Honor Among Enemies

"Commander Cardones, my exec," she said, gesturing Rafe forward, "will escort you to your quarters. I'll have your personal gear brought across as soon as possible so you can get out of those ski

"My people..." Caslet began, then stopped. They were no longer "his" people. They were POWs and her responsibility now, not his. But at least he'd already seen that their captors intended to treat them properly, and he nodded. Then he and his companions followed Cardones from the gallery while two Marines fell in behind, and Honor watched them go with a sad smile.

"What do we do with Vaubon?" Cardones asked. He and Honor stood on Wayfarers bridge, gazing at the plot and wondering what the Schiller authorities made of it all. Even Silesian system surveillance sensors must have picked up the emissions of the short, savage battle, but no one was coming out to ask any questions. That might indicate the Schiller governor, like Hagen, had an "understanding" with the local raiders, but it might also be simple prudence, especially if they'd gotten good reads on the weapons employed. According to Honor's intelligence files, Schiller's heaviest unit was a corvette, and nothing that small would want to irritate anything which mounted a ship of the wall's grasers.

"I don't know," she said after a moment. Nimitz chittered softly from the back of her command chair, and she reached out to stroke him without taking her eyes from the plot.

Caslet had followed the proper protocols for surrendering his ship. If a captain had time, she was supposed to take her crew off in her own small craft, then fire her scuttling charges, but the rules of war established different standards if she found herself in a hopeless tactical position. The enemy was supposed to give her a chance to surrender, and she was supposed to take it rather than get her crew killed for nothing. There were, after all, few survivors from a ship destroyed by point-blank fire, and the quid pro quo for getting them off alive was that her ship, once surrendered, stayed surrendered as the intact prize of the victor.

But before her ship was boarded, she was also supposed to purge her computers and destroy classified equipment, and Caslet had no doubt ONI would still want to examine the ship in detail, and Honor's search parties would ransack her for any hardcopy documents. Yet there would be precious little data to be recovered, and by now the RMN had taken enough Peep ships to be fully conversant with their technology. Honor expected no treasure trove from Vaubon, but she still had to decide what to do with her prize... and her prisoners.

"The most important thing," she said after a moment, as much to herself as to Cardones, "is to keep the Peeps from knowing we've got her. The loss numbers in Posnan probably explain what she's doing out here, but if she was part of a commerce-raiding operation, she wasn't alone. So the first thing is to make sure our people know about this before their people realize we do."

"Makes sense, Ma'am. But what about notifying the Peeps?"

"There's that," Honor agreed unhappily. The Deneb Accords required combatants to report the names of prisoners, and KIAs, to the other side, usually through the Solarian League, since it was almost always the most powerful neutral ground. Though the Peeps were traditionally sloppy about that, the Star Kingdom wasn't, yet telling the Peeps Caslet and his people were prisoners would also tell them his ship had been taken.

"We can hold off for a while," she decided. "We're required to notify their government in 'a reasonable time period,' not as soon as physically possible. Given our own operational security requirements, I'm going to interpret that a bit liberally." Cardones nodded, and she brooded down at the display for a few more moments, then nodded in decision.

"She's still hyper-capable, so we'll put a prize crew aboard, Lieutenant Reynolds can take command, and send her in to Gregor Station for return to Manticore. On the way, she can call at the Andy naval station in Sachsen and again at New Berlin. I think this is something we need to pass on to Herzog Rabenstrange, and we can ask our Sachsen ambassador to relay the information to our stations in the Confederacy. We'll drop dispatches with our naval attache here in Schiller for the rest of the squadron as they rotate through, too. That's probably the fastest way to get the word out without blowing security."

"Yes, Ma'am. And the prisoners?"

"We don't have brig space to hang onto them," Honor murmured, rubbing the tip of her nose, "and I'd like to get their wounded into a proper hospital as soon as possible. We owe them that." She scooped Nimitz off her chair and cradled him in her arms while she considered, then nodded once more. "Vaubon's sickbay is undamaged, and her life support's in good shape. We'll strip out the officers and send most of her enlisted perso

Cardones nodded back. He understood the logic in stripping out Vaubon's officers; they were the ones most likely to instigate some effort to retake their ship during the voyage ahead. "I'll ask Major Hibson to detail a suitable security detachment," he remarked, and Honor nodded.

"Well!" the exec said more briskly. "That takes care of the Peeps, what about the pirates?"

"They get the standard treatment," Honor replied. There was some risk in turning the handful of raiders who'd survived the engagement over to the system governor. Even if he was an honest man, they might spill the beans about Vaubon's capture. On the other hand, there weren't many of them. In fact, there were none from the two lighter ships, and no bridge officers from the light cruiser. The survivors knew they'd been shooting at a light cruiser, but it was unlikely they knew it had been a Peep, and they'd had no opportunity to discover that since. Still... "It might not be a bad idea to gloat a little over how they fell for 'our' light cruisers ambush," she added.

"I'll see to it, Ma'am," Cardones agreed. He moved off to pass the necessary orders, and Honor remained where she was, still gazing at the display.

There were unanswered questions here. Those raiders' numbers had come as a surprise, and they'd also been unusually heavily armed. Merchantmen were almost universally unarmed, and it didn't take a lot of firepower to force them to surrender, but these people had packed in enough weapons to seriously reduce the life support required by the big crews pirates normally carried.

Well, at least she had an excellent chance to find out what it had all been about. There'd been no survivors from Vaubon's first victim; total compensator failure and fifty-one seconds of runaway acceleration at over four hundred gravities had seen to that. But her computers were intact. It had taken three of Commander Harmon’s LACs five hours to chase the hulk down and tow it back to Wayfarer, but Harold Tschu and Je

Warner Caslet kept his shoulders straight as he followed the Marine lieutenant down the passage. It wasn't easy, and he raged at his own stupidity. He'd lost his ship, the most terrible sin any captain could commit, and he'd done it for nothing.

He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles ached. It didn't do a bit of good to know he'd done the right thing, the honorable thing, his brain sneered, given the information he'd had. Intelligence hadn't warned him the Manties were using Q-ships. He'd had every reason to believe Wayfarer truly was a merchantman when he'd gone to her assistance. And even in his self-hatred, he remained convinced he'd made the right decision on the basis of everything he'd known. None of which could temper his self-contempt... or save him from the consequences.