The Shadow of Saganami

Chapter Forty-Seven

"I do n't believe this shit."

"What?" Duan Binyan looked up, startled by the sheer venom in Zeno Egervary's voice. The Marianne was thirty days out of Split, decelerating towards the last planet on her delivery schedule, and Egervary sat glaring at his tactical display.

"That bastard Manticoran," Egervary snarled, and Duan frowned, wondering why Egervary sounded so upset.

"What about them?" he asked. "We knew they had a couple of support ships stationed here."

"Not them," Egervary grated. "That frigging cruiser from Split!"

"What about her?" Duan demanded. He was getting past surprise at the security officer's obviously frightened fury to alarm, and his tone was considerably sharper.

"She's here, too," Egervary spat. "Right here in Montana orbit!"

"What?"

Duan bounced out of his command chair and across to Egervary's station almost before he realized he was moving. Not for the first time, he made a mental note to insist that if Marianne was going to be sent out on this sort of mission he really wanted a proper tactical repeater where he could get at it without leaving his own chair. It was only an absentminded flicker at the bottom of his brain, however. His attention was too firmly fixed on Egervary's plot to spare it any more than that.

"Are you sure?" he demanded as he gazed down at the icons of the ships in orbit around the planet. There weren't many. The icon representing the warship floated in a parking orbit all its own, and there were only two merchantmen-one a Rembrandter, and the other a Solarian, from their transponder codes, the two service ships they'd known about, and half a dozen Montanan LACs to keep it company.

"Unless you know some reason for two Manty cruisers to both be squawking the same transponder code, then, yeah, I'm pretty goddamned positive."

Egervary's tone was scarcely what anyone would have called respectfully disciplined, but Duan paid that little attention. If Egervary's identification was accurate, he had every reason to be worried as hell.

"I don't like this, Binyan." Annette De Chabrol's voice was sharper than usual, if not quite as taut as Egervary's.

"I'm not particularly crazy about it myself, Annette," he replied acidly, still staring down at the plot while his mind whirred.

"They must've spotted the goddamned drop after all," Egervary said. "The bastards nailed the fucking terrorists, then ran on ahead to grab our asses when we showed up here! We're fucked , people!"

Duan glanced sideways at him. Zeno Egervary's language wasn't exactly what you'd care for your sweet old grandmother to hear at the best of times, but he was obviously under more stress than usual. Which could be bad. Egervary was good at his job-both his jobs-but he was also the least stable of Marianne's officers.

"Calm down, Zeno," the captain said as soothingly as he could. Egervary gave him an incredulous look, and Duan shrugged.

"They did not spot the drop, Zeno. If they'd spotted that, they would have nailed us at the same time. We didn't break orbit for over four hours after we made the delivery and recovered the shuttle. You think they would've let us just sit there that long, then actually leave the system, if they'd known what we'd been doing?"

He held Egervary's eyes with his own, and the security head seemed to settle down a bit.

A very tiny bit.

"Then they must've picked up one of the locals with some of the new guns right after we left," he said. "They busted him, and he sang like a bird. That's how they knew to come on ahead and wait for us."

"And just how do you figure that? I didn't tell anybody where we were going next-did you?"

Egervary was still glaring at him, but he gave his head a choppy shake, and Duan shrugged.

"Well, if you didn't, and if I didn't, I'm damned sure Annette didn't. So how do you think they could have figured it out."

"What about the port agent?" Egervary demanded. " He knew what we were doing. If they picked someone up and whoever it was turned him in, he could've told them."

"He couldn't tell them what he didn't know," Duan riposted. "This operation was tightly compartmentalized, Zeno. Our Kornati agent knew we were coming and made the arrangements for us, including assembling our cover cargo, and he could have spilled that part of it. But he didn't know where we were going next. The flight plan we filed with him had us heading for Tillerman as our next port of call, and that's also the destination for the cargo we took on there. We didn't say a word about stopping off at Montana. So the only place he could have sent them is straight ahead to Tillerman."

Egervary frowned, obviously trying to find a hole in Duan's logic. The captain folded his arms, leaning one hip against the tactical console and waited.

