"Well, Sir, unless they're as noble, virtuous, and aboveboard as we are, then I suppose it's possible they might be nasty old pirates."
"The same thought had occurred t' me," Oversteegen said, and then his voice went crisper. "Send the crew t' Action Stations, Linda. I'm on my way."
Abigail leaned back in her comfortable chair in the pinnace's passenger compartment, watching the dark indigo of Refuge's stratosphere give way to the black of space, and considered what she'd learned from Brother Tobias and Brother Heinrich.
It wasn't much, she reflected. In fact, she doubted she'd learned a single thing that hadn't already been included in the captain's ONI analyses. Except that it was pretty evident that the captain had been right about the way Star Warrior's captain had rubbed the Refugians the wrong way during his own visit to Tiberian.
It wasn't anything Tobias or Heinrich had said, so much as the way they hadn't said it, she thought. She hated to admit it, but their attitude towards Star Warrior and her crew was precisely the same as the one certain Graysons must have had when Lady Harrington first visited Yeltsin's Star. The irreligious outsiders had come blundering into their star system, bringing with them all of their own, hopelessly secular concerns and all of their readiness to shed blood, and they'd hated it.
It seemed likely to Abigail that both Star Warrior's captain and the landing party from the Erewhonese cruiser which had followed up the destroyer's disappearance had taken exactly the wrong tack with the Fellowship of the Elect. She was sure they hadn't deliberately stepped on the Refugians' sensibilities, but they did seem to have radiated precisely the sort of eagerness to find and destroy their enemies which the Refugian religion would have found most distasteful.
And whatever might have been true in Star Warrior's case, the cruiser which had followed her to Tiberian had obviously been in vengeance-seeking mode. Clearly, the members of her crew who had spoken with Brother Heinrich and his fellow Elders had been both baffled by and at least a little contemptuous of the locals' rejection of their own eagerness to hunt down and destroy whoever had attacked their destroyer.
To be fair to the Fellowship's Elders, they'd recognized that however nonviolent their own religion might be, the suppression of the sort of piracy which had apparently murdered several thousand of their fellow believers was an abomination in the sight of God. That hadn't made them happy about their Erewhonese visitors' attitudes, however. Nor had it made them any less aware of their own religion's commands against violence, and their cooperation, however sincere, had been grudging.
It had taken Abigail a good hour to overcome that grudgingness, herself, and she'd come to the reluctant conclusion that Captain Oversteegen had chosen the right person for the job, after all. It irked her enormously. Which, she had been forced to admit, was petty of her... which only made it even more irksome, of course. Her own beliefs were in a great many ways very different from those of the Refugians. For one thing, while Father Church taught that violence should never be a first resort, his doctrine also enshrined the belief that it was the duty of the godly to use whatever tools were required when evil threatened. As Saint Austen had said, "He who does not oppose evil by all means in his power becomes its accomplice." The Church of Humanity believed that—helped, no doubt, she admitted, by the threat Masada had presented for so long—and she found the Refugians' hesitance to take up the sword themselves very difficult to understand. Or to sympathize with. Yet at least she understood its basis and depth, and that meant she was undoubtedly a far better choice as Gauntlet's emissary than any of her hopelessly secular fellow middies would have been.
Now if only the trip had actually turned up some vital information that would have led them to the pirates! Unfortunately, as helpful as the Elders had been, in the end, they hadn't been able to tell her anything that seemed significant to her. She'd recorded the entire meeting, and the captain might be able to find something in the recording that she'd missed at the time, but she doubted it. Which meant—
"Excuse me, Ms. Hearns."
Abigail looked up, startled out of her thoughts by Chief Palmer's voice.
"Yes, Chief. What is it?"
"Ma'am, the Captain is on the com. He wants to speak to you."
"Oh, damn!" Haicheng Ringstorff muttered in tones of profound disgust. "Tell me you're lying, George!"
"I wish." If possible, Lithgow sounded even more disgusted than his superior. "But it's confirmed. It's Tyler and Lamar, all right. And our nosy friend couldn't have missed their footprints if he'd tried."
"Crap." Ringstorff shoved himself back in his chair and glared at his com display. Not that he was pissed off with Lithgow. Then he sighed and shook his head in resignation.
"Well, this is why we kept Maurersberger and Morakis on station. Has the Erewhonese challenged Tyler and Lamar yet?"
"No." Lithgow grimaced. "He's changed course to head directly towards them, but he hasn't said a word yet."
"That's going to change, I'm sure," Ringstorff said grimly. "Not that it matters very much. We can't let him go home and tell the rest of his navy about us."
"I know that's the plan," Lithgow said just a bit cautiously, "but is it really the best idea?" Ringstorff frowned at him, and Lithgow shrugged. "Like you, I figure even the Four Yahoos can take a single Erewhonese cruiser. But even after we do, aren't we still fucked? They obviously sent this fellow along to backtrack their destroyer, so if we pop him in Tiberian, they're bound to close in on the system—probably within another few weeks—which will make it impossible for us to go on operating here, anyway. At this point, we can still avoid action if we want to. So why not just pull out, if we're going to have to relocate our operational base whatever happens?"
"You're probably—no, you're certainly—right that we're going to have to find another place to park ourselves," Ringstorff conceded. "But the SOP for the situation was laid out in our initial orders. Now, mind you, I'm perfectly willing to tell whoever wrote those orders to go screw himself, under the right circumstances, but in this case, I think he had a point. If we zap this turkey, it absolutely denies the Erewhonese any information about us. All they'll know is that they lost a destroyer and a cruiser after investigating this system. They're bound to figure that they actually lost them in this system, but if there are no survivors and we nuke the cruiser's wreckage the way we did the tin-can's, they'll never be able to confirm that absolutely. And whatever they may suspect, they won't have any way to guesstimate what we used to take their ships out. If we let this one get away, they'll know we have at least two units, and they'll probably have a pretty good indication that the two they know about were in the heavy cruiser range themselves."
"I can see that. But they're going to figure we must have at least that much firepower, whatever it was aboard, to take their ships out in the first place," Lithgow pointed out.
"Probably." Ringstorff nodded. "On the other hand, they won't be able to be positive that we didn't somehow manage to ambush their cruiser with several smaller units. But, frankly, the main reason I'm willing to take this fellow on is that the Yahoos need the experience."
Lithgow's eyebrows rose, and Ringstorff shrugged.
"I've never been happy about the fact that the basic plan said we had to lie completely doggo—before the home office authorized our... peripheral operations, of course—but then be ready at the drop of a hat to produce four heavy cruisers prepared, if necessary, to take on light Erewhonese or Peep naval forces. You really think these jackasses are going to be prepared to stand up to regular naval units at anything remotely resembling even odds, Solly hardware or no?"