"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One copies no traffic on flight path and cleared to depart. Departing now."

The sharpness had smoothed back down into properly crisp professionalism, she was pleased to note as she fed power to the thrusters. They goosed the pinnace sharply, pushing the small craft clear of Hexapuma 's radar shadow, and she watched her proximity radar. Hawk-Papa-One cleared the pinnace's impeller wedge safety perimeter quickly, and the pressure of acceleration vanished as she brought the wedge up and went to four hundred gravities.

She'd left the flight deck hatch open, and she glanced over her shoulder through it, past the small cubbyhole of the flight engineer. Lieutenant Hedges and a full squad of his platoon occupied about a third of the passenger compartment.

"Attention freighter Golden Butterfly !" She heard the Skipper's voice come up on the com as she settled down on course for the freighter. " Golden Butterfly , this is Captain Terekhov of Her Majesty's Starship Hexapuma . You are ordered to stand by for boarding and examination. My boarding party is en route now. You will open your hatches immediately."

"— will open your hatches immediately."

" Jesus Christ! " Egervary gasped, and Duan Binyan snapped upright in his chair. He heard Annette De Chabrol inhale sharply, but it scarcely registered. He was staring at his plot, where the Manticoran heavy cruiser's impeller wedge had just snapped up. Even as he watched, her sidewalls were coming up, as well, and her broadside energy mounts were training out as she went to battle stations.

"So much for they'll never suspect anything!" Egervary half-shouted, wheeling towards Duan. "They knew all along, goddamn it, just like I said! They were fucking waiting for us and we fucking well sailed right up to them!"

"Shut up!" Duan snapped.

"Why? What the fuck does it matter now? We're dead-we are fucking dead ! When they come aboard, find out what we are, they'll-"

"He said to shut up, Zeno," Annette said viciously, turning on the security officer with a snarl, "so goddamn shut your face !"

Egervary managed to clamp his jaws together, but his facial muscles twitched and jumped and a thick sheen of sweat oozed down his forehead. His hands trembled visibly, and he turned back to his console with something almost like a whimper.

Duan Binyan wanted to whimper himself.

The money was always good for someone willing to serve on one of the Jessyk Combine's "special ships," and the risks weren't really all that great. Despite the best efforts of people like the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, no more than five percent of slave ships were ever apprehended. Most were stopped by people like the Solarian League, where, by and large, the worst a crewman had to worry about was a brief incarceration before the Combine or Manpower bribed him out of jail. No more than a handful were stopped by the Star Kingdom or the Republic in any given year. But the crews on that handful were seldom ever heard of again. Manticore and Haven, for all they hated one another, both took genetic slaving seriously, and the penalty under the law of either star nation was death.

But the odds against being one of those handful of ships were so high, and the money was so good, Jessyk could always find someone to take the chance. Someone like Duan Binyan, who suddenly realized all the money in the galaxy was no use at all to a dead man.

"What are we going to do, Binyan?" De Chabrol asked urgently, her voice lowered so only he could hear.

"I don't— " Duan broke off and wiped perspiration from his own face. "I don't think there's anything we can do, Annette," he admitted hoarsely. "That's a heavy cruiser . She can turn us into vapor anytime she feels like it. If we don't open the hatches, she may just decide to do it. Or, just as bad, she'll blow her way in, and her Marines will come in shooting. Do you want Marines in battle armor burning down that hatch?" he demanded, jerking a thumb at the bridge lift hatch.

"But they're Manties ," she protested, her eyes desperate. It was all she had to say, and Duan's mouth tightened.

"What do you want me to say, Annette? If we let them in and they find out what we are, they may kill us-all right," he said quickly as she opened her mouth, "they probably will kill us! But if we try to stop them, there's no question what'll happen. At least if we open up, we'll live a little longer!"

"I say blow the fucking ship and take the motherless bastards with us!" Egervary said. Duan wheeled towards him, and the security officer bared his teeth in a rictuslike grin. His dark eyes were huge, and his nostrils flared. "Those holier-than-thou motherfuckers are all so hot to kill anyone who does anything they don't approve of! Who the hell died and made them God? I say we take as many to hell with us as we can!"

"That's the stupidest thing you've said yet!" Duan snapped. "You may want to die, but I sure don't!"

"Like what you want's going to make a difference!" Egervary jeered. "We're dead , Binyan. That's what happens when the Manties come on board. Well, if I've got to die, so do they!"