One advantage of Marianne's military-grade hyper generator and particle screening was that her speed would let her stop off at Montana long enough to contact the locals waiting for their special cargo and still make it to Tillerman on time. A regular merchantman would have been too slow for that, and not even the Jessyk agent on Kornati had known about Marianne's superior speed.

"Then what do you think she's doing here?" Egervary challenged.

"I don't have the least idea. The only thing I'm pretty damned confident of is that there's no way they could have predicted that we'd be coming here."

"Whether they could predict it or not, they're here now," De Chabrol pointed out tartly, and Duan nodded.

"Yes, they are. "

"So what do we do?" his executive officer demanded, and he frowned.

If Egervary had spotted the Manty sooner, his options might have been a lot better. Unfortunately, even Marianne's sensor suite had a strictly limited range, especially against targets not obliging enough to have an impeller wedge up. From the look of Egervary's plot, the Manty's parking orbit must have brought her around from the far side of the planet within the last six or seven minutes. Unfortunately, by the time the cruiser was on the right side of the planet and the range was down to something which let Egervary spot her and check her transponder code, Marianne had already made turnover and begun decelerating towards the planet. Now she was twelve minutes past turnover, down to a velocity of 14,769 KPS and about 56.8 million kilometers from the planet, still decelerating at her dignified, tramp freighter's rate of two hundred gravities.

Part of the Jessyk Combine officer wanted to avoid the planet altogether. Despite his soothing words to Egervary, he, too, felt his hackles rising as he looked at that silent icon. What had brought the Manty here? Duan had seen enough bizarre coincidences to know they happened, but this one was more bizarre than most… assuming it was, in fact, a coincidence at all. Under the circumstances, and especially given the nature of the ship under his command and his cargo, he felt no burning desire to find out if it was.

Unfortunately he didn't have much choice. His ship was two hours and three minutes out of Montana orbit. If she suddenly changed course away from the planet, she'd make System Flight Control mildly curious, to say the least. Nor could she magically stop where she was and escape back across the hyper limit. Unless she altered acceleration radically, it was still going to take her two hours to decelerate to rest relative to the system primary, whatever she did. That meant she was committed to at least a flyby of the planet, and not stopping as she went by was certain to arouse the Manty skipper's suspicions.

And if the Manty got suspicious, there was no way Marianne could hope to stay away from her long enough to escape into hyper.

"We'll have to continue on profile," he said finally. Egervary looked as if he wanted to protest, and De Chabrol and Iakovos Sandkaran, the communications officer, didn't look much happier. "We're already committed to making planetfall," he pointed out. "If we try anything else, they're bound to figure we're up to something shady."

"But we're not supposed to be here," De Chabrol pointed out.

"And nobody in the system knows we're not," Duan countered. "Unless you want to suggest the Manty pulled our flight plan from the Split traffic control people?" He snorted. "That wouldn't make any more sense than the notion that they'd somehow run on ahead of us to lurk in ambush, now would it?"

"Maybe not, but what if they recognize us?" Egervary asked.

He looked more than a little pinched around the nostrils, and Duan remembered that Egervary-only his name hadn't been "Egervary" then-had been a "guest" of the Royal Manticoran Navy once before. Fortunately, he'd been acting as the tactical officer aboard a pirate cruiser in Silesia at the time, rather than serving aboard a slaver. Since he hadn't been in the database of the battlecruiser which had taken his ship and he'd been "only" a pirate, he'd been turned over to the local Silesian system governor rather than simply executed by the Manties. Getting him back from a Silly system governor had been trivially easy for Jessyk, but it seemed to have permanently affected Egervary's nerve where Manticoran warships were concerned.

Probably because he figures he is in their database now , Duan thought sarcastically. But his sarcastic amusement faded quickly. Finding yourself in the Manty Navy's database under the heading of previously arrested pirate or slaver was a virtual guarantee of the death sentence the second time they apprehended you.

"There's not any reason they should recognize us," he said, looking Egervary in the eye. "If they didn't spot us doing anything we shouldn't have been doing in Split, there's no reason for them to have done anything except check our transponder code. Why waste time taking a close look at one more rusty tramp-especially one that heads out of the system within less than nine hours of your own arrival? Right?"

