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peacekeeper forces to cover. Watching the news reports, it quickly became clear that whenever the peacekeepers scrambled to halt an outbreak of fighting in one area the people in the places they’d left would immediately start raising hell. From our perspective, that was good. It meant the peacekeepers wouldn’t have any leisure time to wander about and investigate the small freighter coming in outside their normal patrol areas.
    But everything wasn’t great. From our position above the plane of Fagin’s system, we could easily see all the ships operating below us closer to the plane. Two of them, one good-sized and one a bit smaller, showed up as freighters but were loitering not far from the area we’d pass through enroute the fourth planet.
    “Privateers?” Halley asked me.
    “Yeah. Sure to be. You know as well as I do that freighters hang around ports, waiting to off-load or on-load. They don’t hang around the middle of nothing.”
    “Even with freighter engines they wouldn’t have trouble intercepting us. What are you going to do, Kilcannon?”
    “Keep going, cross my fingers, and hope they either ignore us as not worth the trouble or something else happens to distract them.”
    Halley Keracides just nodded and watched the read-outs for a while with me.
    There’s a reason the old saying warns to be careful what you wish for. Less than a day later we were watching news reports of the latest mass slaughter by the good people of Fagin system. There was (or rather, had been) a colony on a moon of the fourth planet which was (or rather, had been) inhabited by a group most of the people on the fourth planet didn’t like for some reason. The peacekeepers protecting it had been drawn away and the fourth planet people had struck.
    “Saints, what the hell’s the matter with them?” Chen asked, not bothering to hide his revulsion.
    “I don’t think there’re any saints watching this system,” Halley Keracides answered.
    I was watching something else. “There’s a ship heading out our way.” They followed my mark. “Looks to be an old freighter. A lot bigger than Lady , but a bit older, I think, from the readings we’re getting.”
    Within another six hours we’d seen news reports confirming that the old freighter had come off of the moon where the colony had been wiped out. Nearly wiped out, that is. They’d gotten most of their kids and some of the adults onto that freighter. Its path to the peacekeepers or other safety in-system blocked by hostiles, the freighter had hauled mass out of the plane of the system in the hopes of getting away.
    Our two loitering privateers started heading for it. They’d been well-positioned for an intercept and they’d catch the fleeing freighter. No question. About two days before the nearest peacekeeper ship could possibly arrive to protect the freighter. And just a few hours before we swept safely past on our way to that fourth planet.
    “You’ve got your distraction, Kilcannon,” Halley Keracides stated in a very quiet voice.
    “Go to hell.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “There’s nothing we can do. Lady doesn’t carry weapons. She’s old, she’s tired and we can’t do a damn thing.”
    Halley nodded, but she didn’t seem to be agreeing. “Maybe you ought to brief Captain Weskind.”
    If I’d spotted even a trace of mockery on her face or in her voice I’d have sealed her in her quarters until we hit port, but there wasn’t any of that. “I should,” I agreed, and left to do that.
    Captain Weskind sat and listened. She always sat while I talked, and after I’d finished I waited. But Captain Weskind didn’t recite her hopes about ‘one good run.’ She just sat there, her face flickering with rapid shifts in emotion, and after a while I excused myself and went back to the bridge, wondering if Captain Weskind had taken a turn for the worse, or if she could no longer say whatever else she might’ve wanted to say.
    The two things nightmares