Chapter Twenty-Eight

“… SO I did exactly what Mister Pirate told me to,” Thomas Bachfisch said with an evil grin. “We hove to, opened our personnel locks, and stood by to be boarded. And then, when their boarding shuttles were about five hundred klicks out, we opened the weapons ports and put an eighty-centimeter graser straight through their ship.”

More than one of his listeners winced at the thought of what it must have been like aboard that piratical cruiser in the fleeting instant its crew had to realize what had happened. There was, however, a marked absence of sympathy for the crew in question. These were all experienced naval officers; they’d seen too much of the wreckage pirates left behind.

“Your ships must have come as a nasty surprise to the pirate community out here, Sir,” Roslee Orndorff observed as she handed another celery stick to Banshee.

“Not so much to the community as a whole, as to the individuals who ran into us,” Bachfisch. “We haven’t really tried to make our presence a secret—after all, half the effect of a Q-ship derives from the fact that potential raiders know she’s out there somewhere. If they don’t know she exists, then they’re not going to be worried over the possibility that any given merchantman might be her. But by the same token, we haven’t exactly broadcast a description of any of our ships, and we’ve been known to change the paint scheme from time to time. The smart paint cost us a pretty penny, but it was worth it.”

“I often think it’s more useful to Q-ships than it’s ever been to regular men-of-war,” Alistair McKeon observed, and several heads nodded. The “paint” used by the RMN and most other navies was liberally laced with nanotech and reactive pigments which allowed it to be programmed and altered, essentially without limit, at will. Unfortunately, as McKeon had just suggested, that was of strictly limited utility for a warship. After all, the distinctive hammerhead hull form of a warship could scarcely be mistaken for anything else, whatever color it might be. Besides, no one was likely to rely on visual identification of any man-of-war, which was one reason most navies also had a distinct tendency to choose one paint scheme—like the RMN’s basic white—and leave it that way.

But merchantmen were another matter entirely. Even there, cruisers and pirate vessels alike tended to rely primarily upon transponder codes, but anyone who wanted to steal a ship’s cargo had to come close enough to do it. And at that point, visual identifications—or misidentifications, in some very special cases—became the norm.

“I’m guessing that if you’re using smart paint, you’re also using… inventive transponder codes, Admiral,” Lieutenant Commander Reynolds put in. Bachfisch looked as if he were about to correct the rank title yet again, then visibly gave up and simply nodded once more.

“I’m confident my people could take just about any pirate out here in straight fight,” he said. “But to be honest, our primary function is to carry cargo. Besides, we may be armed, and Pirates’ Bane may have started life as an armed auxiliary, but that doesn’t make her a dreadnought. She’s got a military-grade compensator and the impellers and particle shields to go with it, and she and Ambuscade both have fairly respectable sidewall generators. But none of our ships have real military hulls or damage control capability.”