A Call To Arms: Chapter Thirteen

    Readiness Two.

    The words echoed through Osterman’s mind as she carefully slid her rebuilt circuit board back into the Forward Missile capacitor-charging monitor. Captain Fairburn hadn’t bothered to explain what was going on, and Osterman suspected most of the crew thought it was just part of the training exercise.

    But all her years in the Navy had honed Osterman’s instincts into fine-tuned sensors in their own right. She could feel the subtle tension in the air, the slight edge in the sporadic orders and communications emanating from the bridge.

    Something was definitely going on.

    But what? A rescue mission? An attack on the Star Kingdom?

    Pirates?

    Readiness Two.

    Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure float swiftly past the compartment doorway. She glanced over just in time to see that he was carrying something fist-sized in his hand. An electronic module, her brain automatically identified it, probably a hex.

    Which in itself wasn’t unusual. Ever since general quarters had been called officers, petty officers, and spacers had been scrambling like mad to get half-working systems up to full operating capacity. Forward Weapons was no exception, and Osterman had nearly been mowed down at least twice by spacers maneuvering racks and large components through the zero-gee at unsafe speeds.

    What made this current sighting odd was that there were no storerooms or component bins in the direction the spacer had come from.

    Which strongly implied that the hex clutched in the spacer’s hand had been borrowed from somewhere else.

    Osterman had pushed her way out of the compartment and sent herself flying down the passageway almost before the analysis had fully worked its way through her brain. Midnight requisitions were hardly unheard of aboard Salamander — indeed, they were depressingly common, given the chronic shortage of equipment. But there was a big difference between borrowing from a secondary system and from a vital one. Wherever the spacer was going with that hex, she was damn well going to find out where he’d gotten it.

    She caught up with him two turns later, and to her complete lack of surprise saw that it was Spacer First Class Hugo Carpenter. “Hold it,” she called as she hurried to catch up. “Carpenter? I said hold it.”

    For that first second it had looked like he might try to ignore the order and make a break for it. But the use of his name had apparently convinced him that running would be both useless and foolish. Catching hold of a handhold, he brought himself to a clearly reluctant halt.

    “Yes, Senior Chief?” he greeted her carefully as he turned around, pressing the hex close to his side. Maybe he was hoping she wouldn’t notice it there.

    Fat chance. Even on a ship full of scavengers, Carpenter was something of a legend among the petty officers.

    “Something seems to have attached itself to your hand,” Osterman said. “I thought you might need help getting it removed.”

    The majority of people didn’t blush in zero-gee. Unfortunately for Carpenter, he wasn’t one of them.

    “Uh…” he stalled, his face reddening.

    “Come on, we don’t have time for this,” Osterman growled, gesturing to the hex. “Where’d you get it?”

    Carpenter sighed.

    “Ensign Locatelli ordered us to get the tracking sensors up and running,” he said, reluctantly holding up the hex.

    “What, all three systems?” Osterman asked, frowning. One of His Majesty’s ships these days was lucky if it had even two of the tracking systems running. Most of the time they had to make do with one.

    “All three,” Carpenter confirmed, giving her a wan smile. “He said he didn’t care how we pulled it off, but that by God we would.”

    Osterman suppressed a scowl. That sounded like Locatelli, all right. Still trying to wield the kind of authority he wasn’t even close to actually possessing.

    “Where’d you get it?” she asked.

    “The laser temperature sensor,” Carpenter said. “I figured that since the system has been down for weeks, and these components were just sitting there –”

    “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Osterman interrupted, plucking the hex out of his hand. With the lack of a functioning x-ray emitter having put the beam weapon semi-permanently out of commission, the rest of its associated equipment had become a sort of happy hunting ground for Salamander’s scroungers.

    And indeed, Carpenter’s hex looked damn near fresh out of the box. There were no kluges, no rebuilds, and only a couple of casing scratches around the mounting bolts where careless techs had missed the mark with their screwdrivers. Definitely a component that hadn’t seen much use.

