“Or,” Engelmann said, reverting to another of a good executive officer’s other roles and playing devil’s advocate, “it could be that there’s nothing spectacular going on here at all. It might just be that some merchie com officer has managed to screw up and accidentally squawk an emergency code without even realizing he’s done it.”

“Possible,” Glockauer said, “but not likely. As you already suggested, their own com equipment ought to be picking up the discrepancy by now… unless there’s some specific reason why it’s not. In any case, we don’t have any option but to proceed on the assumption that it’s genuine.”

“No, Sir,” Engelmann agreed, and the two of them returned their attention to the plot.

The green icon of the freighter, still showing the alphanumeric transponder code assigned to AMS Karawane and surrounded by the angry scarlet circle of Code Seventeen-Alpha, moved steadily across the display. Glockauer considered the data sidebars carefully, then turned his head to look across at Gangying’s tactical officer.

“How’s your solution look, Shilan?”

“We’ve got the overtake on him without any problem, Sir,” Kapitän Leutnant Shilan Weiss assured him. “And we can pull almost twice his maximum acceleration.” She shrugged. “There’s no way he could evade us. Even if he turns and runs for it right this second, we can run him down for a zero-zero intercept at least a full light-minute short of the hyper limit.”

“Shilan’s right, Skipper,” Engelmann said. “But just turning and chasing them down would be a brute force solution to the problem.” He smiled thinly, and it was not a pleasant expression. “I have to admit that what I’d really prefer would be to come up with some brilliant stratagem that tricked the bastards into letting us close with them without all that effort.”

“Not in this universe, Binyan,” Glockauer snorted. “Of course, assuming they have someone over there who can run the numbers as well as Shilan, they’ll know the moment we go after them that they can’t slip away. The only really logical thing for them to do would be to heave to immediately and hope we’re inclined to take prisoners rather than just shoot them out of hand. But whether they’re inclined to see it that way or not, there’s no way to trick any crew of pirates, however stupid they may be, into thinking it would be a good idea to let a heavy cruiser into range of them.”

“I’m afraid you’re right about that, Skipper,” Engelmann admitted. “And there’s no way they’re going to miss seeing us coming, either.”

“Hardly,” Glockauer agreed dryly. He gazed at the plot for a few more seconds, then nodded to himself.

“All right, Shilan. If there’s no point trying to be cute about it, we might as well be brutally direct. Put us on an intercept heading at five hundred gravities. Ruihuan,” he went on, looking at Kapitän Leutnant Hoffner, his communications officer, “go ahead and hail them. Tell them who we are, and ‘suggest’ that they heave to for rendezvous.”