Dukakis, who was all of five centimeters shorter than Karaxis, turned toward the speaker, holding the sobbing little girl between them, and his lip curled. The HSP corporal was a good thirty centimeters shorter than he was and looked like she couldn’t have weighed a whole lot more, without the skinsuit and the equipment belt, than the little girl in his hands. She stood eight or nine meters away from him, and she hadn’t even drawn her stun baton. She simply stood there, arms folded across her chest, and cocked her head as she gazed up at him.

  “Listen, mouní,” he sneered, “nothing worse they can do to me down there than what’s gonna happen if I don’t get my arse off this hab. Me and my bud here? We be just as happy to surrender all sweet and gentle the instant we hit the ground. Can’t hardly do anything like you’re talking about to us ’thout violating our civil rights, if we don’t resist arrest, now can they?”

  Helike Vasdekio considered him with a calm, thoughtful expression that masked the fury raging inside her as she saw Kassandra kneeling on the deck, clutching her broken face while the second ganger twisted one fist in her hair and brandished the other one in promise of still more violence if anyone was stupid enough to approach him. Most of that fury was directed at the gangers, but a lot of it was directed at herself, as well. She should have spotted the tattoos on the younger thug’s forehead and right cheek. And she certainly should have recognized the sinuous green griffin that covered the entire right side of the older one’s face. She was exhausted, she was scared, and she knew she was going to die, but that was no damned excuse for not doing her job and sparing her friends at least this much of the nightmare.

  “That’s your last word on the subject?” she asked. “You figure you’ll get your ride down, then get taken into custody, spend a little time in Eval, and then do—what? Five T-years? Ten?—for assault and kidnapping. Got it all worked out. Trade a few years in the slam for getting off the habitat before something nasty happens to it. Right?”

  “For a mouní, you ain’t so stupid after all,” Dukakis told her. “Yep, that’s ’bout the way it’s gonna work. And if it don’t?” He shrugged. “Well, in that case, I guess my arse gets locked up up here, instead, and somebody else gets this little bitch’s seat, ’cause she won’t be needing it.” He shrugged. “Way I see it, I’m no worse off that way.”

  “Well, if that’s the way you see it, then I guess the only thing for me to do is to spare you the cell time,” she said, and he grinned in triumph.

  Then her right hand moved. It had been tucked into the bend of her left elbow as she stood with her arms crossed. No one had been able to see it until it moved, and even then its movement was so smooth, so casual, so manifestly unthreatening, that it took Dukakis a moment to realize what he was seeing. Indeed, it was unlikely he ever did realize, because he was too busy dying to work it out as the pulser whined and his head exploded.

  Petra screamed in fresh terror as the hurtful hands relaxed instantly. She tumbled to the deck. An instant later, Dukakis’s corpse fell over her, crushing her with its weight. Somebody—a man—started to shout something. But then she heard the high, shrill whining sound a second time. He stopped shouting in mid-word, and she heard another voice, one she knew.

  “Petra! Petra, it’s okay, honey!” that voice said urgently. “Some of you help me get this bastard off her!” it snapped to someone else, and the weight crushing her was suddenly lifted away. She wailed in panic, then sobbed in relief as Helike Vasdekio’s arms enveloped her.

  “It’s okay,” Helike murmured in her ear again and again. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

  “Mommy! Mommy-Mommy-Mommy!”

  “Your Mom’s hurt, honey,” Helike told her. “But she’s going to be all right, I promise. And the man who hurt her, he’ll never hurt anyone again. I promise you that, too. Do you believe me, Petra?”

  Petra pushed back from Helike, bracing her hands on the corporal’s shoulders and staring into her eyes through the curtain of her own tears. She stayed that way for several, eternal heartbeats. Then she nodded once, convulsively, and collapsed back against the side of her parents’ friend’s neck, sobbing.

