"Stop fussing, Jinchu." Bachfisch's voice was hoarse with pain, but he managed a tight smile. There was a different sort of pain in that smile, and something inside Honor winced as she tasted his emotions. "I'm better off than a lot of people."
"Yes, you are, Skipper." Gruber's voice was harsh, hard-edged with exasperation. "Now stop feeling guilty about it, damn it!"
"My fault," Bachfisch replied, shaking his head doggedly on the pillow.
"I didn't see you holding a pulser on anyone to make us sign on," the exec shot back.
"No, but"
"Excuse me, Your Grace," Fritz Montoya put in, "but I'd appreciate it if the three of you could argue about this later." Honor turned to crook one eyebrow at the doctor, and Montoya shrugged. "I've already sent the worst half dozen cases across to Werewolf. Or, perhaps I should say, the worst half dozen other cases. I'd really like to get Captain Bachfisch over there sometime this week, too."
"I'm not leaving the Bane," Bachfisch said stubbornly.
"Oh yes you are, Captain," the blond-haired surgeon captain told him with an implacable calm Honor knew altogether too well from personal experience. "We can argue about it for a while first, if you really want to. But you are leaving."
Bachfisch opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Honor put one hand gently on his shoulder.
"Don't argue," she told him, resolutely not looking at the space where his legs ought to have tented the sheets. "You'll lose. For that matter, you'd lose even if Fritz was the only person who was going to be arguing with you. And he isn't."
Bachfisch looked back up at her for a moment, and then smiled crookedly.
"You always were a stubborn woman," he murmured. "All right, I'll go. But since you're here now..." He looked past her, indicating her staff officers with his eyes, and she nodded.
"I gathered from Commander Gruber's message that you were going to insist on a bedside debrief," she said serenely. "Now, if I were inclined to indulge in calling any kettles black, I might comment on the stubbornness involved in that. Since I'm far too broad-minded to do anything of the sort, however, why don't we just get started?"
Bachfisch's chuckle might have been tight with pain, but it was also genuine, and she tasted his gratitude for her manner.
"Commander Gruber," she waved at the exec, "already told us about your decision to shadow the PeepHecate, wasn't it?" She glanced up at Gruber, who nodded, and Honor looked back down at her old captain. "He told us you'd decided to, but what he couldn't tell us was what the hell you thought you were doing?"
Bachfisch's eyebrows flew up, and Honor tasted the surprise of all of her officers at hearing even that mild an oath out of her, but she never took her own eyes from Bachfisch's. She was willing to be calm and collected about his state, but she wanted him to cherish no illusions about her opinion of the sanity involved in getting himself and his ship mixed up in something like this.
"What I thought I was doing," he told her after a moment, "was trying to figure out what a Havenite fleet might be doing in your bailiwick, young lady. And I might point out that I've been old enough to make decisions for myself for quite some time. Why, just last week I picked out which shirt I wanted to wear without any help at all."
Their eyes held, and then, almost against her will, she smiled.
"Point taken," she told him. "On the other hand, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't try quite so hard to get yourself killed next time. You think we could compromise on that?"
"I'm certainly willing to take it under advisement," he assured her.
"Thank you. Now, getting back to business. You followed Hecate until she left the grav wave."
"Yes." Bachfisch leaned back against his pillow. "We hit a bad patch. Particle densities went way up, and I had to close up on her if I wanted to hold her on sensors. From what her survivors say, that was probably what drew her attention to us. At any rate, she was waiting when we transitioned to wedge."
"And she ordered you to stand by for boarding?"
"Yes." Bachfisch grimaced. "I wouldn't have been too crazy about that under the best of conditions, but out in the middle of nowhere, dealing with a Havenite warship, I really didn't want an armed boarding party to discover that the 'merchie' who'd been shadowing them was armed to the teeth. Besides, there wouldn't have been much point in following her if we'd just let ourselves be hauled off and incarcerated."
"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 chancenot 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 shotwhich, as Bachfisch had just suggested, was almost certainly what he'd donein 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.
"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."