    “You put your old hex in its place, I assume?”

    “Yes, Senior Chief,” Carpenter said. “Ours wasn’t broken, exactly, just a little iffy, and I wasn’t sure it would hold up to one of Ensign Locatelli’s one-ten tests. If it didn’t — well, you know what he’s like.”

    “Not sure I like your tone, Spacer,” Osterman warned. “That’s an officer you’re talking about.”

    “Sorry, Senior Chief.”

    Osterman grunted. Tone notwithstanding, Carpenter had a point. Locatelli the Younger was famous for pushing people and equipment past their limits, and had little patience when the results didn’t match up with his expectations.

    In a navy with infinite money and resources, pushing components to a hundred and ten percent of their normal operating ceilings was a good way to weed out those that might fail under the added duress of combat. In a navy with extremely finite quantities of both, that kind of limit-pushing was just begging for trouble.

    But nobody could tell Locatelli anything. More depressingly, nobody would tell him anything. Not with the shadow of his powerful uncle looming over him.

    Still, this kind of poaching wasn’t something a senior chief ought to turn a blind eye to. Osterman was trying to decide whether to simply tell Carpenter to return the hex, or to take the time to accompany him to the beam monitor compartment to make sure he did it, when the ship’s klaxons abruptly began wailing. “Battlestations! Battlestations! All hands to battlestations. Set Condition One throughout the ship.”

    Osterman swore under her breath. Battle stations. Whatever the hell was going on out there, it had just gotten real.

    “Here,” she said, thrusting the hex back into Carpenter’s hands. “Get the tracker back together before Locatelli skins you alive.”

    “Yes, Ma’am,” he said tensely. Shoving off the handhold, banging his shoulder against the bulkhead in his haste, he headed back toward Forward Missiles.

    And in the meantime, Osterman still had the rest of the capacitor-charging system to double-check. Shoving herself the opposite direction, she flew down the passageway.

    Wondering what the hell Captain Fairburn was up to.

 

---

 

    “I’m sorry, Sir,” Ravel said. “Even if Captain Shresthra was telling the truth about the hyperdrive interface being disassembled, there’s just no way to know how disassembled it was when this Grimm character took over. And without that data, there’s no way to know when Izbica will be ready to translate.”

    Fairburn glared at the gravitics display. Izbica was still far ahead, with the TO still putting their zero-zero rendezvous half an hour away.

    And that assumed the freighter didn’t increase her acceleration again. Salamander was already pulling more gees than Fairburn liked, and he really didn’t want to push his compensator any further than he already was.

    Besides, for all they knew, Izbica’s hyperdrive might already be ready to spin up. Grimm could be one of those sadistic SOBs who would let Salamander get almost in reach before making his move.

    In theory, assuming Salamander made it far enough outside the hyper limit, Fairburn could follow the target into hyperspace. But Salamander was still close enough to the edge to make that a bit risky. If Izbica got even a minute’s head start, all Fairburn would have to show for his trouble would be a single sarcastic communication, some useless sensor readings, and a double handful of nothing.

    And Chancellor Breakwater and his allies would continue their campaign of scorn and contempt for the Navy.

    Fairburn couldn’t let that happen. Not now. Not when Salamander was so close.

    Not when there might be a way to make sure that pirate ship stayed put.

    “TO, what’s our range and position vis-à-vis a missile launch?” he asked.

    Even without looking, he could sense the sudden tension on the bridge. “Excuse me, Sir?” Ravel asked carefully.

    “Relax — I’m not planning to shoot her out of the sky,” Fairburn said, swiveling to face her. Ravel’s expression was just as rigid as her voice. “What I want is to send a missile past her wedge, detonating the warhead in front of her. Close enough for the blast to cause some damage to sensors, maybe glitch the hyperdrive or impellers if we’re lucky, but far enough away not to instantly vaporize her. Can you set up a shot like that?”

