"Are we taking any radar hits?" he asked.
"Negative, Skip. They seem to be concentrating on the Manty." Foraker sniffed in eloquent contempt for the privateers' sloppiness. "Of course, they must have us on gravitics, and they may just not see any reason to look closer our way," she allowed. "We've got them on passive, after all. They're probably tracking us the same way, and we look like another merchie. Maybe they're even hoping we haven't seen them yet. If they are, they wouldn't want to knock on the hatch with their radar."
Caslet nodded and frowned down at the display. That freighter was an enemy vessel. Not a warship, no, but still under an enemy flag. And given his mission orders, that made it his duty to attack it. His superiors had certainly never contemplated a situation in which he might even consider rescuing it, but he knew too much about the psychopaths manning those raiders. Every instinct cried out to go to the Manty's assistance, yet the odds were daunting. He was prepared to back his people against anything in space ton for ton, always allowing for the Manty tech advantage, he amended sourly, and he doubted the pirates had faced anyone who could shoot back since they set up as independents. More than that, his weapons were better than theirs... which made a nice change from being on the short end all the time. He was confident he could take the two smaller ships; it was the larger vessel that worried him. That, and the fact that if he engaged at all, he could be pretty sure someone up the line would want his head. But, damn it, he couldn't just sit here and watch these barbarians murder another crew!
"I want to engage, Sir." He could hardly believe his own words, and he saw the shock in Jourdain’s face as he listened to his own voice go on speaking in calm, level tones which must have belonged to someone else. "They're pirates, and they'll know that even if they take us out, we can hurt them badly first. If we come in openly, they'll probably break off."
"And if they don't?" Jourdain asked flatly.
"If they don't, they can take us if we get unlucky. But not until we hammer them so hard they won't be any threat to Citizen Admiral Giscard’s operations. And if we don't intervene, they're going to do to this ship exactly what they did to Captain Sukowski and Commander Hurlman, or to Erewhon's crew."
"But it's a Manticoran vessel," Jourdain pointed out quietly. "We're out here to raid their commerce ourselves."
"Well," Caslet felt himself smile, "in that case, we'll have to convince these other people to let us have her, won't we?" Jourdain blinked at him, and Caslet shrugged. "It'll be a bit hard on her crew if we 'rescue' them and then take their ship ourselves, Citizen Commissioner, but once they've had a chance to talk it over with Captain Sukowski, I think they'll agree they're better off with us than with Warnecke's people. And, as you say, we are supposed to capture any Manty merchie we run into. It says so right in our orders."
"Somehow," Jourdain said in bone-dry tones, "I doubt the people who drafted those orders expected us to engage pirates at three-to-one odds first."
"Then they should have said so, Sir." Caslet felt his smile grow even broader, felt the reckless surge of adrenaline, and raised one hand in a palm-up gesture. "Given what they did tell us, I don't see that we have an option. Our orders aren't discretionary, after all."
"They'll hang us both out to dry if you lose your ship, Citizen Commander."
"If we lose the ship, that will be the least of our worries, Sir. On the other hand, if we pull it off, I think Citizen Admiral Giscard and Citizen Commissioner Pritchart will turn a blind eye to any, ah, irregularities in our actions. Success, after all, is still the best justification."
"You're out of your mind," Jourdain said conversationally, then shrugged. "Still, I suppose we might as well be hung for sheep."
"Thank you, Sir," Caslet said quietly, and looked at MacMurtree and Foraker. "All right, people, let's do this smart. Deploy an EW drone, Shannon. Slave it to follow us in about a hundred thousand klicks back and set it to radiate another light cruiser signature. If they're only tracking us on passive, they may figure our 'consort' was hiding her impellers in our shadow until we committed to the attack run."
"Aye, Skip," Foraker replied, and Caslet turned to his astrogator.
"Stand by to bring the wedge to full power, Simon, and plot a direct intercept. Then give me time and velocities at course merge."
"Aye, Skip." Lieutenant Houghton punched numbers that would alter Vaubon's course slightly and increase her acceleration radically, then studied his plot for a moment. "Assuming they don't break off, a direct intercept at max accel will cut their base course in eleven minutes and eighteen seconds. We'll come in on a converging vector, range a bit under seven hundred thousand klicks to the nearest bandit, with a relative velocity of plus one-five-niner-six KPS."
"How soon will we enter their missile envelope on that heading, Shannon?"
"Call it eight minutes, Skip."
"All right, people," Warner Caslet decided. "Lets do it."
"We've got a status change on Target Two!"
Commodore Jason Arner stiffened in his command chair on the light cruisers bridge as his tac officer sang out.
"What kind of change?" he snapped.
"It's, Oh, shit! It's not a merchie at all! It's a goddamned light cruiser, and she's coming in full bore!"
"A cruiser?" Arner stabbed a glance at his plot. "Whose?" he demanded. "Is it a Manty?"
"I don't think so." The tac officer brought his active systems and computer support to bear, examining the oncoming ship closely, then shook his head. "Definitely not a Manty. And it's not Andy or Confed, either. Damned if I know who it is, but she's coming in loaded for bear, and..." He paused, then spoke flatly. "I'm showing another cruiser astern of her."
"Shit!" Arner glowered at his display, and his mind whirred. His first assumption, that the cruiser was a Manty using the freighter ahead of him to suck in raiders, had just gone out the lock. But if the newcomers weren't Manties or Andies or Silesians, then who in hell were they? Another pair of raiders? That happened from time to time, though rarely, but there were rules even for their profession, and poaching on another man's kill was against all of them.
"Where'd the second one come from?"
"I don't know," the tac officer replied frankly. "She's about a hundred-k klicks back, and I suppose she could have been hiding under her EW, but if she was, she's got damned good systems. I've been tracking Target Two on gravitics for over a half hour, and I never even got a sniff of another impeller source. Of course, if they worked it right, they could have kept Target Two between us and them. We wouldn't have been able to see her from here if they came in on exactly the right course."
"Or it might be a drone," Arner pointed out.
"It's possible. I just can't say from here."
"How long before you can confirm or deny?"
"Maybe six minutes."
"Can we still evade at that point if we have to?"
"Tight," the tac officer said. He worked at his console for a moment, then shrugged. "If we hang on that long then go to max accel on our best breakaway vector, they can bring us into missile range and keep us there for maybe twenty minutes, depending on their max accel, but they can't get into energy range unless we let them."