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"I see." McKeon rubbed his chin. "Any better read on her mass?"
"It's firming up some as the range drops, Skip, but whatever she's using for EW is a lot better than anything the Peeps are supposed to have. CIC still wants to call her a battlecruiser, but I think this may be one of those new heavy cruisers ONI warned us about. Unless she's red-lining her compensator, and I don't see any reason for her to take that kind of risk just to catch a single Manticoran cruiser, her accel’s too high for a battlecruiser. If I had to bet money, I'd say Bandit Four's the same class, whatever it is."
"I see," McKeon repeated. He patted her lightly on the shoulder and turned back towards his own command chair, then paused. Honor stood beside that chair, hands clasped behind her. Her spine was ramrod straight, and her expression was composed, but she, Andreas Venizelos, and Andrew LaFollet, unlike anyone else on the command deck, wore no skinsuits, and McKeon's stomach muscles tightened once again at the sight.
He drew a deep breath and walked over to stand beside her, and she turned her head to regard him gravely.
"Eleven minutes," he said quietly.
"I heard," Honor replied, and took one hand from behind her to rub the tip of her nose. She glanced at the time readout in the corner of McKeon's command chair repeater plot, then gestured at the small icon that represented the convoy's projected arrival point.
"Ten minutes," she said softly, and McKeon nodded.
"Ten minutes," he agreed. "And Bandit One's not going to be able to range on them before they hyper back out."
"We also serve who run away," Honor replied with a small smile, and McKeon surprised them both with a genuine chuckle.
But his moment of humor was short lived, and his eyes returned to the plot as if drawn by magnetism. Prince Adrian's effort to lure Bandit One away from the convoy's translation point had worked, but it had also demonstrated just how much firepower the Peeps had deployed to ambush them. In addition to the four ships Metcalf had originally picked up, she and her recon drones had since located five more, including three destroyers, a light cruiser, and what could only be a battlecruiser. None of the additional units she'd picked up had any chance of overhauling Prince Adrian, but their sheer numbers and the fact that they were trying to overtake her said ominous things about the person who'd set this ambush up. Whoever was in command over there had positioned his ships with such care that even with her early detection, Prince Adrian would have found it all but impossible to evade all of them.
Having done that, the enemy commander obviously intended to bring all the strength he could to bear. He wanted not equality or a simple advantage in firepower but a crushing superiority, and where many a CO would have given up and whistled his rearmost units back to their initial positions, this one had done nothing of the sort. The numbers said they would never catch Prince Adrian, but those numbers didn't include the possibility that the Manticoran ship might be damaged in the coming clash with Bandit One, now bearing down on her from starboard. If Adrian took heavy impeller damage or some other freak hit, or even if she was simply forced to turn sharply away from her opponent, one or more of the trailers might conceivably get into range to engage her yet. The odds against it were long, but this character was going to keep coming with everything he had for as long as there was the smallest conceivable chance that it might do him some good, and that was a most un-Peep-like attitude.
McKeon drew his eyes from the plot and looked back at his commodore, and his lips tightened. He hesitated a moment, and then leaned close to her.
"Honor, will you please get out of here and into a rescue suit?" he demanded in a voice pitched too low for anyone else to hear but still harsh with concern.
She gazed at him with dark, chocolate-brown eyes, and he felt his teeth trying to grind together at her calm expression and quizzically arched eyebrow. She reached up to rub Nimitz’s ears, and the 'cat pressed against her fingers. McKeon needed no link to Nimitz to know the 'cat's deep, anxious purr urged Honor to take his advice, but she seemed as unmoved by Nimitz’s advice as by McKeon’s.
"I need to be here," she said mildly, and McKeon inhaled sharply. Part of him wanted to grab her by the scruff of the neck, haul her physically off the bridge, and hand her over to his Marines with orders to stuff her into a suit for her own good. The fact that any such attempt on his part would end in a swift and humiliating fiasco made it no less attractive... only impractical. Even assuming LaFollet didn't take his head off for laying hands on Steadholder Harrington, Honor herself could tie him up in a bow anytime she felt like it, and they both knew it. But commodore and steadholder or not, he wanted her off his command deck before they entered Bandit One's range, because neither she nor any other human member of her party had brought their skinsuits with them when they came over from Alvarez.
Navy and Marine skinsuits weren't something which could be ordered off the rack. They had to be very carefully fitted to their wearers, indeed, "fitted" was a barely adequate word, for in many respects they were custom built to suit the individual for whom they were intended. Other vacuum gear, like the heavy hardsuits that construction crews wore or the clumsy rescue suits which were part of any ship's lifesaving gear, could be worn by almost anyone but had limited utility. Hardsuits, for instance, were basically small, independent spacecraft designed for extended deep-space use or handling cargo in depressurized holds. They literally wouldn't fit into the internal spaces of a starship, and while rescue suits could be worn almost anywhere, they were little more than emergency environmental envelopes designed to be towed around by rescue crews.
In many respects, Honor and her party would have been better off aboard a civilian transport, for interstellar law required commercial ships to carry sufficient suits for all passengers. Sheer cost, not to mention the need for fitting time, made it impossible for liners to provide that many skinsuits, so passenger suits were a cross between a rescue suit and a skinsuit, almost a throwback to the clumsy suits of the early first-century Post Diaspora, though considerably less bulky. Even they would have been unsuitable for long-term wear, and their old-fashioned gloves lacked the miniaturized, biofeedback servomechs which made it possible for a skinsuited individual to thread a needle even in vacuum, but they were infinitely preferable to a rescue suit.
Unfortunately, Prince Adrian's equipment list didn't include any of them. Rescue suits were provided for those cases in which people were temporarily separated from their personal equipment, but the Navy assumed naval personnel normally would keep their issue skinsuits to hand. Under the letter of the regs, Honor and her people should have brought their suits with them, however inconvenient the extra baggage would have been, since they'd intended to be aboard Prince Adrian for over twelve hours, but that regulation was routinely ignored. And so it was that of her entire party, only Nimitz, whose special skinsuit fitted neatly into a custom-designed carryall, was properly equipped for a warship at battle stations.
"Look," McKeon said now, still careful to keep his voice low, "you're not the only one who's going to die if we lose pressure here." He twitched his head at Venizelos and LaFollet, who were busy ignoring the conversation. "They're not suited up, either."
Something flickered in those dark brown eyes, and Honor turned to look at her subordinates. LaFollet seemed to feel her gaze, for he looked up and met it levelly, and her eyes flicked back to McKeon.
"You fight dirty," she said softly, an edge of steel in her voice, and he shrugged.
"So sue me."
She regarded him for several silent seconds, then cleared her throat.
"Andy, take Andrew and go below and join the others," she said crisply.
Venizelos turned quickly, and his expression indicated both that he'd anticipated her order and that he didn't much like it.
"I assume you'll be joining us, Milady," he said flatly. It wasn't a question, and Honors lips thinned.
"You may assume whatever you wish to assume, Commander. But you'll do your assuming in the boat bay gallery in a rescue suit."
"With all due respect, Commodore Harrington, I believe my place is here," Venizelos replied. Honor's eyes hardened and she started to speak harshly, then paused and visibly got a grip on her temper.
"I understand that, Andy," she said much more quietly, "but there's nothing at all you can do here, and there's no point in both of us being pigheaded."
Despite the tension in the air, amusement flickered in Venizelos' eyes at the word "both," but he showed no sign of retreating.
"You're right there, Ma'am. That's why I feel you should join the rest of us in the boat bay."
"I'm sure you do," Honor replied evenly, "but there is a difference between us, you know." One of Venizelos' eyebrows arched, and she smiled with bleak humor. "You're a commander, and I'm a commodore. That means I can order you to go."
"I..." Venizelos began, but her raised hand cut him off in midbreath. It wasn't an arrogant gesture, or a dismissive one, yet its finality was impossible to disobey.
"I'm serious, Andy. Whatever Captain McKeon may believe, I need to be here. This ship is part of my squadron, and her current position is the result of my orders. But you don't need to be here, and you're going to the boat bay right now."
Venizelos' mouth set rebelliously, and he darted a look past her to McKeon, as if appealing to Prince Adrian's CO for support. But McKeon only looked grimly at Honor's back, with the expression of a man who knew he'd lost the argument. The chief of staff hesitated a moment longer, but then his shoulders sagged and he nodded.
"Very well, Ma'am," he said heavily, and turned to punch for the lift. "Come on, Andrew," he said in that same, resigned tone, but the armsman shook his head.
"No, Sir," he said calmly. Venizelos' head turned, but the major wasn't looking at him. Instead, his gray eyes were locked with his Steadholder's, and he smiled ever so faintly. "Before you say anything, My Lady, I should remind you that this is one order you can't give."
"I beg your pardon?" Honors tone was chill, but LaFollet refused to flinch.
"I'm your personal armsman, My Lady. Under Grayson law, you can't legally order me to leave you if I believe your life is in danger. If you attempt to, it is not only my right but my responsibility to refuse to obey."
"I'm not in the habit of tolerating insubordination, Major!" Honor said sharply, and LaFollet came to attention.
"I'm sorry you regard me as insubordinate, My Lady," he said. "If you wish to construe my actions in that light, you are fully entitled to dismiss me from your service upon our return to Grayson. In the meantime, I remain bound by my oath, not simply to you, but to the Conclave of Steadholders, to discharge my duty as your armsman."