  “It’s okay, Petra,” Helike Vasdekio told the weeping child in her arms as she stepped across the bodies of the men she’d just killed. A couple of other evacuees and one of the habitat EMTs had helped Kassandra back to her feet. Now they steadied her, walking her down the boarding tube to the shuttle, and Helike paused at the entrance.

  “You’ve got to go now, Honey,” she said, handing Petra off to one of the shuttle flight crew. The girl tried frantically to cling to her, but she shook her head and disengaged the clutching hands as gently as she could.

  “I’ve got her, Helike,” a voice said gruffly, and she looked up in recognition.

  “Take care of her for me, John,” she said, feeling her eyes burn. “Her dad’s a friend. And he’s running Flight Control for this entire station quadrant.”

  Sergeant John Debnam met her gaze and nodded in understanding as he gathered the little girl who was about to lose her father into his arms.

  “I’ve got her,” he promised again, his weary voice softer. “I’ll look after her and her mom. My word.”

  “Thanks,” Vasdekio said even more softly, then looked down at Petra, frightened and tearful as she found herself in a stranger’s arms.

  “You go on with John now, Petra,” she said. “He’s a good friend of mine. He’ll take good care of you and your mom. And you be brave, hear me? Your mom needs you, and she’s going to need you even more in the next little bit. So you be there for her. Can you do that? Can you be brave for me?”

  Petra sniffed, scrubbing her eyes with her fists, then nodded. Her lips trembled, but she actually managed a shaky smile.

  “Good!” Vasdekio said. “I knew I could count on you! Now go on, because I’ve got to get back to work.”

  HMS Angrim

  and

  HMS Cinqueda

  Hypatia System

  “I don’t like this, Jayson. I don’t like it at all,” Commander Megan Petersen said. “If they’re serious about something like this in Hypatia, what are they going to be willing to do somewhere else?” She shook her head, brown eyes worried. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about where this is going to end up.”

  It wasn’t something she would have admitted to anyone under most circumstances. And as the captain of a Queen’s ship, it was something she couldn’t have admitted to any of her crew. A captain’s job was to project the confidence, or at least the determination, her people needed from her. It was not to let those same people see the inner frailties any human being possessed. They knew they were there, but just as the rules of the game required her to pretend they weren’t, those same rules required her crew to pretend she’d fooled them.

  Her father had tried to warn her how lonely command was, and she’d believed him. She just hadn’t realized how deep that loneliness could cut. Especially when the man she loved was so close at hand…and so far away.

  “Can’t say I’m too crazy about it, myself,” Commander Jayson Stob told her from his cabin aboard HMS Cinqueda. “I’d like to think the bastards were only running some kind of elaborate bluff—or that this Hajdu’s timetable was just designed to get the Hypatians to evacuate as quickly as humanly possible. The only problem is, I don’t.”

  “It’s just…I’ve already seen this before. I don’t want to see it again. Not here, not anywhere,” Megan said, and Jayson nodded.

  Megan’s previous ship, HMS Nomad, had made her hyper translation just outside the Manticore Binary System’s hyper-limit less than forty-five minutes before the Yawata Strike had turned her elation and eager anticipation into nightmare.

  She’d been Nomad’s XO, completing her final deployment before assuming command of a brand, shiny new destroyer. HMS Arngrim’s originally designated CO had been reassigned to the command of a Saganami-C completing at Hephaestus, and Nomad had been ordered to expedite her return to Manticore so Megan could replace him.

  That’s what she’d been looking forward to—seeing her new ship, meeting her new crew, assuming the hard-earned responsibilities of command. And instead, she’d spent the next ninety-six hours straight pulling scores of bodies and a tiny handful of survivors out of mangled wreckage. Jayson had been out-system at the time, spared the first-hand horror she’d confronted, but he knew others who’d been there, and it had left a mark on all of them.

  That and an iron determination that something like the Yawata Strike would never happen again. A determination which had to be making the situation here in Hypatia enormously worse for her, he thought, wishing, not for the first time, that they weren’t on separate ships.