Egervary looked at him for a moment, then gave a jerky nod.

"All right, then." Duan turned to Sandkaran. "Have we contacted Flight Control yet, Iakovos?"

"No," Sandkaran said, shaking his head.

"And we haven't started squawking our transponder code yet, right?" Another headshake. "Good. Let's crank up a new -transponder-the Golden Butterfly , I think. Get it ready, then contact Flight Control and request a parking orbit as Butterfly . Don't put the transponder on-line until they call you back up and whack you on the wrist for not having it up. Be a little crabby when they do, like a typical lazy merchant spacer. Then put the Butterfly code up. By the time we actually make orbit, the Manty should already have been informed by Flight Control that we're coming under our new name."

"What should I give them for purpose of visit?"

"Good question." Duan thought for a moment, then snorted. "Whatever this guy's doing here, I don't propose to do anything that could make him suspicious of us. The customers waiting on this planet don't know exactly when we're supposed to arrive, anyway. They won't think anything one way or the other if we don't contact them with the right ID code. So I think this time our hatches will just stay sealed nice and tight. If the Combine had a shipping agent on the planet, I'd try telling them we were just dropping off a company message on our way through. Unfortunately, we don't have an agent here. So I think our best bet is to haul out that busted oxygen tank."

Understanding showed in Sandkaran's eyes. Annette actually chuckled, and even Egervary cracked a slight smile. Marianne carried a severely damaged liquid oxygen tank everywhere she went. It was her excuse for stopping at planets where she couldn't produce a legitimate cargo or other reason for being there. The tank was identical to the ones in her life-support plant, and stopping to replace something like that at the earliest possible moment would make sense for any merchantship. Especially for a freighter as dilapidated as Marianne appeared to be, since such a ship would undoubtedly be operating on a thinner safety margin than better maintained vessels.

"Be sure you declare an emergency and explain its nature when you call up Flight Control, Iakovos," Duan directed.

"Do you think Westman's going to call it quits?" Aikawa Kagiyama asked quietly.

He and Helen were sitting at the tactical station. Officially, they had the tac watch, since The Book required Tactical to be manned at all times aboard Manticoran warships. Since absolutely nothing was likely to happen at the moment, it made sense to give both Lieutenant Commander Kaplan and Lieutenant Hearns some downtime. It was also an opportunity for a couple of snotties to get a little more "independent" tac time on their logs. So, officially, Helen was Tac Officer of the Watch with Aikawa as her assistant.

Now she glanced at him quizzically, and he shrugged.

"I'm not asking you to betray any confidences, Helen. On the other hand, do you really think there's anyone in the ship who hasn't figured out roughly why we hurried our buns back here so quickly? Or that the Skipper and Van Dort must've had some reason to go dirt-side and see him again?"

"Well, put that way, I guess not," she admitted.

Now that she thought about it, Aikawa and Ragnhild had put remarkably little energy into bugging her for details. The other two denizens of Snotty Row didn't count. Paulo, of course, never tried to weasel information out of her, and Leo Sottmeister had been left behind on Kornati, along with Hexapuma's third pinnace and Lieutenant Kelso's platoon.

But apparently Aikawa's curiosity had finally gotten the better of his-limited-ability to control it. She looked back at the main plot without really seeing it and considered what she'd seen and heard.

"I don't know what he's going to decide, Aikawa," she said finally, slowly. "I'll tell you this, though. He isn't a bit like Nordbrandt must be. I figure he could be as stubborn and as dangerous as they come over something he really believes in. And I think he really believed in keeping us out of Montana when he started all this. But I'm not so sure he does, anymore. Or, at least, I think he's figured out it's not as black-and-white as he thought it was. I guess the real question's whether or not he's flexible enough to admit we're not the original font of all evil and be sensible about this."

"And do you think he is?"

"I don't know," she repeated honestly. "I hope so, but I wouldn't even venture a guess at this point."

"What I was afraid of," Aikawa sighed. "I guess it would have been too easy for-"

He broke off as a soft chime sounded and an icon on the tactical plot changed. He and Helen both looked at it.

