Not that it mattered either way, because Ferrero’s cruiser had surprised the other ship skulking along at a low base velocity. That was what had attracted her tac officer’s attention in the first place. Given its small size, its low velocity and position just inside the hyper limit of the Adelaide System, especially headed towards the primary, was a dead giveaway. The only logical reason for a vessel the size of a very small frigate to be moving in-system at such a low speed (especially in Silesia) was that it was a pirate or privateer trolling for prizes. The low velocity at which merchantmen normally made the final translation into normal-space from hyper made them extremely vulnerable to interception immediately upon arrival, particularly since it always took at least a short interval for their sensors to settle down enough for them to be able to detect anything in their vicinities. Until they could at least see what lay in proximity to them, they couldn’t even know a threat was there to begin trying to evade it. Even when they realized they were in danger, merchantmen were slow and clumsy ships. When a potential enemy also had the advantage of surprise, the chance that a merchant skipper could evade him was remote, at best.

If evasion failed and an armed vessel, however small, managed to bring its weapons into range of an unarmed freighter, the merchant ship would find itself completely helpless. And the best way for an armed vessel to do that was to be moving at a relatively low velocity on the same approximate heading a merchie might be expected to arrive upon. Too much relative speed, and it would overrun its intended victim, unable to decelerate to rendezvous before the merchantman could reverse her own acceleration, break back across the hyper limit, and escape into hyper-space. Too little, and even a whalelike merchantman might be able to somehow twist aside and make it back into hyper before she could be overhauled.

That was obviously what the ship on Ferrero’s plot had had in mind. The fact that it had gone to maximum acceleration directly away from her own command the moment she identified herself and instructed it to heave to for examination was ample confirmation in her own mind that it was a pirate. Unfortunately for it, the same tactical considerations which applied to merchantmen at low velocity evading pirates applied to pirates at low velocity evading heavy cruisers… with one notable exception. A pirate needed to rendezvous with its prize if it wanted to loot it; a heavy cruiser was under no obligation to rendezvous with a pirate, because said pirate could be blown out of space in passing just fine. And that was the situation which obtained in this instance.

Ferrero and her crew hadn’t really planned on doing any pirate-hunting this afternoon, but sometimes God rewarded the virtuous when they expected it least. This was clearly one of those times, and Jessica Epps had found herself heading in-system at just over sixty-three thousand KPS. Given the geometry of the cruiser’s pursuit curve, that had worked out to an overtake advantage of forty-two thousand kilometers per second—well, 40,007.162 KPS, if Ferrero wanted to be fussy about it—over an initial range of three and a half light-minutes. Which meant that even with its slight acceleration advantage, the ship she was pursuing couldn’t possibly evade her. In fact, assuming constant acceleration for both ships, Jessica Epps would overtake her prey completely in just under twenty-five minutes, and bring it into missile range well before that.