Honor glared at him for a long, smoldering moment, but her tone was almost conversational when she spoke again.
"We're not on Grayson, Andrew. We're on a Queens ship. Suppose I instruct Captain McKeon, as Prince Adrian's commanding officer, to order you below?"
"In that case, My Lady, I would, regretfully, be forced to refuse his orders," LaFollet said, and his tone, too, had changed, as if they both knew already how the argument was going to end yet shared some peculiar responsibility to carry the debate to its inevitable conclusion. And as Alistair McKeon watched them, he realized that more than misplaced pride or even LaFollet’s sense of duty drove him. The Grayson's granite intransigence arose from a deep, intensely personal loyalty, in its own way, a deep and abiding love, though one without romance or sexuality, to the woman he served.
"You can't refuse." Honors voice was gentler. "He's the captain of this ship."
"And I, My Lady, am your armsman," LaFollet replied, and this time he smiled.
Honor gazed at him a moment longer, then shook her head. "Remind me to have a long discussion with you when we get home, Major," she told him.
"Of course, My Lady," he said politely, and she smiled one of her crooked smiles. Then she pointed a long index finger at Venizelos.
"As for you, Commander, on your way!" she said, and to his own surprise, Venizelos chuckled. He, too, looked at LaFollet for a moment, and then he nodded and stepped into the lift. The doors closed behind him, and Honor turned, gave McKeon another of those smiles that combined intransigence and apology.
"Convoy translation in six minutes," Geraldine Metcalf announced into the silence.
"They'll enter the bag in another fourteen minutes, Citizen Captain," Citizen Lieutenant Allworth observed, and Helen Zachary nodded.
"You know, Skipper," Citizen Commander Luchner said, "there's something odd about this bird."
"Odd? What do you mean, Fred?"
"I'm not sure," the exec said slowly. He rubbed his upper lip with the side of an index finger for a moment, frowning in thought. "It's just that I can't figure out why he's made all his maneuvers in the same plane. I mean, if I were him, I'd have been looking for the least-time course out of here the instant I realized someone was waiting for me."
"What are you trying to say, Citizen Commander?" People's Commissioner Kuttner demanded.
"I'm not sure," Luchner repeated, hiding a flash of annoyance at Kuttner’s intrusion into his conversation with his captain. The commissioners tense, almost accusatory tone didn't help things a bit, the exec reflected, fighting to avoid the feeling that he had to defend himself against it.
"I believe what the Citizen Exec is pointing out, Sir," Zachary intervened, "is that the evasive action the enemy's initiated wasn't the most effective one available. Of course, it's entirely possible that whoever's in command over there simply made a less than optimum decision; that sort of thing can happen in any navy, after all. But it's part of Citizen Commander Luchner’s duties to consider whether or not there could be some other reason for it, one which would make sense to us, too, if we only knew what it was."
"With all due respect, Citizen Captain," Kuttner said impatiently, "I don't see any mystery. He's detected the units pursuing him, but as you yourself pointed out to me, he doesn't know we're here, which means he's running for what he thinks is open space."
"Perhaps so," Zachary replied politely, "but it's never wise to get too locked into a single possible explanation, Sir." She was a bit surprised at herself. She'd entered the conversation only to divert Kuttner from Luchner and protect her exec; now she felt an odd compulsion to continue the argument, and she wasn't certain whether it arose simply out of her irritation at Kuttner's smug assurance or if Luchner’s question had roused some instinctive suspicion of her own. "She may not know we're here, Citizen Commissioner," she went on, "but her course changes certainly make it clear that she's known Nuada was there from the beginning. In fact, I think it's most likely that she picked Nuada up before she realized anyone else was waiting for her."
"And?" Kuttner demanded impatiently when she paused.
"And her present course makes it impossible for her to avoid engaging Nuada... the ship she must have the best fix on," Zachary said slowly. She turned to Luchner and her eyes darkened. "That's it, isn't it, Fred?" she said. "That's what's bothering you. Why choose a course that gives the one ship she has to know about a shot at her?"
"Yes, Citizen Captain." Luchner's own eyes lit with sudden understanding. "That's exactly what it is! If he'd simply made a ninety degree alteration in any plane, or even turned at right angles in the same plane, he'd have scooted back out across the limit before Nuada could possibly catch him. He'd have avoided all of us, unless he happened to stumble over a ship lying doggo like we were. But as it is..."
"As it is, she's drawn the pursuit of the only ship who could have interdicted the volume in which she made her alpha translation," Zachary said flatly. Kuttner swiveled his head back and forth between the officers, his expression baffled, and Zachary leaned back with a sigh. "That's a very clever captain over there," she said. "Aside from the fact that she doesn't know we're out here, she's done everything exactly right."
"Would you mind explaining what you're talking about?" Kuttner snapped, and Zachary turned her head to look at him.
"If the Citizen Commander and I are correct, Sir, it's very simple. You see..."
"Hyper footprint!" Citizen Lieutenant Allworth barked. "Multiple hyper footprints bearing one-oh-six by oh-oh-three!"
GNS Jason Alvarez led Convoy JNMTC-76 back into n-space. Ship after ship emerged from hyper, each in turn spangling the emptiness with brilliant azure fire as Warshawski sails hundreds of kilometers in diameter bled transit energy. No sensor array within forty light-minutes could have missed that massive signature, and on the flag bridge of PNS Count Tilly, Lester Tourville swore with vile intensity as CIC reported.
Nor was he alone. Every Peep skipper in the Adler System realized what Prince Adrian had done, and their sulfurous reactions to the enormity of the prize they'd been sucked away from mirrored their admiral's. Aside from Nuada herself, and, of course, the hidden Katana, every ship which had been pursuing Prince Adrian swerved away to go after the convoy. Not because they had any realistic hope of intercepting it, but simply because they couldn't see that huge, glittering opportunity and not pursue it.
Captain Thomas Greentree stood at Lieutenant Commander Terracelli's shoulder, looking down at the tac officers larger, more detailed plot. It would take a few minutes for Alvarez's sensors to sort things out, but in the meantime...
"Sir!" Greentree's turned quickly at his com officer's sudden, uncharacteristic exclamation. He started to open his mouth, but Lieutenant Chavez went right on speaking. "We're picking up a Flash Priority transmission from Lady Harrington, Sir!"
"Flash Priority?" Greentree repeated. "What does it say?"
"I don't know yet, Sir. It's FTL and it's still coming in. I..."
Chavez broke off, his eyes going wide, and Greentree made himself clamp his mouth shut. There was no point badgering the com officer with questions he couldn't answer yet, and despite many improvements over the crude original systems, the FTL com's one real drawback remained its slow data transmission rate. It could shoot pulses across light-minutes virtually instantaneously, but the time required to generate each pulse meant a simple declarative sentence could take as much as two full minutes to transmit. Which, of course, was why code groups were used. It was almost like a revision to the ancient wet-navy days of signal flags, when a flag could stand for a single letter of the alphabet or an entire sentence from the fleets code book, and...
"Orders from the Flag, Captain," Chavez said, and Greentree felt his jaw clench as he noted the com officer's shaken tone and jerked his head for him to continue.
"The convoy is to reenter hyper and return to Clairmont immediately," Chavez said, and now his voice was flat and utterly toneless. "You are to assume command, Sir... and inform Admiral Sorbanne at Clairmont that the enemy has taken the Adler System."
"I'm to assume command?" Greentree heard his own voice asking the question before he could stop it, and Chavez nodded.
"Yes, Sir. And return to Clairmont with the convoy. Immediately."
"But what about Lady Harrington?" Terracelli blurted. Greentree turned to glare at him, but his heart wasn't in it, for the tac officer's question burned in his own mind.
"I..." Chavez paused and looked back down at his display where more clusters of alphanumeric characters had continued forming even as he spoke. His eyes flicked over them, and then he swallowed. "Prince Adrian is drawing the Peeps into pursuing her, Captain," he said in that same flat voice. "She will proceed independently to rejoin the squadron at Clairmont. And..." his tonelessness wavered, and he looked back up to meet Greentree's eyes "...the order to hyper back out is repeated, Sir. Twice."
Greentree stepped quickly to the lieutenant's side and gazed down at the display, and his lips were a thin, tight line. Chavez was right, and the captains lips thinned still further as one final sentence spelled itself out very slowly, letter by letter.
"These orders are nondiscretionary, Thomas," it said, and his fists clenched. He looked up, meeting Chavez's eyes, and for just an instant he hovered on the brink of ordering the com officer to delete that final sentence from the message log. But he was a naval officer. However much his instincts might scream to go to Lady Harrington's assistance, he was a naval officer, responsible not just for himself but for all the ships of the squadron and all the merchantmen under their escort, and he had his orders.
"Sir," Lieutenant Commander Terracelli said into the silence, "I'm picking up incoming impeller signatures."
"How many?"
"At least five, Sir. Two are probably battlecruisers."
"How long?"
"Minimum of thirty-one minutes to extreme missile range for the closest, Sir."
"Thank you."
