"Not until we open the ports and blow them to Hell, anyway," he said, and his tenor voice was suddenly harsh and very, very cold. Then he shook himself. "As for the clowns we just handed over to you," he went on in a more conversational tone which never warmed his eyes at all, "they were already in their boarding shuttles on the way across to us when their ship and the rest of their crewmates turned into plasma behind them. So they really didn't have much choice but to leave their weapons behind, come through the personnel lock one at a time, and surrender, exactly the way we told them to. They certainly didn't want to piss off our gunners by trying to do anything else."

The oberleutnant looked at the lined face and those icy eyes and decided not to ask any more of the multitude of questions still hovering in his mind. He felt reasonably confident Bachfisch would have answered them courteously enough, but there was something about the merchant skipper which discouraged too much familiarity.

The young Andermani officer looked around the boat bay gallery. Like everything else about Pirates' Bane, the bay was perfectly maintained. It was also spotless, with freshly painted bulkheads and a deck which looked literally clean enough to eat off of. One look at the freighter's captain would have been sufficient to warn anyone that he ran an extraordinarily taut ship, especially for a trader here in Silesia, but this went beyond mere tautness. Pirates' Bane looked far more like a warship, or the naval auxiliary as which she had begun life, than she looked like any "normal" merchantman the lieutenant had ever boarded.

He returned his eyes to Pirates' Bane's captain and came briefly to attention. He wasn't in the habit of expending military courtesy on mere merchant spacers, but this one was different. And despite the oberleutnant's own awareness of the steadily escalating tension between his own navy and that of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, he recognized that difference.

"Well, Kapitan," he said, "let me repeat my Kapitan's expression of admiration. And I'd like to add my own to it."

"Thank you, Oberleutnant," Bachfisch replied gravely.

"And," the Andy assured him with a thin smile, "I believe you can be confident that you won't be seeing this particular batch of pirates again."

Todfeind accelerated steadily away from Pirates' Bane, and Bachfisch stood on his command deck, watching the visual imagery of the departing heavy cruiser. For just a moment, his eyes filled with a deep, naked longing, but it vanished as quickly as it had come, and he turned to his bridge crew.

"Well, we've wasted enough time doing our civil duty," he remarked dryly, and most of the people on the bridge grinned at him. Bachfisch might never lose his Manticoran accent, but he'd spent the last forty T-years in Silesia, and like most crews in Silesia, the one he'd assembled aboard the Bane was drawn from every imaginable source. It included Silesians, Andies, other Manticorans, Sollies, even one or two men and women who obviously sprang from the People's Republic of Haven. But the one thing every one of them had in common was that, like the crew of the Bane's sister ship Ambuscade, they'd signed on with the express assurance that their ships would never be surrendered to the raiders who plagued Silesia. It might be a bit much to call any of them crusaders, and certainly if they were knights at all, most of them were at best a murky shade of gray, but every one of them took a profound satisfaction in knowing any pirate who went after the Bane or Ambuscade would never make another mistake.

None of them were quite certain precisely what it was which had motivated their skipper to spend the past four decades amassing the financial resources to purchase, arm, and maintain what amounted to a pair of Q-ships of his very own. For that matter, no one—with the possible exceptions of Captain Laurel Malachi, Ambuscade's skipper, and Jinchu Gruber, the Bane's exec—had the least idea how the Captain had gotten his hands on the warrant as a naval auxiliary which let him evade the Confederacy's prohibition against privately owned armed vessels. Not that any of them cared. However curious they might occasionally be, what mattered was that unlike most merchant spacers in the Confederacy, they could be relatively certain when they set out on a run that they would reach the other end safely even if they did happen across a pirate cruiser or two in the process.

The fact that most of them had their own axes to grind where the brutal freebooters who terrorized Silesian merchant shipping were concerned only added to their willingness to follow Bachfisch wherever he led without any carping little questions. His demand that they submit to military-style discipline and weapons training, both shipboard and small arms—and the short shrift he gave anyone who came up short against the high standards he required—was perfectly all right with them. Indeed, they regarded it as a trifling price to pay for the combination of security and the opportunity to pick off the occasional pirate. And every one of them knew it was the fact that Bachfisch's ships always reached their destinations with their cargoes intact which allowed him to charge the premium freight rates which also allowed him to pay them extraordinarily well by Silesian standards.

Thomas Bachfisch was perfectly well aware that most naval officers would have been appalled at the thought of accepting some of the personnel who served aboard his ships. There'd been a time when he would have experienced profound second thoughts about allowing some of them aboard, himself. But that had been a long time ago, and what he felt today was a deep pride in how well his disparate people had come together. Indeed, he would have backed either of his crews against most regular warships of up to battlecruiser tonnage, not just against the typical pirate scum they usually encountered.

He looked back at the visual display for a moment, then glanced at his tac officer's plot and frowned. In keeping with her armed status, Pirates' Bane boasted a sensor outfit and weapons control stations superior to those aboard most official Confederate Navy warships, and his frown deepened as he noted the data sidebar on the plot.

He stepped closer and looked over the tac officer's shoulder. She sensed his presence and turned to look up at him with a questioning expression.

"Can I help you, Skipper?" she asked.

"Um." Bachfisch rested his left hand lightly on her right shoulder and leaned forward to tap a query on her data pad. The computer considered his inquiry for a nanosecond or two, then obediently reported Todfeind's tonnage. Lieutenant Hairston looked down at the fresh numbers blinking on her own display, compared them to the acceleration sidebar, and pursed her lips.

"They'd appear to be in a bit of a hurry, wouldn't they?" she observed.

"I suppose that's one way to put it, Roberta," Bachfisch murmured.

He straightened and rubbed his chin gently while he gazed intently at the plot. Todfeind wasn't the very newest ship in the Andy inventory, but her class had been designed less than ten T-years ago, and she massed right on four hundred thousand tons. At that tonnage, her normal maximum acceleration should have been around five hundred gravities. Since the Andermani Navy, like every other navy in space, normally restricted its skippers to less than the maximum acceleration available to them under full military power, she should have been accelerating at no more than four hundred or so. But according to the tac officer's sensors, she was pulling just over four-seventy-five.

"They're right on the edge of their compensator's max performance," Hairston observed, and Bachfisch glanced at her. He started to say something, then shrugged, smiled at her, patted her shoulder once more, and turned to the exec.