"Either they've just killed their wedges, or their stealth just got a lot better, Sir. And that far out, I don't think it's likely they just brought that much more EW on-line."

"Then what do you think they're doing, Lieutenant?" FitzGerald asked in his best professorial manner.

"They were still moving at approximately eighty-six hundred KPS when we lost them," she said after a moment. "I'd guess they're planning on coming in ballistic from this point, with their impellers at standby. That velocity isn't very high, but that would make sense if they want to be as unobtrusive as possible-they wouldn't want to have to spill any more velocity if they end up needing to maneuver. At that low a speed, they can decelerate using minimum power wedges, so as to hold their signatures down, if they decide that's what they want to do. But they're coming in on a shortest-distance flight path towards Pontifex, so they obviously want a look at the traffic in the planet's vicinity. I'd say they figure that leaving the freighter out there, beyond the hyper limit, will keep anyone from spotting her, on the one hand, and put her in a position to escape into hyper before anyone could possibly intercept her, on the other. In the meantime, they can come in, take a look around the inner system, and find out whether or not there's anything here worth attacking. Commodore Karlberg was obviously right-they have to be more modern and powerful than anything he's got, given how they managed to futz up our sensor arrays-so they probably figure that even if somebody spots them, they can fight their way clear without too much trouble if they have to."

"I believe I agree with you, Ms. Hearns," FitzGerald said.

He tapped a few quick calculations into his own keypad and watched the results display themselves on the plot.

The shaded cone continued to grow steadily, indicating the volume into which the strobing icons might have moved at their last observed acceleration and velocity since the array had lost its hard lock, and he frowned. It was possible the bogeys' stealth systems actually had baffled the arrays. In that case, it was also possible they'd begun decelerating unseen, as a preliminary to moving away from the system. But that possibility wasn't even worth considering. There wasn't much Hexapuma could do about them if they were, and they weren't going to pose any immediate threat to Nuncio, but he didn't believe for a moment that they were doing any such thing-not with the freighter still decelerating steadily towards rest.

No, it was far more likely that Abigail's analysis was right on the money, in which case...

The result came up on his plot. At their last observed velocity, the two strobing icons would drift clear to Pontifex in just over twenty hours. And if they continued to coast in, running silent on ballistic courses, nobody with Nuncio's level of technology would see a thing before they actually crossed the planet's orbital shell. Hexapuma , on the other hand, armed with a hard datum on where they'd killed their wedges and knowing exactly what volume of space to watch, should be able to find them again with her heavily stealthed remote arrays' passive systems without their knowing a thing about it. It would be simple enough to steer the remotes into positions from which they could observe Bogey One and Bogey Two's predicted tracks closely enough to defeat the level of stealth they'd so far demonstrated, at any rate. The trick would be to do it using light-speed control links. It was unlikely the bogeys had picked up the arrays' FTL grav pulses yet, given how far away from the arrays they still were and how weak those pulses were, but Hexapuma 's transmissions to them would be far more easily detected. So the data Hexapuma had was going to get older, but would still be enormously better than anything the bogeys had. Or that they would believe Nuncio could have, which meant...

The XO sat back in the command chair, thinking hard. The freighter was the joker in the deck. Captain Terekhov and his senior officers had discussed several contingency plans built around the possibility that one or even two pirate cruisers might come calling, but none of those contingencies had considered the possibility that they would bring a captured prize with them. Taking out the pirates themselves would be a good day's work, but it was possible some or even all of the merchantship's original crew was still on board her.

The thought of leaving merchant spacers in pirate hands was anathema to any Queen's officer, but FitzGerald was damned if he saw any way to avoid it this time. However good Hexapuma and her crew might be, she could be in only one place at a time, and she was the only friendly vessel in-system which could realistically hope to engage the pirate cruisers and survive. Yet she was also the only hyper-capable friendly warship in Nuncio, which meant she was the only unit which could pursue the merchantship if her prize crew got into hyper-space.

No matter how he chewed at the unpalatable parameters of the tactical problem, Ansten FitzGerald could see no way to solve both halves of the equation, and just for a moment, he felt guiltily grateful that the responsibility for solving them lay on someone else's shoulders.

He reached out and tapped a com combination on his keypad. The screen lit with the image of Hexapuma 's snarling hexapuma-head crest which served as the com system's wallpaper, and a small data bar indicated that it had been diverted to a secondary terminal for screening. Then the data bar blinked to indicate an open circuit as the recipient accepted the call sound-only.

