"Very well, Lieutenant Hearns." The same attack release order from Hexapuma glowed on Captain Einarsson's com display aboard Wolverine , and the Nuncian wasn't waiting for Abigail to formally relay it to him. Despite possible reservations about female officers, he obviously had no more interest in wasting precious time than she did. "It looks like it's up to your people. Good luck, Einarsson clear."

"Thank you, Sir," Abigail acknowledged, then glanced at Ragnhild. Abigail was an excellent pilot, but she knew she wasn't in Ragnhild's league when it came to natural ability, and she was perfectly prepared to let the midshipwoman have the stick.

"Separate now," she said quietly.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Separating now," Ragnhild replied crisply, and Abigail felt the shudder as the tractors released and the maneuvering reaction thrusters began pushing them away from Wolverine .

She left that part of the operation to Ragnhild and punched the channel to the other pinnace.

"Hawk— Papa-Three, this is Hawk-Papa-Two. We are cleared for attack. I repeat, we are cleared for attack. Separate now. I repeat, separate now and engage your wedge as soon as you clear your safety zone. Papa-Two has the alpha target: Papa-Three has the beta target. Confirm targeting and stand by to engage."

"Hawk— Papa-Two, Papa-Three is separating," Aikawa Kagiyama's voice came back through her earbug. "Confirm targets. Papa-Two will take the alpha target; Papa-Three will take the beta target."

"Very well, Papa-Three," Abigail said, and her eyes never wavered from the targeting display in front of her.

The two pinnaces had completed separation from their host LACs even while Aikawa was speaking. Now main reaction thrusters blazed to life, slamming them forward under almost a hundred gravities of acceleration. It wasn't much, compared to impeller drive, but it was an enormously higher acceleration than the thrusters normally generated. Their primary function was for final docking approaches or other circumstances which required the pinnaces to maneuver in close proximity to other spacecraft. A pinnace impeller wedge was minuscule compared to that of a starship, or even a LAC, but it was still lethal to any solid structure it encountered, and contact with a larger, more powerful wedge would burn out the pinnace's nodes as catastrophically as a direct hit from a capital ship graser. Which was why Hawk-Papa-Two and Papa-Three had to be at least ten kilometers clear of any of the LACs-or each other-before the safety interlocks would allow their nodes to come fully on-line.

Fortunately, the engineers who designed the RMN's small craft had grasped the point that emergencies sometimes happened and built the Navy's pinnaces with that in mind. The reaction thrusters were far more powerful than their normal operational envelope would ever require, although their endurance at such high power settings was relatively short. The bad news was that, without a wedge, the pinnaces had no inertial compensators, which left only the internal gravity plates. They did all they could, but on their best day, they couldn't match the performance of a compensator, and over fifteen gravities of apparent acceleration got through to the protoplasm of their crews.

It squeezed like the hand of an angry archangel. Abigail's harsh grunt was driven from her lungs, but she'd known it was coming, and her skinsuit tightened about her limbs and torso to force blood back into her brain. She ignored the physical discomfort while the pinnace vibrated like a living creature under the thrusters' power, and she watched the time display on her console through half grayed-out vision as it spun downward even as the range from Wolverine raced upward. Then her eyes flicked back to her targeting display.

The Dromedary sat rock steady on the display. It wasn't an actual optical image of the freighter, although it was now less than seventy thousand kilometers away. The pinnace's imaging systems could have showed the freighter easily enough at that range, but the tactical computers had been instructed to -generate a wire-drawing of the ship, instead. The skeletal schematic allowed her a far better grasp of the actual targeting parameters, and the countdown to optimal firing range spun downward in its own window in the corner of the display.

She felt a deep, visceral urge to take the shot herself. To squeeze the stud on her control column when the countdown reached zero. But that was the primitive warrior part of her. The shot had already been locked into the computers, and the inhuman precision of emotionless cybernetics was far better suited than an acceleration-hammered human brain to a maneuver like this. The window was too tight for anything else.

The thrusters burned for seven endless seconds. Then, abruptly, between one labored breath and the next, the thunderous vibration ceased as the pinnaces moved far enough from the LACs to bring up their impellers. Even as Abigail gasped in relief, a corner of her brain pictured the sudden consternation on the freighter's command deck as the impeller sources blazed suddenly on the big ship's sensors at the deep-space equivalent of dagger range, rocketing towards her now at six hundred gravities' of acceleration.

She had another thirty-three seconds to envision it and wonder if the stunned pirates could overcome their shock quickly enough to get a signal off before her pinnaces reached their programmed attack range.

But then again, if Hexapuma's ID on One and Two is right, maybe "pirates" isn't exactly the right noun after all, she thought, and then the countdown window reached zero.