"' Golden Butterfly ,'" Aikawa repeated, reading the name which had appeared as the incoming merchantship brought its transponder on-line and CIC updated the plot. "They think up some pretty screwy names for merchies, don't they?"

"See?" Duan smiled as Montana System Flight Control accepted their ID and the ostensible reason for their visit. The pleasant young woman who'd taken their call hadn't even fussed very hard over the previous absence of any transponder code, and Sandkaran had been suitably apologetic. Now he was turning the microphone over to Azadeh Shirafkin, Marianne's-or, for the moment, Golden Butterfly's-purser.

"I told you," Duan went on to De Chabrol and Egervary as the young woman made sympathetic noises over Shirafkin's explanation of their supposed emergency. "We'll just slide in under their radar horizon by not calling any attention to ourselves, pick up our new oxygen tank, and then-very quietly-get the hell out of here again."

"It works for me," Egervary said fervently.

Aikawa Kagiyama felt bored. Standing a tactical watch was all very well, but it would have been nice if there'd been something a bit more energetic than Montana's anemic traffic to keep an eye on. Even the arrival of a typical tramp for a routine repair call was a welcome diversion… which said something significant about just how boring things had been before the weirdly named Golden Butterfly arrived.

For want of anything else to do, he decided to run a tracking exercise on the freighter, which was now less than fifteen minutes from entering orbit. She was moving at barely 1,703 KPS, and only 736,096 kilometers out, and he had an almost perfect sensor angle, right up the kilt of her wedge.

He studied the information on his display. Aside from the fact that her active sensor emissions seemed just a bit more energetic than he would have expected out of a ship like her, the data was thoroughly uninteresting. He almost pulled the sensors off of her, then shrugged. If he was bored, the ratings manning CIC probably were, as well. He might as well give them something to do, too, so he punched in the command for a routine evaluation of the ship.

He wasn't at all prepared for what came back a moment later.

Helen was no longer sitting at Tactical. Lieutenant Commander Kaplan was, and Helen actually found it a bit difficult to see the plot from where she stood. Perhaps that was because Abigail Hearns, Guthrie Bagwell, Ansten FitzGerald, and Captain Terekhov were all crowded in, peering over Kaplan's shoulder as a noticeably nervous Aikawa took the lot of them back through his impromptu tracking exercise.

"… so, then, Ma'am, I asked CIC to do an evaluation. Just as a drill. I never expected to get this back from them."

He looked up at the circle of astronomically senior faces looming over him, and Captain Terekhov's hand gripped his shoulder.

"Good work, Aikawa," he said quietly. " Very good work."

"Skipper," Aikawa's face flushed with obvious pleasure, "I wish I deserved the credit. But it was just one of those things. I can't even say I had 'a feeling,' because I sure as heck didn't!"

"That doesn't matter," FitzGerald told him. "What matters is that you did it."

"Even that wouldn't have mattered if you hadn't had Abigail and me pull in everything we could while we were in Kornati orbit, Skipper," Kaplan pointed out.

Terekhov nodded almost absently, his mind busy.

Whoever that was over there, he doubted very much that the ship's real name was Golden Butterfly . And he was quite certain the other vessel's commander had no idea Hexapuma had gotten a complete emissions map off of her before she left Split. If he'd even suspected that, he would never have been stupid enough to try using a false transponder code.

"Whoever that is, he's gutsy," FitzGerald remarked. Aikawa looked up at him, and the XO snorted. "Coming right up on us this way takes about a kiloton of nerve. We've been squawking our transponder ever since we went into orbit, so he has to know who we are."

"Might be nerve," Kaplan said. "But it could be desperation, too. I'm betting there's either something here on Montana he absolutely has to do, or else he didn't realize we were here until it was too late to do anything but come on in and ask for a parking orbit of his own."

"I'm inclined to think you're right, Guns," Terekhov said. "Or even that it's both-something he has to do and a late pickup on our presence. The question is what we do about it."

