“The entire ‘engagement’ lasted about twenty-seven seconds,” Bachfisch said. “As nearly as I can determine, Hecate hadn’t even cleared completely for action. Her people weren’t even in skinsuits, and only four of their broadside laser mounts appear to have been manned. As soon as they saw our weapons, they opened fire with those four and blew the ever living hell out of two of our main cargo holds, three of our starboard graser mounts, and our backup enviro plant. They also killed eleven of my people and wounded eighteen more.”

“Nineteen,” Gruber corrected grimly. Honor glanced at him, and he jabbed a finger at Bachfisch.

“Nineteen,” Bachfisch conceded. Honor looked back towards him, and he twitched his shoulders. “Compared to some of the rest of my crew, I got off easy.”

“We’re not going to have that particular conversation, Captain,” Honor told him firmly. “You and I have both been there before, and I’m not going to help you beat yourself up over it. Even,” she added with a wry smile, “if this does seem to happen to both of us quite a bit out here in Silesia!”

Bachfisch blinked at her, then laughed out loud, and she smiled more naturally as she felt the cold, bleak knot of his guilt ease… for the moment, at least.

“At any rate,” he went on more briskly, “they blew the crap out of us. But a destroyer isn’t much better armored than a merchie, and they were wide open. I didn’t even suspect just how wide open they were, but it was like pushing baby chicks into a pond, Honor. We fired a single broadside and—”

He broke off, shaking his head, and Honor tasted a brief, intense layer of a completely different sort of guilt. This time she didn’t try to do anything about it. No one could have, anyway.

“We took her survivors aboard afterward,” he said heavily. “There were only forty-three of them, and we lost two of them to wounds despite everything we could do. Then we came here.”

“We have all forty-one of the remaining survivors in custody, Admiral,” Gruber put in. Honor looked back up at him, and the exec shrugged. “The Captain told me to get to Marsh as quickly as we could to report to you, but it occurred to me on the way here that with everything else you already have going on, you don’t need to be officially involved in an attack on a Havenite warship.”

“I’d hardly call what you and the Captain have described an ‘attack’ on a warship,” Honor observed.

“No, Your Grace,” Gruber agreed. “But you’re not the government that warship belonged to. At any rate, we’re prepared to present the evidence of our own sensor logs before any admiralty court and to stand by an impartial verdict on our actions. At the moment, however, any court would be considering the actions of a Silesian-flag vessel holding a warrant as a Silesian Navy auxiliary merchant cruiser. As such, we could argue that we had a legitimate Silesian security interest in investigating Hecate’s actions and intentions. If we hand them over to the Manticoran authorities, however, we bring the Star Kingdom officially into all of this. From all we’ve heard out here about the current relations between the Star Kingdom and the Republic, I wasn’t at all sure that would be a good idea.”