    “Yes, Sir, I think so,” Ravel said, her voice going even more stiff and formal. “But even with close-control telemetry I can’t guarantee the blast will damage Izbica enough to disable her. If the error’s on the other end, it may destroy her outright.”

    “Understood,” Fairburn said. “But actually disabling her may not be necessary. Once we’ve proven we have the will and the ability to destroy her, Grimm may be more willing to surrender.”

    “That may be, Sir,” Todd spoke up, his expression and tone as formal as the TO’s. “For the record, Sir, I’m obliged to remind you that a missile is an expensive and valuable part of the Star Kingdom’s arsenal. To spend one on what is little more than a warning shot could be construed as wasteful.”

    And Breakwater would indeed construe it that way, Fairburn knew. Firing a missile at Izbica would be a huge gamble, on several levels.

    “I must also remind you, on the record,” Todd continued, “that standing orders require that all expenditures of missiles and other restricted ordnance be fully justified by the situation, and can only be done in consultation with the Executive and Tactical Officers.”

 

---

 

    “So noted,” Fairburn said, an eerie feeling creeping along his spine. He’d read this order when it first came out five T-years ago, and remembered feeling the same black cynicism that probably every other officer in the Navy had felt at the time. Here and now, though, the words didn’t sound nearly so ridiculous. “For the record, I note in turn that I am consulting Executive Officer Commander Todd and Tactical Officer Lieutenant Commander Ravel. Have either of you anything to say?”

    Todd and Ravel exchanged looks. Neither seemed exactly thrilled at the plan, Fairburn could see. But neither did they want to go down in Star Kingdom history as the ones who’d ruined the Navy’s first chance to finally nab a real pirate.

    “I agree with Captain Fairburn’s assessment of the situation,” Todd said formally. “The circumstances justify the expenditure of a missile.”

    “I also agree,” Ravel said.

    “So noted and logged,” Fairburn said. And thanked God that Breakwater hadn’t added language that would have required them to ask his personal permission to do their damn jobs. “Weapons Officer, prep me a missile. TO, plot me a warning shot.

    “Let’s take these bastards down.”

 

---

 

    The last board was half reassembled, and Grimm was starting to breathe a little easier, when a sudden curse came from the intercom. “Grimm — they’ve launched on us,” Merripen bit out.

    Grimm felt his heart skip a beat. “You mean a missile? They’ve launched a missile?”

    “No, a cupcake,” Merripen snarled. “Yes, a damn missile. What the hell do I do?”

    “You start by not panicking,” Grimm said, thinking fast. Unless the destroyer had increased its acceleration significantly — and Bettor had given Merripen strict orders to watch for that when the latter took over bridge duty — they still had several minutes before even a fast-track missile could reach them. “You’ll want to do a pitch, either up or down. Twenty degrees ought to be enough. Can you do that?”

    “Yeah, sure, I can do that,” Merripen said. “But if I do, I won’t be able to see the Salamander anymore.”

    Grimm frowned. That side effect of the maneuver hadn’t occurred to him. But Merripen was right. Blocking the incoming missile’s path with the floor of the Izbica’s wedge would also block their view of the Salamander.

    Could that be exactly what Captain Fairburn was going for? To force the Izbica to lose track of it while it –?

    While it what? Fired another missile, this one angled and arcing to run straight up the Izbica’s kilt? Or kicked up to a pursuit acceleration that was far greater than its listed limits?

    Both scenarios were damn unlikely. But neither was completely out of the question.

    But Grimm and the others had no choice. There was a missile incoming, and no matter what Fairburn had planned for after that, it would all be irrelevant if the missile blew the Izbica to atoms.

    “Just do it,” he growled toward the intercom.

    “Fine,” Merripen growled back. “You just get that interface the hell back together, okay? Suddenly, this isn’t looking like such a good neighborhood.”

    “Yeah, yeah,” Grimm said, feeling fresh sweat working its way onto his skin. “Working on it.

 

---

 

    The missile had been launched, Salamander had cut her acceleration long enough for the solid booster to get the weapon clear enough of the ship, and as the missile’s wedge came up Salamander resumed her own acceleration.

