Trial by Fire - eARC by Charles E. Gannon Page B

awful close, two hundred klicks and still retroboosting. Now maneuvering to match vectors with us.” Hazawa’s voice tightened. “Sir, if they close to within fifty klicks, my orders clearly stipulate that I must take them under fire. And if they attempt to board, I must—”
    “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Trevor turned to Caine, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the craft’s now visible outline. “How long?” he asked.
    “That they’ll be alongside us in three or four minutes, tops. But how did they come straight to us?”
    Caine looked out at the debris-field, most of it just winking bits of distant, rolling scrap metal, a few close enough that their tattered outlines were visible. He shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. We are in slightly better shape than the remains of the closest fleet auxiliary, the San Marin, but she’s a bigger hull, and so should be more interesting to them. I think they’d be eager to get a look at the contents of a tender with half of her lading intact.”
    Hazawa’s voice was slightly tremulous over the shipwide. “All personnel, all sections: watch personnel to the weapons lockers to distribute sidearms. Stand by to repel boarders. Enemy craft at one hundred kilometers.”
    Repel boarders? In space? It was too ludicrous to imagine, but it was about to happen. The enemy craft, a rounded body bloated by a large number of fuel tanks and furnished with a sharp, inquisitive prow, kept approaching. The proximity alarm triggered automatically, set up a shipwide ululation which underscored Hazawa’s order: “PDF battery: acquire target.”
    Trevor rose. “Okay, so no one has any idea how they found us. Any thoughts about—?”
    Caine turned quickly. “Trevor, our distress signal: will it be the same as the type emitted by, let’s say, the frigate?”
    “Yeah, except it’ll be a lot longer. The frigate is a single hull: one registry code. But this ship carries modules, each of which has its own registry.”
    “So all the registries of all the carried modules are transmitted along with that of the carrier?”
    “Yeah, they’re appended to the end of the basic transponder signal. That way, if there’s a wreck, rescue teams can figure out if any of the modules are missing, or—”
    “And how does the cutter’s transponder know the registry of all the modules?”
    “Well, as long as they’re attached, it polls their individual registry chips, and—”
    Caine shook his head and interrupted. “Trevor, you changed our habmod’s registry, right before the attack, didn’t you?”
    “Yeah. Since we’re just civvie diplomats again, I had to change the module’s designation from military to—” Trevor stopped. “Oh, Christ.”
    Caine nodded. “You changed it to a diplomatic code.”
    Hazawa’s voice announced, “Enemy craft closing through fifty kilometers. Stand by to—” Static surged over his last order.
    Trevor felt a flash of hot moisture rise on his brow. He slapped his collarcom, noticed that the cutter’s PDF pod had powered up. “So the attackers think—”
    “—that we’re flying a diplomatic pennon: a white flag. One of their commo officers must know how to read our data streams and noticed it embedded in either the transponder code, the distress signal, or both.”
    Trevor nodded. “Lieutenant Hazawa, please respond.” Nothing. Where the hell—?
    And just as Hazawa responded—sounding both more confident, relieved, and excited—the bridge back-chatter confirmed what Trevor saw happening on his subsystem activity monitor. Behind Hazawa’s energetic, “Yes, Captain?” was a whoop that almost drowned out the background report that Trevor dreaded hearing. “Direct hit on the enemy ship, sir. The bogey is venting atmosphere and angling away erratically. Reacquiring—”
    “No, Lieutenant!” Trevor shouted into his static-ridden collarcom. “Stand down, stand—!”
    Hazawa’s “Say again?” vied