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# Chapter Forty-Five

"The exec needs you on the bridge, Skipper."

Thomas Bachfisch laid his cards facedown on the card table and swung his chair to face the rating who'd just poked his head through the hatch into the officers' lounge.

"Did he say why?" the captain asked.

"Yes, Sir. One of those Peep destroyers is up to something."

"Is it?" Bachfisch made his voice sound completely calm and glanced back at his partner and their opponents.

"I'd better go take a look," he told them, and nodded to Lieutenant Hairston. "Make sure they don't cheat when they add up the score, Roberta. We'll finish trouncing them later."

"If you say so, Skip," Hairston said, looking dubiously at the score sheet.

"I do," he assured her firmly, then stood and headed for the hatch.

* * *

Jinchu Gruber looked up from Pirate's Bane's main tactical display as Bachfisch arrived on the armed freighter's bridge. The plot was less detailed than it might have been, since the Bane had no interest in advertising her full capabilities. All of the data displayed on it had been collected using solely passive sensors, but that was quite adequate for Bachfisch's purposes. Especially this close to the object of his interest.

"What's happening, Jinchu?" he asked quietly as he crossed to the exec's side.

"I'm not really sure, Skipper," Gruber replied in a tone which made the simple statement answer at least half a dozen questions. Like "Why do you think we're so interested in a pair of Havenite destroyers?" or "Why do you think we've sat here in orbit for the last four days, piling up penalty fees for late delivery?" or "What in the galaxy do you think is going on in your captain's putative mind?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Skipper?" Gruber said quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why do you think he should be headed there, Skipper?" Gruber asked intently.

"I could say it's because it lies within less than a light-year and a half of the point at which his projected course leaves the wave. But that's not really the question you're asking, is it Jinchu?"

He cocked an eyebrow at the exec, and, after a moment, Gruber nodded slowly.

"What I'm afraid of," Bachfisch said then, "is that he's headed there because he has friends waiting for him. Probably quite a lot of them."

"Peep naval units in the middle of Silesia camped out in an uninhabited star system?" Gruber shook his head. "I'm not quite ready to call you crazy, Skipper, but I'm damned if I can think of any reason for them to be doing something like that."

"I can think of one," Bachfisch said, and his voice was suddenly grim. "Horus is the only star system in the Saginaw Sector which has an official Havenite diplomatic mission. It also happens to lie on an almost direct line from the Basilisk terminus of the Wormhole Junction to the Sachsen Sector. And if you extend our destroyer's course from Horus to this star," he tapped the icon on his display yet again, "you'll see that it also forms a straight line . . . from Horus towards Marsh."

Gruber dropped his eyes to the plot and stared at it for several seconds, then looked back up at his captain.

"With all due respect, Skipper, that's crazy," he said. "You're suggesting that the Peeps have sent some sort of naval force clear from the Republic to the Confederacy and parked it in a star system in the middle of nowhere so they can attack Sidemore. Unless you're suggesting that they're out here to attack the Andies for some reason!"

"I can't see any reason for them to be picking a fight with the Andies right now, no," Bachfisch said. "And I admit that sending a big enough force out here to mount a credible attack on Duchess Harrington's forces at Sidemore would be a fairly lunatic act under any normal set of circumstances. But you've heard just as many rumors about the tension between the Star Kingdom and the Republic as I have, Jinchu. It's possible the new ships Theisman has been talking about really do exist. In fact, it's possible that there are more of them than he's chosen to tell us about.

"Now, if I were the Havenite Secretary of War, and I knew my government was getting sick and tired of being put continually on hold in its so-called peace negotiations with the Star Kingdom, I might be thinking very seriously about my war plans. And if the Admiralty had been kind enough to send one of the Star Kingdom's better admirals out to a distant station, with only a handful of modern ships and a lot of obsolescent ones, then I might figure that it would be worth my while to send a much larger force of my own modern capital ships out here to pounce on her as part of a coordinated offensive against the Star Kingdom and the Manticoran Alliance."

