thieves are sort of kindred spirits."

"Or else they just found the whole thing amusing," Sandler said, retrieving an armful of linens from the suitcase and heading back toward the bedroom. "Still, definitely worth a commendation for quick thinking."

Cardones smiled tightly as he lifted out a set of wine glasses. "Which of course no one will ever see?"

"Probably not," she conceded from the bedroom. "Sorry."

"That's okay," Cardones said. "It's the thought that counts."

Half an hour later, the assault boats lifted away from the comet and disappeared back into space. An hour after that, Sandler and Cardones were closeted with the manager, who no longer had any capacity left for new surprises, but simply and numbly accepted the money Sandler gave her to pay for the damage to their suite.

Six hours after that, they were back aboard the Shadow.

 

"Well, there's good news, and there's bad news," Ensign Pampas grunted as he slid into a chair across from Sandler, Hauptman, Damana, and Cardones and spread a handful of data chips onto the wardroom table in front of him. "First bit of good news: this weapon of theirs really does exist."

"That's part of the good news?" Hauptman asked.

"It means we're not going to look stupid as the Intelligence service that fell for someone's disinformation game," Pampas said dryly. "The bad news is that I can't see any way of stopping this thing."

"Explain," Sandler said.

Pampas ran his fingers tiredly through his hair. He and the other two techs had been sifting through the Sun Skater data for the past twenty hours, and the skin of his face was sagging noticeably. Swofford and Jackson, in fact, had already been ordered to bed, and Pampas himself was only going to be up long enough to give his preliminary report. "Near as I can explain it, it's like a kind of heterodyning effect between the two impeller wedges," he said. "A rapid frequency shift that creates an instability surge in the victim's wedge."

"From a million klicks out?" Damana asked. "That's one hell of a stretch."

"This isn't like a grav lance," Pampas said, shaking his head. "That does actually push the wedge out far enough to knock out a sidewall. What this thing does is more subtle. It runs the attacker's wedge frequency up and down, alternating between a pair of wildly different frequencies, setting up a sort of rolling resonance. Even at a million klicks out, there's enough of an effect to throw an instability into the victim's own wedge, which manifests itself as a transient feedback through the stress bands back into the nodes. The current goes roaring through a handful of critical junction points—" He lifted a hand and dropped it back onto the table. "And as we saw, poof."

A hard-edged silence settled momentarily onto the table. "Poof," Sandler repeated. "Is it focused, or does it affect the entire spherical region around it?"

"With only the one target in this particular attack, it's hard to tell," Pampas said. "But I'd guess it's focused. There may be a spherical effect at a much closer range, but the million-klick shot has got to be aimed."

"Well, that's something, anyway," Damana said. "If we can keep to missile-duel range, we should be able to stay out of its way."

"Unless they set the things up in stealthed probes," Hauptman said darkly. "Or even in a mine field."

"That's the other thing," Pampas said, his lips puckering slightly. "If we're right about how this thing operates, it won't work against a warship."

Damana and Sandler exchanged startled glances. "You mean one of our warships?" Sandler asked.

"I mean any warship," Pampas said.

Damana was staring at Pampas as if waiting for the punchline. "You've lost me. Why not?"

"Because warships generate two different sets of stress bands, remember?" Pampas said patiently.

"Thank you for that lesson in the obvious," Damana said tartly. A bit too tartly, in Cardones's opinion; but then, Damana was tired, too. Certainly everyone here knew perfectly well that every warship generated two separate stress bands. The outer one was what kept an opponent's sensors from getting an accurate read on the inner one, because—in theory, at least—someone with an accurate read on the strength of a wedge could slip an energy weapon or sensor probe straight through. Preventing that from happening was one reason warships' impeller nodes were so powerful for their size. "So why can't it just take them down one at a time?"

"Because there's no specific frequency for a resonance to latch onto," Pampas explained. "The two wedges act like weakly coupled springs, with their frequencies in effect flowing back and forth into each other. Same reason it's impossible to scan through someone else's wedge. We—I mean the guys inside—know how the wedges flow into each other, because we've got the nodes and the equipment running them. But there's no way to figure it out from the outside."

"If you're right, that would explain why we haven't seen this thing used in combat before," Hauptman commented.

"Maybe," Sandler said. "But that doesn't make it any less of a threat to merchantmen and other civilian craft. You sure there's no way to block it, Georgio?"

Pampas held out his hands, palms upward. "Give us a break, Skipper," he protested. "We're not even sure we've got the exact method figured out right yet. All I said was that if we are right, the effect can't be blocked. It's like gravity in general, working through the fabric of the space-time continuum. I don't know any way to build a barrier to space itself."

"Well, then, how about trying to stop the effect?" Cardones asked hesitantly.

"How?" Pampas asked, his tone one of strained patience. "I just got finished saying we can't stop it."

"No, I mean stop what it's doing to the impellers," Cardones said. "If it's an induced current that's frying the junction points, can't we put in some extra fuses or something to bleed it off?"

"But then the—" Pampas broke off, a sudden gleam coming into his red-rimmed eyes. "The wedge would come down anyway," he continued in a newly thoughtful voice. "But then all it would take would be putting in a new batch of fuses instead of trying to cut out and wire in a complete set of junction points."

"Couldn't you even use self-resetting breakers instead?" Damana suggested. "That way you wouldn't need to replace anything at all."

"And your wedge would be ready to go back up as soon as the breakers cooled," Pampas agreed, nodding slowly. "Probably somewhere in the thirty-second to five-minute range."

"Either way, it would beat the hell out of lying there helpless," Hauptman said.

"Yes," Pampas said. "Yes, this has definite possibilities. Let me pull up the circuit layouts—"

"Negative," Sandler interrupted. "All you're pulling up right now is a blanket. Neck-level ought to do it."

"I'm all right," Pampas assured her. "I want to get going on this."

"You can get going after you've slept a few hours," Sandler said, her tone making it clear it was an order. "Go on, get out of here."

"Yes, Ma'am." Wearily, but clearly trying not to show it, Pampas got up from the table and trudged from the room.

"Best news we've had in months," Hauptman commented.

"Definitely," Damana agreed. "So what's our next move, Skipper? Back to Manticore to report?"

"Not quite yet," Sandler said slowly, fingering the data chips Pampas had left behind. "After all, right now all we've got is a theory as to what's happening. And a possible theory of how to counter it."

She lifted an eyebrow. "Wouldn't it be nice to be able to drop a complete package on Admiral Hemphill's desk instead?"

"Okay," Damana said cautiously. "So how do we go about doing that?"

Sandler was gazing thoughtfully out into space. "We start by setting course for Quarre."

"Quarre?" Damana asked, looking surprised.

"Yes," Sandler said, her eyes coming back to focus. "We're going to commandeer one of the Manticoran freighters waiting there for the next convoy and let Georgio play with circuit breakers on the way to Walther. If I'm right—if the Jansci is their next target—we may get a chance to see if we've really found the answer."

Damana glanced pointedly at Cardones, as if to remind his captain that the Jansci and her high-tech cargo were classified information from mere regular Navy types. "Except that they've never hit a whole convoy before," he pointed out. "Individual ships only. Certainly never one with a military escort."

