He brushed the thought aside once more, not without the reflection that perhaps his impression of her youth had something to do with the bone-deep weariness which made him feel every month of his own much greater age, and waved her closer to his command chair. She handed him an electronic memo board, and a dark-haired man looked out of the small screen at him when he pressed the playback button.

“You were right, Sir,” Commodore Scott Zrubek told him without preamble. “They were trying to sucker us, just as you suspected they might. So I held the rest of the squadron at extreme range and sent a couple of destroyer divisions in to take a closer look at those ‘merchantmen’ of theirs. I think there may have been a small change of management when they saw what we were doing.”

Zrubek’s smile could really be extremely unpleasant, Tourville noted approvingly.

“It looks like they’d stuffed their cargo holds full of missile pods,” the commodore continued. “They’d obviously hoped we’d come in close enough for them to roll the pods, but when they realized we weren’t going to bring the heavy ships into their range, someone figured out that just killing off the destroyers was only going to really, really piss us off. So since we’d declined to walk into their ambush and there was no way in hell those merchies could run away from us, they decided to own up and surrender while we were in a prisoner-taking mood. Unfortunately, from the preliminary reports, it sounds like their CO had other ideas, so apparently his exec shot him in the back of the head to change his mind.”

Tourville grimaced. There’d been a lot of that going around lately, and he supposed he had to consider it a good sign, over all. But that didn’t make the scenario Zrubek was describing any less ugly.

“At any rate, Sir,” the commodore went on, “we’ve got the merchantmen, and what looks like the better part of three of the old StateSec intervention battalions that were serving as Marines—more or less, anyway. Some of the StateSec goons may have been conscripts since Saint-Just got the boot, but it looks to me like the bulk of them are pretty hard core. One or two of them actually wanted to put up a fight when we boarded, and I’ve got my staff spook running them through the database now. I’m not going to be surprised if some of them turn up on the ‘shoot on sight’ list.

“In the meantime, we’re firmly in control of all six ships, with what I’d estimate to be the equivalent of two or three superdreadnought load-outs worth of missile pods on board. My people are vacuuming the computers now, and the previous owners were too busy bargaining for their lives and surrendering to worry about data dumps. We’ve got our crypto teams ready for a preliminary run at the secure portions, and I’m having complete downloads prepared to send over to the flagship.