"Skipper, are you seriously suggesting that the Peeps are not only planning to restart the war but looking to kick it off with some sort of sneak attack?" Gruber asked very quietly.

"Frankly," Bachfisch said grimly, "I've been surprised they didn't do it months ago. If I were President Pritchart or Thomas Theisman, I'd have been thinking about it very seriously for at least a T-year now."

Gruber's surprise showed, and Bachfisch chuckled harshly.

"Of course I would have, Jinchu! It's been obvious from the beginning that the High Ridge Government had no intention of negotiating seriously or fairly with them. Why in the world should they feel any compunction about kicking someone who totally ignores their own efforts to actually end this damned war and normalize relations in the ass? I'd do it in a heartbeat, assuming I had the capability, under the same circumstances, and I think they've been trying to get the Star Kingdom's attention in hopes that someone would listen without their resorting to brute force. Hell, when you come right down to it, they've done everything short of handing a copy of their war plans to High Ridge and Janacek! Why do you think Theisman announced their new fleet units?"

"To bring pressure to bear on the Star Kingdom," Gruber replied.

"Of course. But the kind of pressure they brought to bear is significant, too. I think in a lot of ways it amounted to a deliberate warning that they've developed the capacity to stand up to the Royal Navy. A warning they delivered in the forlorn hope that someone in Landing would be able to rub at least two brain cells together and realize the Star Kingdom has to start treating the Republic as a legitimate government and began negotiating in good faith.

"Neither of which High Ridge has done."

"You sound almost as if you're on the Republic's side, Skipper," Gruber said slowly.

"I'm not. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize that they have a perfect right to be angry at having their legitimate concerns so persistently ignored."

"So what, exactly, do you think we're doing out here, Skipper?" Gruber asked after a moment.

"At the moment, all I'm really after is confirming the point at which this fellow is going to leave the grav wave. If we can get away with it, I'd really like to see the point at which he begins translating back down to n-space. That would confirm whether or not he's headed where I think he's headed. But I don't cherish any illusions about how likely they are to let an unidentified freighter go traipsing through the middle of their fleet if they really are out here. And given that the system I think this destroyer is bound for is officially uninhabited, I can't think of any possible way to come up with a convincing story for why we might 'just happen' to be dropping in on them."

"And if we manage to confirm all of that?"

"If we manage to confirm all of that—or even half of it—then we immediately make tracks for Sidemore," Bachfisch said. "I know the people who are expecting us to deliver their cargoes are going to be more than a little pissed off when we don't show. And I know we're going to be looking at some pretty stiff penalties. But I strongly suspect that Duchess Harrington will defray any of our losses out of her discretionary funds when she hears what we have to tell her. And she and her intelligence people can probably help us concoct some sort of explanation for our customers' benefit."

"I see." Gruber looked back down at the plot.

"I realize I'm taking a chance shadowing a destroyer," Bachfisch said softly. "And I suppose it's not fair to our people for me to be doing it in the interests of my own kingdom. None of them signed on to be Preston of the Spaceways. But I can't just sit there and watch something like this happen."

"I wouldn't worry about the people, Skipper," Gruber told him after a moment. "I don't say they're looking forward to any possible confrontations with the Peeps, but most of them have already figured out at least part of what you're up to. And the truth is, Skip, that if you figure this is what we need to be doing, we're all prepared to trust your judgment. You've gotten us into trouble a time or two, but you've always gotten us out the other side again."

He looked up, and Bachfisch nodded in satisfaction at what he saw in the exec's face.

* * *

"That bogey is closing up on us a little, Sir."

Lieutenant Commander Dumais, captain of the Trojan-class destroyer RHNS Hecate, cocked his head in an invitation for his tac officer to continue.

"I still can't tell you exactly what it is," Lieutenant Singleterry admitted. "Local h-space conditions are particularly bad just now. But it still looks like a merchie."

"A merchie," Dumais repeated, then shook his head. "I don't question your judgment, Stephanie, but just what in Hell do you think a merchie would be doing following us around this way? Using us for cover against pirates, sure. But following us out into the middle of nowhere?"