"And now we know why," Sandler agreed. "But remember that they've been building this whole thing up for several months. They'll know we've been watching for a pattern; if the Jansci is their main target, they'll make sure that's the attack where they break that pattern. It's a perfect way to throw us off-balance."

"I don't know, Skipper," Hauptman said doubtfully. "Sounds too complicated for a Peep operation."

"I agree," Sandler said. "But I don't think the Peeps are working on their own on this one. I think they've linked up with someone else who's plotted out the actual strategy."

"Who?" Cardones asked.

Sandler shrugged. "Sollies would be my first guess. Or maybe the Andies. Someone who has the technical expertise to come up with this gravitic heterodyne in the first place."

"And then foist it off on the Peeps?" Hauptman asked doubtfully. "Knowing full well it's only a matter of time before we figure out how to stop it?"

"Maybe they figure it's a chance to stock up on Manticoran merchandise until that happens," Sandler said. "Or maybe whoever owns the hardware is running a con game of his own on the Peeps."

"That's a kick of an idea," Damana said. "They'd sure be ripe for it, too, especially after Basilisk."

"Just be thankful he didn't dangle it in front of us," Hauptman said dryly. "I bet BuWeaps would be just as interested in this thing as the Peeps are."

"Don't laugh," Sandler warned. "The way these top-secret operations get compartmentalized, someone in Hemphill's office could very well have the sales brochure sitting on his desk right now."

An image flashed through Cardones's mind: Captain Harrington's expression as she was told she and Fearless would be given yet another new weapon to test out. The mental picture was accompanied by an equally brief surge of pity for whoever wound up delivering that message to her.

"Regardless, the sooner we nail this one shut, the better," Sandler went on. "Jack, get us on our way to Quarre. Jessica, pull up the stats on the Dorado and Nightingale and their crews. As soon as any of the techs wakes up, you'll put your heads together and figure out which one would be better for this test."

She looked at Cardones as she gathered up the data chips Pampas had left behind. "And while you do that, Rafe and I are going to go over this analysis with a fine-edge beam splitter. If there's anything Georgio's missed, I want to find it."

 

"Fearless to all convoy ships," Honor called over the ship-to-ship. "We're ready to leave orbit. Bring your wedges up and move into your positions."

She motioned to Metzinger, and the com officer closed the circuit. "How are they doing, Andy?" she asked.

"Looks good," Venizelos said, peering at his displays. "Dorado in particular seems really eager to take point."

"McLeod's ex-Navy," Honor told him, picking out the big merchantman on her own displays. "Warn him not to get too far ahead of the pack."

"Right," Venizelos said with a grin. Ex-Navy types, they both knew, sometimes forgot that the ship they were now commanding had about as much fighting power as a new-born treekitten. "You heard the Skipper, Joyce. Put a leash on him."

 

"Dorado acknowledging," Captain McLeod growled, cutting off the com with the heel of his hand. "You heard the Fearless, Lieutenant. Pull us back a few gees."

Hauptman, at the helm, glanced around at Sandler. "Go ahead," the real master of the Dorado confirmed for her, and it seemed to Cardones that McLeod's thin, dyspeptic face went a little thinner. It was bad enough, he reflected, to have had your ship commandeered by a bunch of hotshot ONI types barely twelve hours before departure.

But to have it commandeered by lunatics who had calmly announced their intention of ripping up and rearranging its guts in flight was even worse. The average merchie captain would probably have gone into hysterics at the very thought, or else fled to his cabin and the nearest available bottle. McLeod, former first officer of one of Her Majesty's destroyers, was made of tougher stuff.

Maybe he'd go find that bottle when he learned exactly what it was they were planning to rip up.

 

Sandler waited until the convoy was in hyper-space before turning Pampas, Swofford, and Jackson loose on the nodes. McLeod, to Cardones's mild surprise and quiet admiration, not only didn't come unglued, but even insisted on squeezing his way into the impeller room, dangerous high voltages and all, to watch them work.

Working on a ship's impeller nodes in flight was roughly equivalent to rebuilding a ground car engine while running a steeplechase. Sandler readily admitted she couldn't remember another case of anyone doing such a thing, but also pointed out that that alone didn't mean anything. Besides, as she reminded Captain McLeod roughly twice a day, surgeons routinely worked on living, pumping hearts without any trouble.

On the other hand, none of their techs were exactly open-torso surgeons. Still, as the days progressed and the new circuit breakers gradually began to appear at the critical junction points, McLeod's permanent expression of impending doom started to ease a little. He began to let the techs work without hovering over their shoulders, spending more time in the wardroom with his crew and any of the ONI team who happened to be off duty, sometimes regaling them with stories of his days in the Navy.

And since Cardones had little to do with either the refit or the day-to-day operation of the ship, he tended to be one of the more regular participants at McLeod's oral history lessons. It was all highly entertaining, and he suspected that at least some of it was actually true.

But mostly, he thought about the Fearless.

Sandler hadn't told him that his own ship would be running escort for their convoy. Maybe she hadn't known it herself. But it added just one more layer of frustration and dread to the voyage. Frustration, because so many of Cardones's friends were within easy com range and yet he couldn't even tell them he was here. He was on a secret mission, and Sandler had forbidden any contact, and that was that.

And dread, because if Sandler's analysis was right, the convoy was soon going to come under attack. Cardones was Fearless's tac officer, and her bridge was where he was supposed to be during combat. Certainly not here aboard a merchantman, being about as useless as it was possible for a Queen's officer to be.

And he was useless. In the quiet dark of the night, that was what rankled the most. The rationale for bringing him into this in the first place had been Hemphill's assumption that this mysterious weapon was a variant of her beloved grav lance. Now that they knew it wasn't, there was no reason at all for him to be here. Sandler ought to call it quits, swear him to secrecy, and just send him across to the Fearless.

But that was out of the question. Sandler had her orders, and like Captain Harrington, she knew how to follow them. Cardones would stay put until they were all told otherwise.

The refit itself seemed to drag on at the pace of a lethargic banana slug, but Cardones recognized that as the skewed perspective of someone who wasn't actually doing any of the work. They were, in fact, still twelve hours out from the hyper limit when Pampas pronounced the job complete.

And at that point, there wasn't anything for any of them to do except wait.

 

"Nightingale's out, Skipper," Venizelos announced, peering at his displays. "Reconfiguring her sails . . . looks clean."

Honor nodded, her own attention on her long-range sensor displays. As always, right at the hyper limit was the most likely place for a pirate to be lurking.

But there were no impeller signatures showing nearby. "Full active sensors," she ordered.

"Already running," Wallace said. "Nothing showing."

"Very good," Honor said. "Stephen, compute us a course for Walther Prime, and let's get moving."

 

"Commodore?" Lieutenant Koln, Vanguard's tac officer, called from across the bridge. "They're here, Sir."

"Where?" Dominick demanded, swiveling toward his own tac displays.

"One-three-eight by four-two-three," Koln said. "About three light-minutes away."

Dominick had the images now. "Course?"

"Straight in, Sir," Koln said with a note of satisfaction. "Looks like the escort is riding the convoy's port flank."

"Good." Dominick looked at Charles. "Any last-minute suggestions you'd care to make?"

"None," Charles said. "They're playing exactly as you anticipated."