Greentree turned away, walked slowly back to his command chair, and lowered himself into it. Thirty-one minutes. It was plenty of time for the convoy to make its escape. Once back across into hyper, the grav wave they'd ridden to Adler would let them accelerate at thousands of gravities, and all his merchantmen were JNMTC ships. By the time the first Peep could translate in pursuit, they'd be too far down range for the Peeps even to track them, far less fire on them. All he had to do was abandon his commodore.
But he really had no choice, did he? He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked back at Chavez.
"General signal, Com," he rasped. "The convoy will reenter hyper in two minutes. Adrian," he didn't even look at his astrogator, "plot our course back to Clairmont and pass it to Lieutenant Chavez for transmission to all units. Santander will take point."
"There they go," Luchner said bitterly, and Zachary nodded in silent agreement. She shared his bitterness, a bitterness made all the worse because they'd figured out what was coming before it actually happened, but she also felt an unwilling professional admiration for the Manty cruiser skipper who'd sucked Nuada out of position to do anything about it. Not that she intended to let that stop her from destroying her opponent.
She watched the impeller signatures of the convoy vanish and raised her voice.
"How long were they in n-space, Tactical?"
"Approximately nine minutes, Citizen Captain, but their initial translation required over three minutes."
"Thank you," Zachary said absently, and looked at Luchner. "Not bad at all for a convoy that size, was it Fred?" Luchner shook his head, and she smiled thinly. "Well, now that they've put one over on us, let's just see if we can't give Ms. Cruiser a little surprise of her own. Pass the word to Engineering. I want maximum military power in four minutes."
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
"It's firming up some as the range drops, Skip, but whatever she's using for EW is a lot better than anything the Peeps are supposed to have. CIC still wants to call her a battlecruiser, but I think this may be one of those new heavy cruisers ONI warned us about. Unless she's red-lining her compensator, and I don't see any reason for her to take that kind of risk just to catch a single Manticoran cruiser, her accel’s too high for a battlecruiser. If I had to bet money, I'd say Bandit Four's the same class, whatever it is."
"I see," McKeon repeated. He patted her lightly on the shoulder and turned back towards his own command chair, then paused. Honor stood beside that chair, hands clasped behind her. Her spine was ramrod straight, and her expression was composed, but she, Andreas Venizelos, and Andrew LaFollet, unlike anyone else on the command deck, wore no skinsuits, and McKeon's stomach muscles tightened once again at the sight.
He drew a deep breath and walked over to stand beside her, and she turned her head to regard him gravely.
"Eleven minutes," he said quietly.
"I heard," Honor replied, and took one hand from behind her to rub the tip of her nose. She glanced at the time readout in the corner of McKeon's command chair repeater plot, then gestured at the small icon that represented the convoy's projected arrival point.
"Ten minutes," she said softly, and McKeon nodded.
"Ten minutes," he agreed. "And Bandit One's not going to be able to range on them before they hyper back out."
"We also serve who run away," Honor replied with a small smile, and McKeon surprised them both with a genuine chuckle.
But his moment of humor was short lived, and his eyes returned to the plot as if drawn by magnetism. Prince Adrian's effort to lure Bandit One away from the convoy's translation point had worked, but it had also demonstrated just how much firepower the Peeps had deployed to ambush them. In addition to the four ships Metcalf had originally picked up, she and her recon drones had since located five more, including three destroyers, a light cruiser, and what could only be a battlecruiser. None of the additional units she'd picked up had any chance of overhauling Prince Adrian, but their sheer numbers and the fact that they were trying to overtake her said ominous things about the person who'd set this ambush up. Whoever was in command over there had positioned his ships with such care that even with her early detection, Prince Adrian would have found it all but impossible to evade all of them.
Having done that, the enemy commander obviously intended to bring all the strength he could to bear. He wanted not equality or a simple advantage in firepower but a crushing superiority, and where many a CO would have given up and whistled his rearmost units back to their initial positions, this one had done nothing of the sort. The numbers said they would never catch Prince Adrian, but those numbers didn't include the possibility that the Manticoran ship might be damaged in the coming clash with Bandit One, now bearing down on her from starboard. If Adrian took heavy impeller damage or some other freak hit, or even if she was simply forced to turn sharply away from her opponent, one or more of the trailers might conceivably get into range to engage her yet. The odds against it were long, but this character was going to keep coming with everything he had for as long as there was the smallest conceivable chance that it might do him some good, and that was a most un-Peep-like attitude.
McKeon drew his eyes from the plot and looked back at his commodore, and his lips tightened. He hesitated a moment, and then leaned close to her.
"Honor, will you please get out of here and into a rescue suit?" he demanded in a voice pitched too low for anyone else to hear but still harsh with concern.
She gazed at him with dark, chocolate-brown eyes, and he felt his teeth trying to grind together at her calm expression and quizzically arched eyebrow. She reached up to rub Nimitz’s ears, and the 'cat pressed against her fingers. McKeon needed no link to Nimitz to know the 'cat's deep, anxious purr urged Honor to take his advice, but she seemed as unmoved by Nimitz’s advice as by McKeon’s.
"I need to be here," she said mildly, and McKeon inhaled sharply. Part of him wanted to grab her by the scruff of the neck, haul her physically off the bridge, and hand her over to his Marines with orders to stuff her into a suit for her own good. The fact that any such attempt on his part would end in a swift and humiliating fiasco made it no less attractive... only impractical. Even assuming LaFollet didn't take his head off for laying hands on Steadholder Harrington, Honor herself could tie him up in a bow anytime she felt like it, and they both knew it. But commodore and steadholder or not, he wanted her off his command deck before they entered Bandit One's range, because neither she nor any other human member of her party had brought their skinsuits with them when they came over from Alvarez.
Navy and Marine skinsuits weren't something which could be ordered off the rack. They had to be very carefully fitted to their wearers, indeed, "fitted" was a barely adequate word, for in many respects they were custom built to suit the individual for whom they were intended. Other vacuum gear, like the heavy hardsuits that construction crews wore or the clumsy rescue suits which were part of any ship's lifesaving gear, could be worn by almost anyone but had limited utility. Hardsuits, for instance, were basically small, independent spacecraft designed for extended deep-space use or handling cargo in depressurized holds. They literally wouldn't fit into the internal spaces of a starship, and while rescue suits could be worn almost anywhere, they were little more than emergency environmental envelopes designed to be towed around by rescue crews.
In many respects, Honor and her party would have been better off aboard a civilian transport, for interstellar law required commercial ships to carry sufficient suits for all passengers. Sheer cost, not to mention the need for fitting time, made it impossible for liners to provide that many skinsuits, so passenger suits were a cross between a rescue suit and a skinsuit, almost a throwback to the clumsy suits of the early first-century Post Diaspora, though considerably less bulky. Even they would have been unsuitable for long-term wear, and their old-fashioned gloves lacked the miniaturized, biofeedback servomechs which made it possible for a skinsuited individual to thread a needle even in vacuum, but they were infinitely preferable to a rescue suit.
Unfortunately, Prince Adrian's equipment list didn't include any of them. Rescue suits were provided for those cases in which people were temporarily separated from their personal equipment, but the Navy assumed naval personnel normally would keep their issue skinsuits to hand. Under the letter of the regs, Honor and her people should have brought their suits with them, however inconvenient the extra baggage would have been, since they'd intended to be aboard Prince Adrian for over twelve hours, but that regulation was routinely ignored. And so it was that of her entire party, only Nimitz, whose special skinsuit fitted neatly into a custom-designed carryall, was properly equipped for a warship at battle stations.
"Look," McKeon said now, still careful to keep his voice low, "you're not the only one who's going to die if we lose pressure here." He twitched his head at Venizelos and LaFollet, who were busy ignoring the conversation. "They're not suited up, either."
Something flickered in those dark brown eyes, and Honor turned to look at her subordinates. LaFollet seemed to feel her gaze, for he looked up and met it levelly, and her eyes flicked back to McKeon.
"You fight dirty," she said softly, an edge of steel in her voice, and he shrugged.
"So sue me."
She regarded him for several silent seconds, then cleared her throat.
"Andy, take Andrew and go below and join the others," she said crisply.
Venizelos turned quickly, and his expression indicated both that he'd anticipated her order and that he didn't much like it.
"I assume you'll be joining us, Milady," he said flatly. It wasn't a question, and Honors lips thinned.
"You may assume whatever you wish to assume, Commander. But you'll do your assuming in the boat bay gallery in a rescue suit."
"With all due respect, Commodore Harrington, I believe my place is here," Venizelos replied. Honor's eyes hardened and she started to speak harshly, then paused and visibly got a grip on her temper.
"I understand that, Andy," she said much more quietly, "but there's nothing at all you can do here, and there's no point in both of us being pigheaded."
Despite the tension in the air, amusement flickered in Venizelos' eyes at the word "both," but he showed no sign of retreating.
"You're right there, Ma'am. That's why I feel you should join the rest of us in the boat bay."
"I'm sure you do," Honor replied evenly, "but there is a difference between us, you know." One of Venizelos' eyebrows arched, and she smiled with bleak humor. "You're a commander, and I'm a commodore. That means I can order you to go."
"I..." Venizelos began, but her raised hand cut him off in midbreath. It wasn't an arrogant gesture, or a dismissive one, yet its finality was impossible to disobey.
"I'm serious, Andy. Whatever Captain McKeon may believe, I need to be here. This ship is part of my squadron, and her current position is the result of my orders. But you don't need to be here, and you're going to the boat bay right now."
