“She is, is she?” Bachfisch moved a bit closer to the exec and gazed down at the tac plot himself. The bright icon representing one of the Havenite tin cans was, indeed, headed for the hyper limit at a leisurely hundred gravities of acceleration. He watched it for a few seconds, then looked up and met Gruber’s eye.

“I think it’s time we were getting underway, Jinchu,” he said calmly. “Take us out of orbit and put us on a heading of—” he glanced back down at the plot again “—one-zero-seven two-three-niner at one hundred gees.”

Gruber looked back at him for perhaps three seconds, then nodded.

“Yes, Sir,” he said, and turned from the tactical section towards the helmsman.

· · • · ·

Bachfisch tipped back comfortably in his command chair, crossed his legs, and contemplated the spectacular beauty of the main visual display. Pirate’s Bane rode the tangled force lines of a grav wave, sliding through hyper-space on the wings of her Warshawski sails. The huge disks of focused gravity stress radiated outward for the better part of three hundred kilometers at either end of her hull. They glowed and flickered with an ever shifting pattern of gorgeous radiance in an almost hypnotic rhythm which never ceased to amaze and humble him.

This time, however, his attention wasn’t on the vision before him. It was on something else entirely, something he couldn’t see at all… unless he looked back at his tactical repeater.

The Havenite destroyer loped steadily onward with the lean, greyhound grace of her breed, apparently oblivious to the cart horse of a freighter rumbling stolidly along behind her. It was unlikely that she was genuinely unaware of Pirate’s Bane’s presence. On the other hand, grav waves were the broad, gleaming highways of the ships which plied the depths of hyper-space. Given the sheer immensity of the universe, it was unusual for two ships not actively in company to find themselves within sensor range of one another even in a grav wave, but it was scarcely unheard of. After all, if two ships were headed in the same direction, they were bound to chart their courses to use the same grav waves. And some freighter skippers made it a point to ride the coattails of a transiting warship, whatever navy it belonged to, as a way to acquire a sort of jury-rigged escort through dangerous space.

If the destroyer had noticed Pirate’s Bane behind her, she might be wondering where the freighter was bound. Which was fair enough, since Bachfisch was busy wondering where she might be bound. For that matter, he’d felt a lively curiosity about her and her sistership from the moment the Bane made port in the Horus System. Havenite warships had always been rare in Silesia. Most of those currently in the Confederacy, unfortunately, were crewed by fugitives who had turned to an unauthorized life of crime now that the officially approved brigandage which StateSec had waged against the People’s Republic’s own citizens had come to a screeching halt.