"Well, Sir," Abigail said, "we know one of the two transponder codes they've used must be false. For all we know both of them may, but at least one has to be bogus. That's sufficient reason to board and examine her under interstellar law, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," Terekhov agreed. "And I think that's what we'll do." He turned to FitzGerald. "Get hold of Tadislaw, Ansten. Tell him I'll want a boarding party ready to go within the next fifteen minutes."

"Skipper, you know she's armed," FitzGerald said. "We picked up that much in Split, and look how quickly she got here. Whatever else she is, she isn't a standard merchie. We don't know what else they may have hidden away over there."

"Can't be helped," Terekhov replied. "According to this," he tapped the detailed readout from the Split data, "she's got two lasers in each broadside plus some point defense. It'll take her at least five or ten minutes to clear away the broadside weapons, and there's no way she can do that at this range without our seeing it coming. Same for anything she has hidden, except that she'll have to take the time to clear away the false plating or whatever over it first, as well. Her point defense could come up faster, but it's not going to hurt us if we clear for action ourselves before we tell her we're coming to visit. Unless they've got some sort of death wish, they're not going to argue with a heavy cruiser that's obviously ready to turn them into drifting wreckage."

"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One is ready to depart."

Ragnhild Pavletic heard the edge of excitement sharpening her tone and forced herself to step back from it just a bit.

"Hawk- Papa-One, Flight Ops. You are cleared to depart. No traffic, repeat, no traffic."

"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One copies no traffic on flight path and cleared to depart. Departing now."

The sharpness had smoothed back down into properly crisp professionalism, she was pleased to note as she fed power to the thrusters. They goosed the pinnace sharply, pushing the small craft clear of Hexapuma's radar shadow, and she watched her proximity radar. Hawk-Papa-One cleared the pinnace's impeller wedge safety perimeter quickly, and the pressure of acceleration vanished as she brought the wedge up and went to four hundred gravities.

She'd left the flight deck hatch open, and she glanced over her shoulder through it, past the small cubbyhole of the flight engineer. Lieutenant Hedges and a full squad of his platoon occupied about a third of the passenger compartment.

"Attention freighter Golden Butterfly !" She heard the Skipper's voice come up on the com as she settled down on course for the freighter. " Golden Butterfly , this is Captain Terekhov of Her Majesty's Starship Hexapuma . You are ordered to stand by for boarding and examination. My boarding party is en route now. You will open your hatches immediately."

"- will open your hatches immediately."

" Jesus Christ! " Egervary gasped, and Duan Binyan snapped upright in his chair. He heard Annette De Chabrol inhale sharply, but it scarcely registered. He was staring at his plot, where the Manticoran heavy cruiser's impeller wedge had just snapped up. Even as he watched, her sidewalls were coming up, as well, and her broadside energy mounts were training out as she went to battle stations.

"So much for they'll never suspect anything!" Egervary half-shouted, wheeling towards Duan. "They knew all along, goddamn it, just like I said! They were fucking waiting for us and we fucking well sailed right up to them!"

"Shut up!" Duan snapped.

"Why? What the fuck does it matter now? We're dead-we are fucking dead ! When they come aboard, find out what we are, they'll-"

"He said to shut up, Zeno," Annette said viciously, turning on the security officer with a snarl, "so goddamn shut your face !"

Egervary managed to clamp his jaws together, but his facial muscles twitched and jumped and a thick sheen of sweat oozed down his forehead. His hands trembled visibly, and he turned back to his console with something almost like a whimper.

Duan Binyan wanted to whimper himself.

The money was always good for someone willing to serve on one of the Jessyk Combine's "special ships," and the risks weren't really all that great. Despite the best efforts of people like the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, no more than five percent of slave ships were ever apprehended. Most were stopped by people like the Solarian League, where, by and large, the worst a crewman had to worry about was a brief incarceration before the Combine or Manpower bribed him out of jail. No more than a handful were stopped by the Star Kingdom or the Republic in any given year. But the crews on that handful were seldom ever heard of again. Manticore and Haven, for all they hated one another, both took genetic slaving seriously, and the penalty under the law of either star nation was death.

But the odds against being one of those handful of ships were so high, and the money was so good, Jessyk could always find someone to take the chance. Someone like Duan Binyan, who suddenly realized all the money in the galaxy was no use at all to a dead man.