Venizelos' mouth set rebelliously, and he darted a look past her to McKeon, as if appealing to Prince Adrian's CO for support. But McKeon only looked grimly at Honor's back, with the expression of a man who knew he'd lost the argument. The chief of staff hesitated a moment longer, but then his shoulders sagged and he nodded.
"Very well, Ma'am," he said heavily, and turned to punch for the lift. "Come on, Andrew," he said in that same, resigned tone, but the armsman shook his head.
"No, Sir," he said calmly. Venizelos' head turned, but the major wasn't looking at him. Instead, his gray eyes were locked with his Steadholder's, and he smiled ever so faintly. "Before you say anything, My Lady, I should remind you that this is one order you can't give."
"I beg your pardon?" Honors tone was chill, but LaFollet refused to flinch.
"I'm your personal armsman, My Lady. Under Grayson law, you can't legally order me to leave you if I believe your life is in danger. If you attempt to, it is not only my right but my responsibility to refuse to obey."
"I'm not in the habit of tolerating insubordination, Major!" Honor said sharply, and LaFollet came to attention.
"I'm sorry you regard me as insubordinate, My Lady," he said. "If you wish to construe my actions in that light, you are fully entitled to dismiss me from your service upon our return to Grayson. In the meantime, I remain bound by my oath, not simply to you, but to the Conclave of Steadholders, to discharge my duty as your armsman."
Honor glared at him for a long, smoldering moment, but her tone was almost conversational when she spoke again.
"We're not on Grayson, Andrew. We're on a Queens ship. Suppose I instruct Captain McKeon, as Prince Adrian's commanding officer, to order you below?"
"In that case, My Lady, I would, regretfully, be forced to refuse his orders," LaFollet said, and his tone, too, had changed, as if they both knew already how the argument was going to end yet shared some peculiar responsibility to carry the debate to its inevitable conclusion. And as Alistair McKeon watched them, he realized that more than misplaced pride or even LaFollet’s sense of duty drove him. The Grayson's granite intransigence arose from a deep, intensely personal loyalty, in its own way, a deep and abiding love, though one without romance or sexuality, to the woman he served.
"You can't refuse." Honors voice was gentler. "He's the captain of this ship."
"And I, My Lady, am your armsman," LaFollet replied, and this time he smiled.
Honor gazed at him a moment longer, then shook her head. "Remind me to have a long discussion with you when we get home, Major," she told him.
"Of course, My Lady," he said politely, and she smiled one of her crooked smiles. Then she pointed a long index finger at Venizelos.
"As for you, Commander, on your way!" she said, and to his own surprise, Venizelos chuckled. He, too, looked at LaFollet for a moment, and then he nodded and stepped into the lift. The doors closed behind him, and Honor turned, gave McKeon another of those smiles that combined intransigence and apology.
"Convoy translation in six minutes," Geraldine Metcalf announced into the silence.
"They'll enter the bag in another fourteen minutes, Citizen Captain," Citizen Lieutenant Allworth observed, and Helen Zachary nodded.
"You know, Skipper," Citizen Commander Luchner said, "there's something odd about this bird."
"Odd? What do you mean, Fred?"
"I'm not sure," the exec said slowly. He rubbed his upper lip with the side of an index finger for a moment, frowning in thought. "It's just that I can't figure out why he's made all his maneuvers in the same plane. I mean, if I were him, I'd have been looking for the least-time course out of here the instant I realized someone was waiting for me."
"What are you trying to say, Citizen Commander?" People's Commissioner Kuttner demanded.
"I'm not sure," Luchner repeated, hiding a flash of annoyance at Kuttner’s intrusion into his conversation with his captain. The commissioners tense, almost accusatory tone didn't help things a bit, the exec reflected, fighting to avoid the feeling that he had to defend himself against it.
"I believe what the Citizen Exec is pointing out, Sir," Zachary intervened, "is that the evasive action the enemy's initiated wasn't the most effective one available. Of course, it's entirely possible that whoever's in command over there simply made a less than optimum decision; that sort of thing can happen in any navy, after all. But it's part of Citizen Commander Luchner’s duties to consider whether or not there could be some other reason for it, one which would make sense to us, too, if we only knew what it was."
"With all due respect, Citizen Captain," Kuttner said impatiently, "I don't see any mystery. He's detected the units pursuing him, but as you yourself pointed out to me, he doesn't know we're here, which means he's running for what he thinks is open space."
"Perhaps so," Zachary replied politely, "but it's never wise to get too locked into a single possible explanation, Sir." She was a bit surprised at herself. She'd entered the conversation only to divert Kuttner from Luchner and protect her exec; now she felt an odd compulsion to continue the argument, and she wasn't certain whether it arose simply out of her irritation at Kuttner's smug assurance or if Luchner’s question had roused some instinctive suspicion of her own. "She may not know we're here, Citizen Commissioner," she went on, "but her course changes certainly make it clear that she's known Nuada was there from the beginning. In fact, I think it's most likely that she picked Nuada up before she realized anyone else was waiting for her."
"And?" Kuttner demanded impatiently when she paused.
"And her present course makes it impossible for her to avoid engaging Nuada... the ship she must have the best fix on," Zachary said slowly. She turned to Luchner and her eyes darkened. "That's it, isn't it, Fred?" she said. "That's what's bothering you. Why choose a course that gives the one ship she has to know about a shot at her?"
"Yes, Citizen Captain." Luchner's own eyes lit with sudden understanding. "That's exactly what it is! If he'd simply made a ninety degree alteration in any plane, or even turned at right angles in the same plane, he'd have scooted back out across the limit before Nuada could possibly catch him. He'd have avoided all of us, unless he happened to stumble over a ship lying doggo like we were. But as it is..."
"As it is, she's drawn the pursuit of the only ship who could have interdicted the volume in which she made her alpha translation," Zachary said flatly. Kuttner swiveled his head back and forth between the officers, his expression baffled, and Zachary leaned back with a sigh. "That's a very clever captain over there," she said. "Aside from the fact that she doesn't know we're out here, she's done everything exactly right."
"Would you mind explaining what you're talking about?" Kuttner snapped, and Zachary turned her head to look at him.
"If the Citizen Commander and I are correct, Sir, it's very simple. You see..."
"Hyper footprint!" Citizen Lieutenant Allworth barked. "Multiple hyper footprints bearing one-oh-six by oh-oh-three!"
GNS Jason Alvarez led Convoy JNMTC-76 back into n-space. Ship after ship emerged from hyper, each in turn spangling the emptiness with brilliant azure fire as Warshawski sails hundreds of kilometers in diameter bled transit energy. No sensor array within forty light-minutes could have missed that massive signature, and on the flag bridge of PNS Count Tilly, Lester Tourville swore with vile intensity as CIC reported.
Nor was he alone. Every Peep skipper in the Adler System realized what Prince Adrian had done, and their sulfurous reactions to the enormity of the prize they'd been sucked away from mirrored their admiral's. Aside from Nuada herself, and, of course, the hidden Katana, every ship which had been pursuing Prince Adrian swerved away to go after the convoy. Not because they had any realistic hope of intercepting it, but simply because they couldn't see that huge, glittering opportunity and not pursue it.
Captain Thomas Greentree stood at Lieutenant Commander Terracelli's shoulder, looking down at the tac officers larger, more detailed plot. It would take a few minutes for Alvarez's sensors to sort things out, but in the meantime...
"Sir!" Greentree's turned quickly at his com officer's sudden, uncharacteristic exclamation. He started to open his mouth, but Lieutenant Chavez went right on speaking. "We're picking up a Flash Priority transmission from Lady Harrington, Sir!"
"Flash Priority?" Greentree repeated. "What does it say?"
"I don't know yet, Sir. It's FTL and it's still coming in. I..."
Chavez broke off, his eyes going wide, and Greentree made himself clamp his mouth shut. There was no point badgering the com officer with questions he couldn't answer yet, and despite many improvements over the crude original systems, the FTL com's one real drawback remained its slow data transmission rate. It could shoot pulses across light-minutes virtually instantaneously, but the time required to generate each pulse meant a simple declarative sentence could take as much as two full minutes to transmit. Which, of course, was why code groups were used. It was almost like a revision to the ancient wet-navy days of signal flags, when a flag could stand for a single letter of the alphabet or an entire sentence from the fleets code book, and...
"Orders from the Flag, Captain," Chavez said, and Greentree felt his jaw clench as he noted the com officer's shaken tone and jerked his head for him to continue.
"The convoy is to reenter hyper and return to Clairmont immediately," Chavez said, and now his voice was flat and utterly toneless. "You are to assume command, Sir... and inform Admiral Sorbanne at Clairmont that the enemy has taken the Adler System."
"I'm to assume command?" Greentree heard his own voice asking the question before he could stop it, and Chavez nodded.
"Yes, Sir. And return to Clairmont with the convoy. Immediately."
"But what about Lady Harrington?" Terracelli blurted. Greentree turned to glare at him, but his heart wasn't in it, for the tac officer's question burned in his own mind.
