War Of Honor

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 co

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 pla

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.