Dominick felt his chest swell with professional pride. Yes; as he had anticipated. This was his plan, and his alone, and he was looking forward to showing Charles a thing or two about Republican military tactics. "Yes, indeed," he said. "Mr. Koln, alert Captain Vaccares. Activate Plan Alpha."

 

"Captain, we've got a disturbance," Wallace said suddenly, leaning over his displays. "Off to port, about three and a half million klicks. Looks like—"

He broke off. "Looks like someone's getting hit," Venizelos put in. "Silesian merchantman Cornucopia, by the transponder."

Honor swiveled toward her tac displays. From the target's impeller strength and acceleration, CIC was tentatively identifying it as a merchantman in the two-million-ton range. She was running full out, driving hard toward the relative safety of the inner system.

But she wasn't going to make it. Her attacker was already in energy range and coming up fast, blasting away with lasers and grasers both. "Damage?" she asked.

"No sign of debris," Venizelos said. "They may be firing warning shots, trying to get her to heave to."

But connecting or not, the sheer number of weapons being fired simultaneously indicated the attacker was at least the size of a light cruiser. Way too big for the average pirate ship—

"Captain." Wallace's voice was suddenly tight. "CIC's pulling a Silesian emission spectrum from the raider . . . with something not Silesian beneath it."

"What do you mean, 'not Silesian'?" Venizelos asked, frowning at him.

But Wallace's gaze was locked on Honor's face. And from the tension around his eyes, she knew there was only one thing his veiled words could mean.

They'd found their Andermani raider.

She took a deep breath. "Stephen, plot me an intercept course for that raider," she ordered, still looking at Wallace. "Full acceleration."

"Full acceleration?" Venizelos swiveled to face her. "What about our own convoy?"

"They'll just have to do the best they can," Honor told him, forcing her voice to remain calm. "Joyce, inform the other ships we'll be leaving them temporarily. Instruct them to follow our vector so as to stay as close to us as possible."

Metzinger glanced uncertainly at Venizelos. "Skipper, if someone else is lying doggo—"

"You have your orders, Lieutenant," Honor said, more harshly than she'd intended. It was one thing to sit in a calm briefing room aboard the Basilisk and acknowledge orders in a nice safe theoretical way. It was something else entirely to actually run out on ships full of men and women who were trusting her for their safety.

But she had no choice. "And then," she added quietly, "order battle stations."

 

On the Dorado's nav display, the distant impeller signature suddenly shifted vector. "There he goes," Cardones announced.

"Who, the raider?" Sandler asked, leaving her quiet consultation with Pampas and McLeod at the back of the bridge and stepping to his side.

"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones told her. "Looks like he's pulling for the hyper limit."

Sandler hissed softly between her teeth as she leaned over his shoulder for a better look. "I don't like this, Rafe," she murmured. "There's something wrong here."

"What, you don't believe there could be two unconnected raiders working the same system?" Cardones asked.

"No," Sandler said flatly. "And neither do you. This is some kind of setup, and we both know it. What I don't understand is why Fearless was so damn quick to abandon us."

"Maybe Captain Harrington knows something we don't," Cardones suggested.

"Maybe," Sandler conceded. "I just hate sitting out here feeling helpless." She rubbed her chin. "And you're sure that raider isn't our Peep?"

Cardones shook his head. "He's pulling way too many gees to be a battlecruiser," he said. "Besides, his emission spectrum is definitely Silesian."

"As far as you can tell from these sensors, anyway," she said with an edge of contempt. "I wish we could pull Shadow out from under the wedge long enough to take some decent readings."

"I suppose we could," Cardones said doubtfully. Sandler had refused to leave the Shadow behind in an unsecured Silesian port, but the dispatch boat was too big to shoehorn into the Dorado's cargo hold without everyone in sensor range knowing something funny was going on. The solution had been to moor her onto the merchie's hull near the upper bow, where the stress bands would hide her from prying eyes but where she could be slipped in and out quickly if necessary. "But if someone's watching," he added, "that could give away the whole show."

"I know," Sandler agreed reluctantly as she straightened up. "Well, whatever's going on, we don't have much choice but to keep going. Just keep your eyes open."

"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said, frowning as something caught his eye. Had something happened to the Fearless's impellers just then?

Yes—there it was again. A brief flicker, as if the nodes were having trouble keeping the wedge up.

Like something was interfering with them.

A hard knot settled into his stomach. They had only Pampas's professional opinion, after all, that this Peep heterodyning trick wouldn't work against a military wedge. That fleeing raider wasn't far out of the million-klick range; and if he was equipped with the same weapon and was testing its range . . . 

He squeezed his hands briefly into fists, fighting against the almost overwhelming urge to pounce on the com and warn Fearless what they might be up against. But even if he did, there was nothing they could do to counter such an attack except turn and run for it.

And that was something Captain Harrington would never do.

He took a deep breath, forcing himself to let it out slowly. You go into battle, Sandler had reminded him, fully prepared to sacrifice some of your own. It was one of the truisms of warfare; and no one had ever promised him that the ones who died wouldn't be his friends and colleagues. It was the life he'd chosen, and he would just have to learn to accept the darker aspects of it.

Fearless's impellers seemed to be running properly now. Taking another deep breath, Cardones fought the demons from his mind and settled down to watch.

The minutes trickled into an hour; and finally, the time was right. The Manty warship had continued her chase, her course taking her farther and farther away from the alleged attacker's alleged victim.

More to the point, that course had taken her away from her own convoy. Even if she turned around right now, it would be over two hours before she could burn off her current velocity and get back.

Which meant it was time to strike.

"Prepare to bring wedge to full power," he ordered. "Lieutenant, has CIC sorted out yet which ship is the Jansci?"

"They've run all the transponders in range, Sir," Koln reported. "So far they haven't tagged her, but there are a couple that are still being blocked by impeller shadows."

Dominick nodded. Or Jansci might be running under a false ID. If the Manties suspected there was a leak in their Merchant Coordination office on Silesia, they might have taken such a precaution with this particular ship.

No matter. They were too far out from the inner system to draw attention from Walther Prime's laughable excuse for a government. Once they eliminated the escort, they could cut open each of the merchies at their leisure until they found the one they wanted.

And speaking of the escort— "Did CIC happen to identify the Manty warship?"

"Yes, Sir." Koln smiled slyly. "They make it the Star Knight-class heavy cruiser Fearless. Captain Honor Harrington commanding."

"Harrington?" Dominick echoed. "Harrington? The Butcher of Basilisk?"

"Yes, Sir," Koln said.

Dominick settled back in his chair and sent Charles a smile. "The Butcher of Basilisk herself," he repeated. "Well, well. This is going to be an extra pleasure."

"Indeed," Charles said.

A nice, neutral answer; from which Dominick deduced Charles had no idea who Harrington was. No matter. This operation had been intended to kill two birds with one stone: to prove the capabilities of a devastating weapon against the Manties, while at the same time driving a wedge of suspicion between the Star Kingdom and Andermani Empire.

Now, it appeared, there was going to be a third bird in the path of this particular stone: Captain Honor Harrington herself.

