Ferrero jerked upright in her chair, spinning towards Tactical in astonishment. Harris took another fraction of a second to confirm the preposterous readings, then looked up.

“The Andy just launched on the pirate, Skipper! I have three birds in acquisition!”

Ferrero’s eyes dropped to her own repeater plot, and she swallowed a curse of disbelief as it updated. Harris was right. Preposterous as it sounded, Hellbarde had just launched missiles at Jessica Epps’ prize in complete violation of all interstellar naval practice. Not to mention at least half a dozen solemn protocols Ferrero could think of right off hand.

There was nothing she—or anyone in the universe—could have done to change what happened next. Hellbarde was much closer to the target than Jessica Epps was, and the flight time on her missiles was little more than seventy seconds. None of them were warning shots, either.

The hapless suspected pirate altered course, rolling ship frantically in an effort to interpose the roof of its impeller wedge between it and the incoming warheads. It was wasted effort, and its pathetically outclassed counter missiles and point defense were equally useless. Seventy-four seconds after Hellbarde’s launch, what had been a forty-seven-thousand-ton starship had become a spreading pattern of very small pieces of wreckage.

“Jessica Epps, this is Hellbarde,” the same harsh, hard voice said from the bridge speakers. “As we said, we will deal with it. Hellbarde, clear.”

Every eye on Jessica Epps’ command deck turned to Erica Ferrero. Most of them turned away, almost as quickly, for not one of her officers could ever recall having seen so much raw fury on their captain’s face. She glared at her plot, lips tight in a snarl of anger, and every fiber of her being wanted to lash out at that smug, disdainful voice.

But a small, clear voice of warning sounded in the back of her brain, despite her rage. She had no doubt that Kapitän der Sterne Gortz—whoever the hell she was—had enjoyed what she’d just done, but the fact that she’d done it at all, coupled with the increased Andermani presence throughout this entire region, suggested a great many unpleasant possibilities. No warship captain in her right mind would gratuitously violate all accepted interstellar law and standards of behavior and simultaneously insult another navy the way Gortz just had… unless there was a very good reason for it.

It was always possible that Gortz wasn’t in her right mind, but that seemed unlikely, to say the least. Another possibility was that she was one of the Andies who particularly resented the RMN’s presence in Silesia—or, at least, the Star Kingdom’s refusal to give her own star nation a free hand in the Confederacy—and who believed she was sufficiently well born (or had sufficiently powerful personal patrons within the IAN) to escape the consequences of her actions.

Or, Fererro thought, it’s also possible that she was under orders to do precisely what she just did. Or something else like it.

The Andies had been confronting Manticoran warships more and more openly and aggressively for months now. There’d never been anything else quite this blatant, but if Gortz’s actions did represent a deliberate, pre-sanctioned act, it was arguably a direct, straight-line evolution of what they’d already been doing. Yet if that were the case, it was also a substantial escalation, a deliberate provocation.