"I..." Chavez paused and looked back down at his display where more clusters of alphanumeric characters had continued forming even as he spoke. His eyes flicked over them, and then he swallowed. "Prince Adrian is drawing the Peeps into pursuing her, Captain," he said in that same flat voice. "She will proceed independently to rejoin the squadron at Clairmont. And..." his tonelessness wavered, and he looked back up to meet Greentree's eyes "...the order to hyper back out is repeated, Sir. Twice."
Greentree stepped quickly to the lieutenant's side and gazed down at the display, and his lips were a thin, tight line. Chavez was right, and the captains lips thinned still further as one final sentence spelled itself out very slowly, letter by letter.
"These orders are nondiscretionary, Thomas," it said, and his fists clenched. He looked up, meeting Chavez's eyes, and for just an instant he hovered on the brink of ordering the com officer to delete that final sentence from the message log. But he was a naval officer. However much his instincts might scream to go to Lady Harrington's assistance, he was a naval officer, responsible not just for himself but for all the ships of the squadron and all the merchantmen under their escort, and he had his orders.
"Sir," Lieutenant Commander Terracelli said into the silence, "I'm picking up incoming impeller signatures."
"How many?"
"At least five, Sir. Two are probably battlecruisers."
"How long?"
"Minimum of thirty-one minutes to extreme missile range for the closest, Sir."
"Thank you."
Greentree turned away, walked slowly back to his command chair, and lowered himself into it. Thirty-one minutes. It was plenty of time for the convoy to make its escape. Once back across into hyper, the grav wave they'd ridden to Adler would let them accelerate at thousands of gravities, and all his merchantmen were JNMTC ships. By the time the first Peep could translate in pursuit, they'd be too far down range for the Peeps even to track them, far less fire on them. All he had to do was abandon his commodore.
But he really had no choice, did he? He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked back at Chavez.
"General signal, Com," he rasped. "The convoy will reenter hyper in two minutes. Adrian," he didn't even look at his astrogator, "plot our course back to Clairmont and pass it to Lieutenant Chavez for transmission to all units. Santander will take point."
"There they go," Luchner said bitterly, and Zachary nodded in silent agreement. She shared his bitterness, a bitterness made all the worse because they'd figured out what was coming before it actually happened, but she also felt an unwilling professional admiration for the Manty cruiser skipper who'd sucked Nuada out of position to do anything about it. Not that she intended to let that stop her from destroying her opponent.
She watched the impeller signatures of the convoy vanish and raised her voice.
"How long were they in n-space, Tactical?"
"Approximately nine minutes, Citizen Captain, but their initial translation required over three minutes."
"Thank you," Zachary said absently, and looked at Luchner. "Not bad at all for a convoy that size, was it Fred?" Luchner shook his head, and she smiled thinly. "Well, now that they've put one over on us, let's just see if we can't give Ms. Cruiser a little surprise of her own. Pass the word to Engineering. I want maximum military power in four minutes."
Chapter Seventeen
Honor managed to keep the exultation out of her expression, yet she felt as if the entire universe had just been lifted from her shoulders. An echo of her own enormous relief flowed into her from the rest of Prince Adrian's bridge crew as the convoy blinked safely back into hyperspace, and she turned her head to exchange a satisfied look with McKeon. Now all they had to do was deal with the one enemy between them and escape, and while anything could happen in a deep space engagement, Honor was more than willing to take her chances in an eleven-minute, maximum range running engagement with a Peep. The Allies' advantages in missile combat remained overwhelming, and even if that really was a battlecruiser over there, it wouldn't have the time or the firepower to...
An alarm buzzed harshly, and her head snapped around to the tactical station as a brilliant red icon glared in Metcalf's main display, thirty degrees off Prince Adrian's port bow but accelerating to cross her base course.
"New unidentified contact!" Surprise sharpened the tac officers voice. "Designate this contact Bandit Ten. She must've been holding her accel down to hide from us," Metcalf continued, but then her tone changed as initial surprise gave way to puzzlement. "Skipper, CIC calls it a Sword-class cruiser from its impeller signature and emissions fingerprint, but there's something wrong with the drive numbers."
"What d'you mean, 'wrong'?" McKeon demanded.
"She's not accelerating nearly fast enough for the amount of energy she's radiating," Metcalf replied. "She should be turning up at least five KPS-squared with that strong a drive signature, and she's barely making a good four and a quarter."
McKeon frowned, but he had much more to worry about than an unexplained drive ambiguity, and he shook that concern aside to concentrate on more pressing ones.
"Assume constant accelerations and headings and project time to missile range and our time to the hyper limit," he said crisply.
"Aye, aye, Sir." Metcalf's hands danced across her panel while McKeon frowned down at his plot. Honor frowned at it, as well, but she also gnawed the inside of her lip, for she could think of at least one all too likely reason for the Peep's low acceleration.
"On the assumptions you specified, Skipper, we're thirty-one minutes from the limit," Metcalf reported after several seconds. "The missile geometry will give Bandit Ten a maximum powered engagement range of just under eight million klicks, and we'll enter her envelope in seventeen and a half minutes. Assuming our course and accel remain constant, but she alters to maximize her engagement time, she can stay with us all the way to the limit, call it thirteen-point-five minutes from the time she opens fire."
"Can we avoid her?"
"Negative, Sir. We can reduce her engagement window, but we can't stay out of her reach. And she's positioned herself just about perfectly, Skip. With her coming in high from the left and Bandit One coming in from starboard and low, she's got us boxed. The further away from her we stay, the closer we come to Bandit One. As it is, we'll be in range of both of them simultaneously for at least eleven minutes."
"I see." McKeon rubbed his jaw, then punched numbers into his plot. He considered them briefly, tried another combination, and looked up at Honor. "Gerry's right, Ma'am," he said quietly. "We're between Scylla and Charybdis. I can reduce Bandit Ten's engagement window to a maximum of ten minutes, but only if I increase Bandit One's to a minimum of fifteen. Or I can leave Bandit One at eleven minutes and accept the thirteen-plus-minute engagement from Bandit Ten."
Honor nodded and gripped her hands together behind her. She pursed her lips for a moment, then sighed.
"You do realize the most likely explanation for Bandit Ten's low observed accel, of course," she said.
"Missile pods," McKeon replied grimly.
"Probably," Honor agreed. She gazed at her old friend for several seconds, but she said nothing more. She might be the commodore of CruRon Eighteen, but Alistair McKeon was the captain of HMS Prince Adrian. The responsibility for what happened to his ship was his, and so was the decision on how he fought her. Honor was as aware as McKeon that many flag officers would have refused to admit that in their own desperate need to do something, but this was no squadron-level decision, for there was no squadron. There was only Prince Adrian, on her own in a single-ship engagement, and even if she hadn't been, Honor had complete faith in Alistair McKeon's judgment. She would not insult him by interfering with his orders or second-guessing his decisions, and she saw a flicker of gratitude in his eyes before he turned back to his officers.
"Chief Harris, roll us a hundred degrees to starboard but maintain heading and acceleration," he told his helmsman crisply, and then swiveled his chair to face Metcalf. "From his accel, Bandit Ten is probably towing missile pods, Gerry, but Bandit One's accel has been too high for that all along. We could cut Ten's engagement time by altering course to starboard and diving away from him, but there's not much point. Ten minutes or thirteen, he's still going to get his initial salvo off, and there's nothing we can do about it, but Bandit One's probably got more sustained missile capacity. So we'll stay low, take Ten's best punch, and keep as far from One as we can for as long as we can."
"Understood, Sir," Metcalf replied tensely.
"Well, she's made up her mind," Helen Zachary said softly. The Manticoran cruiser had rolled ship, turning the belly of her wedge to Katana, and her EW had come online. With the enemy accelerating steadily towards Katana, the theoretical maximum powered range of the bigger, more powerful missiles in Zachary's pods was on the order of eight and a half million kilometers, but the Manty’s ECM and decoys would reduce their effective range to barely seven million. That should still be enough, however.
"What do you mean, 'made up her mind'?" Kuttner demanded. "He hasn't done a thing except bring up his EW. He certainly hasn't altered course!"
"No, she hasn't," Zachary agreed. "And she's not going to. Her original heading will expose her to a total of just under twenty-five minutes of fire: thirteen and a half from us, and eleven from Nuada. Any course alteration would decrease the engagement window for one of us, but only by increasing it for the other. She's playing the odds, but notice the fact that she's rolled ship away from us."
"So what?" Kuttner asked, and Zachary managed not to sigh.
"By rolling her port sidewall away from us, Sir, she rolls it towards Citizen Captain Turner. It doesn't give him a very good shot, but it gives him a better one than it gives us, and she's also staying low, keeping the belly of her wedge towards us. In other words, she's more worried about protecting herself from our fire than Nuada's, which suggests she's figured out we're towing pods." Zachary shook her head. "I told you that was a sharp customer over there, Citizen Commissioner."
Seconds dragged on Prince Adrian's bridge even as the digital time displays raced downward. There was no brilliant, last-minute maneuver this time. The elements of the equation were brutally clear, and most of Prince Adrian's officers had seen Allied missile pods in action. They knew what was coming, and the only real question was how many missiles Bandit Ten had available. Oh, it also mattered how good they were, and when the Peeps would choose to fire them, but if Bandit Ten had enough of them, quality and timing became secondary. Even under ideal conditions, EW could expect to fool only so many missiles. Those that got through would have to be intercepted by active defenses, and there was, quite simply, an absolute upper limit to the number of targets Prince Adrian's defensive fire control and weapons could handle before they became saturated. And without her squadron mates to lend their weight to her defensive fire, that number was lower than Alistair McKeon or Honor Harrington wanted to think about.