"What are we going to do, Binyan?" De Chabrol asked urgently, her voice lowered so only he could hear.

"I don't- " Duan broke off and wiped perspiration from his own face. "I don't think there's anything we can do, Annette," he admitted hoarsely. "That's a heavy cruiser . She can turn us into vapor anytime she feels like it. If we don't open the hatches, she may just decide to do it. Or, just as bad, she'll blow her way in, and her Marines will come in shooting. Do you want Marines in battle armor burning down that hatch?" he demanded, jerking a thumb at the bridge lift hatch.

"But they're Manties ," she protested, her eyes desperate. It was all she had to say, and Duan's mouth tightened.

"What do you want me to say, Annette? If we let them in and they find out what we are, they may kill us-all right," he said quickly as she opened her mouth, "they probably will kill us! But if we try to stop them, there's no question what'll happen. At least if we open up, we'll live a little longer!"

"I say blow the fucking ship and take the motherless bastards with us!" Egervary said. Duan wheeled towards him, and the security officer bared his teeth in a rictuslike grin. His dark eyes were huge, and his nostrils flared. "Those holier-than-thou motherfuckers are all so hot to kill anyone who does anything they don't approve of! Who the hell died and made them God? I say we take as many to hell with us as we can!"

"That's the stupidest thing you've said yet!" Duan snapped. "You may want to die, but I sure don't!"

"Like what you want's going to make a difference!" Egervary jeered. "We're dead , Binyan. That's what happens when the Manties come on board. Well, if I've got to die, so do they!"

The security officer hovered on the brink of outright madness in his terror, Duan realized. And that terror, as all too often happened, was feeding his rage, fanning it like a furnace.

"No," the captain said flatly, forcing his voice to project a calm he was far from feeling. "We're going to do exactly what they tell us to, Zeno. Exactly ."

"You think so?" Egervary's grin was wider and more maniacal than ever, and he whipped back around to his panel.

Duan Binyan had an instant to realize what that grin had meant, and he lunged towards the security officer screaming in protest.

"Stand by, Lieutenant Hedges," Ragnhild said. "We'll be coming up on her main personnel hatch in another five minutes."

"Right, Ragnhild," Michael Hedges acknowledged with a smile.

He was one of the very few people serving in Hexapuma who looked almost as young as Ragnhild did. It was unfortunate that he'd had the bad judgment to become a Marine rather than a Navy officer, but he was awfully cute anyway. Of course, he was considerably senior to her, but Regs only prohibited relationships between officers in the same chain of command. Technically, that included Marines aboard a ship, but it was a technicality that was winked at most of the time. So maybe it wasn't such a bad thing he was a Marine after all…

She smiled back at him and returned her attention to her HUD, and one eyebrow rose as she saw half a dozen patches of plating blowing away from the freighter's hull. One of the sudden openings was almost directly in front of the pinnace, and she saw something in it. It was an indistinct, barely visible shape, but there was something naggingly familiar about that half-glimpsed form, and it seemed to be turning to point in her direction.

God, it's a-!

Ragnhild Pavletic never completed the thought.

The universe punched Helen Zilwicki in the belly. Nothing else could have explained the sudden, hoarse exhalation. The way her heart stopped and her lungs froze as Hawk-Papa-One exploded.

Point defense cluster , an icy voice said in the back of her brain, clear and precise-a stranger's voice, surely not her own.

Shock at the sheer, suicidal stupidity of what they'd just seen gripped every officer on Hexapuma's bridge. Every officer but one.

"Laser clusters only-force neutralization!" Captain Aivars Aleksandrovich Terekhov snapped. " Fire! "

"You fucking idiot!" Duan howled.

His hands closed on Egervary's neck from behind. His shoulders and arms heaved ferociously, and the security officer flew up out of his seat. All Duan had really been thinking about was getting the maniac away from the tactical panel before he did something even stupider-as if there'd been anything stupider he could do! He succeeded in that, but the savage, panic-driven strength with which he tore Egervary away from the console also snapped the man's neck like a stick.

