The XO sat back in the command chair, thinking hard. The freighter was the joker in the deck. Captain Terekhov and his senior officers had discussed several contingency plans built around the possibility that one or even two pirate cruisers might come calling, but none of those contingencies had considered the possibility that they would bring a captured prize with them. Taking out the pirates themselves would be a good day's work, but it was possible some or even all of the merchantship's original crew was still on board her.
The thought of leaving merchant spacers in pirate hands was anathema to any Queen's officer, but FitzGerald was damned if he saw any way to avoid it this time. However good Hexapuma and her crew might be, she could be in only one place at a time, and she was the only friendly vessel in-system which could realistically hope to engage the pirate cruisers and survive. Yet she was also the only hyper-capable friendly warship in Nuncio, which meant she was the only unit which could pursue the merchantship if her prize crew got into hyper-space.
No matter how he chewed at the unpalatable parameters of the tactical problem, Ansten FitzGerald could see no way to solve both halves of the equation, and just for a moment, he felt guiltily grateful that the responsibility for solving them lay on someone else's shoulders.
He reached out and tapped a com combination on his keypad. The screen lit with the image of Hexapuma's snarling hexapuma-head crest which served as the com system's wallpaper, and a small data bar indicated that it had been diverted to a secondary terminal for screening. Then the data bar blinked to indicate an open circuit as the recipient accepted the call sound-only.
"Captain's steward's quarters, Chief Steward Agnelli," a female voice which couldn't possibly be as wide awake as it sounded said.
"Chief Agnelli, this is the Exec," FitzGerald said. "I hate to disturb the Captain this late, but something's come up. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wake him."
Aivars Terekhov took one more look at the immaculate officer in his cabin's mirror as Joanna Agnelli brushed a microscopic speck of lint from his shoulder. She looked up, brown eyes meeting his in the mirror, and her mouth twitched in a brief smile.
"Do I pass muster?" he asked, and her smile reappeared, broader.
"Oh, I suppose so, Sir."
He was still getting used to her Sphinxian accent. Dennis Frampton, his previous personal steward, had been born and raised in the Duchy of Madison on the planet Manticore, and his accent had been smooth, with rounded vowels quite unlike the sharp crispness of Sphinxians like Agnelli. Dennis had been with him for over five T-years, long enough for him and Terekhov to have become thoroughly comfortable with one another. And it had been Dennis who'd convinced him that appearing in proper uniform at all times, and especially when it looked as if something… interesting might be going to happen, was one of a captain's most valuable techniques for exuding a proper sense of control and confidence. He'd always insisted on inspecting his Captain's appearance minutely before letting him out in public.
Just as he had at Hyacinth.
A shadow of memory and sharp-edged loss flickered in the ice-blue eyes looking back at him from the mirror. But it was only a shadow, he told himself firmly, and smiled back at Agnelli.
"My wife always said I should never be allowed out without a keeper," he said.
"Which, begging the Captain's pardon, shows she's a very smart lady," Agnelli replied tartly. She came from the old school, with an astringent personality and a firm sense of her responsibility to badger and pester her captain into taking proper care of himself. And she was also the only person aboard Hexapuma whose cabin intercom was left keyed open at night in case that same captain needed her.
Which meant she was the only person aboard the cruiser who knew about the gasping, sweating nightmares which still woke him from time to time.
"I've taken the liberty of putting on a fresh pot of coffee," she continued. "It should be ready shortly. With the Captain's permission, I'll bring it to the bridge in… fifteen minutes."
Her tone was rather pointed, and Terekhov nodded meekly.
"That will be fine, Joanna," he said.
"Very good, Sir," Chief Steward Agnelli said, without even a trace of triumph, and stepped back to let him go out and play.
"Captain on the bridge!"
"As you were," Terekhov said as he strode briskly through the bridge hatch, before any of the seated watchstanders could rise to acknowledge his arrival. He crossed directly to FitzGerald, who stood looking over Abigail Hearns' shoulder at her display.
The exec turned to greet him, warned by the quartermaster's announcement, and felt a brief flicker of surprise. He knew he'd personally awakened the captain less than ten minutes ago, yet Terekhov was perfectly uniformed, bright-eyed and alert, without so much as a single hair out of place.
"What do we have here, Ansten?"
"It was Ms. Hearns who actually spotted it, Skipper," FitzGerald said, and squeezed the young Grayson lieutenant's shoulder. "Show him, Abigail."
"Yes, Sir," she replied, and indicated the display.
It took her only a very few sentences to lay out the situation, and Terekhov nodded. He also noticed that the remote arrays must have been right up against the extreme limit of their assigned deployment envelopes to have picked up the two lead bogeys before they closed down their impellers, and he knew he hadn't authorized the change. He scratched one eyebrow, then shrugged mentally. He felt confident that the XO had already attended to any reaming which had been required. After all, taking care of that sort of thing so his captain didn't have to was one of an executive officer's more important functions.
"Good work, Lieutenant Hearns," he said instead. "Very good. Now we only have to figure out what to do about them."
He smiled, radiating confidence, and folded his hands behind him as he walked slowly towards the chair at the center of the bridge. He seated himself and studied the deployed repeater plots, thinking hard.
FitzGerald watched the Captain cross his legs and lean comfortably back in the chair and wondered what was going on behind that thoughtful expression. It was impossible to tell, and the exec found that moderately maddening. Terekhov couldn't really be as calm as he looked, not with that freighter tagging along behind.
Terekhov sat for perhaps five minutes, stroking his left eyebrow with his left index finger, lips slightly pursed as he swung the command chair from side to side in a gentle arc. Then he nodded once, crisply, and pushed himself back up.
"Ms. Hearns, you have the watch," he said.
"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the watch," she acknowledged, but she remained where she was, and he gave a mental nod of approval. Technically, she should have moved to the command chair, but she could monitor the entire bridge from where she was, and she recognized that it was more important not to leave Tactical uncovered at the moment.
"Be so good as to contact Commander Kaplan and Lieutenant Bagwell, if you please," he continued. "My compliments, and I'd like them to join the Exec and me. We'll be in Briefing One; inform them that it will be acceptable for them to attend electronically."