"Coming into our maximum missile range in fifteen seconds," Metcalf announced finally, her voice taut with the professional calm of her training.
"Engage as specified," McKeon replied firmly.
"Hostile launch!" Citizen Lieutenant Allworth sang out. "Multiple launches. Estimate sixteen inbound."
"This soon? How can they possibly expect to hit us at this range?" Kuttner forgot to sound officious in his genuine bafflement, and Zachary smiled humorlessly.
"They're not shooting at Katana, Citizen Commissioner, and those aren't laser heads." Kuttner stared at her, and her nostrils flared. "They're old-fashioned nukes, Sir, going for proximity soft kills on the pods." She looked away from the commissioner and considered her tactical display. The Manticoran warheads sped towards her command, and if she was right about their warheads and targeting, they would detonate well astern of Katana, far enough out to be a difficult point defense solution, yet close enough to burn out the electronics of her missile pods. But they would take time to arrive, and she refused to allow their threat to spook her into a premature launch of her own missiles.
"Citizen Lieutenant Allworth," she said crisply.
"Yes, Citizen Captain?"
"You will flush your pods in... one hundred and forty seconds from now."
Honor watched Prince Adrian's first salvo sweep towards the enemy. A second followed fifteen seconds later, and a third. A fourth, and still the Peep made no reply. Ten broadsides were in space, a hundred and sixty missiles, without drawing a single answering shot, and she felt the rising hope of some of McKeon's officers. But she didn't share their elation... and neither did McKeon. They looked at one another, and Honor didn't need Nimitz to know what McKeon was thinking.
The captain had hoped an early launch on his part might shake his enemy's nerve, push her into an early launch of her own, while her accuracy would be at its lowest. But the Peep commander had refused the bait, which left only the meager hope that she might wait too long, let the missiles of Prince Adrian's first broadside get in close to her pods and cripple them before they could...
"Missile separation!" Geraldine Metcalf announced flatly, and Honor's nails cut into her palms as her hands fisted behind her. "Multiple missile separations," Metcalf went on. "Estimate eighty-plus inbound."
"Damn," Alistair McKeon said almost mildly.
Eighty-four missiles howled towards HMS Prince Adrian. That was little more than half the total she had already fired, but there was an enormous difference between ten separate sixteen-missile broadsides, separated in time and space so that each offered the missile defense crews its own fire solution problem, and a single, massive deluge. It was a grim equation the People's Navy had faced all too often since the war's opening battles. Now it was the turn of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Geraldine Metcalf and her assistants did their best as the tide of destruction roared down on them.
Jammers snarled, fighting to blind the incoming missiles' homing systems, and decoys sang to them, tempting them astray. But the People's Republic's new Solarian League-upgraded missiles were far more dangerous than the ones with which the PN had begun the war. Their sensors were more sophisticated, the capability of their targeting discrimination software had been increased by a factor of three, and the RMN’s lack of data on them made Metcalf’s ECM much less effective than projected. Barely a quarter of the birds in that massive salvo were blinded, and only a handful more succumbed to the decoys' seduction. Fifty-seven of them burned straight through the cruisers best EW efforts, and countermissiles zipped out to meet them. The blood-red icons began to vanish from Metcalf’s plot with mechanical precision, but they died too slowly. Thirty-five broke through the countermissile envelope, and last-ditch laser clusters trained onto them, firing desperately, trying to kill them before they reached attack range.
The lasers got nineteen. Only sixteen missiles, less than twenty percent of the original broadside, survived to reach attack range, but it was enough. The cruiser writhed in desperate evasion attempts, and she managed to avoid some of them, but they came driving in, with ample time and power remaining on their drives to execute their terminal attack maneuvers, and she couldn't avoid them all.
Four of the sixteen laser heads wasted themselves against the floor of Prince Adrian's impeller wedge as she spun on her axis to interpose it, and three more overshot her and clawed equally uselessly at her wedge's roof. Of the other nine, five detonated to port and "above" the cruiser, and like the missiles in Manticoran missile pods, those in Katana's pods were as powerful as anything a super-dreadnought might have carried. Prince Adrian bucked as clusters of bomb-pumped lasers slashed arrogantly through her sidewall to savage her hull. Armor splintered, internal bulkheads shattered, two missile tubes, a graser, three laser clusters, and her number three radar array were smashed, and thirty-two members of her crew died as the energy blew into her hull, but the sidewall and the antiradiation fields inside it had blunted and attenuated those lasers.
But there was no sidewall to protect against the four laser heads which exploded directly ahead of her. Their clustered fury ripped straight down the throat of her wedge, and damage alarms shrieked as transfer energy slammed into her, tearing alloy like tissue and slaughtering her people. Power levels fluctuated madly, spikes surging through the systems in the forward portion of the ship too quickly for circuit breakers to function, and massive secondary explosions followed in their wake. Honor was thrown to her knees as a giants fist shook McKeon's ship, like a terrier shaking a rat, and the bridge displays flickered, died, and then came back up.
"Damage report!" McKeon snapped, but there was no response. He stabbed at the com buttons on his chair arm, plugging directly into Damage Control Central. "Damage report!" he repeated, but still there was no answer, and he punched another combination, this one direct to Commander Gillespie's com. "Taylor, I need a damage report!"
"The Exec's dead, Skipper," someone gasped over the intercom after a seeming eternity. "DCC's gone. We're... all... dead... down..."
The voice died, and McKeon closed his eyes in anguish.
"Good hits on Bandit Ten!" Metcalf announced. "We got at least four in on the bastards, Sir!"
"Negative function on all forward point defense!" someone else barked. "We've lost Lidar One and Two! Grav Threes down!"
"Switch to Lidar Five!" Metcalf replied, and one of her assistants acknowledged the order, but the tide of disaster rolled on over her voice. Without Damage Control Central the reports came in piecemeal... but they came.
"Graser One is down. Heavy casualties on Graser Three and Five and in Missile Five. No contact with Missile Seven. Magazine One is out of the feed queue."
"What about Impeller One?" McKeon demanded of the helmsman, abandoning his efforts to get through to anyone in Engineering.
"Sir, Impeller One doesn't answer," Chief Harris replied tautly. "Our accel's down to two hundred gravities and dropping."
"Sidewall Generators One, Three, Five, and Seven are off-line. We're losing the port sidewall, Captain!"
"Sir, Bandit One has opened fire. Twenty-four missiles inbound. Impact in one-seven-three seconds."
"Bandit Ten is altering course and increasing acceleration. Closing at five-point-three KPS-squared!"
Prince Adrian shuddered again, twisting about her iron bones as fresh energy smashed into her.
"Direct hit on CIC!" a voice shouted over the com. "We're losing con..."
The voice chopped off in midsyllable. Smoke gouted from the main ventilation trunk before it slammed shut, and more damage alarms snarled.
"Bridge, this is Juno in Fusion Two!" The voice of Lieutenant Juno, Prince Adrian's junior engineering officer, came from the intercom. "I'm setting up here for damage control, but it doesn't look good."
"Status of Impeller One?" McKeon demanded.
"Gone, Sir," Juno said harshly. "We may have four or five beta nodes left, if I can get them back on-line, but that's it."
McKeon's face clenched. With her forward alpha nodes gone, Prince Adrian had lost her Warshawski sails... and Adler lay squarely in the heart of a hyper-space gravity wave, where only sails would permit a ship to maneuver. That single, devastating salvo from Katana had doomed his ship, and McKeon knew it.
"Helm, bring us forty degrees to port!" he snarled, and his gaze locked with Metcalf’s across the bridge as Harris acknowledged. "We're going down Ten's throat, Gerry. Hit the bastard with everything you've got!"
"Aye, aye, Sir." Metcalf hunched over her panel, fighting the destruction of her sensors and fire control systems as much as the enemy, and the ship bucked as still more missiles smashed through her crippled defenses to blot away weapons and the people who crewed them.
Honor dragged herself to her feet, Nimitz clinging to her shoulder. She felt blood dribbling down her chin from where she'd bitten her lip in her fall, but it was a distant awareness, one that belonged to someone else, far, far away, and she swept her eyes over the glaring crimson damage lights on McKeon's displays. She opened her mouth, then staggered and clung to the command chairs back as Prince Adrian heaved in fresh agony. She almost fell again, but she stayed upright somehow and grabbed McKeon's shoulder.
"Surrender, Alistair." She didn't raise her voice, yet its very calmness cut through the combat chatter and damage reports and the howl of alarms like a knife, and McKeon stared at her.
"But..." he began, but she shook her head and squeezed his shoulder hard.
"Surrender," she repeated. "That's an order."
Still McKeon stared at her, and she understood his agonized hesitation. His shame. In the five hundred-T-year history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, only thirty-two Queen’s ships had ever surrendered to an enemy.
"I said surrender, Captain!" she said more sharply. "We got the convoy out, but your entire forward impeller room's gone. Now surrender your ship before any more of our people die for nothing!"
