She drew a deep breath and looked around the table at the assembled officers… and at Thomas Bachfisch. His merchant service uniform looked totally out of place amid the black and gold of the RMN, and yet for all that, she felt a curious sense of completion at seeing him there. It was right that her first commanding officer should be here when she assumed her first station command, and as she looked at him, she felt the same awareness—or something very like it—radiating from him, as well.

“Very well, Ladies and Gentlemen,” she told them all. “Thanks to Captain Bachfisch, we have significantly more information about possible threat levels than we had when we arrived. What I’d like to do now is to move down to the flag deck simulator and play with some of the new possibilities. And if you have the time, Captain,” she said, gazing directly into his eyes, “I would be both pleased and honored if you’d join us there. I would value your input greatly.”

“The honor would be mine, Your Grace,” Bachfisch replied after a moment.

“Good!” Honor said with a huge smile, then stood and scooped Nimitz onto her shoulder.

“In that case, People,” she told her officers with another smile for Bachfisch, “let’s be about it.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“WAYFARER, this is LaFroye. Our pinnace is closing from your six o’clock and low. ETA is now twelve minutes.”

“Understood, LaFroye. Ah, may I ask just what it is you’re concerned about?”

Jason Ackenheil sat back in his command chair, watching Lieutenant Gower, his com officer talking to one Captain Gabrijela Kanjcevic, mistress after God of the Solarian-flag merchant ship Wayfarer, and smiled thinly. It was safe enough, since he was far outside the range of Gower’s visual pickup. Wayfarer wasn’t that huge for a merchie—a fast freight hauler configured for relatively small cargos (by the standards of the leviathans which roamed the interstellar deeps) and limited passenger service—although she still dwarfed LaFroye to minnow-status. But the minnow had teeth and the whale didn’t, so the whale had better be extremely polite to the minnow. On the other hand, some merchies were more equal than others, and Wayfarer undoubtedly felt reasonably secure in her League registry. After all, no Manticoran captain in his right mind wanted to provoke a career-ending incident with the League. Which explained why, so far at least, Kanjcevic sounded wary but not truly concerned.

But that was about to change… assuming, of course, that his information was accurate.

Which, all things being equal, it had damned well better be.

“It’s only routine, Captain,” Gower assured the face on his com screen. Then he glanced over his shoulder, as if checking to see if anyone were in proximity, and leaned turned back towards Kanjcevic’s image.

“Just between you and me, Ma’am, it’s pretty silly, actually. We’ve had reports of a rash of merchant losses in this sector over the last few months, and Intelligence has decided someone’s using an armed merchant raider. So orders came down from Sidemore to make an eyeball check on every merchant ship we can.” He shrugged. “So far, we’ve checked eleven without finding a thing.” He did not quite, Ackenheil noticed, add “of course,” but his tone made it superfluous, anyway. “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for our pinnace to dock, come aboard, make sure you don’t have any grasers hidden away, and let you go on about your business. But if we don’t check it out, well…”