"Bring up the wedge," he ordered, admiring the way his voice rang around the bridge. The convoy, following its escort as best it could, was in perfect striking position now, situated more or less between Vanguard and Fearless. Dominick could head toward Fearless, picking off the merchantmen with the Crippler as he passed. Then, when Fearless turned back to defend them—as she undoubtedly would—he would have her pinned between himself and Captain Vaccares's appropriated Andy cruiser.

"We have the Jansci now, Sir," Koln announced. "Bearing two-four—"

"I see her," Dominick interrupted, a stirring of anticipation in his stomach. First the Jansci, then the rest of the merchantmen, then Harrington. Life was indeed good. "That's your target, Mr. Koln. Order the Crippler prepared for action."

 

For the first fraction of a second, Cardones thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, or else that something had gone wrong the Dorado's sensors.

And then, the horrible truth rolled in on him. "Captain!" he snapped at Sandler. "That's not a merchie. It's the Peep battlecruiser!"

Sandler was at his side at an instant. "Damn," she bit out. "You sure?"

"She just brought her wedge up to military strength," Cardones told her tightly. "Better trick even than lying doggo—we knew something was there, and so we didn't look at it more closely."

"We would have looked if we'd had the sensors to do it with," Sandler ground out. "And you saw how that first ship drew Fearless off before she could get within range to see through the masquerade herself. Clever. Looks like someone's still pulling the Peeps' strings."

"So what do we do?" Damana asked from the helm console beside Cardones.

"What else?" Sandler said. "We let him come for us."

Her hand, resting on the edge of Cardones's sensor board, tightened against the smooth metal. "And find out if this defense really works."

 

The Vanguard was on the move now, and the first Manty merchantman was within range. "Fire Crippler," Dominick ordered.

The bridge lights dimmed as the weapon did its magic with the Vanguard's impellers; and with a suddenness that still never failed to amaze him, the Jansci's wedge collapsed.

"Target disabled," Koln confirmed.

"Very good, Mr. Koln," Dominick said. First the Jansci, then the rest of the merchantmen. "Lock onto second target. Fire when ready."

 

"Skipper!" Venizelos snapped. "We've got—what the hell?"

"What?" Honor asked, her eyes darting to the display holding the image of their fleeing raider. There was no indication it was firing or changing course or anything else that should have startled her exec that way.

"The Cornucopia," Venizelos bit out savagely. "She just fired up a military-class wedge."

"New identification from CIC," Wallace put in. "They now make it a Peep battlecruiser."

Honor felt her throat muscles tighten. Exactly the same trick they'd used themselves on Iliescu back in Zoraster system. Only this time it was Fearless who'd been caught like an amateur.

"She's moving on the convoy," Venizelos continued. "The merchies are starting to scatter. A lot of good that's going to do them. Looks like the Peep's going to— Skipper!"

"I saw," Honor said, staring at the displays in disbelief. Suddenly, without warning, the Jansci's impellers had gone down. "Was she hit?"

"I didn't see any missiles," Venizelos said. "She is within energy range; but I didn't see any—"

He broke off, inhaling sharply. The Poor Richard's wedge had collapsed, too.

"Commander?" Honor demanded, swiveling toward Wallace.

But Wallace looked as bewildered as everyone else on the bridge. "No idea, Ma'am," he said grimly. "I've never heard of anything like this happening before."

"Well, it's happening now," Honor said, watching her displays. Behind them, the Sable Chestnut's wedge was the third to go.

And this time she spotted something else: an odd fluctuation in the battlecruiser's own wedge just before the merchie's had collapsed. Some new Peep version of a grav lance, maybe? Something powerful enough to take down an entire wedge, not just sidewalls?

Or had the fluctuation been for the same purpose as the flicker she'd ordered on Fearless's own impellers an hour earlier? There were two known players on the Peep side now; could there be a third lurking in the shadows?

Abruptly, she came to a decision. "Turn ship and decelerate," she ordered. "We're going back."

Wallace's head twisted around. "Captain?"

"We're going back, Mr. Wallace," she repeated. "The convoy needs us."

"But the raider—"

"The raider will keep," she cut him off, warning him with her eyes.

His mouth worked, but he turned back to his board without comment, shoulders hunched in silent protest. Thinking of their orders from Admiral Trent, no doubt.

Or else thinking about the fact that the enemy was a battlecruiser that outgunned Fearless by probably three to one.

"Peep's altered course toward the Dorado," Venizelos announced. "From the data, CIC speculates that whatever they're doing to the merchie's impellers operates at a range of about a million klicks."

Or in other words, ten times the range of a grav lance. Or at least, of a Manticoran grav lance.

Which meant that Honor's gut reaction a minute ago had been correct. If this was indeed a new Peep weapon, they needed to find out as much as they could about it. Admiral Trent might not be happy that she'd let the Andermani raider escape, but under the circumstances—

"Aspect change in the raider, Skipper," Venizelos announced. "She's also flipped and decelerating."

"Run the numbers, Stephen," Honor ordered. "Assume the battlecruiser waits for us. What's our intercept time?"

"For a zero-zero intercept, two hours thirteen minutes," DuMorne said. "We'll be in missile range twelve minutes before that."

"And the raider?"

"She'll be in missile range of us four minutes after that," DuMorne said.

"Good," Honor said, forcing her voice to remain calm. So the enemy wasn't going to be content with just looting the convoy, or even with suckering Fearless into going up against a ship three times her size. Instead, they were going to guarantee victory by making Fearless fight both ships at the same time.

"Good?" Wallace echoed. "What's good about it?"

"They'll have us surrounded," Honor said evenly, remembering an old, old quote. "This time they won't get away."

She turned back to her displays, ignoring Wallace's look of disbelief. In the distance, the battlecruiser's wedge fluctuated again—

 

—and with a distant thundercrack and a jolt that could be felt straight through the deck plates, Dorado's wedge collapsed.

"Hot diggedy damn," Captain McLeod's strained voice said into the sudden silence. "Is that what was supposed to happen?"

"Part of it," Sandler assured him, crossing to the engineering status board. "Georgio?"

"Don't know yet," Pampas said, his fingers playing almost tentatively with the keys. "The breakers are still popped, but they might just be too hot to reset."

Cardones looked back at his displays. The Peep was still moving among the scattering convoy, methodically popping merchie wedges as it went.

But something new had now been added to the picture. On the distant marker indicating the Fearless, the green number indicating acceleration away had been replaced by a red one.

Which meant Fearless had given up on the chase. She was decelerating hard, killing her forward velocity and preparing to come to the convoy's rescue.

Where she would face a Peep battlecruiser.

"Captain Sandler?" he called. "You'd better come see this."

"What is it?" Sandler asked, making no move to leave Pampas's side.

"Fearless is decelerating," Cardones told her. "I think she's going to come back."

"Understood," Sandler said, and turned back to Pampas's board.

Cardones blinked. "Captain?"

Reluctantly, he thought, she turned back. "What?"

"Aren't we going to do something?" he asked. "I mean, she's coming back."

"What exactly would you like me to do, Commander?" Sandler countered. "Warn the Peep off? Or shall we just charge to the attack ourselves? Don't worry, Captain Harrington can handle him."

"But—"

"I said don't worry," Sandler said, cutting his protest off with a stern look. "Kilo for kilo, Fearless has far better weapons than any Peep warship. You know that."