    “They did it,” Forward Gunnery Officer Lieutenant (jg) Pascal Navarre murmured from behind Osterman. “They really did it.”

    Osterman nodded silently. Captain Fairburn had actually fired one of Salamander’s missiles.

    Or rather, Salamander’s senior officers had launched it. She’d seen that ridiculous committee order when it first came down, requiring a vote of the senior officers before a ship’s captain could spend any of the Navy’s precious ordnance.

    Clearly, all of those officers had agreed.

    What the hell was going on out here?

    Osterman hadn’t the faintest idea. But given the situation, maybe Ensign Locatelli’s loud insistence that all three of his tracking systems be functional might not have been such a stupid order, after all.

    An instant later, a dull thud sounded faintly in the distance.

    And the telemetry section of the status board went solid red.

    “Telemetry,” Navarre snapped unnecessarily. “Damn. Crash kit?”

    “Probably not,” Osterman said, grabbing a handhold and pulling herself into the passageway. “I’ll get the one from Autocannon.”

    “No — I’ll get it,” Navarre said. “You get to telemetry.”

    “Aye, aye, Sir,” Osterman said. Leaning into the handhold and her own inertia, she changed direction and headed toward the telemetry compartment.

    She had the face off the main panel when the sound of someone tumbling through the hatchway came from behind her. “Report,” Ensign Locatelli ordered tartly.

    “Telemetry is down, Sir,” Osterman said, her teeth clenching around the last word as she spotted the problem. “Looks like a hex blew.”

    She spared a glance at him as she shoved off the deck toward the crash kit. But there was no recognition of reality in Locatelli’s eyes, no connecting of the blatantly obvious dots. All he saw was a dead component, and a job for his senior chief petty officer. “Then we’d better replace it, hadn’t we?” he said.

    “Yes, Sir,” Osterman said, consciously unclenching her teeth. This was no time for revelations or recriminations. One of Salamander’s missiles was running free, and with the telemetry system crashed there was no way for anyone to guide or otherwise control it. All the missile had right now was its own internal hunting programming, and that might not be the proper setup for whatever Fairburn had in mind. “Can you get the face off the aux panel, Sir?” she called back over her shoulder.

    At least Locatelli knew how to move when he needed to. By the time Osterman got back with the crash kit he had pulled off the auxiliary panel’s face and set it out of the way. Osterman braked to a halt with her feet against the supports and popped open the kit.

    Crash kits were supposed to be the emergency supply boxes, theoretically holding a spare or two of all the major components for a given electronics or hydraulics system. Unfortunately, they were as subject to pilferage as all the rest of the ship’s equipment. As Osterman had predicted to Navarre, the telemetry crash kit was woefully incomplete, with barely a third of its untouchable contents having actually remained untouched.

    Among the missing items, of course, were the two hexes that were supposed to be there.

    “Damn,” Locatelli growled as he peered into the box. “Now what?”

    “We first get the bad one out,” Osterman said, grabbing the eight-mil wrench from the tool tack strip and getting to work on the hex. “The Lieutenant’s getting the crash kit from Autocannon. Maybe it’ll have a hex.”

    “If it doesn’t?”

    “Then you’d better have Carpenter pull the one he stole for your Number Three tracking system, hadn’t you?” Osterman countered. It wasn’t the smartest thing a petty officer could say to an officer, but she wasn’t much in the mood for tact right now.

    “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Locatelli shot back. “My people don’t steal equipment. They get it from Stores, and through proper channels.”

    Osterman felt her teeth clenching up again. Either the man was as dumb as paint, or he was deliberately turning a blind eye to the inevitable consequences of his or-else orders. “Unless Stores doesn’t have what’s needed,” she said. “In which case –”

    She broke off as Navarre came caroming in off the edge of the hatchway. “Got it,” he puffed. “What do you need?”

    “A hex,” Osterman told him, mentally crossing her fingers.

