David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

She didn't offer any estimate on personnel casualties… and Einarsson didn't ask for one.

"No, we won't know until then," the Nuncian said, instead. "But it sounds like you hit them hard enough to give us a chance to get aboard. Which, to be honest," he admitted, "is more than I really expected. Without your pinnaces, we wouldn't even have had a shot at pulling this off. Well done, Lieutenant Hearns. Please accept my compliments and pass them on to the rest of your people."

"Thank you, Sir. I will," she said.

"And after you do that," Einarsson added grimly, "go back there and kick those people's a-butts up between their ears."

"Aye, aye, Sir," Lieutenant Abigail Hearns said, without even a trace of amusement for his self-correction. "I think you can count on that one."

Hawk- Papa Flight continued decelerating hard. The pinnaces' velocity fell by almost six kilometers per second every second, slowing their headlong plunge towards the Nuncio System's Oort Cloud and the endless interstellar deeps beyond. Their sensors continued to hold Bogey Three, and Abigail's grimly satisfied estimate that the freighter had been successfully lamed hardened into virtual certainty as the freighter's position and emissions signature alike remained unchanged.

"Excuse me, Ma'am."

She turned and looked at the midshipwoman in the pilot's seat. Ragnhild's expression was calm enough, but there was a shadow behind her blue eyes. Blue eyes which saw not merely her current mission commander or Hexapuma 's JTO when they looked at Abigail, but also her officer candidate training officer-her teacher and mentor.

"Yes, Ragnhild?" Abigail's tone was calm, unruffled, and she returned her own gaze to the console before her.

"May I ask a question?"

"Of course."

"How many people do you think we just killed?" Ragnhild asked softly.

"I don't know," Abigail replied, infusing just a hint of cool consideration into her tone. "If there was a standard station-keeping watch in both compartments, there would have been two or three people in the hyper generator room, and four or five in the after impeller room. Call it eight." She turned and looked the younger woman levelly in the eye. "I don't imagine any of them survived."

She held the midshipwoman's gaze for a three-count, then returned her attention once more to her displays.

"It's possible the number's higher than that," she continued. "That estimate assumed a station-keeping watch, but they may've had full watches in both compartments, especially if they were at standby for a quick escape. In that case, you can double the number. At least."

Ragnhild said nothing more, and Abigail watched her unobtrusively from the corner of one eye. The midshipwoman looked unhappy, but not surprised. Sad, perhaps. Her expression, Abigail thought, was that of someone who had just realized that she'd come much more completely to grips with the possibility of her own death in combat than with the possibility that she might kill someone else. It was a moment Abigail herself remembered only too well, from a cold day on the planet Refuge, two T-years past. The moment she'd squeezed the trigger of a dead Marine's pulse rifle and seen not the sanitized electronic imagery of distant destruction but the spray patterns of blood from shredded human flesh and pulverized human bone.

But you were in command then, just like now, she reminded herself. And the people you killed were the ones who'd just killed one of your Marines… and fully intended to kill all of you. You had other responsibilities, other imperatives to concentrate on. Ragnhild doesn't-not right now, this instant, at least.

"However many we've already killed," she continued into the midshipwoman's silence, "it's less than are going to die aboard Bogey Three one way or the other before this thing's done." She turned her head to look at Ragnhild again. "If they're smart, they'll surrender and open their hatches the instant we get back. But even if they do, the odds are at least some of them-possibly all of them-will die anyway."

"But if they're Peep raiders, they're covered by the Deneb Accords!" Ragnhild protested.

" If they're Peeps operating under the legal orders of their own government, yes," Abigail agreed. "Personally, I think that's unlikely."

"You do… Ma'am?" Ragnhild was obviously surprised, and Abigail shrugged. "But the Captain's message said we have to assume they are," the midshipwoman protested diffidently.

"I realize the other two bogeys have been identified as Havenite designs, and I'm not saying I have any intention of ignoring the Captain's instructions and acting on the assumption that their crews aren't also Havenite. But neither of those ships is new-build, and we're an awful long way away from any star system in which the Republic would have any legitimate strategic interest."

Ragnhild looked as if she wanted to protest, and Abigail smiled slightly. No doubt the midshipwoman felt trapped between her Captain's apparent certainty and the skepticism of her own OCTO. Who, she was undoubtedly remembering at this particular moment, was a very junior officer, herself.

"I don't know which assumption Captain Terekhov is operating under, Ragnhild," she admitted. "He may not have come to an actual conclusion himself yet. Or he may have access to information to which I'm not privy that provides an additional reason to believe these are official Havenite commerce raiders. In either case, he's got a responsibility to bear even unlikely possibilities in mind.

"But I do remember the ONI reports I saw aboard Gauntlet on my own snotty cruise. One of the possibilities Captain Oversteegen had to consider was that the pirates we were looking for in Tiberian might be StateSec holdouts from the Saint-Just Regime who'd taken their ships and gone rogue when he got himself shot. Admittedly, Tiberian was a lot closer to the Republic than the Talbott Cluster is. But if I were the commander of a shipload of StateSec goons who'd refused to surrender, I'd have wanted to get as far away from Thomas Theisman and Eloise Pritchart as I possibly could. On balance, I think it's more likely we're looking at something like that than that Theisman would consider sending two obsolescent ships the next best thing to a thousand light-years from his main combat zone to harass us in an area the Star Kingdom hasn't even formally annexed yet."

Ragnhild's expression was suddenly much more thoughtful, and Abigail smiled again, a bit more broadly.

"I suppose that analysis could be the result of the fact that I'm a Grayson, not a Manticoran. I've noticed-no offense, -Midshipwoman-that you Manties think of the current government of the Republic, whoever it happens to be at the moment, as the font of all evil in the known universe. Not surprising, I suppose, given your experiences with them over the last, oh, sixty or seventy T-years.

"We Graysons, on the other hand, spent as long as your entire Star Kingdom's existed thinking that way about Masada. We're less fixated on governments and more fixated on ideologies, you might say-religious ones in our own case, of course. And we've seen more than enough evidence of displaced Masadans turning to freelance thuggery and atrocities and popping up in the most peculiar places after being run out of Endicott by the Occupation, like those so-called 'Defiant' fanatics who attacked Princess Ruth and Helen's sister in Erewhon last year. So, with all due respect, even if the Captain does think these are probably official Havenite naval units under officially sanctioned orders, I'm not so sure. And if they aren't," her smile disappeared, and her gray-blue eyes were suddenly very, very cold, "then the Deneb Accords don't come into it at all, do they?"

"No, Ma'am," Ragnhild said, slowly. "I don't suppose they do."