The pinnaces had moved over thirty-eight hundred kilometers closer to Bogey Three in the thirty-nine seconds they'd spent under power, but the range was still just a shade over sixty-four thousand kilometers when the lasers fired. Hexapuma was one of the first ships to receive the new Mark 30 Condor -class pinnaces, and the Condors ' sensor suites, EW, and fire control had all been improved in tandem with their upgraded compensators, while the previously standard nose-mounted two-centimeter laser had been upgraded to a five-centimeter weapon, with significantly improved gravitic lensing.

A proper warship's sidewalls would have brushed the best efforts of those weapons contemptuously aside, and if its sidewalls had been down, its armor would have absorbed the hits with little more than superficial damage. But warship armor was a carefully designed, multilayered combination of ablative and kinetic armors-complex metallic-ceramic alloys of almost inconceivable toughness-laid over a hull framed and skinned in battle steel.

Bogey Three was a merchantship. Her hull was unarmored, and formed not out of battle steel, but out of old-fashioned, titanium-based alloys, and when those lasers hit, the results were spectacular.

Despite the misconceptions which civilians, accustomed only to medical and commercial laser applications, somehow still managed to cling to, weapons grade lasers were not fusing weapons. The energy transfer was too sudden, too huge, for that. Plating struck by an incoming laser shattered, and that was precisely what happened to Bogey Three.

Atmosphere belched from the ragged wounds smashed with brutal suddenness through the freighter's skin. Small breaches, compared to those a full-sized warship's weapons would have torn, but the people on the other sides of those breaches had been given absolutely no warning. One instant, they were going about their normal routines in the normal, shirt-sleeve environment of a starship; the next, a shrieking demon of coherent energy exploded into their very midst. Splinters of their own ship slashed into them like buzz saws, and even as the wounded screamed, the atmosphere about them went howling into the voracious vacuum. Automated emergency systems slammed blast doors shut, sealing off the breached compartments... and denying those damned souls trapped in destruction's path any possibility of escape.

But the human carnage was secondary, just a side effect. Those precisely targeted stilettos of energy had other objectives, and Abigail's fire smashed deep into Bogey Three's hyper generator compartment. She couldn't tell how much damage she'd actually inflicted, but the pinnace's tactical computers estimated a seventy-two percent chance that it was sufficient to cripple the generator beyond immediate repair. In fact, the computers were pessimistic; what was left of that generator would have been useful only for raw materials.

Hawk— Papa-Three's shot went in effectively simultaneously, but much further aft, and its target was not Bogey Three's ability to enter or leave hyper, but rather its ability to maneuver in normal-space.

Commercial impeller wedges were unlike military ones. A warship generated a double stress band above and below its hull; a merchant vessel generated only a single band. The difference reflected the fact that it was theoretically possible for an enemy to analyze an impeller wedge sufficiently to adjust for the gravity differential's distorting effect on sensors. If he could do that, then he could "see" through it, which no one thought was a good idea applied to his own navy. Using a double wedge, in which the outer protected the inner from analysis, thwarted any such effort. And, of course, naval designers, by their very nature, worshiped the concept of redundancy as the way to survive battle damage. But merchant designers had other priorities, and civilian-grade impellers were fifty to sixty percent less massive, on a node-for-node basis, than military-grade installations. The military-grade systems were commensurately more expensive, and their design lifetimes were substantially shorter, all of which was highly undesirable from the viewpoint of designing a durable, low-maintenance, low-cost freight-hauling vessel.

But one of the consequences of the difference in design was that whereas a warship, like a pinnace, could generate a functioning impeller wedge with only one impeller ring, a freighter required both. And another consequence was that whereas warship impeller rooms were subdivided into mutiple armored, individually powered and manned compartments, a civilian impeller room was one large, open space, completely unarmored and without the multiply redundant power and control circuits-and -manpower-of a military design.

Which was why Hawk-Papa-Three's shot inflicted such horrific damage.

The laser's entry wound itself was no more than a pinprick, a tiny puncture, against the vast dimensions of its target. Any one of the beta nodes in Bogey Three's after impeller ring massed dozens of times more than the attacking pinnace did. But size, as size, meant nothing. The laser blasted straight through the impeller room's thin skin and directly into Beta Twenty-Eight's primary generator. The generator exploded, throwing bits and pieces of its housing into the surrounding jungle of superconductor capacitors and control systems, and a brutal power spike blew back from it to Beta Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Nine. Without the internal armored bulkheads and cofferdams, the separate, parallel control runs, and redundant circuit breakers of military design, there was little to stop the train wreck of induced component failures, and a chain reaction of shorting, arcing superconductor rings raced through the compartment. The trapped lightning bolts crashed back and forth with the ferocity of enraged demons, taking one node after another completely off-line with catastrophic damage, and more frantic alarms screamed on the freighter's bridge.