"If I could tell you that, Skipper, then I'd be wasting my time in the Navy compared to the fortune I could be making choosing winning lottery numbers." Singleterry shook her own head in turn. "All I can tell you for sure is that whoever this is, she's been following along behind us ever since we left Horus. Well, that and the fact that she's closed up by almost half a light-minute in the last six hours."

"Hmmm." Dumais frowned in thought. "You did say local sensor conditions are bad?"

"Yes, Sir. In fact, they pretty much suck, and they're getting worse. Particle count is way up, and that grav eddy at three o'clock is funneling them straight over us."

"In that case, I can think of two possible explanations for her behavior," Dumais said. "The one I like better is that she is riding our heels as cover against pirates and she wants to stay close enough to be sure we'll notice if anyone hits her."

"And the other one is that she's closing up to hold us on her own sensors?" Singleterry asked, then tugged at the lobe of her left ear as Dumais nodded. "I guess that might make sense. But that would suggest she really has been deliberately shadowing us."

"Yes, it would," Dumais agreed.

"Which brings me back to the question of why a merchant ship would be doing anything of the sort," Singleterry said.

"I suppose that one possibility is that she isn't a merchant ship, whatever she may look like," Dumais suggested.

"You think she might be a warship?"

"It's certainly possible. Play a few games with your nodes, and you can make a warship's impeller wedge or Warshawski sails look like a merchie's."

"A Manty?" Singleterry suggested unhappily.

"Possibly. On the other hand, it's more likely to be an Andie out here. For that matter, it could actually be a Silly. This is officially their territorial space, after all, even if everyone else seems inclined to forget that. One of them could have noticed us hanging around in Horus and gotten curious."

"I guess an Andie or a Silly would at least be better than a Manty," Singleterry said. "But either way, I don't think the Admiral is going to be very happy if there's anything to your suspicions."

"Tell me about it!" Dumais snorted. He gazed at his plot for several more seconds, frowning in thought.

Hecate would be transitioning from Warshawski sail to impeller wedge when she left the fringes of the grav wave in another three hours. At that point, she'd be within less than five and a half hours' flight time of her destination. And if that was a shadowing warship back there, then whoever she belonged to would have a very shrewd notion of where Dumais' ship was headed. Which meant that they'd have a very shrewd notion of where Second Fleet lay awaiting its orders from Nouveau Paris.

The lieutenant commander growled a silent mental curse. He'd worried about the decision to use his ship and her squadron mate Hector as Second Fleet's communications link with Ambassador Jackson in Horus from the moment he was assigned the duty. He understood the absolute necessity of making sure that link was secure, but it would have been a lot smarter to use a regular dispatch boat for the job. Unfortunately, whatever New Octagon genius had thought this one up had neglected to consider that possibility, and apparently no one there—or on Admiral Tourville's staff—had realized until Second Fleet reached Silesia that Ambassador Jackson didn't already have a dispatch vessel assigned to him.

Under the circumstances, the Admiral hadn't had any choice about making his own arrangements to cover the final leg of the communications link. And because he didn't have any dispatch boats of his own, he'd had to detach a couple of destroyers for the job.

The worst part of it was that Second Fleet had to be positive its communications were functioning properly. If the order to attack was sent from home, it had to get through. So Admiral Tourville had left not one, but two destroyers behind to ensure the maintenance of his communications with Ambassador Jackson. Two destroyers weren't going to be all that much more noticeable than one, and at least this way, the ambassador could use one ship to shuttle back and forth between Horus and Second Fleet, maintaining constant contact while keeping the other on station in Osiris orbit in case the actual attack order should come in.

Dumais wasn't at all sure what was in the sealed dispatches Jackson had instructed him to deliver to Admiral Tourville this time. Nothing the ambassador had said had given him any impression that they were truly vital, and he would really have preferred not to be sent off to play postman with some routine message. On the other hand, he supposed it did make sense to use his ship rather than risk hiring a commercially available dispatch boat and giving it the coordinates for Second Fleet's hiding place.

