“Assuming they’d been willing to simply incarcerate you, Captain,” Lieutenant Commander Reynolds put in quietly.

“That thought did occur to me, Commander.” Bachfisch grimaced again. “I know there’s been a change of government in the People’s Republic, but I’m inclined to take that with a grain of salt where the safety of my own people is concerned. Besides, if they’re here covertly, it might be… inconvenient for them if witnesses to their presence ever turned up.”

“I understand your concerns, Captain,” Honor said. “And, in your place, I would have felt exactly the same way. But I strongly suspect that you and George are both doing whoever Thomas Theisman sent out here a disservice. Theisman isn’t the sort of man to countenance atrocities or to send anyone who would countenance them off to an independent command. I speak from a certain degree of personal experience.”

“You may be right,” Bachfisch agreed. “But either way, I didn’t want a Havenite boarding party aboard the Bane. If Hecate had been a pirate, it would have been easy enough. Just let them come in close to drop their pinnace, then run out the grasers and blow her to hell.” He shrugged. “We’ve done that often enough.”

“But this wasn’t a pirate, and I didn’t want to kill anyone I didn’t have to. Maybe I was too squeamish. Or maybe I was just stupid. Anyway, I refused to be boarded.”

“Was that when she opened fire?” Honor asked quietly when he paused.

“Yes and no,” Bachfisch replied. Then he sighed. “She certainly did fire,” he said. “The only problem is that I’m still not sure it wasn’t intended solely as a warning shot to encourage us to cooperate. We were so close by that point that her captain may simply have chosen to use an energy mount instead of a missile, and the shot did miss. But it didn’t miss by very much, and I didn’t feel I could take a chance—not with a regular warship already in energy range. And besides,” he admitted, “I was nervous as a cat.” He shook his head. “At any rate, I jumped. I didn’t pull the trigger, perhaps, but I did stop requesting him to stand clear and order him to. And I also ordered the plating over our weapons bays jettisoned.”

“At which point,” Gruber put in harshly, “they definitely opened the ball.”

“Yes,” Bachfisch agreed heavily. “Yes, they certainly did.”

Honor gazed down at him and nodded slowly while her always excellent imagination showed her what must have happened in the instant that Pirate’s Bane trained out her own grasers. There’d been no way the destroyer’s captain could have guessed that he was accosting a ship which was actually more heavily armed than his own. He’d fired his warning shot—which, as Bachfisch had just suggested, was almost certainly what he’d done—in the belief that he was dealing with a typical, unarmed merchantman. The shock when he realized what he was actually facing, coupled with the way Bachfisch had followed him, must have been… profound.