    Crossing them uselessly. There were no hexes in Navarre’s kit.

    “Now what?” Locatelli demanded.

    Dumb as paint. Leaning past him, Osterman jabbed the intercom.

    “Forward Tracking; Telemetry,” she called. “Osterman. Shut down one of your tracking systems, pull out a hex, and bring it to me here.”

    “What?” Locatelli said. “Wait –”

    “Meanwhile, Sir,” Osterman put in as she cut off the intercom, “may I suggest you and Lieutenant Navarre start calling the other stations nearby and see if any of them has a crash kit with a spare hex.”

    “Senior Chief — ” Locatelli began, his voice dropping into Authority Zone.

    “Good idea, Senior Chief,” Navarre interrupted. “Ensign, you start with Electronic Warfare and Sensors — use the intercom in the next compartment. I’ll call Gravitics and Forward Impellers from here.”

    “Sir — ”

    “Move it, Locatelli.”

    Out of the corner of her eye, Osterman saw Locatelli throw a glare in her direction. But he merely nodded and swam his way out the hatchway.

    “Thank you, Sir,” Osterman murmured.

    “Just doing my job,” Navarre rumbled, moving over to the intercom. “Meanwhile, better make sure the hex didn’t cascade anything else when it died.”

    “Already on it.”

 

---

 

    The seconds crept by. Slowly, they turned into a full minute.

    And the missile was still rogue.

    Fairburn consciously forced open his hands, which had somehow closed themselves into fists when he wasn’t watching. A rogue missile might not be a commander’s worst fear, but it was pretty damn high on the list.

    And still the missile flew. How long did it take to repair a damn telemetry transmitter, anyway?

    “Tracking reports missile still on kill course, Sir,” Ravel said tautly.

    Fairburn’s hands again closed into fists. Kill course. Not the overshoot-and-explode in the wide open area in front of Izbica that he’d planned for it. With its telemetry link to Salamander gone, the missile had shifted to internal guidance.

    And the default programming was to go for the kill.

    Whether the missile would be able to carry out its new goal was still in question, of course. At its current flight angle, Izbica’s floor was blocking a direct intersect vector, and as the missile gained speed it progressively lost its already limited maneuverability. At this point it really had only three possibilities: impact on Izbica’s floor, make it past the edge of the floor and impact on the roof, or split the difference and detonate during the split-second it was between the two stress bands.

    The first two scenarios would accomplish nothing except the waste of the missile itself. The third would probably vaporize the freighter.

 

---

 

    If Grimm had killed Shresthra and the rest of the crew, Izbica’s destruction could be viewed as a form of summary and unprocessed justice on a group of murderers. If the pirates had merely confined the crew, Fairburn would be guilty of murder himself.

    “Telemetry’s back up,” Ravel snapped abruptly. “Retaking control.”

    Fairburn glanced at the timer. Two minutes four seconds had passed since the missile took off. Fifty-six seconds to go before its wedge burned out.

    “Can you get it back on track?” he asked.

    “Working on it, Sir,” Ravel said. Fairburn counted off ten more seconds — “No, Sir,” Ravel said. “It’s too far along on its kill course. I might be able to get it to detonate between Izbica’s stress bands, but the timing would be tricky.”

    Fairburn looked at the tactical display. His eyes followed the missile’s track as it converged on Izbica’s…

    “Shall I send the self-destruct code?” Ravel prompted.

    “No,” he told her. “Run it into Izbica’s wedge. Try to get it to detonate just before it hits. But if you can’t, just let it hit her wedge.”

    “If we detonate between bands, we can still pretend it was a deliberate warning shot,” Todd pointed out.

    “Too close, XO,” Fairburn said. “Even if Commander Ravel can pull off the timing, we stand a good chance of killing everyone aboard.”

    Todd cleared his throat.

    “Understood, Sir,” the XO said, lowering his voice. “May I point out that the whole point of the warning shot was to demonstrate that we had the skill to put a missile exactly where we wanted it? Running it into their wedge hardly sends that message.”