Which was how he found himself out here with that incredibly irritating sensor ghost dogging his heels.

"We don't have any idea of what his sensor capabilities might be, do we?" he asked Singleterry after a moment.

"Assuming he's hanging back at the very edge of his ability to hold us on his scanners," the tac officer replied, "I'd say that they aren't quite as good as ours are."

"Which would seem to suggest that there's a better chance it's a Silly than an Andy," Dumais mused aloud.

"Or," Singleterry countered, "that it's a merchie with a really good commercial-grade sensor suite. Given how risky a neighborhood this can be, a lot of the merchant ships that spend time out here have much better sensor packages than anything we'd see closer to home."

"Definitely a point to bear in mind," Dumais acknowledged. He thought for a few more moments, then grimaced.

"I don't think we can risk making any assumptions where this bird is concerned, Stephanie. I suppose it still possible that it's pure coincidence that he's back there, but it strikes me as unlikely. And the one thing we can't do is lead anybody straight to the Fleet. Unfortunately, we're already close enough to the Fleet rendezvous that anyone with half a brain should be able to narrow the volume down without much difficulty. So we'd better go see who it is."

"What do we do if it turns out it is a warship?" Singleterry asked.

"If it's a warship, then it's a warship." Dumais sighed. "There's provision in the ops order for the Admiral to shift to another star system if he has to. We don't want to do it, because it's always possible that the jump off order could reach Horus before we got Ambassador Jackson and Hector informed as to the new rendezvous point. Unfortunately, if this is a warship, we won't have much choice, unless I want to risk creating a fresh interstellar incident by opening fire."

"Even if it's a Manty?" Singleterry asked in a deliberately expressionless voice, and Dumais grinned crookedly.

"Especially if it's a Manty," he replied. "Not that the Admiral would thank us if we shot up an Andie or a Silly, either. And," he added conscientiously, "let's not forget that we don't know what size this fellow is. If he's a heavy cruiser, or a battlecruiser, then it might just be a bit . . . foolhardy of us to cross swords with him, don't you think?"

"Oh, yes," Singleterry said fervently. "Foolhardy is exactly the word I'd choose, Sir, and I can't begin to tell you how happy I am to hear you using it under the circumstances!"

"I thought you might approve," Dumais said dryly.

"And if it turns out this really is a merchie?" Singleterry asked.

"In that case, our options are a little broader," Dumais pointed out. "First of all, a merchie isn't going to argue with a warship if it tells him to heave to and be boarded. Secondly, we could put a prize crew aboard her and hand her over to Admiral Tourville. He could hold her at the fleet rendezvous indefinitely, if he had to, and the assumption when she didn't turn up at her destination as scheduled would simply be that one of the pirates operating out here had picked her off. If we're ordered to carry out the attack, he can release her after the fact with an apology and probably a fairly stiff reparations payment from the Government."

"And if we're never ordered to attack?" Singleterry asked very quietly, and Dumais grimaced again. He knew what she was really asking, because their orders had made it crystal clear that if no attack was ever launched, then Second Fleet had never been here. Exactly what the Republican Navy might be expected to do with a merchant ship full of people who knew Second Fleet had been here wasn't something he really wanted to consider. Even so, he knew it would be far better for that to be a merchantman rather than a warship.

"We'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it," he told his tac officer after a moment. "For right now, we have to concentrate on the matter at hand. If this turns out to be a merchie, we'll put enough of our people aboard to make sure everything stays under control and leave her right where she is while we take Hecate on to the rendezvous and report in to the Admiral. If he wants her brought the rest of the way in to him, we'll come back and get her. If he decides to shift the rendezvous, we'll come back, take our people off, apologize politely, and decamp." He shrugged. "It's not perfect, but it's the most flexible option we have, and the Admiral would expect us to show some initiative."

"It sounds to me like it should work, Skipper," Singleterry said thoughtfully.

"I hope so," Dumais said cheerfully. "Because if it doesn't, we're going to have a hell of a time explaining to the Admiral why we couldn't handle a single merchie!"

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