Corporal Carras—the same corporal, Honor realized suddenly, who had been War Maiden’s tube sentry when she first joined the ship—pushed himself away from the pinnace. He drifted outward for four or five meters, and then engaged his skinsuit thrusters once he was sure he had cleared their safety perimeter. He accelerated smoothly towards the freighter, riding his thrusters with the practiced grace of some huge bird of prey, and the rest of his section followed.

Even with their obvious practice it took time for all of the Marines to clear the hatch for Hirake and Honor, but at last it was their turn, and despite her best effort to mirror the cool professionalism of Blackburn’s Marines, Honor felt a fresh flutter of excited anxiety as she followed Hirake into the open hatch. The lieutenant commander launched herself with a gracefulness which fully matched that of the Marines, yet was somehow subtly different. She sailed away from the pinnace, and Honor pushed herself out into emptiness in the tac officer’s wake.

This far out, the system primary was a feeble excuse for a star, and even that was on the far side of the freighter. The pinnace and its erstwhile passengers floated in an ink-black lee of shadow, and hull-mounted spotlights and the smaller helmet lights of skinsuits pierced the ebon dark. The pinnace’s powerful spots threw unmoving circles of brilliance on the freighter’s hull, picking out the sealed cargo hatch and the smaller personnel hatch which gaped open ahead of it, yet their beams were invisible, for there was no air to diffuse them. Smaller circles curtsied and danced across the illuminated area and into the darkness beyond as the helmet lights of individual Marines swept over the hull. Honor brought up her own helmet lamp as her thrusters propelled her towards the ship, and her eyes were bright. She cherished no illusion that she was a holo-drama heroine about to set forth on grand adventure, yet her pulse was faster than usual, and it was all she could do not to rest her right hand on the butt of her holstered pulser.

Then something moved in the darkness. It was more sensed than seen, an uncertain shape noticed only because it briefly occluded the circle on the hull cast by someone else’s light as it rotated slowly, keeping station on the ship. She rotated her own body slightly, bringing her light to bear upon it, and suddenly any temptation she might still have nursed to see this as an adventure vanished.

The crewwoman could not have been more than a very few standard years older than Honor… and she would never grow any older. She wore no suit. Indeed, even the standard shipboard coverall she once had worn had been half-ripped from her body and drifted with her in the blackness, tangled about her arms and shoulders like some ungainly, rucked up shroud. An expression of pure horror was visible even through the froth of frozen blood caked about her mouth and nose, and the hideousness of her death had relaxed her sphincters. It was not simply death. It was desecration, and it was ugly, and Honor Harrington swallowed hard as she came face-to-face with it. She remembered all the times she and Academy friends had teased one another, humorously threatening to “space” someone for some real or imagined misdeed, and it was no longer funny.

She didn’t know how long she floated there, holding her light on the corpse which had once been a young woman until someone jettisoned her like so much garbage. It seemed later like a century, but in reality it could not have been more than a very few seconds before she tore her eyes away. She had drifted off course, she noted mechanically, and Lieutenant Commander Hirake was twenty or thirty meters ahead of her and to the right. She checked her HUD, and tapped a correction on her thruster controls. She felt a sort of surprise when her fingers moved the skinsuit gloves’ finger servos with rocklike steadiness, and she accelerated smoothly to follow the tac officer through the blackness.

It was interesting, a detached corner of her brain noted almost clinically. Despite her horror, she truly was collected and almost calm—or something which counterfeited those qualities surprisingly well.

But she was very, very careful what else she let her helmet light show her.

“…so that’s about it, Sir.” Commander Layson sighed, and let the memo board drop onto the corner of Captain Bachfisch’s desk. “No survivors. No indications that they even tried to keep any of the poor bastards alive long enough to find out what Gryphon’s Pride might’ve had in her secure cargo spaces.” He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes wearily. “They just came aboard, amused themselves, and butchered her entire company. Eleven men and five women. The lucky ones were killed out of hand. The others…” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head.

“Not exactly what our briefing told us to expect,” Bachfisch said quietly. He tipped back in his own chair and gazed at the deckhead.

“No, but this is Silesia,” Layson pointed out. “The only thing anyone can count on here is that the lunatics running the asylum will be even crazier than you expected,” he added bitterly. “Sometimes I wish we could just go ahead and hand the damned place over to the Andies and be done with it. Let these sick bastards deal with the Andy Navy for a while with no holds barred.”

“Now, Abner,” Bachfisch said mildly. “You shouldn’t go around suggesting things you know would give the Government mass coronaries. Not to mention the way the cartels would react to the very notion of letting someone else control one of their major market areas! Besides, would you really like encouraging someone like the Andermani to bite off that big an expansion in one chunk?”

“All joking aside, Sir, it might not be that bad a thing from our perspective. The Andies have always been into slow and steady expansion, biting off small pieces one at a time and taking time to digest between mouthfuls. If they jumped into a snake pit like Silesia, it would be like grabbing a hexapuma by the tail. They might be able to hang onto the tail, but those six feet full of claws would make it a lively exercise. Could even turn out to be a big enough headache to take them out of the expansion business permanently.”

“Wishful thinking, Abner. Wishful thinking.” Bachfisch pushed himself up out of his chair and paced moodily across his cramped day cabin. “I told the Admiralty we needed more ships out here,” he said, then snorted. “Not that they needed to hear it from me! Unfortunately, more ships are exactly what we don’t have, and with the Peeps sharpening their knives for Trevor’s Star, Their Lordships aren’t going to have any more to spare out this way for the foreseeable future. And the damned Silesians know it.”

“I wish you were wrong, Sir. Unfortunately, you’re not.”

“I only wish I could decide which were worse,” Bachfisch half-muttered. “The usual sick, sadistic, murdering scum like the animals that hit Gryphon’s Pride, or the goddamn ‘patriots’ and their so-called privateers!”

“I think I prefer the privateers,” Layson said. “There aren’t as many of them, and at least some of them pretend to play by some sort of rules. And there’s at least a sense of semi-accountability to the government or revolutionary committee or whoever the hell issued their letter of marque in the first place.”

“I know the logic.” Bachfisch chopped at the air with his right hand. “And I know we can at least sometimes lean on whoever chartered them to make them behave—or at least to turn them over to us if they misbehave badly enough—but that assumes we know who they are and where they came from in the first place. And anything we gain from that limited sort of accountability on their part, we lose on the capability side.”

Layson nodded. It didn’t take much of a warship to make a successful pirate cruiser. Aside from a few specialized designs, like the Hauptman Cartel’s armed passenger liners, merchantmen were big, slow, lumbering and unarmored targets, helpless before even the lightest shipboard armament. By the same token, no sane pirate—and however sociopathic all too many of them might be, pirates as a group tended to be very sane where matters of survival were concerned—wanted to take on any warship in combat. Even here in Silesia, regular navy crews tended to be better trained and more highly motivated. Besides, a pirate’s ship was his principal capital investment. He was in business to make money, not spend it patching the holes in his hull… assuming he was fortunate enough to escape from a regular man-of-war in the first place.