"Besides, this particular Peep has almost certainly had a lot of its armament gutted to make room for their wedge-killer," Damana added. "Fearless should be all right."

"Got it!" Pampas crowed suddenly. "There they go, Skipper. Breakers have closed, and the nodes are back up to standby."

He grinned up at Sandler. "We did it, Ma'am."

"We did indeed," she agreed, some of the lines smoothing out of her face as she clapped Pampas on the shoulder. "Well done, Georgio."

"So what are we waiting for?" McLeod asked. "They're moving away from us right now. We could bring up the wedge and make a run for the inner system, and they'd have to decelerate before they could even think about coming after us."

"No," Sandler said, an odd note to her voice. "No, leave the wedge down."

"But we might at least be able to distract them," Cardones put in. A number on his display caught his eye as it changed— "Uh-oh."

"What?" Damana asked.

"The raider's also flipped over and started decelerating," Cardones told him.

"ETA?"

Cardones was running the numbers. "Looks like they'll reach here pretty much together," he said. "They're trying to box Fearless between them."

"They're going to succeed, too," Damana agreed, eying his captain. "This changes things, Skipper. Even if Fearless can handle a gutted battlecruiser, adding a light cruiser's tubes to the mix stacks the odds the other way."

"Again, what do you want me to do about it?" Sandler asked.

"As Captain McLeod suggests, we could run for it," Damana said. "If we can draw the Peep far enough out of position, it would give Fearless a chance to take out the raider first instead of having to face both of them together."

"Unless the Peep decides we're not worth bothering with," Sandler pointed out. "She might just let us go, in which case we'll have done it for nothing."

"So?" Cardones said. "I mean, what have we got to lose by trying?"

"What have we got to lose?" Sandler demanded. "We have everything to lose."

She looked back and forth between Cardones and Damana. "Don't you see? Either of you? We now have the counter to their wedge-killer; but they don't know we have it. If they leave here without finding that out, who knows how much time and money Haven will waste building these things and putting them aboard their ships?"

Cardones stared at her in disbelief. "You mean you'd let Fearless die for that?"

"People die all the time in war, Mr. Cardones," Sandler said tartly. "If it makes you feel any better, they won't have died for nothing."

"Yes, they will," Cardones shot back. "The Peeps aren't going to just recall all their ships to base and load these things aboard them. They'll keep on testing; and sooner or later, they're bound to run into a merchie with the breakers installed."

A sudden cold wave washed over him. "Or weren't you going to tell anyone outside ONI about this?" he breathed. "Were you just going to let merchies continue to get slaughtered?"

"I'm not going to debate it with you, Lieutenant," Sandler said icily. "You have your orders. The wedge stays down." Deliberately, she turned her back on him. "Georgio, let's see the self-diagnostics on those junction points."

Cardones turned back to his displays, his stomach churning with anger, an odd sense of loss digging an empty spot into his soul. He'd been wrong. Elayne Sandler was nothing at all like Honor Harrington. Captain Harrington would never, ever sacrifice people for nothing this way. When she put people at risk it was for duty or defense, not for some stupid psychological game played by dark-minded men and women in dark-minded rooms. That was what she had done at Basilisk . . . and it was what she was about to do right now.

And Fearless, and all aboard her, would die.

There was no doubt about that. None at all. Sandler and Damana might be right about the limited combat capabilities of the battlecruiser, and Fearless could certainly take the light cruiser now coming in from behind her.

But she couldn't take on both at the same time. Not and survive.

He had to do something. Fearless was his ship, and Honor Harrington his captain. He had to do something.

He stared at the display . . . and like a row of dominoes toppling in sequence, the answer came.

Maybe. It would mean disobeying Sandler's direct order, of course, and that would mean the end of his career.

But what was a career for, anyway?

Seated at the helm beside him, Damana was staring straight forward, his own expression a mask. Taking a deep breath, Cardones reached over to his board—

And before Damana could stop him, he activated the wedge.

 

"What in the world?" Koln said, his forehead wrinkling in surprise.

"What?" Dominick demanded, swiveling his command chair to face him.

"One of the merchies, Sir," Koln said, glancing at Charles before returning his frown to the displays. "The Dorado. Her wedge has come up again."

"What?" Dominick growled, and shifted his own frown to Charles. "What's going on?"

"What do you mean, what's going on?" Charles countered, filling his voice and expression with casual unconcern even as his heart sank a few centimeters within him. "Your crew missed, that's what's going on."

"Impossible," Koln insisted. "The wedge was down."

"Because you caught a corner of it," Charles explained patiently. "You caused enough of a surge to confuse the software, but not enough to actually fry the junction points. I've mentioned this possibility to you before."

He held his breath as Dominick frowned slightly, clearly trying to remember. Charles had mentioned no such thing, of course, because he'd just now made it up. But he'd thrown so much technobabble at the commodore over the past few months that the other hopefully wouldn't remember this one way or the other.

Apparently, he didn't. "Fine," Dominick grunted. "So what do we do about it?"

"Obviously, you hit her again," Charles said. "Try to make it a clean shot this time."

Dominick grunted again and shifted his attention back to the helmsman. "What's she doing?"

"Heading away at full acceleration," the helmsman said. "Looks like she's making for the inner system."

"Mr. Koln?" Dominick invited.

"There are four other ships we haven't hit yet," Koln reminded him. "Given our current position and vector, it would make more sense to cripple them first, then go back for the Dorado."

Dominick stroked his chin. "Will that give us enough time to get back into position before Fearless arrives?"

"No problem," Koln assured him. "The Dorado is hardly going to outpace us."

"Good," Dominick rumbled. "I wouldn't want Captain Vaccares to have to face Fearless alone. We deserve some of the satisfaction of pounding Harrington to dust."

"Just be sure you don't kill everyone aboard," Charles warned. As if that was actually going to happen now. "Remember that part of the plan is to leave survivors who will testify they saw the People's Republic and a disguised Andermani warship working together."

"Don't worry, we'll leave a few," Dominick said, settling back comfortably into his chair. "Carry on, Mr. Koln."

"Yes, Sir." Koln returned to his skeet shooting.

Charles heaved a silent sigh of regret. So the Manties had figured it out already. Too bad—he'd hoped he could get his hands on some of Jansci's really high-tech cargo before the house of cards came tumbling down. Some genuine, useful hardware would have made his next run that much more believable and profitable.

Still, such was the way of the game. And he was hardly going to leave this one empty-handed.

No one was paying any particular attention to him as the Vanguard swung around to target the next merchie. Casually, Charles got up from his chair and began to circle around the bridge in the casual urgency of a man making for the head. Just beyond the head was the bridge's exit.

Standing in the hatchway, he looked back one final time. Sic transit gloria mundi, he thought, and ducked quietly through the opening.

Nobody saw him go.

 

"I will have your head, Mister," Sandler ground out in a voice with broken-glass edges, glaring at Cardones as if trying to set him on fire through willpower alone. "You hear me, Cardones? You are dead."

"That'll be up to a court-martial to decide," Cardones said, rather surprised at how calm he had suddenly become. The die had been cast, and there was nothing to do now but ride it through. "But for right now, may I have your permission to help the Fearless?"

