Elizabeth Moon - Rules of Engagement

“We just wanted a tow,” the captain said. “I don’t see why you want to board.”

“It’s R.S.S. policy to board all vessels seeking assistance,” Esmay said, repeating what Captain Solis had told her. “Just a routine, sir.”

“Damned nuisance,” the captain said.

“Think of it as practice,” Esmay said. “If we didn’t practice close-hauling and boarding, we might not be quick enough for someone with a serious emergency. After all, it might be your ship . . .”

“Oh, all right,” he said. “Just as long as you’re not planning to practice cutting holes in my hull.”

Shrike deployed standard tug grapples, backed up by its military-grade tractor. In this instance, the grapples homed neatly on the freighter’s signal, and locked on as Shrike maintained matching course and velocity. The tractor snugged the SAR ship closer still. Esmay gave the orders that sent Jig Arek and her team across a few hundred meters of vacuum to the other ship.

Rescue Two made its way in and out of all the holds, while Shrike boosted the freighter gently on its way, then returned before Solis ordered the grapples retracted.

“Captain—what were they looking for?” Esmay asked.

“Just practicing,” Solis said.

She looked at him; finally he grinned at her.

“All right. You might as well know. Sector’s concerned about possible shortages in the munitions inventory. We think some stuff’s being diverted from Fleet to civilian use. So the admiral says to check every ship that asks us for a boost. It is good practice, including the use of the warhead detection equipment.”

“What’s missing?” asked Esmay.

Solis spread his hands. “I’ve been told I don’t need to know, but since they specified the equipment we were to use looking for it, I’d say someone’s misplaced some of the more effective nukes.”

“Ouch.”

“Exactly. If our stuff’s being transshipped on civilian freighters, it could be going anywhere. To anyone. Probably not the Benignity—they have their own munitions industry, and plenty in stock. But any of the lesser hostile powers, or domestic malcontents . . .”

“Or simply pirates,” Esmay said.

“Yes. Anyone who wants a big bang.”

Elias Madero , owned by the Boros Consortium, followed a five-angled route that had proved lucrative for decades. Olives and wine from Bezaire, jewels mined on Oddlink, livestock embryos from Gullam, commercial-grade organics from Podj, entertainment cubes from Corian, which had FTL traffic from deeper insystem, and the largest population in the area. She was a container hauler, picking up at each port the hold-shaped containers that had been filling since her last visit there. Her crew, most of them permanent, often had no idea what was in the containers. The captain did, presumably, and also the Boros agents at each port. But the containers had no accessible hatches—one advantage of container ships was supposed to be the impossibility of petty pilfering by crews—so they had no idea that the container in Hold 5 which was supposed to be filled with 5832 cube players was actually full of arms stolen from a Fleet stockpile. The other containers in Hold 5, which should have had entertainment cubes to be played in the cube players, contained more illicit weaponry, including thirty-four Whitsoc 43b11 warheads, their controlling electronics, and the arming keys.

Boros’ agent at Bezaire would not have been happy to find the contents of that container, since she had a contract to supply the cube players and the entertainment cubes supposedly filling the rest of Hold 5.

Elias Madero came out of FTL flight, retranslating to normal space, to traverse the real-space distance between two jump points in the same system, colloquially known as Twobits. This shortcut had been marked “questionable” on standard charts for years, because the presence of two jump points in the same system was believed, on theoretical grounds, to lead to spatial instability of the jump points. If the insertion point shifted, an inbound ship might find itself emerging too close to a large mass, with no time to maneuver clear. But the nearest greenlined route meant three more jump point calculations, and added eleven days to the Corian-Bezaire passage. Since jump point temporal coordinates were fuzzy anyway, many commercial haulers used shortcuts to ensure that they met contractual delivery dates . . . while filing flight plans that were all greenlined.

This crew had made the traverse before, many times, without incident. The jump points had not shifted in the past fifty years, while the possibility that they might kept the system uncrowded.

On this trip, system insertion went as smoothly as usual, and the Elias transferred to insystem drive without a hitch.

“That’s done, then,” Captain Lund said to his navigator, clapping a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Four days, and we’ll be out of here again. I’m going to bed.” Custom and regulation both required that a captain be on the bridge during jump point insertions; Lund had been up three shifts running because of a minor engineering problem.

His navigation officer, a transfer from Sorias Madero , a sister ship, nodded. “I have the course laid, sir. By my calculations, ninety-seven point two hours.”

“Very good.”

Captain Lund, balding and stocky, waited until he was in his cabin to take off his jacket and kick off his shoes. He hung the jacket up neatly, set his shoes side by side, laid his trousers, neatly folded, over the back of his chair, with his shirt over them. This was his last cycle . . . when he reached Corian again, he would retire at last. Helen . . . his grandchildren . . . the neat little house set high on a slope above the valley . . . he drifted into sleep, a smile on his face.

The sharp yelp of the emergency alarm woke him. He touched the comunit above his bunk.

“Captain here—what is it?”

“Raiders, sir.”

He sat up, ducking automatically from the overhanging cabinets. “I’m on my way.”

Raiders? What kind of raiders would hang around a route where almost no ships went? No ships, really—he’d never found any indication that others used this two-jump transit.

Had they been tailed through FTL? He’d heard rumors that Fleet was developing some kind of scan that worked in FTL. The Benignity? Certainly not Aethar’s World, and they were across Familias space anyway.

From the bridge, the situation was clear. Two of them, their weapons systems lighting up the scan board with red threats. On the com screen, a hard-faced man in a uniform he didn’t recognize was speaking in accented Standard—an accent he hadn’t heard before, with the words pulled out twice as long.

“You surrender your ship, and we’ll let the crew off in your lifeboats—”

Captain Lund almost choked. What good would lifeboats be, in a lifeless system that no one visited because of the paired jump points?

“Wheah’s yoah captain? I wanna talk to him.”

Lund stepped up to the comunit, and nodded to his exec, who stepped back.

“This is Captain Lund. Who are you and what do you think you’re doing?”

“Takin’ yoah ship, sir.” The man favored him with a tight grin that did not look at all friendly. “In the name of sacred liberty, and the Nutex Militia. We apologize for any . . . ah . . . inconvenience.”

“You’re pirates!” Lund said. “You have no right—”

“Them’s harsh words, sir. We don’t like disrespect for our beliefs, sir. Let me put it this way—we have the weapons to blow your ship away, and we’re offerin’ you a chance to save your crews’ lives. Some of ’em, anyway. If you surrender your ship, and allow us to board without resistance, we will swear not to kill any of your legal crew.”