    “Sir, Izbica has gone to full-bore acceleration,” CIC reported. “Pushing their compensator to the limit.”

    “She’s pulling away,” Todd confirmed. “Shall we increase our own acceleration to compensate?”

    “Negative,” Fairburn growled. In theory, Salamander had more than enough gravs waiting in reserve. In practice, the iffy state of her compensator made any such increase far too dangerous to attempt.

    Fairburn had already taken one gamble. His ship had failed him. He wasn’t about to tempt fate with another roll of such badly loaded dice. “We could try another warning shot,” Ravel offered quietly. “We might still have time.”

    “With our telemetry probably being held together with packing tape?” Fairburn shook his head. “No. At best, we’re one for two — hardly the convincing argument we’d hoped to deliver. At worst, we kill them all.”

    “They are pirates, Sir,” Todd reminded him.

    “I know,” Fairburn said. “But bodies alone prove nothing. If we can’t take them alive, there’s no point in taking them dead.”

    There was a slight pause. “Yes, Sir,” Todd said.

    “Everyone stand ready to follow when Izbica jumps into hyperspace,” he ordered, raising his voice again so that the entire bridge could hear. “We may yet be able to run them down.”

    There was the usual murmur of acknowledgments.

    But Fairburn hardly heard them. It was still history in the making, certainly. But not the glorious historical victory he’d envisioned.

    It might even be the beginning of the end of the Royal Manticoran Navy. Breakwater would certainly be all over this once he heard about it. It was conceivable that a fiasco of this magnitude would be the straw that would persuade Parliament to let the Chancellor take the Navy apart and fold it into MPARS.

    Even if that didn’t happen, it was certainly the end of the career of one Captain John Ross, Baron Fairburn.

 

---

 

    “Crap, crap, crap,” Merripen’s muttered voice came from the intercom. “They hit us, Grimm. The damn Manticorans fired a missile and hit us.”

    “Yes, I know,” Grimm said with all the patience he could manage. He’d seen the result of that impact on the repeater displays down here.

    That result being exactly nothing. The Izbica’s wedge had made short work of the weapon, exactly the way stress bands were supposed to. There’d been a bit of a power flutter, but that was all.

    “So are we dead?” he asked Merripen.

    “What?” Merripen asked. “No, of course we’re not dead.”

    “Then shut up about it,” Grimm said. “We still pulling ahead of them?”

    “Yeah. For the moment.”

    “That’s all we need,” Grimm said. “Relax — we’re almost ready. Did you call up the Number One course package like I told you?”

    “Yeah, it’s plugged in,” Merripen growled. “You do realize they’re outside the hyper limit, right? And that there’s no way in hell we can outrun them in this thing?”

    “Trust me,” Grimm said with a tight smile. He made the last connection — “Ready,” he said, plugging the board into the interface and keying for a self-test. “Don’t touch anything — I’ll be right up.”

    The self-test had finished by the time Grimm reached the bridge, with everything showing a satisfactory green. “I hope you’ve got a really good hole card on this one,” Merripen warned with a grunt as he moved away from the helm station. “Fairburn’s called twice with orders to surrender.”

    “Why didn’t you pipe it down to me?” Grimm asked, keying up the board.

    “‘Cause you were busy,” Merripen said. “I didn’t think you had time to gloat.”

    “There’s always time to gloat,” Grimm admonished him mildly. “Okay. Here goes…”

 

---

 

    “There she goes!” Ravel snapped. “Bearing…we’ve got her vector, Sir.”

    “Go!” Fairburn snapped, mentally crossing his fingers. If Salamander’s hyperdrive was in the same sorry shape as her telemetry system, this was going to be a very short trip.

    Fortunately, it wasn’t. Without even a flicker of a problem, Salamander translated into the alpha band.

    Only to find that Izbica had vanished.

    “Where did she go?” Fairburn demanded, running his eyes back and forth over the sensor displays, as if he could will the freighter’s image into existence by sheer willpower. “There’s no way she could have gotten out of range that fast. Could she?”