The security officer hovered on the brink of outright madness in his terror, Duan realized. And that terror, as all too often happened, was feeding his rage, fanning it like a furnace.

"No," the captain said flatly, forcing his voice to project a calm he was far from feeling. "We're going to do exactly what they tell us to, Zeno. Exactly ."

"You think so?" Egervary's grin was wider and more maniacal than ever, and he whipped back around to his panel.

Duan Binyan had an instant to realize what that grin had meant, and he lunged towards the security officer screaming in protest.

"Stand by, Lieutenant Hedges," Ragnhild said. "We'll be coming up on her main personnel hatch in another five minutes."

"Right, Ragnhild," Michael Hedges acknowledged with a smile.

He was one of the very few people serving in Hexapuma who looked almost as young as Ragnhild did. It was unfortunate that he'd had the bad judgment to become a Marine rather than a Navy officer, but he was awfully cute anyway. Of course, he was considerably senior to her, but Regs only prohibited relationships between officers in the same chain of command. Technically, that included Marines aboard a ship, but it was a technicality that was winked at most of the time. So maybe it wasn't such a bad thing he was a Marine after all...

She smiled back at him and returned her attention to her HUD, and one eyebrow rose as she saw half a dozen patches of plating blowing away from the freighter's hull. One of the sudden openings was almost directly in front of the pinnace, and she saw something in it. It was an indistinct, barely visible shape, but there was something naggingly familiar about that half-glimpsed form, and it seemed to be turning to point in her direction.

God, it's a-!

Ragnhild Pavletic never completed the thought.

The universe punched Helen Zilwicki in the belly. Nothing else could have explained the sudden, hoarse exhalation. The way her heart stopped and her lungs froze as Hawk-Papa-One exploded.

Point defense cluster , an icy voice said in the back of her brain, clear and precise-a stranger's voice, surely not her own.

Shock at the sheer, suicidal stupidity of what they'd just seen gripped every officer on Hexapuma 's bridge. Every officer but one.

"Laser clusters only-force neutralization!" Captain Aivars Aleksandrovich Terekhov snapped. " Fire! "

"You fucking idiot!" Duan howled.

His hands closed on Egervary's neck from behind. His shoulders and arms heaved ferociously, and the security officer flew up out of his seat. All Duan had really been thinking about was getting the maniac away from the tactical panel before he did something even stupider-as if there'd been anything stupider he could do! He succeeded in that, but the savage, panic-driven strength with which he tore Egervary away from the console also snapped the man's neck like a stick.

The corpse was still in midair when Hexapuma fired.

The range was less than four thousand kilometers.

At that range, point defense lasers capable of taking out incoming, wildly evading missiles at ranges of sixty or seventy thousand kilometers were more than enough to deal with any unarmored target not protected by a sidewall or an impeller wedge. It wasn't often that a warship had the opportunity to use its point defense against even hostile small craft, far less another starship, because nobody was insane enough not to surrender when a naval vessel got that close.

Usually, at any rate.

The good news for Marianne was that Hexapuma 's laser clusters were far less powerful than her broadside energy mounts. One of the heavy cruiser's grasers would have blown entirely through the freighter's civilian hull, and probably broken her back in the process. The laser clusters wouldn't do that, but dozens of them studded each of Hexapuma 's flanks, and the Royal Manticoran Navy believed in being prepared. Rare though the opportunity to use the normally defensive weapons offensively might have been, BuWeaps had considered how best to do so when the chance offered itself, and Naomi Kaplan's vengeful finger punched up a stored fire plan. The tactical computer considered the data coming back to it from the active sensors briefly— very briefly-then established its targets, assigned each of them a threat value, assigned them to specific point defense stations, and opened fire.

Stilettos of coherent light stabbed out from Hexapuma . Each of a cluster's eight lasers was capable of cycling at one shot every sixteen seconds. That was one shot every two seconds from every cluster in Hexapuma 's starboard broadside and Marianne 's hull plating seemed to erupt outward. The strobing laser clusters tracked across her, precisely, carefully, almost literally unable to miss at such an absurdly short range, as Hexapuma savaged the ship which had killed her pinnace. They scourged her with whips of barbed energy, shattering and smashing, wiping away weapons, sensors, impeller nodes.

It took precisely twenty-three seconds from the instant Terekhov gave the command to fire to reduce the ship which had just murdered eighteen of his people to a shattered, broken wreck that would never move under its own power again.