Sandler's glare only got hotter. "We might as well, Skipper," Damana murmured from her side. "The disinformation thing is out the window now anyway."

"No, it's not," she countered, shifting her glare to him as if astonished that he would dare come to Cardones's support against her. "They'll simply assume they missed."

"Until they get aboard and examine the junction points," Damana said, holding her gaze without flinching.

"Which they wouldn't even have thought to do if he hadn't reactivated the wedge," Sandler snarled.

Damana just stood there silently . . . and slowly the fire died from Sandler's eyes. "They won't let us get away, you know," she said, turning back to Cardones. "They'll come after us and disable us; and then they'll go back and blow Fearless into dust anyway. Then they'll come back as Jack said and find out how we spiked their toy and ruined all their fun. We had a plan; and now you've wrecked it. And for nothing."

"I don't think so," Cardones said, trying to match her gaze the way Damana had. "That is, it wasn't for nothing. Because you're right, they don't realize yet what we've done. And that gives us a weapon we can use against them."

He looked at Damana. "But we don't have much time."

"What do you need?" Damana asked evenly.

"Some equipment from Shadow," Cardones told him. "And I need Ensign Pampas and Captain McLeod to stay behind with me for a few minutes."

Damana threw a sideways look at Sandler's stiff profile. "I take it that means the rest of us are abandoning ship?"

"I'll be damned if I'll leave my ship," McLeod spoke up indignantly.

"You'll do what you're told," Sandler said coldly. For a long moment her eyes searched Cardones's face. Then, reluctantly, she gave a sort of half nod. "Jack, collect the team and get aboard Shadow," she said. "Captain McLeod, order your people to go with them."

McLeod started to sputter, took a closer look at her face, and choked back the objection. "Yes, Ma'am," he gritted instead, and turned to the intercom.

"So what's the plan?" Sandler asked, her eyes still on Cardones.

Cardones gestured toward the displays. "From the way we saw them operate at Tyler's Star, I'm guessing they'll move in close and launch boarding boats after they take out our wedge again."

"Probably," Sandler said. "So?"

"So," Cardones told her grimly, "we're going to prepare a little reception for them."

 

"That's odd," Wallace murmured. "Captain, CIC just reported one of the merchies has brought her wedge back up."

"I thought you said they'd all been knocked out," Honor said, looking over at her displays. He was right: the Dorado was up and running again, lumbering toward the inner system.

"They were," Wallace agreed. "McLeod must have gotten his nodes working again."

"Any idea how?"

Wallace snorted under his breath. "I don't even know how the Peeps knocked them out."

"Mm," Honor said, frowning at the numbers. Yes, the Dorado was running; but where was she running to? Surely McLeod didn't think he could outrun a battlecruiser in that thing.

And then understanding struck her, and she smiled a bittersweet smile. Of course. McLeod couldn't get away; but what he could do was try to distract the Peep. Possibly even drag him far enough out of position that Fearless would be able to engage the two enemy ships one at a time.

The catch was that if he was able to become enough of an irritation that he actually did any good, that defiance might well cost him his life.

Which left Honor with only two options: to take advantage of his proffered sacrifice, or to instead try to distract the Peep herself into leaving the Dorado alone.

Fearless had finished her deceleration and was finally starting to close the distance back toward the convoy she'd abandoned. The raider behind her, she noted, was accelerating in her wake, continuing to herd her toward the battlecruiser while at the same time being careful not to get close enough that she would be tempted to turn and engage. It was still over an hour back to the convoy, according to DuMorne's plot. Plenty of time for the battlecruiser to deal with the Dorado.

For a moment she studied the numbers. Fearless's acceleration was hovering right at five hundred and four gees. That was far above the normal eighty percent power the RMN normally maintained, but it still left a safety margin of almost three percent against her inertial compensator. . .

"Chief Killian," she said quietly to the helmsman, "increase acceleration to maximum military power."

Venizelos turned to look at her, but remained silent. He'd probably run the numbers, and the logic, the same way she had.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Killian acknowledged, and the safety margin dropped to zero as Fearless went to a full five hundred and twenty gravities.

"And prepare a broadside, Commander Wallace," she continued. "We'll fire as soon as we're within range."

Because, after all, it was the wolf's job to distract the rampaging bear from the cub, not the other way around.

And with a little luck, the Peep would find out just how distracting HMS Fearless could be.

 

"We're in range of the Dorado, Commodore," Koln announced. "Crippler reports ready to fire."

"Tell them to make sure they actually hit the damn thing this time," Dominick said pointedly. "Fire when ready."

"Yes, Sir," Koln said, touching the signal key. Vanguard's lights dimmed yet again, and on Dominick's tac display Dorado's wedge vanished. "Good," he said, weighing his options. As long as he was here anyway, he could send a couple of boarding boats to go and loot the attempted runaway.

But if he did, that would leave Jansci floating around on its own behind him, with all that top-secret military equipment aboard. Would the Manties have orders to destroy the most sensitive cargo in case of imminent capture? The Harlequin's crew hadn't bothered with any such sabotage before they'd run; but then, Harlequin's cargo hadn't been as sensitive as what was supposed to be aboard the Jansci, either.

There was no point in taking chances. He opened his mouth to order the ship around—

"Sir!" Koln said suddenly. "We've got another ship on scope. Small one—dispatch boat class, about forty thousand tons."

"Where?" Dominick demanded, scanning his displays.

"Behind the Dorado," Koln said. "It must have been hidden by her wedge. Probably moored to the topside hull; they had their belly to us when their nodes went down that first time. Really hauling gees, too."

"Yes," Dominick murmured. The dispatch boat was indeed eating up space, and at a rate that was impressive even for that class of high-speed ship. That implied it was something special.

He smiled, a sudden wolfish grin. "Well, well," he said. "The Manties are being cute, Lieutenant."

"Sir?" Koln asked.

Dominick gestured at his displays. "There's no reason for the average merchie to carry a boat like that." He cocked an eyebrow. "Which implies she's not an average merchie."

For a second Koln just looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. "The Jansci," he said, nodding.

"Exactly," Dominick agreed. "Somewhere along the line, she and the Dorado must have exchanged ID transponders."

And they might not even have tumbled to the deception if the crew hadn't panicked and jumped ship. Typical Manties.

His smile vanished. Unless the hurry they were in wasn't simply panic . . . 

"Full scan of the Dorado," he snapped. "Look for odd energy or electronic emissions."

"Nothing showing, Sir," Koln said, sounding puzzled. "Except that the nodes are acting like they're on standby. That's impossible, of course—that last Crippler blast caught them dead center, and we saw the wedge collapse."

Dominick gnawed at his lower lip. Koln was right—he'd watched the wedge die himself.

So then what the hell was happening over there? Some new technological deviltry the Manties had come up with? A feedback loop in the nodes, maybe; something that would blow up the impellers and fusion plant after the crew had had time to get away?

He couldn't even begin to guess the details. But the details didn't matter anyway. He'd been right the first time: those Manties were the keepers of a ship full of secrets, and they were going to scuttle that ship.

Or at least, they were going to try.

"Man the boarding boats—double-time," Dominick ordered. "Helm, get us in as close as you can—I want the crews aboard as quickly as possible."

