"Now that, Binyan, is an excellent thought," Glockauer approved. "If the software's set up to automatically append the Seventeen-Alpha to any ID request from a warship, but not under any other circumstances. . . ."

"Exactly," the exec said. "Although, it would have been nice—assuming that there's anything to this entire theory—if Reichenbach had bothered to warn us that they were going to do something like this."

"Might not be a line-wide decision," Glockauer replied. "Mind you, Old Man Reichenbach was born with a poker up his ass, and he runs his company the way he damned well pleases. I wouldn't put it past him to have come up with the idea and ordered it implemented without even discussing it with his skippers. Or, on the other hand, it might be that this was the bright idea of some individual captain. A one-time solo shot, as it were, that Reichenbach himself doesn't know a thing about."

"Or," Engelmann said, reverting to another of a good executive officer's other roles and playing devil's advocate, "it could be that there's nothing spectacular going on here at all. It might just be that some merchie com officer has managed to screw up and accidentally squawk an emergency code without even realizing he's done it."

"Possible," Glockauer said, "but not likely. As you already suggested, their own com equipment ought to be picking up the discrepancy by now . . . unless there's some specific reason why it's not. In any case, we don't have any option but to proceed on the assumption that it's genuine."

"No, Sir," Engelmann agreed, and the two of them returned their attention to the plot.

The green icon of the freighter, still showing the alphanumeric transponder code assigned to AMS Karawane and surrounded by the angry scarlet circle of Code Seventeen-Alpha, moved steadily across the display. Glockauer considered the data sidebars carefully, then turned his head to look across at Gangying's tactical officer.

"How's your solution look, Shilan?"

"We've got the overtake on him without any problem, Sir," Kapitan Leutnant Shilan Weiss assured him. "And we can pull almost twice his maximum acceleration." She shrugged. "There's no way he could evade us. Even if he turns and runs for it right this second, we can run him down for a zero-zero intercept at least a full light-minute short of the hyper limit."

"Shilan's right, Skipper," Engelmann said. "But just turning and chasing them down would be a brute force solution to the problem." He smiled thinly, and it was not a pleasant expression. "I have to admit that what I'd really prefer would be to come up with some brilliant stratagem that tricked the bastards into letting us close with them without all that effort."

"Not in this universe, Binyan," Glockauer snorted. "Of course, assuming they have someone over there who can run the numbers as well as Shilan, they'll know the moment we go after them that they can't slip away. The only really logical thing for them to do would be to heave to immediately and hope we're inclined to take prisoners rather than just shoot them out of hand. But whether they're inclined to see it that way or not, there's no way to trick any crew of pirates, however stupid they may be, into thinking it would be a good idea to let a heavy cruiser into range of them."

"I'm afraid you're right about that, Skipper," Engelmann admitted. "And there's no way they're going to miss seeing us coming, either."

"Hardly," Glockauer agreed dryly. He gazed at the plot for a few more seconds, then nodded to himself.

"All right, Shilan. If there's no point trying to be cute about it, we might as well be brutally direct. Put us on an intercept heading at five hundred gravities. Ruihuan," he went on, looking at Kapitan Leutnant Hoffner, his communications officer, "go ahead and hail them. Tell them who we are, and 'suggest' that they heave to for rendezvous."

"Aye, aye, Sir!" Hoffner acknowledged with a grin.

"And just to give Ruihuan's suggestion a little added point, Shilan," Glockauer continued, "why don't you go ahead and bring up your targeting systems? A few long-range radar and lidar hits should help to convince him we're serious."

"Aye, aye, Sir." Weiss' smile was at least as unpleasant as Engelmann's had been, and she turned back to her console and her tracking party as the heavy cruiser altered course.

Glockauer returned her smile and waved Engelmann towards his own station, then settled back in his command chair to await Karawane's reply to Hoffner's demand that she heave to. His eyes returned to the icon burning in his plot, and his smile faded.

Piracy was always a problem here in the Silesian Confederacy. Silesia had never been anything but a sort of ongoing political meltdown at the best of times, and in this one thousand nine hundred and eighteenth year of mankind's diaspora to the stars, the times were anything but the best. In fact, things had been going steadily downhill even from Silesia's ramshackle norm for the last fifteen T-years.

Little though Glockauer or any other Andermani officer might care to admit it, the Royal Manticoran Navy had been the true mainstay of piracy suppression in the Confederacy for over two centuries. It was only in the last hundred or so T-years that the Andermani Empire's fleet had begun to acquire the size and the numbers to pretend to exercise any meaningful, long-term police power in the area. Glockauer knew that was true, just as he understood that until the last fifty years—seventy-five, at the most—the Andermani merchant fleet had been too insignificant to justify the expense required to build up the Navy's light forces to a point which would have permitted it to make any real inroad into the bloody forays of the Confederacy's pirates and privateers.

Of course, even though piracy suppression was a natural part of the responsibilities of any naval officer, the Empire's interest in Silesia had never been limited to, or even primarily focused on, the losses of its merchant lines. The true Andermani interest in the Confederacy had been unwaveringly focused upon frontier security concerns and the possibility of expansion. It would have been impolitic (to say the least) to admit that aloud, but no one in the Empire, the Confederacy, or the Star Kingdom of Manticore with an IQ above that of a rock could have had any illusions in that regard. Certainly, the Manties had been quick to depress any Andermani pretensions to sovereignty in the Confederacy, which they regarded with depressing arrogance as their own private fishing pond.

The grueling demands of the Manticoran war against the People's Republic of Haven had distracted the RMN from its traditional role as the policeman of Silesia, though. That distraction had grown increasingly pronounced over the last fifty or sixty T-years, during the RMN's build up to face the Peeps, and especially in the last fourteen or fifteen, after the actual shooting started. Glockauer wasn't supposed to know about the high-level internal debates in both the Navy and the Foreign Ministry over how the Empire ought to have responded to the combination of steadily worsening local conditions and the opportunity the Manties' distraction offered. Again, however, only an idiot could have been unaware of them. On the one hand, the Manticoran preoccupation with the Peeps had been an almost irresistible temptation to satisfy the Empire's long-standing territorial ambitions while the RMN had too much on its plate to respond effectively. On the other hand, the Star Kingdom had been the Empire's buffer against the People's Republic's insatiable expansionism.

In the end, real politik had governed, as it had a tendency to do in the Empire's foreign policy. Acquiring outright control of its legitimate sphere of interest in the Confederacy might have been nice, but joggling Manticore's elbow while the Star Kingdom was fighting for its life against someone who would just love to gobble up the Empire, as well, might have been fatal. So the Andermani Empire had elected to be "neutral" in the Star Kingdom's favor.