    “No,” Todd said grimly. “Best bet is that she did a microjump and got back to n-space just as we were leaving it.”

    Fairburn clenched his teeth. Todd was right. It would take precise timing, but that had to be the answer.

    “TO, calculate how far Izbica would have gotten if she’d translated down just as we translated up,” he ordered. “Helm, get us back to n-space as close to that spot as you can. CIC, I want a full-sensor scan as soon as we translate.”

    “Got it,” Ravel reported. “Sending coordinates to the helm.”

    “Ready to translate,” the helmsman reported.

    “Go,” Fairburn ordered.

    Izbica wasn’t there. Izbica was nowhere.

    Salamander spent the next six hours not finding her.

 

---

 

    Bettor lifted a glass of the wine Merripen had found in the late Captain Shresthra’s private stores.

    “That,” he said flatly, “was about as crazy a trick as I’ve ever seen.”

    “Not crazy at all,” Grimm said mildly, taking a sip from his own glass. Whatever else Shresthra had been, he’d had excellent taste in alcoholic beverages. “It’s all in the timing. Plus a certain degree of willingness to push the envelope when making one’s translations. Don’t forget, I spent a lot of time studying this ship during the voyage. I knew exactly what it could and couldn’t do.”

    “I still think it was crazy,” Merripen said. “But I guess you can’t argue with success.”

    “Especially when success pays so well,” Grimm said. “Speaking of which, I hope you were able to get all the data you needed, because we sure as hell aren’t going back.”

    “I got enough,” Bettor assured him. “Another couple of hours would have been nice, but I should have enough to confirm the junction’s existence and give us a close approximation as to where it’s lurking.”

    “Good enough,” Grimm said.

    “And meanwhile,” Merripen rumbled, “the Manticorans now know there are pirates working the area.”

    Gently, Grimm swirled the wine in his glass. Yes, that was indeed the downside of all this. In retrospect, he probably should have just ignored Izbica’s hails and let Fairburn come to the pirate/hijacker conclusion on his own. That was surely all the little man’s little brain was capable of. The problem was that, without Grimm’s declaration on record, a more clever brain might have started thinking outside the lines and wondering if there might be another reason behind the Izbica’s passengers’ visit.

    The odds that someone was searching for wormholes in their system were extremely low, of course. But low odds were not zero odds; and if the Manticorans even suspected what it was they were sitting on, there would be a mad scramble to get all those mothballed ships back into service to defend themselves and their incredible asset.

    But pirates weren’t nearly such a serious threat, certainly not to a system with this many warships already in service. The most likely response to Izbica’s hijacking would be a beefing-up of their customs personnel and procedures, and maybe more escort runs.

    Of course, the best-case scenario would have been to continue on to Minorca without causing any ripples whatsoever, leave the Izbica peaceably, and catch the Axelrod freighter that would be arriving on carefully unrelated business. That would have left everyone blissfully unaware of what had happened, and given no one any reason to look at this ship, her passengers, or her cargo ever again.

    But what was done was done.

    And really, the repercussions were unlikely to be anything serious.

    “Not a problem,” he assured Merripen. “They’ll probably tighten up scrutiny on incoming passengers, but that’ll be the end of it.”

    “You don’t think they’ll beef up their Navy?”

    “Against the vague threat of some pirates?” Grimm shook his head. “Not a chance. I mean, come on — they already have all the hardware they need for that.”

    “The Navy will want more anyway,” Merripen said. “Navies always do.”

    Grimm snorted. After spending a week in Manticore orbit reading the newsfeeds, skimming the recent history, and generally getting a feel for the Star Kingdom, he could answer that one with complete confidence. “Of course they’ll want more,” he said. “But they won’t get it. Not here.”

    “You sure?” Merripen persisted.

    Grimm lifted his glass in salute, the transcript of Chancellor of the Exchequer Earl Breakwater’s last speech in Parliament floating before his eyes. “I guarantee it.”