Honor Among Enemies

"But it's a Manticoran vessel," Jourdain pointed out quietly. "We're out here to raid their commerce ourselves."

"Well," Caslet felt himself smile, "in that case, we'll have to convince these other people to let us have her, won't we?" Jourdain blinked at him, and Caslet shrugged. "It'll be a bit hard on her crew if we 'rescue' them and then take their ship ourselves, Citizen Commissioner, but once they've had a chance to talk it over with Captain Sukowski, I think they'll agree they're better off with us than with Warnecke's people. And, as you say, we are supposed to capture any Manty merchie we run into. It says so right in our orders."

"Somehow," Jourdain said in bone-dry tones, "I doubt the people who drafted those orders expected us to engage pirates at three-to-one odds first."

"Then they should have said so, Sir." Caslet felt his smile grow even broader, felt the reckless surge of adrenaline, and raised one hand in a palm-up gesture. "Given what they did tell us, I don't see that we have an option. Our orders aren't discretionary, after all."

"They'll hang us both out to dry if you lose your ship, Citizen Commander."

"If we lose the ship, that will be the least of our worries, Sir. On the other hand, if we pull it off, I think Citizen Admiral Giscard and Citizen Commissioner Pritchart will turn a blind eye to any, ah, irregularities in our actions. Success, after all, is still the best justification."

"You're out of your mind," Jourdain said conversationally, then shrugged. "Still, I suppose we might as well be hung for sheep."

"Thank you, Sir," Caslet said quietly, and looked at MacMurtree and Foraker. "All right, people, let's do this smart. Deploy an EW drone, Sha

"Aye, Skip," Foraker replied, and Caslet turned to his astrogator.

"Stand by to bring the wedge to full power, Simon, and plot a direct intercept. Then give me time and velocities at course merge."

"Aye, Skip." Lieutenant Houghton punched numbers that would alter Vaubon's course slightly and increase her acceleration radically, then studied his plot for a moment. "Assuming they don't break off, a direct intercept at max accel will cut their base course in eleven minutes and eighteen seconds. We'll come in on a converging vector, range a bit under seven hundred thousand klicks to the nearest bandit, with a relative velocity of plus one-five-niner-six KPS."

"How soon will we enter their missile envelope on that heading, Sha

"Call it eight minutes, Skip."

"All right, people," Warner Caslet decided. "Lets do it."

"We've got a status change on Target Two!"

Commodore Jason Arner stiffened in his command chair on the light cruisers bridge as his tac officer sang out.

"What kind of change?" he snapped.

"It's, Oh, shit! It's not a merchie at all! It's a goddamned light cruiser, and she's coming in full bore!"

"A cruiser?" Arner stabbed a glance at his plot. "Whose?" he demanded. "Is it a Manty?"

"I don't think so." The tac officer brought his active systems and computer support to bear, examining the oncoming ship closely, then shook his head. "Definitely not a Manty. And it's not Andy or Confed, either. Damned if I know who it is, but she's coming in loaded for bear, and..." He paused, then spoke flatly. "I'm showing another cruiser astern of her."

"Shit!" Arner glowered at his display, and his mind whirred. His first assumption, that the cruiser was a Manty using the freighter ahead of him to suck in raiders, had just gone out the lock. But if the newcomers weren't Manties or Andies or Silesians, then who in hell were they? Another pair of raiders? That happened from time to time, though rarely, but there were rules even for their profession, and poaching on another man's kill was against all of them.

"Where'd the second one come from?"

"I don't know," the tac officer replied frankly. "She's about a hundred-k klicks back, and I suppose she could have been hiding under her EW, but if she was, she's got damned good systems. I've been tracking Target Two on gravitics for over a half hour, and I never even got a sniff of another impeller source. Of course, if they worked it right, they could have kept Target Two between us and them. We wouldn't have been able to see her from here if they came in on exactly the right course."

"Or it might be a drone," Arner pointed out.

"It's possible. I just can't say from here."

"How long before you can confirm or deny?"

"Maybe six minutes."

"Can we still evade at that point if we have to?"

"Tight," the tac officer said. He worked at his console for a moment, then shrugged. "If we hang on that long then go to max accel on our best breakaway vector, they can bring us into missile range and keep us there for maybe twenty minutes, depending on their max accel, but they can't get into energy range unless we let them."

Arner grunted and rubbed his clean shaven chin. Unlike many of his fellows in the squadron, he remembered having been something approaching a regular naval officer, and he kept himself presentable. Some hapless merchant skippers had seen that presentability and hoped it meant they were dealing with a civilized individual. They'd been wrong, but for all his other faults, Jason Arner seldom panicked, and the instincts of the naval officer he'd almost been were at work now. If those were other raiders, or regular warships, and they kept coming, he'd have to fight them. On the other hand, he had three ships to their two, even assuming they were both really ships at all, and his vessels were heavily armed for their to

"Maintain your pursuit profile," he told his helmsman, and looked back at the tac officer. "Keep on that second ship. Let me know the instant you're certain either way.

"They're not breaking off, Skip," Foraker reported, and Caslet nodded. A small voice of sanity was screaming somewhere inside him, because despite all he'd said to Jourdain, he knew what he was about to do was incredibly stupid. For that matter, he was sure Jourdain knew that as well as he did. If he had to fight three-to-one odds, Vaubon would be hammered into a junk pile even if he won, and if he lost, every man and woman of his crew was probably going to die. Looked at from that perspective, there was no logic at all in risking everything to protect an enemy vessel, yet he knew he was going to do it anyway.

Why? he wondered. Because it was the job of a naval officer to protect civilians from murderers and rapists? Because he truly believed it was his duty to his own navy? That reducing the odds Citizen Admiral Giscard might have to face was worth it? Or was it his own insane gesture of defiance to the Committee of Public Safety? His own way of saying, just this once, "Look! I'm still an officer in a navy whose honor means something, whatever you think"?

He didn't know, and it didn't matter. Whatever drove him, it drove the rest of his officers, as well. He could feel it in them, all of them, even Jourdain, and he smiled grimly at his plot.