“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Very well. Mecia, tell them one more time to cut their acceleration. And tell them this is their final warning.”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am.” Lieutenant McKee cleared her throat. “Sittich, this is Jessica Epps. You well cut your acceleration immediately. Repeat, immediately. This is your final warning. Jessica Epps, clear.”

There was no response, and Ferrero glanced at Harris.

“Maintaining her accel, Skipper,” the tac officer told her.

“Maybe she needs a more pointed warning,” the captain observed. “Fire your warning shot, Shawn.”

“Aye, aye, Ma’am. Firing now.”

Harris pressed the firing key, and a single missile spat from Jessica Epps’ Number One chase tube and went screaming off towards Sittich.

Ferrero watched the missile’s icon slash across her repeater plot towards the fleeing slaver. No doubt Gortz was on the verge of apoplexy by now, she reflected cheerfully. Well, it served the bastard right. After all the times he’d—“Missile launch!” Harris snapped suddenly. Ferrero jerked upright in her command chair in disbelief. Surely no one aboard Sittich was stupid enough to try to resist a heavy cruiser!

“Multiple missile launches from Hellbarde!” Harris barked. “Looks like a full broadside, Ma’am!”

For a fraction of a second, Ferrero stared at him. He couldn’t be serious! Hellbarde was still well outside her effective missile envelope! There was no—The thought chopped off. No, Erica Ferrero thought, her mind suddenly almost impossibly calm. Hellbarde wasn’t still well outside her effective envelope; she was just outside what everyone had thought her envelope was.

What Erica Ferrero had thought her envelope was.

“Helm, go to evasion plan Gamma!” she snapped. “Tactical! Forget Sittich.” She smiled thinly, forcing herself to radiate confidence even as her conscience flailed at her for the overconfident assumptions which had brought her command to this pass. But it was too late to worry about that, just as it was too late to try to talk any sort of sense into Gortz.

“It looks like we’re going to have an even more interesting afternoon than we thought, People,” she told her bridge crew, then nodded to Harris.

“Engage the enemy, Lieutenant,” she said.

Chapter Forty-Two

“YOU know,” Mercedes Brigham said quietly as she, Nimitz, and Andrew LaFollet walked down the passage towards Werewolf’s flag briefing room with Honor yet again, “this couldn’t have happened at a much worse time, Your Grace.”

“You’re right,” Honor agreed, equally quietly. “Not that there could ever be a ‘good’ time for it.”

“No, Ma’am.”

The compartment hatch opened before them, and feet scuffed on the decksole as the waiting officers rose.