He glared at his displays. Because he would be damned if he would let the damn Royalists take his prize—his prize—away from him.

 

They were nearly finished when the bone-cracking sound of the collapsing wedge once again echoed through the Dorado. "There it goes," Pampas called from beneath the sensor monitor panel. "Hope the breakers can handle all this stress."

"We'll send a nasty letter to the manufacturer if they can't," Cardones said, looking over his own handiwork. Just wrap the receiver pack around the control cables, Sandler had said, and the remote control would be ready to rock. He just hoped he'd wrapped it properly. "How's it going in there?"

"Two minutes," Pampas said. "Maybe less."

The bridge door slid open, and Cardones turned as McLeod stepped in. "Forward sensor interlocks are disabled," he announced. "And I checked the lifeboat on my way back. Everything's ready."

"Good," Cardones said. "Georgio says two more minutes and we'll be off."

"I hope so," McLeod said sourly, stepping over to the helm and peering at the displays. "The Peep's still coming."

Cardones nodded, craning his neck to look at the impeller status display. "Looks like the breakers just closed again," he said. "Georgio?"

"Finished," Pampas said. "Let me make sure the wires are sealed and I'll be right with you."

"What's he doing down there?" McLeod asked, the worry in his voice tinged with suspicion.

Cardones took a deep breath. "He's just taken the compensators off line."

McLeod's mouth fell open a centimeter. "On a ship with a functional wedge? Are you insane? You fire up the impellers—"

His face suddenly changed. "That's why you had me wreck the interlocks," he breathed. "No compensators, no limit protection on the wedge—you fire it up now, and anyone aboard will be smeared across the bulkheads like jelly."

"Yes, I know," Cardones said evenly, looking back at the display. The Peep battlecruiser was on the move now, sweeping in with sudden new urgency toward the Dorado. Preparing, no doubt, to launch its boarding boats . . . 

"Done," Pampas grunted.

"Good." Carefully, Cardones picked up the attaché case that contained Sandler's remote control system. "Let's go."

 

"They've dropped another boat," Koln announced. "Standard lifeboat this time."

"Never mind the lifeboat," Dominick growled. The boarding boats were in space now, driving hard toward the drifting Dorado, and there was no indication that whatever the Royalists had done to the nodes was gaining any ground. They should have plenty of time to get aboard and shut the system down before it blew.

But now, with the safety of his precious cargo assured, he was taking another look at the people who had tried to deprive him of it.

They were still fleeing, out there in their souped-up dispatch boat. Running as if their lives depended on it.

Which was, Dominick decided, as forlorn a hope as he'd ever heard of. Certainly Vanguard couldn't catch a boat that fast; but then, he hardly had to catch them to make his displeasure known. "Lock a graser on that dispatch boat," he ordered, shifting his eyes to the lifeboat. The merchantman's lower-ranking crewmen, most likely, left to fend for themselves when their superiors ran out in the faster boat.

Well, they would have the last laugh. They would get to see their former oppressors die.

"Graser ready, Commodore."

"Key it to me," Dominick ordered. This one he would do himself. A shame he couldn't use a missile, he thought regretfully. A missile would be even more satisfying, because that way the Manties would have a few seconds to see their doom bearing down on them. With a graser, unfortunately, they would be dead before they even knew about it.

But missiles cost money, and personal vengeance might as well be economical.

On his board, the fire-control command key winked on. Savoring the moment, he reached out a hand to push it.

 

Ten thousand kilometers away, seated behind Pampas and McLeod in the lifeboat, Cardones gave the remote-control displays one final check. The heading was keyed, the course maneuver settings locked in. All was ready.

Mentally crossing his fingers, he pressed the button.

"Commodore!"

Koln's startled cry cut across the bridge, jerking Dominick's finger away from the firing key before he could push it and jerking his eyes toward the displays.

The Dorado was moving.

Not just a reflexive twitch or jerk, either. The merchantman was swinging around, scattering away the boarding boats swarming toward it, bringing itself nose-on to the Vanguard.

And with its wedge blazing away at full power, it leaped forward.

But not at the pathetic acceleration of a normal merchantman. Not a lumbering, insignificant two hundred gees. Instead, the Dorado was burning through space at an utterly impossible two thousand gravities, fully four times Vanguard's own top rate.

The very shock of it froze Dominick in his chair for that first horrifying fraction of a second. It was insane—the crew would have had to cut the safety interlocks, disable the inertial compensator, and crank the nodes up to a level they couldn't possibly maintain for more than a minute or two before vaporizing under the stress.

Impeller nodes that shouldn't have been operating in the first place!  

"Evasive!" he snapped. "Ninety-degree starboard yaw—full power. Port broadside: fire at will."

The helmsman was on it in an instant, swinging the Vanguard hard over and kicking her into motion. But it was too late. The Dorado was turning right along with it, locked on and still coming.

"Shoot it!" Dominick shouted again, a note of desperation in his voice. He swung his chair around to snarl at Charles—

The snarl died in his throat. The seat beside the tac station was empty.

Charles was gone.

He swung around again, eyes darting to every corner of the bridge, knowing even as he did so that it was a pitiful way to waste his last few seconds of life. Charles had left the bridge and probably the ship, leaving nothing behind but empty promises and the acid taste of betrayal.

Belatedly, the port lasers and grasers opened fire. But with Fearless looming in the distance, all of Vanguard's fire control had been locked into the long-range sensors, and there was no time to recalibrate for short-range fire. One graser beam did manage to score a direct hit, going straight down the Dorado's throat and burning clear through its centerline, and for a brief moment Dominick dared to hope.

But there was nothing on that path of destruction but crew quarters, control systems, and cargo holds. Nothing that could disable those straining impeller nodes or otherwise halt the terrible Juggernaut bearing down on them.

And then there was no more time for firing. No more time for anything . . . except to appreciate a last bitter flicker of irony.

As he had those last few seconds to see his doom bearing down on him.

 

The Dorado reached the Peep battlecruiser . . . and with just under five hundred kilometers still separating them, their two impeller wedges intersected.

The nodes went first, in both ships, the sudden influx of gravitational energy shattering them into explosions of shrapnel and superheated gas that ripped through the impeller rooms, crushing decks and bulkheads and killing everyone in their path. Shock waves and electromagnetic pulses swept ahead of the shrapnel, crushing and killing and demolishing electronics as they passed. Vanguard writhed in agony; the Dorado, far weaker and more vulnerable than a warship, was already twitching her last death throes.

And then, the expanding spheres of destruction reached the fusion mag bottles.

The Dorado's fusion generator had already died, hammered into useless rubble along with everything else inside the merchantman's hull. But the Vanguard's twin plants, like the beating hearts of the still struggling ship, had somehow managed to survive.

They died now; and for a brief, eye-wrenching second there was a new star in the Walther System's night sky.

And then the star faded, and there was nothing left but a quietly expanding sphere of plasma and debris.

 

Aboard the recently renamed light cruiser Forerunner, Captain Vaccares stared at his displays in disbelief. One minute the Vanguard had stood alone among a group of disabled merchantmen, waiting like a lion for its prey to be driven to it.

And now, in the blink of an eye, it was gone.

And that same prey, the HMS Fearless, was hailing him.