  And just what would you do about it if you were on the same ship? he asked himself. You know what you’d like to do, but you also know what Article One Nineteen would have to say about it, don’t you? Of course, Megan’s probably smart enough to not transgress the sacred Articles of War—one of you should be, anyway—so it’d probably actually be worse, in the end.

  At least they were assigned to the same task group. It might be a pretty thin silver lining, since they probably wouldn’t have been if he’d gotten his ship, but the Yawata Strike had changed that, too. He’d been designated to command the new Roland-class HMS Laozi almost five T-months before Megan had been ordered to Arngrim, and she’d twitted him mercilessly in the letters she’d recorded, crowing over the fact that she’d have her new ship a month and a half before he got his despite his “head start.”

  Neither of them had seen the Yawata Strike coming.

  Arngrim had been two T-months ahead of Laozi in the building queue…which meant she’d been away from HMSS Vulcan, where both of them had been built, on a builders’ trial of her impeller nodes when Vulcan was blown apart. And that was how Megan came to command her first destroyer while her fiancé remained an executive officer.

  Jayson was scarcely the only Queen’s officer whose career had been scrambled by the Yawata Strike, and he tried to keep his disappointment in perspective. It was harder sometimes than others, but he supposed that was human nature. And he was enormously relieved Megan had been spared at least that much. There were times he envied her magnificent new ship, but the nightmares she’d experienced during the brief leave they’d snatched together before this deployment killed any sense of resentment stone cold.

  He could see the ashes of those nightmares behind her eyes even now as they spoke over the low-powered whisker lasers connecting the squadron’s ships in a network no one could have detected from more than a very few thousand kilometers away.

  “I know you’ve seen it, sweetheart,” he said now. “We all have, but you had a ringside seat. I’m just as glad I didn’t. That may be cowardly of me, but it’s true. And I wish to hell there were some way to tell you it’s not going to happen again here and make that be the truth, but I can’t. Nobody can.”

  “I know. I know!” She shook her head, then kissed the fingers of her right hand and laid them gently against her display. His eyes brightened, and she smiled as he returned the long-distance caress.

  “I know,” she repeated. “And I guess what I’m really doing is just talking to someone who can listen to me carry on without its being prejudicial to discipline!”

  “You’re entitled, whenever I’m available,” he pointed out. “One of the things I’m here for, now that I think about it.” He lifted his nose. “Feel free to lay all of your concerns in my capable hands, my daughter.”

  “What I’m going to feel free to do is kick you in the ass the next time I see you,” she replied with a chuckle, and he shook his head mournfully.

  “Such a violent person,” he sighed. “I don’t really understand how I came to find myself in such an abusive relationship.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she told him. “My idiot, but an idiot.”

  “At your service.”

  He grinned, delighted by her gurgle of laughter. He didn’t expect it to last, but for the moment, at least…

  “I think what you need,” she began, “is for someone to—”

  She broke off as a chime sounded and the icon of an urgent message flashed beside the name “Thirunavu” in one corner of her display.

  “Just a sec, Jayson,” she said. “Rolf’s pinging me.”

  She put the ship-to-ship link on hold and hit the message icon. A blue-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned face with a hawklike profile appeared in Jayson’s place.

  “Yes, Rolf?”

  “Skipper, we’ve got an update from Phantom,” her executive officer said without preamble. “President Vangelis just got formal notice from Hajdu.” Lieutenant Commander Thirunavu shook his head, his eyes grim. “There won’t be any more extensions. Anybody who can’t get off before he opens fire is just out of luck.”

  Megan Petersen felt herself go cold. Until that very moment, she realized, some part of her had hoped Hajdu’s threat to destroy the Hypatian orbital infrastructure before it could be completely evacuated was only some sick bluff. Maybe she’d been able to do that because what he proposed to do instead violated so many laws of interstellar warfare. In fact, it was a violation of the fourth clause of the Eridani Edict, part of the League’s very Constitution.

