Engaging the Enemy

Engaging the Enemy is a military science fiction novel by the American writer Elizabeth Moon, published in 2006.

Its central figure is Kylara Vatta, the unconventional member of a shipping family who has been assembling a defensive force from whatever she can find: a converted ship, a crew of people who would not normally be hired and a set of arrangements with the worlds that need protection from pirate raids. In this volume the attacks on civilian shipping are part of a larger campaign, and the people running it have both a political purpose and a personal interest in Vatta and her family. Moon writes the books as a sequence about trade and logistics, and about the problem of keeping a company alive when the routes it depends on are the ones being attacked; this novel puts the heroine in the position of being both a target and the person responsible for the defence.

Moon had written the first two volumes of the sequence before this one, and the same story continues in the books that follow.