"Captain's steward's quarters, Chief Steward Agnelli," a female voice which couldn't possibly be as wide awake as it sounded said.

"Chief Agnelli, this is the Exec," FitzGerald said. "I hate to disturb the Captain this late, but something's come up. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wake him."

Aivars Terekhov took one more look at the immaculate officer in his cabin's mirror as Joanna Agnelli brushed a microscopic speck of lint from his shoulder. She looked up, brown eyes meeting his in the mirror, and her mouth twitched in a brief smile.

"Do I pass muster?" he asked, and her smile reappeared, broader.

"Oh, I suppose so, Sir."

He was still getting used to her Sphinxian accent. Dennis Frampton, his previous personal steward, had been born and raised in the Duchy of Madison on the planet Manticore, and his accent had been smooth, with rounded vowels quite unlike the sharp crispness of Sphinxians like Agnelli. Dennis had been with him for over five T-years, long enough for him and Terekhov to have become thoroughly comfortable with one another. And it had been Dennis who'd convinced him that appearing in proper uniform at all times, and especially when it looked as if something... interesting might be going to happen, was one of a captain's most valuable techniques for exuding a proper sense of control and confidence. He'd always insisted on inspecting his Captain's appearance minutely before letting him out in public.

Just as he had at Hyacinth.

A shadow of memory and sharp-edged loss flickered in the ice-blue eyes looking back at him from the mirror. But it was only a shadow, he told himself firmly, and smiled back at Agnelli.

"My wife always said I should never be allowed out without a keeper," he said.

"Which, begging the Captain's pardon, shows she's a very smart lady," Agnelli replied tartly. She came from the old school, with an astringent personality and a firm sense of her responsibility to badger and pester her captain into taking proper care of himself. And she was also the only person aboard Hexapuma whose cabin intercom was left keyed open at night in case that same captain needed her.

Which meant she was the only person aboard the cruiser who knew about the gasping, sweating nightmares which still woke him from time to time.

"I've taken the liberty of putting on a fresh pot of coffee," she continued. "It should be ready shortly. With the Captain's permission, I'll bring it to the bridge in... fifteen minutes."

Her tone was rather pointed, and Terekhov nodded meekly.

"That will be fine, Joanna," he said.

"Very good, Sir," Chief Steward Agnelli said, without even a trace of triumph, and stepped back to let him go out and play.

"Captain on the bridge!"

"As you were," Terekhov said as he strode briskly through the bridge hatch, before any of the seated watchstanders could rise to acknowledge his arrival. He crossed directly to FitzGerald, who stood looking over Abigail Hearns' shoulder at her display.

The exec turned to greet him, warned by the quartermaster's announcement, and felt a brief flicker of surprise. He knew he'd personally awakened the captain less than ten minutes ago, yet Terekhov was perfectly uniformed, bright-eyed and alert, without so much as a single hair out of place.

"What do we have here, Ansten?"

"It was Ms. Hearns who actually spotted it, Skipper," FitzGerald said, and squeezed the young Grayson lieutenant's shoulder. "Show him, Abigail."

"Yes, Sir," she replied, and indicated the display.

It took her only a very few sentences to lay out the situation, and Terekhov nodded. He also noticed that the remote arrays must have been right up against the extreme limit of their assigned deployment envelopes to have picked up the two lead bogeys before they closed down their impellers, and he knew he hadn't authorized the change. He scratched one eyebrow, then shrugged mentally. He felt confident that the XO had already attended to any reaming which had been required. After all, taking care of that sort of thing so his captain didn't have to was one of an executive officer's more important functions.

"Good work, Lieutenant Hearns," he said instead. "Very good. Now we only have to figure out what to do about them."

He smiled, radiating confidence, and folded his hands behind him as he walked slowly towards the chair at the center of the bridge. He seated himself and studied the deployed repeater plots, thinking hard.

FitzGerald watched the Captain cross his legs and lean comfortably back in the chair and wondered what was going on behind that thoughtful expression. It was impossible to tell, and the exec found that moderately maddening. Terekhov couldn't really be as calm as he looked, not with that freighter tagging along behind.

Terekhov sat for perhaps five minutes, stroking his left eyebrow with his left index finger, lips slightly pursed as he swung the command chair from side to side in a gentle arc. Then he nodded once, crisply, and pushed himself back up.