"Andermani Light Cruiser Alant," a woman's voice came from the bridge speaker, "or whatever you're calling yourself now, this is Captain Harrington aboard Her Majesty's Ship Fearless. You are ordered to strike your wedge and surrender your ship."

"Fearless has turned around again, Captain," the helmsman announced. "She's started accelerating toward us."

"Turn ship," Vaccares ordered. Between the two of them, he and Commodore Dominick could easily have taken a Manticoran heavy cruiser. But with Vanguard gone, he would have had to be insane to think of facing Fearless alone. "Give me full acceleration toward the hyper limit."

The images on the displays canted around as the Forerunner swung a hundred eighty degrees over. Vaccares double-checked the numbers and nodded to himself. The hyper limit was only about an hour away, he was still outside Fearless's missile envelope, and he was faster than she was.

They were going to make it home. Not covered with glory, as Commodore Dominick had planned, or loaded with treasure and the key to Manticore's conquest, as Charles had promised. No, they would be returning to Haven like a dog with its tail between its legs. But at least they would be returning.

And then, even as he came to that conclusion, the forward display flashed a sudden warning. "Hyper footprint!" the tac officer called. "Directly ahead of us."

"Identify," Vaccares ordered. Another Manty? Had the convoy had a second escort lurking out at the edge of the system?

But it wasn't a Manty.

It was far worse.

"Unidentified raider, this is His Imperial Majesty's battlecruiser Neue Bayern," a harsh, German-accented voice announced coldly. "You have no means of escape. Surrender, or be destroyed."

Frantically, Vaccares looked at the tac display. But Neue Bayern was right. Between the battlecruiser in front of him and the Fearless behind him, there was no vector he could take that wouldn't force him into engagement with one or both of the larger ships for at least ten minutes.

He could fight, of course. He and his crew could die for the glory of Haven, or at least to save it from the consequences of getting caught with a seized Andermani ship.

But too many people had already died in this fiasco. Most of them were Manties, but they were dead just the same.

He could see no reason to voluntarily add to their number.

"Strike the wedge," he ordered the helmsman quietly. "And then signal the Neue Bayern and Fearless.

"Tell them we surrender."

 

Admiral of the Red Sonja Hemphill looked up from the report and steadied her gaze onto the face of the young man standing stiffly at parade rest in front of her desk. "And what, Lieutenant," she said frostily, "am I supposed to do with you?"

Lieutenant Cardones's cheek might have twitched, but there was no other reaction Hemphill could see. "Ma'am?" he asked evenly.

"You disobeyed a direct order from a superior," Hemphill said, tapping a fingertip on the memo pad in front of her. "Captain Sandler's report makes it clear she told you not to raise the Dorado's wedge. Yet you did so anyway. Are you aware that that's a court-martial offense?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said. "And I make no excuse."

Hemphill felt her face settle into a familiar set of lines. "Aside from the fact that it saved every man and woman aboard the Fearless?" she suggested.

This time there was definitely a twitch. "Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said. "And the crews of the merchantmen, too."

"And do you intend to make a habit of placing individual lives over the value of official Naval or governmental policy?" Hemphill continued. "More to the point for a line officer, do you intend to place the value of these lives over the lawful execution of your orders?"

The young man's face had settled into lines of its own. "No, Ma'am," he said.

"That's good, Lieutenant," Hemphill said, letting her voice chill a few degrees. "Because if you were—if I even thought you were—you would be out of the service so fast it would take you three weeks just to catch up with your butt. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Good," Hemphill said softly. "Then allow me make myself even clearer. You acted out of loyalty to Captain Harrington and the Fearless. I appreciate that. But loyalty must always be balanced with the larger perspective. Here we had a chance—a small one, admittedly, but still a chance—to feed Haven a line of disinformation that could have tied up its time and resources for years to come."

She lifted her chin. "And no matter what you, Captain Harrington, or anyone else aboard Fearless ever do with your careers, you will never accomplish anything that could possibly pay that kind of dividend for the Star Kingdom. Understood?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said.

"Good." Hemphill nodded toward the door. "You're hereby detached from your temporary ONI duty. You will return to duty aboard Fearless when she returns to Manticore in approximately one month; until then, you're on R and R leave. The yeoman will give you a copy of your orders."

"Thank you, Ma'am," Cardones said.

"And remember that everything you heard, saw, or did while with Tech Team Four is classified," Hemphill added. "Dismissed."

Cardones saluted, and with a crisp about-face he strode from the office.

With a grimace, Hemphill lowered her eyes to the report again. Yes, the kid had disobeyed orders, and she had needed to come down hard on him to make sure he didn't get casual about such things.

But in all honesty, it was hard to fault him for his actions. Even Sandler's own report had conceded it would have taken a miracle for Manticore to have kept up the deception long enough for Haven to commit any serious resources to the Crippler project. Balanced against that was the fact that the team had solved the problem, ended that particular threat to Manticoran shipping, and given the Peeps a sore nose along with it.

And even in the grand scheme of things, saving Her Majesty's Navy a heavy cruiser and its crew was nothing to be sneered at.

Especially when that ship had been instrumental in delivering a captured Andermani light cruiser back to its rightful owners, eliminating a potential source of tension before it really got started.

The Andies placated, and the Peeps humiliated. Two birds taken out with a single stone; and Hemphill was certainly realistic enough to appreciate the economy of such things.

And maybe there was a third bird waiting to be winged by this particular stone. That trick Harrington had used, flickering her impellers to signal the Neue Bayern lurking out beyond the hyper limit, had some definite possibilities. Not as a standard interception tactic per se; the Andies had had to do some very precise maneuvering in order to circle through hyper-space and plant themselves squarely in the escaping raider's path that way. Most Manticoran astrogators weren't competent enough to pull off a trick like that, at least not on a regular basis.

But the maneuver itself was almost beside the point. The point was that Harrington had found a way to use gravitational waves to send a signal to the Andies.

And since gravity pulses effectively moved faster than light and were detectable from much farther away . . . 

Especially if they could combine this idea with the new high-yield fusion bottles and superconductors being designed for the next-generation electronic warfare drones, and maybe throw in something from the compact LAC beta nodes already undergoing testing over at BuWeaps . . . 

A third bird, indeed. Maybe.

Pulling Sandler's report from her memo pad, she slipped in Harrington's and began to carefully reread it.

 

Bracing himself, feeling a little like the new kid in school, Cardones stepped onto Fearless's bridge.

It looked just the same as when he'd left. Looked, felt, and smelled; and for a moment he just stood inside the hatch, taking it all in. It seemed like forever since he'd left this place. Since he'd left these people.

"There you are," a familiar voice said. "Welcome back, Rafe."

He turned, the new-kid feeling fading away like a light morning mist. Captain Harrington was standing with Andy Venizelos by the com station, consulting together over a memo pad. "Thank you, Ma'am," Cardones said. "How was the tour?"

"Interesting," the captain said. Her voice was casual, but Cardones thought he saw a flicker of something in the exec's face. "Yours?"

"About the same," Cardones said, matching her tone. "Permission to resume my station?"

"Permission granted," she said, and smiled. "Enough lazing around, Mr. Cardones. Get back to work."

"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said, smiling back. Taking another deep breath, he crossed to his station.

It was good to be home.