"I..." McKeon closed his eyes, then shook himself and nodded. "Helm, turn us away from the enemy and kill your accel," he said in a voice like hammered iron. "Commander Metcalf, jettison every FTL-equipped drone with a locked in self-destruct command, then purge the computers and instruct all hands to destroy classified equipment and material. Lieutenant Sanko, hail Bandit Ten. Inform her captain we surrender."
An alarm buzzed harshly, and her head snapped around to the tactical station as a brilliant red icon glared in Metcalf's main display, thirty degrees off Prince Adrian's port bow but accelerating to cross her base course.
"New unidentified contact!" Surprise sharpened the tac officers voice. "Designate this contact Bandit Ten. She must've been holding her accel down to hide from us," Metcalf continued, but then her tone changed as initial surprise gave way to puzzlement. "Skipper, CIC calls it a Sword-class cruiser from its impeller signature and emissions fingerprint, but there's something wrong with the drive numbers."
"What d'you mean, 'wrong'?" McKeon demanded.
"She's not accelerating nearly fast enough for the amount of energy she's radiating," Metcalf replied. "She should be turning up at least five KPS-squared with that strong a drive signature, and she's barely making a good four and a quarter."
McKeon frowned, but he had much more to worry about than an unexplained drive ambiguity, and he shook that concern aside to concentrate on more pressing ones.
"Assume constant accelerations and headings and project time to missile range and our time to the hyper limit," he said crisply.
"Aye, aye, Sir." Metcalf's hands danced across her panel while McKeon frowned down at his plot. Honor frowned at it, as well, but she also gnawed the inside of her lip, for she could think of at least one all too likely reason for the Peep's low acceleration.
"On the assumptions you specified, Skipper, we're thirty-one minutes from the limit," Metcalf reported after several seconds. "The missile geometry will give Bandit Ten a maximum powered engagement range of just under eight million klicks, and we'll enter her envelope in seventeen and a half minutes. Assuming our course and accel remain constant, but she alters to maximize her engagement time, she can stay with us all the way to the limit, call it thirteen-point-five minutes from the time she opens fire."
"Can we avoid her?"
"Negative, Sir. We can reduce her engagement window, but we can't stay out of her reach. And she's positioned herself just about perfectly, Skip. With her coming in high from the left and Bandit One coming in from starboard and low, she's got us boxed. The further away from her we stay, the closer we come to Bandit One. As it is, we'll be in range of both of them simultaneously for at least eleven minutes."
"I see." McKeon rubbed his jaw, then punched numbers into his plot. He considered them briefly, tried another combination, and looked up at Honor. "Gerry's right, Ma'am," he said quietly. "We're between Scylla and Charybdis. I can reduce Bandit Ten's engagement window to a maximum of ten minutes, but only if I increase Bandit One's to a minimum of fifteen. Or I can leave Bandit One at eleven minutes and accept the thirteen-plus-minute engagement from Bandit Ten."
Honor nodded and gripped her hands together behind her. She pursed her lips for a moment, then sighed.
"You do realize the most likely explanation for Bandit Ten's low observed accel, of course," she said.
"Missile pods," McKeon replied grimly.
"Probably," Honor agreed. She gazed at her old friend for several seconds, but she said nothing more. She might be the commodore of CruRon Eighteen, but Alistair McKeon was the captain of HMS Prince Adrian. The responsibility for what happened to his ship was his, and so was the decision on how he fought her. Honor was as aware as McKeon that many flag officers would have refused to admit that in their own desperate need to do something, but this was no squadron-level decision, for there was no squadron. There was only Prince Adrian, on her own in a single-ship engagement, and even if she hadn't been, Honor had complete faith in Alistair McKeon's judgment. She would not insult him by interfering with his orders or second-guessing his decisions, and she saw a flicker of gratitude in his eyes before he turned back to his officers.
"Chief Harris, roll us a hundred degrees to starboard but maintain heading and acceleration," he told his helmsman crisply, and then swiveled his chair to face Metcalf. "From his accel, Bandit Ten is probably towing missile pods, Gerry, but Bandit One's accel has been too high for that all along. We could cut Ten's engagement time by altering course to starboard and diving away from him, but there's not much point. Ten minutes or thirteen, he's still going to get his initial salvo off, and there's nothing we can do about it, but Bandit One's probably got more sustained missile capacity. So we'll stay low, take Ten's best punch, and keep as far from One as we can for as long as we can."
"Understood, Sir," Metcalf replied tensely.
"Well, she's made up her mind," Helen Zachary said softly. The Manticoran cruiser had rolled ship, turning the belly of her wedge to Katana, and her EW had come online. With the enemy accelerating steadily towards Katana, the theoretical maximum powered range of the bigger, more powerful missiles in Zachary's pods was on the order of eight and a half million kilometers, but the Manty’s ECM and decoys would reduce their effective range to barely seven million. That should still be enough, however.
"What do you mean, 'made up her mind'?" Kuttner demanded. "He hasn't done a thing except bring up his EW. He certainly hasn't altered course!"
"No, she hasn't," Zachary agreed. "And she's not going to. Her original heading will expose her to a total of just under twenty-five minutes of fire: thirteen and a half from us, and eleven from Nuada. Any course alteration would decrease the engagement window for one of us, but only by increasing it for the other. She's playing the odds, but notice the fact that she's rolled ship away from us."
"So what?" Kuttner asked, and Zachary managed not to sigh.
"By rolling her port sidewall away from us, Sir, she rolls it towards Citizen Captain Turner. It doesn't give him a very good shot, but it gives him a better one than it gives us, and she's also staying low, keeping the belly of her wedge towards us. In other words, she's more worried about protecting herself from our fire than Nuada's, which suggests she's figured out we're towing pods." Zachary shook her head. "I told you that was a sharp customer over there, Citizen Commissioner."
Seconds dragged on Prince Adrian's bridge even as the digital time displays raced downward. There was no brilliant, last-minute maneuver this time. The elements of the equation were brutally clear, and most of Prince Adrian's officers had seen Allied missile pods in action. They knew what was coming, and the only real question was how many missiles Bandit Ten had available. Oh, it also mattered how good they were, and when the Peeps would choose to fire them, but if Bandit Ten had enough of them, quality and timing became secondary. Even under ideal conditions, EW could expect to fool only so many missiles. Those that got through would have to be intercepted by active defenses, and there was, quite simply, an absolute upper limit to the number of targets Prince Adrian's defensive fire control and weapons could handle before they became saturated. And without her squadron mates to lend their weight to her defensive fire, that number was lower than Alistair McKeon or Honor Harrington wanted to think about.
"Coming into our maximum missile range in fifteen seconds," Metcalf announced finally, her voice taut with the professional calm of her training.
"Engage as specified," McKeon replied firmly.
"Hostile launch!" Citizen Lieutenant Allworth sang out. "Multiple launches. Estimate sixteen inbound."
"This soon? How can they possibly expect to hit us at this range?" Kuttner forgot to sound officious in his genuine bafflement, and Zachary smiled humorlessly.
"They're not shooting at Katana, Citizen Commissioner, and those aren't laser heads." Kuttner stared at her, and her nostrils flared. "They're old-fashioned nukes, Sir, going for proximity soft kills on the pods." She looked away from the commissioner and considered her tactical display. The Manticoran warheads sped towards her command, and if she was right about their warheads and targeting, they would detonate well astern of Katana, far enough out to be a difficult point defense solution, yet close enough to burn out the electronics of her missile pods. But they would take time to arrive, and she refused to allow their threat to spook her into a premature launch of her own missiles.
"Citizen Lieutenant Allworth," she said crisply.
"Yes, Citizen Captain?"
"You will flush your pods in... one hundred and forty seconds from now."
Honor watched Prince Adrian's first salvo sweep towards the enemy. A second followed fifteen seconds later, and a third. A fourth, and still the Peep made no reply. Ten broadsides were in space, a hundred and sixty missiles, without drawing a single answering shot, and she felt the rising hope of some of McKeon's officers. But she didn't share their elation... and neither did McKeon. They looked at one another, and Honor didn't need Nimitz to know what McKeon was thinking.
The captain had hoped an early launch on his part might shake his enemy's nerve, push her into an early launch of her own, while her accuracy would be at its lowest. But the Peep commander had refused the bait, which left only the meager hope that she might wait too long, let the missiles of Prince Adrian's first broadside get in close to her pods and cripple them before they could...
"Missile separation!" Geraldine Metcalf announced flatly, and Honor's nails cut into her palms as her hands fisted behind her. "Multiple missile separations," Metcalf went on. "Estimate eighty-plus inbound."
"Damn," Alistair McKeon said almost mildly.
Eighty-four missiles howled towards HMS Prince Adrian. That was little more than half the total she had already fired, but there was an enormous difference between ten separate sixteen-missile broadsides, separated in time and space so that each offered the missile defense crews its own fire solution problem, and a single, massive deluge. It was a grim equation the People's Navy had faced all too often since the war's opening battles. Now it was the turn of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Geraldine Metcalf and her assistants did their best as the tide of destruction roared down on them.
