War Of Honor

"Yes." Bachfisch leaned back against his pillow. "We hit a bad patch. Particle densities went way up, and I had to close up on her if I wanted to hold her on sensors. From what her survivors say, that was probably what drew her attention to us. At any rate, she was waiting when we transitioned to wedge."

"And she ordered you to stand by for boarding?"

"Yes." Bachfisch grimaced. "I wouldn't have been too crazy about that under the best of conditions, but out in the middle of nowhere, dealing with a Havenite warship, I really didn't want an armed boarding party to discover that the 'merchie' who'd been shadowing them was armed to the teeth. Besides, there wouldn't have been much point in following her if we'd just let ourselves be hauled off and incarcerated."

"Assuming they'd been willing to simply incarcerate you, Captain," Lieutenant Commander Reynolds put in quietly.

"That thought did occur to me, Commander." Bachfisch grimaced again. "I know there's been a change of government in the People's Republic, but I'm inclined to take that with a grain of salt where the safety of my own people is concerned. Besides, if they're here covertly, it might be . . . inconvenient for them if witnesses to their presence ever turned up."

"I understand your concerns, Captain," Honor said. "And, in your place, I would have felt exactly the same way. But I strongly suspect that you and George are both doing whoever Thomas Theisman sent out here a disservice. Theisman isn't the sort of man to countenance atrocities or to send anyone who would countenance them off to an independent command. I speak from a certain degree of personal experience."

"You may be right," Bachfisch agreed. "But either way, I didn't want a Havenite boarding party aboard the Bane. If Hecate had been a pirate, it would have been easy enough. Just let them come in close to drop their pi

"But this wasn't a pirate, and I didn't want to kill anyone I didn't have to. Maybe I was too squeamish. Or maybe I was just stupid. Anyway, I refused to be boarded."

"Was that when she opened fire?" Honor asked quietly when he paused.

"Yes and no," Bachfisch replied. Then he sighed. "She certainly did fire," he said. "The only problem is that I'm still not sure it wasn't intended solely as a warning shot to encourage us to cooperate. We were so close by that point that her captain may simply have chosen to use an energy mount instead of a missile, and the shot did miss. But it didn't miss by very much, and I didn't feel I could take a chance—not with a regular warship already in energy range. And besides," he admitted, "I was nervous as a cat." He shook his head. "At any rate, I jumped. I didn't pull the trigger, perhaps, but I did stop requesting him to stand clear and order him to. And I also ordered the plating over our weapons bays jettisoned."

"At which point," Gruber put in harshly, "they definitely opened the ball."

"Yes," Bachfisch agreed heavily. "Yes, they certainly did."

Honor gazed down at him and nodded slowly while her always excellent imagination showed her what must have happened in the instant that Pirate's Bane trained out her own grasers. There'd been no way the destroyer's captain could have guessed that he was accosting a ship which was actually more heavily armed than his own. He'd fired his warning shot—which, as Bachfisch had just suggested, was almost certainly what he'd done—in the belief that he was dealing with a typical, unarmed merchantman. The shock when he realized what he was actually facing, coupled with the way Bachfisch had followed him, must have been . . . profound.

"The entire 'engagement' lasted about twenty-seven seconds," Bachfisch said. "As nearly as I can determine, Hecate hadn't even cleared completely for action. Her people weren't even in skinsuits, and only four of their broadside laser mounts appear to have been ma

"Nineteen," Gruber corrected grimly. Honor glanced at him, and he jabbed a finger at Bachfisch.

"Nineteen," Bachfisch conceded. Honor looked back towards him, and he twitched his shoulders. "Compared to some of the rest of my crew, I got off easy."

"We're not going to have that particular conversation, Captain," Honor told him firmly. "You and I have both been there before, and I'm not going to help you beat yourself up over it. Even," she added with a wry smile, "if this does seem to happen to both of us quite a bit out here in Silesia!"

Bachfisch blinked at her, then laughed out loud, and she smiled more naturally as she felt the cold, bleak knot of his guilt ease . . . for the moment, at least.

"At any rate," he went on more briskly, "they blew the crap out of us. But a destroyer isn't much better armored than a merchie, and they were wide open. I didn't even suspect just how wide open they were, but it was like pushing baby chicks into a pond, Honor. We fired a single broadside and—"

He broke off, shaking his head, and Honor tasted a brief, intense layer of a completely different sort of guilt. This time she didn't try to do anything about it. No one could have, anyway.

"We took her survivors aboard afterward," he said heavily. "There were only forty-three of them, and we lost two of them to wounds despite everything we could do. Then we came here."

"We have all forty-one of the remaining survivors in custody, Admiral," Gruber put in. Honor looked back up at him, and the exec shrugged. "The Captain told me to get to Marsh as quickly as we could to report to you, but it occurred to me on the way here that with everything else you already have going on, you don't need to be officially involved in an attack on a Havenite warship."

"I'd hardly call what you and the Captain have described an 'attack' on a warship," Honor observed.

"No, Your Grace," Gruber agreed. "But you're not the government that warship belonged to. At any rate, we're prepared to present the evidence of our own sensor logs before any admiralty court and to stand by an impartial verdict on our actions. At the moment, however, any court would be considering the actions of a Silesian-flag vessel holding a warrant as a Silesian Navy auxiliary merchant cruiser. As such, we could argue that we had a legitimate Silesian security interest in investigating Hecate's actions and intentions. If we hand them over to the Manticoran authorities, however, we bring the Star Kingdom officially into all of this. From all we've heard out here about the current relations between the Star Kingdom and the Republic, I wasn't at all sure that would be a good idea."

"So he has them confined in the secure quarters I had fitted up for pirates," Bachfisch said, smiling approvingly at his executive officer. "They don't know where we are at the moment. In fact, they don't even know we're not still underway. So if you prefer, we can continue on to a Silly naval base and turn them over to 'proper authorities' there."

"I'm impressed, Commander Gruber," Honor said. "And I appreciate your forethought." She didn't add that she felt confident his forethought had been exercised more because of what he knew his captain would want than because he really cared all that much himself about relations between Manticore and Haven.

"All the same," she said thoughtfully, "I think handing them over to us would probably be the best course. We're the closest naval base to the point at which this action actually occurred. It would make sense for a ship as badly damaged as the Bane to head for the closest authorities, particularly since you have wounded from both ships' companies who need medical attention."