"Confirmed," Venizelos said. "And he's definitely hauling—" he broke off, glancing at Wallace "—he's pulling some serious acceleration," he said instead. "I make it four hundred ten gees."
Four hundred gees, with the slowest member of their convoy able to pull barely two hundred. "I presume he's on an intercept course?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma'am," Lieutenant Commander Stephen DuMorne called from the astrogator's station. "Vector's firming up... okay. At present course and speed, he'll hit the edge of our missile envelope in seventeen minutes."
Honor studied the plot DuMorne had sent over to her astrogation screen. The bogy was coming in hard, all right. But given the relative positions and vectors, he still had time to break off without engaging if he got spooked.
They would just have to make sure that didn't happen. "Joyce, signal the other ships on whisker," she ordered. "Plan Alpha. Then sound battle stations."
"Yes, Ma'am," Metzinger said, and got busy at her board.
And now came the really crucial question. "Mr. Wallace?" she asked.
The other was hunched stiffly over his board, and Honor found herself holding her breath. If they really had found their Andy raider, first time out of the box...
But then Wallace straightened up, and even before he spoke she could tell from his body language that they'd come up empty. "According to the Silesian emission spectrum," he said, just slightly emphasizing the word Silesian, "it looks like we've got something on the order of a small destroyer."
"Convoy's breaking apart," Venizelos reported. "Alpha looks good."
Honor nodded. Plan Alpha had been carefully tailored to give any approaching pirates the one thing that invariably spurred them to greater effort: signs of panic among their victims. The faster merchantmen were starting to pull away from the group, pushing their impellers and inertial compensators to the limit as if trying to beat the pirate to his planned intercept point. Running for it, and to hell with the slower and more vulnerable members of the convoy.
It was, unfortunately, an all-too-common response, despite the fact that it was ultimately self-destructive. Not only did splitting up ruin any chance for a convoy to use their wedges for mutual protection, but it also strung the ships out into a space-going shish kabob, presenting the raider with a series of bite-sized morsels from which he could choose whichever looked the tastiest.
And as the convoy reacted exactly as the pirate expected, the pirate now unknowingly returned the favor. His vector shifted slightly to try to outrun the lead merchies, and he pulled out another fifteen gees of acceleration he'd been holding in reserve. He smelled fresh blood, all right, and he was charging full-bore in for the kill.
Unfortunately for him, the whole thing was a fraud. Some of the merchies were indeed pulling ahead in response to Honor's order, but it was a carefully plotted and controlled maneuver, one that would let them drop back into their original formation with only a few minutes' notice.
"Update," Venizelos called. "Bogy will now hit the edge of our envelope in twelve minutes. Point of no escape in fourteen."
"Chief Killian, ease us through the pack toward him," Honor ordered the helmsman. "Mr. Wallace, give me a targeting solution, but keep the active sensors off-line. All crews, stand by ECM and point defense, and be ready to bring the wedge to full strength."
A watchful silence descended on Fearless's bridge. Honor listened to the quiet updates and watched as the red area on her tactical display shrank steadily toward nothingness. It was already nearly gone; and when it disappeared, so would any chance the pirate would have to evade contact. She checked her readiness status boards, feeling the usual slight pre-action quiver in her stomach and thankful she'd taken the precaution of putting Nimitz into his life-support pod in her quarters before they'd dropped out of hyper. With a pirate lurking this close to their exit point, she wouldn't have had time to run him down to her quarters by the time they'd spotted him.
Of course, James MacGuiness, her loyal steward, was perfectly capable of handling that job himself, and she could certainly have entrusted the 'cat to his care. But it was better all around that she'd been able to do it herself—
"Missile away!" Venizelos barked abruptly.
"Where?" Honor demanded, searching her displays. There it was, scorching away from the pirate.
"Well away forward," Venizelos said. "It's going to pass a hundred thousand kilometers in front of Flagstad's bow."
Honor felt her eyebrows lifting as she confirmed the missile's vector for herself. Most pirates didn't bother with anything as civilized as warning shots. "Are you getting anything from his ID transponder, Joyce?" she asked.
"Nothing useful," Metzinger said. "It reads out as the Locksley, with a Zoraster registry, but there's no ship of that name in our files." She paused for a moment, listening to her earbud. "He's calling on us to drop our wedges and prepare to be boarded," she added. "He claims to be with the Logan Freedom Fighters, and pledges we won't be harmed if we cooperate."
Venizelos snorted. "Cute. And, of course, your average merchie wouldn't know the Logan group doesn't operate in the Zoraster system."
"Actually, they may have just started," Wallace spoke up. "One of Logan's top lieutenants has been talking with the Zoraster Freemen about an alliance. They may have cut a deal."
"You're kidding," Venizelos said, frowning at him. "Where did you hear that?"
Wallace gave him a wry smile. "Try reading the ONI dispatches sometime," he said. "It's all in there."
Venizelos's mouth twitched. "I guess I'll have to start skimming them a little slower," he conceded. "I don't know, though. Boarding merchies sounds more like a pirate maneuver than something freedom fighters would do."
"Especially when their fight is supposed to be with the Silesian Navy, not Manticoran merchantmen," Honor agreed. "Joyce, has he given any explanation for his demand?"
"Yes, Ma'am," Metzinger said, her voice suddenly grim. "He says they're looking for a shipment of shredder pulser darts. Apparently there's a special order on its way to the Ellyna Valley government."
"Yuck," Venizelos muttered under his breath.
"Agreed," Honor said with a disgusted feeling of her own. Pulser darts were lethal enough without adding in the shredding capability that could take out whole clusters of people with a single shot. All civilized nations, including the Star Kingdom, had banned them long ago. So, for that matter, had the Silesian Confederacy, at least on paper.
Unfortunately, there were still people out there who had no qualms about using them, which was why there were still people out there manufacturing the damned things.
"Tell them we don't have anything like that aboard any of our ships," she instructed Metzinger.
"Yes, Ma'am." Metzinger turned back to her board.
"I guess you can't blame them for not wanting to end up on the receiving end of shredders," Venizelos commented.
"Next question being whether they plan to destroy them if they find them, or simply load 'em in their own guns," DuMorne pointed out.
"They'll destroy them," Wallace told him. "The Logan group has consistently denounced the use of street-sweeper weapons, and there's never been a report of their own people using them. Any deal they made with the Freemen would have required that same restraint."
"So what exactly is our official stance toward these people?" Venizelos asked. "The usual hands-off thing, unless and until they threaten our shipping, at which point we can slap them down as hard as we want?"
"Basically," Honor said, turning back to Metzinger. "Joyce?"
"He apologizes, but says they have to check for themselves, Ma'am," the com officer reported. "He again promises we won't be harmed unless we do something foolish."