  My God, she thought. That’s what this is, really, isn’t it? This “Operation Buccaneer” was conceived from the beginning specifically as an Eridani violation. It’s a terror campaign, and all Hajdu’s really doing is coming out of the shadows to underline that for all its future victims!

  How had they gotten here? How had they reached a point where the Solarian League was willing to openly violate its own Eridani Edict? The edict specifically designed to prevent this sort of atrocity? Which required any military commander to take every possible precaution to limit collateral damage and preclude any avoidable civilian deaths? The League had executed more than one officer—military commander or brigand; it hadn’t mattered—over the last eight hundred T-years for violating the fourth clause, and now it was prepared to violate it itself.

  It has to go. The realization went through her like an icicle. The League has to go. It’s not enough to just negotiate peace with it again. Not anymore. Anything so corrupt it could embrace something like this has to go.

  “Understood, Rolf,” she said. “I’ll be on the bridge in ten.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Thirunavu said formally, and she nodded, then punched back to her link to Cinqueda.

  “We just heard from Phantom, and—”

  “I got the word while you were talking to Rolf,” Jayson interrupted her. “They need me in AuxCon.”

  “Understood.” She stared at the display for a long, still moment, drinking up the sight of him, storing him away in her heart. Then she inhaled.

  “Be safe, love,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

  SLNS Troubadour

  Hypatia System

  “How are we doing, Ellen?” Commander Madison Echols inquired as he stepped on to the ridiculously spacious bridge of SLNS Troubadour.

  The commander knew an officer with as little seniority as he had was fortunate to have a command at all in the Solarian League Navy. Despite its huge size, the SLN was rank-heavy—to put it kindly—and the decision against mobilizing the Reserve had only emphasized that. An awful lot of officers who should have been commanding squadrons, or at least divisions, during any shooting war had been forced to settle for individual ship commands. For that matter, some of those officers were on the beach, which made Madison Echols profoundly grateful to be in space.

  Despite that, and given the human ability to infallibly recognize how much greener the grass was somewhere else, Echols would have preferred to command a warship. That was not to be, however, and so he’d been assigned to the TUFT fleet and given the 7,000,000-ton Troubadour. His new command was old and long overdue for a general overhaul. She was also slow, unmaneuverable, and totally unarmed. She was, however, all his, which made up for a lot. Despite which, he had yet to grow accustomed to the sheer size—and the sparse instrumentation—of her civilian-designed command deck. He could have played basketball in here!

  “Captain Abshire’s just finishing the pod deployment, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Ellen Riba, Troubadour’s executive officer, replied.

  Riba was seated in the rather worn captain’s chair at the center of the bridge, and she unwrapped herself from it and saluted—sort of—still cradling her cup of coffee in her off hand. Not very shipshape and Navy style, Echols admitted as he acknowledged the salute with a nod, but Troubadour had that effect on people. Besides, anyone who hadn’t made at least captain was a pretty junior tadpole by Solarian standards. They tended to adopt a sort of “what the hell, we’re all in this together” attitude.

  “I’ll bet she’s delighted about that,” he said as he stepped past Riba and settled into the chair she’d just vacated.

  Like himself, Florence Abshire was a mere commander, although both of them were entitled to the title of “captain” as starships’ commanding officers. He’d known her a long time, though, and he had a pretty fair notion of how she must feel about this entire “Buccaneer” crap. He knew how he felt, at any rate. The term “buccaneer” had all sorts of glamorous connotations, the notion of a swashbuckler with the audacity to back his wit against the entire galaxy, take his chances against any foe. The operation to which it had been appended was anything but glamorous, and they certainly weren’t taking any chances when they executed it.

  He understood the logic behind it, and his sympathy for so-called neutral star nations who’d shown their hostility by embracing the Manties and their friends was limited. But he also knew the Solarian League Navy—his Navy—was deliberately picking victims specifically on the basis of who could—and couldn’t—fight back. That his Navy had embarked on a systematic campaign of vandalism because it dared not face its enemies in combat. And so, what he felt whenever he thought about Buccaneer was shame.