The corpse was still in midair when Hexapuma fired.

The range was less than four thousand kilometers.

At that range, point defense lasers capable of taking out incoming, wildly evading missiles at ranges of sixty or seventy thousand kilometers were more than enough to deal with any unarmored target not protected by a sidewall or an impeller wedge. It wasn't often that a warship had the opportunity to use its point defense against even hostile small craft, far less another starship, because nobody was insane enough not to surrender when a naval vessel got that close.

Usually, at any rate.

The good news for Marianne was that Hexapuma's laser clusters were far less powerful than her broadside energy mounts. One of the heavy cruiser's grasers would have blown entirely through the freighter's civilian hull, and probably broken her back in the process. The laser clusters wouldn't do that, but dozens of them studded each of Hexapuma's flanks, and the Royal Manticoran Navy believed in being prepared. Rare though the opportunity to use the normally defensive weapons offensively might have been, BuWeaps had considered how best to do so when the chance offered itself, and Naomi Kaplan's vengeful finger punched up a stored fire plan. The tactical computer considered the data coming back to it from the active sensors briefly- very briefly-then established its targets, assigned each of them a threat value, assigned them to specific point defense stations, and opened fire.

Stilettos of coherent light stabbed out from Hexapuma . Each of a cluster's eight lasers was capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That was one shot every two seconds from every cluster in Hexapuma's starboard broadside and Marianne's hull plating seemed to erupt outward. The strobing laser clusters tracked across her, precisely, carefully, almost literally unable to miss at such an absurdly short range, as Hexapuma savaged the ship which had killed her pinnace. They scourged her with whips of barbed energy, shattering and smashing, wiping away weapons, sensors, impeller nodes.

It took precisely twenty-three seconds from the instant Terekhov gave the command to fire to reduce the ship which had just murdered eighteen of his people to a shattered, broken wreck that would never move under its own power again.

Alarms screamed. The bridge quivered and jerked like a small boat in a gale as Marianne's four-million-ton hull shuddered in agony. Transfer energy hammered her as Hexapuma's fury flayed alloy flesh from her bones.

There were other screams, here and there throughout her hull. Human screams, not electronic ones, and-for the most part-very brief. Low-powered laser clusters might be, compared to regular broadside weapons, but atmosphere belched out of the holes smashed into her. Some of it came from cargo holds, but most came from the ship's compartments. From impeller rooms which were torn open by laser talons, spilling men and women in coveralls and shirt sleeves into the merciless vacuum. From passageways inboard from targeted laser clusters. From berthing quarters directly inboard from her broadside lasers. From messing compartments inboard from her main broadside sensor array.

There were fifty-seven men and women aboard Marianne before Hexapuma fired. That was an extraordinarily large crew for a merchantship, but then most merchantships never had to worry about cargoes of desperate slaves.

By the time Zeno Egervary's body hit the deck and stopped sliding, there were fourteen still-living men and women aboard the freighter's shredded wreck.

" Cease fire! " the terror-distorted voice screamed over the com. " For God's sake, cease fire! We surrender! We surrender! "

Aivars Terekhov's face was like hammered iron. His visual display showed the rapidly dispersing wreckage of Ragnhild Pavletic's pinnace. The pieces were very, very small.

"Who's speaking?" Frozen helium was warmer than that voice.

"This is… this is Duan Binyan," the other voice gasped, jagged and shrill with panic. "I'm… I was the captain, but I swear to God I never ordered that! I swear it! "

"Whether you ordered it or not, it was your responsibility, Captain ," Terekhov said with a flat, terrible emphasis. "I will be sending a second pinnace. This one will contain a full platoon of battle-armored Marines. At the first sign of resistance, they will employ lethal force. Is that understood, Captain ?"

"Yes. Yes! "

"Then understand this, as well. You've just murdered men and women of the armed forces of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. As such you are guilty, at the very least, of piracy, for which the sentence is death. I suggest, Captain , that you spend the next few minutes trying to think of some reason I might consider letting you continue to live."

Aivars Terekhov smiled. It was a terrifying expression.

"Think hard, Captain ," he advised almost gently. "Think very hard."