Jammers snarled, fighting to blind the incoming missiles' homing systems, and decoys sang to them, tempting them astray. But the People's Republic's new Solarian League-upgraded missiles were far more dangerous than the ones with which the PN had begun the war. Their sensors were more sophisticated, the capability of their targeting discrimination software had been increased by a factor of three, and the RMN’s lack of data on them made Metcalf’s ECM much less effective than projected. Barely a quarter of the birds in that massive salvo were blinded, and only a handful more succumbed to the decoys' seduction. Fifty-seven of them burned straight through the cruisers best EW efforts, and countermissiles zipped out to meet them. The blood-red icons began to vanish from Metcalf’s plot with mechanical precision, but they died too slowly. Thirty-five broke through the countermissile envelope, and last-ditch laser clusters trained onto them, firing desperately, trying to kill them before they reached attack range.
The lasers got nineteen. Only sixteen missiles, less than twenty percent of the original broadside, survived to reach attack range, but it was enough. The cruiser writhed in desperate evasion attempts, and she managed to avoid some of them, but they came driving in, with ample time and power remaining on their drives to execute their terminal attack maneuvers, and she couldn't avoid them all.
Four of the sixteen laser heads wasted themselves against the floor of Prince Adrian's impeller wedge as she spun on her axis to interpose it, and three more overshot her and clawed equally uselessly at her wedge's roof. Of the other nine, five detonated to port and "above" the cruiser, and like the missiles in Manticoran missile pods, those in Katana's pods were as powerful as anything a super-dreadnought might have carried. Prince Adrian bucked as clusters of bomb-pumped lasers slashed arrogantly through her sidewall to savage her hull. Armor splintered, internal bulkheads shattered, two missile tubes, a graser, three laser clusters, and her number three radar array were smashed, and thirty-two members of her crew died as the energy blew into her hull, but the sidewall and the antiradiation fields inside it had blunted and attenuated those lasers.
But there was no sidewall to protect against the four laser heads which exploded directly ahead of her. Their clustered fury ripped straight down the throat of her wedge, and damage alarms shrieked as transfer energy slammed into her, tearing alloy like tissue and slaughtering her people. Power levels fluctuated madly, spikes surging through the systems in the forward portion of the ship too quickly for circuit breakers to function, and massive secondary explosions followed in their wake. Honor was thrown to her knees as a giants fist shook McKeon's ship, like a terrier shaking a rat, and the bridge displays flickered, died, and then came back up.
"Damage report!" McKeon snapped, but there was no response. He stabbed at the com buttons on his chair arm, plugging directly into Damage Control Central. "Damage report!" he repeated, but still there was no answer, and he punched another combination, this one direct to Commander Gillespie's com. "Taylor, I need a damage report!"
"The Exec's dead, Skipper," someone gasped over the intercom after a seeming eternity. "DCC's gone. We're... all... dead... down..."
The voice died, and McKeon closed his eyes in anguish.
"Good hits on Bandit Ten!" Metcalf announced. "We got at least four in on the bastards, Sir!"
"Negative function on all forward point defense!" someone else barked. "We've lost Lidar One and Two! Grav Threes down!"
"Switch to Lidar Five!" Metcalf replied, and one of her assistants acknowledged the order, but the tide of disaster rolled on over her voice. Without Damage Control Central the reports came in piecemeal... but they came.
"Graser One is down. Heavy casualties on Graser Three and Five and in Missile Five. No contact with Missile Seven. Magazine One is out of the feed queue."
"What about Impeller One?" McKeon demanded of the helmsman, abandoning his efforts to get through to anyone in Engineering.
"Sir, Impeller One doesn't answer," Chief Harris replied tautly. "Our accel's down to two hundred gravities and dropping."
"Sidewall Generators One, Three, Five, and Seven are off-line. We're losing the port sidewall, Captain!"
"Sir, Bandit One has opened fire. Twenty-four missiles inbound. Impact in one-seven-three seconds."
"Bandit Ten is altering course and increasing acceleration. Closing at five-point-three KPS-squared!"
Prince Adrian shuddered again, twisting about her iron bones as fresh energy smashed into her.
"Direct hit on CIC!" a voice shouted over the com. "We're losing con..."
The voice chopped off in midsyllable. Smoke gouted from the main ventilation trunk before it slammed shut, and more damage alarms snarled.
"Bridge, this is Juno in Fusion Two!" The voice of Lieutenant Juno, Prince Adrian's junior engineering officer, came from the intercom. "I'm setting up here for damage control, but it doesn't look good."
"Status of Impeller One?" McKeon demanded.
"Gone, Sir," Juno said harshly. "We may have four or five beta nodes left, if I can get them back on-line, but that's it."
McKeon's face clenched. With her forward alpha nodes gone, Prince Adrian had lost her Warshawski sails... and Adler lay squarely in the heart of a hyper-space gravity wave, where only sails would permit a ship to maneuver. That single, devastating salvo from Katana had doomed his ship, and McKeon knew it.
"Helm, bring us forty degrees to port!" he snarled, and his gaze locked with Metcalf’s across the bridge as Harris acknowledged. "We're going down Ten's throat, Gerry. Hit the bastard with everything you've got!"
"Aye, aye, Sir." Metcalf hunched over her panel, fighting the destruction of her sensors and fire control systems as much as the enemy, and the ship bucked as still more missiles smashed through her crippled defenses to blot away weapons and the people who crewed them.
Honor dragged herself to her feet, Nimitz clinging to her shoulder. She felt blood dribbling down her chin from where she'd bitten her lip in her fall, but it was a distant awareness, one that belonged to someone else, far, far away, and she swept her eyes over the glaring crimson damage lights on McKeon's displays. She opened her mouth, then staggered and clung to the command chairs back as Prince Adrian heaved in fresh agony. She almost fell again, but she stayed upright somehow and grabbed McKeon's shoulder.
"Surrender, Alistair." She didn't raise her voice, yet its very calmness cut through the combat chatter and damage reports and the howl of alarms like a knife, and McKeon stared at her.
"But..." he began, but she shook her head and squeezed his shoulder hard.
"Surrender," she repeated. "That's an order."
Still McKeon stared at her, and she understood his agonized hesitation. His shame. In the five hundred-T-year history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, only thirty-two Queen’s ships had ever surrendered to an enemy.
"I said surrender, Captain!" she said more sharply. "We got the convoy out, but your entire forward impeller room's gone. Now surrender your ship before any more of our people die for nothing!"
"I..." McKeon closed his eyes, then shook himself and nodded. "Helm, turn us away from the enemy and kill your accel," he said in a voice like hammered iron. "Commander Metcalf, jettison every FTL-equipped drone with a locked in self-destruct command, then purge the computers and instruct all hands to destroy classified equipment and material. Lieutenant Sanko, hail Bandit Ten. Inform her captain we surrender."
Chapter Eighteen
"Who did you say?" Lester Tourville stared at the face on his com, certain he'd misunderstood, but Citizen Captain Bogdanovich nodded vigorously.
"There's no mistake, Citizen Admiral. May I play Citizen Captain Zacharys message for you?"
Tourville nodded, and the time and date header for a burst transmission message addressed to the chief of staff replaced Bogdanovich's image. The header disappeared in turn, and a slim, severe-faced woman appeared. The name patch on the left breast of her skinsuit said "ZACHARY, HELEN G," and her dark eyes seemed to hold an echo of the astonishment Tourville himself had just experienced. She looked out of the screen for a moment, then cleared her throat.
"Citizen Captain Bogdanovich," she said formally, "I have to report that PNS Katana, under my command, and PNS Nuada, Citizen Captain Wallace Turner, commanding, have engaged the Manticoran heavy cruiser Prince Adrian. After a long range exchange in which I was able to take maximum advantage of my towed missile pods, Prince Adrian was compelled to surrender. Katana suffered moderate damage, including twenty-one casualties, seven of them fatal, but Nuada sustained no damage, and my executive officers preliminary survey indicates that Prince Adrian's casualties were at least six times our own. We are examining the prize, but her crew's destruction of classified equipment seems to have been thorough, and the heavy damage we ourselves inflicted includes the destruction of her forward impeller room. My present impression is that repair will be impossible out of our available resources, and I'm afraid we'll have to destroy her rather than take her with us when we withdraw from the system."
"There's no mistake, Citizen Admiral. May I play Citizen Captain Zacharys message for you?"
Tourville nodded, and the time and date header for a burst transmission message addressed to the chief of staff replaced Bogdanovich's image. The header disappeared in turn, and a slim, severe-faced woman appeared. The name patch on the left breast of her skinsuit said "ZACHARY, HELEN G," and her dark eyes seemed to hold an echo of the astonishment Tourville himself had just experienced. She looked out of the screen for a moment, then cleared her throat.
"Citizen Captain Bogdanovich," she said formally, "I have to report that PNS Katana, under my command, and PNS Nuada, Citizen Captain Wallace Turner, commanding, have engaged the Manticoran heavy cruiser Prince Adrian. After a long range exchange in which I was able to take maximum advantage of my towed missile pods, Prince Adrian was compelled to surrender. Katana suffered moderate damage, including twenty-one casualties, seven of them fatal, but Nuada sustained no damage, and my executive officers preliminary survey indicates that Prince Adrian's casualties were at least six times our own. We are examining the prize, but her crew's destruction of classified equipment seems to have been thorough, and the heavy damage we ourselves inflicted includes the destruction of her forward impeller room. My present impression is that repair will be impossible out of our available resources, and I'm afraid we'll have to destroy her rather than take her with us when we withdraw from the system."