On Basilisk Station

through and damage their targets, but the Fleet had steadfastly refused every political pressure to abandon live-fire exercises. Computer simulations were invaluable, and every officer and rating of whatever branch spent long, often grueling hours in the simulators, but actual firings were the only way to be sure the hardware really worked. And, expensive or not, live-fire exercises taught the missile crews things no simulation could.

But she had other things to worry about as Admiral D'Orville charged towards her, and worry she did, for Honor wasn't precisely the RMN's best mathematician. Despite aptitude tests which regularly said she ought to be an outstanding number-cruncher, her Academy performance scores had steadfastly refused to live up to that potential. In point of fact, she'd nearly flunked out of multi-dimensional math in her third form, and while she'd graduated in the top ten percent overall, she'd also held the embarrassing distinction of standing two-hundred-thirty-seventh (out of a class of two hundred and forty-one) in Mathematics.

Her math scores hadn't done much for her own selfconfidence at the time—and they'd driven her instructors to distraction. The profs had known she could handle the math. The aptitude tests said so, her tac simulator scores had blown the roof off the curve—which wasn't exactly the mark of a mathematical moron—and her maneuvering scores had been just as high. Her kinesthetic sense was acute, she could solve multi-unit three-dimensional vector intercepts in her head (as long as she didn't think about what she was doing), and none of that ability had shown up in her applied mathematics grades. The only person it never seemed to have bothered was Admiral Courvosier—only he'd been Captain Courvosier, then—and he'd ridden her mercilessly until she came to believe in herself, whatever the grades said. Give her a real-time, real-world maneuver to worry about and she was fine, but even today she was a poor astrogator—and she could worry herself into panic attacks just thinking about math tests. Which, she knew, was the reason for her present, carefully hidden jitters; she'd had too much time to worry about today's maneuver.

Yet this was hardly a case of hyper-space navigation, she reminded herself firmly. Just four simple little dimensions, something Sir Isaac Newton could have handled, and she probably wouldn't have worried about it if it had come at her cold. When that sort of thing happened, she didn't worry—she simply responded as Admiral Courvosier had trained her to, trusting the abilities she couldn't quite seem to lay her cognitive hands upon, and her unbroken string of 'Excellent' and 'Superior' tactical ratings had confounded even her most dubious Academy critics.

But in this instance, she'd had plenty of time to worry about it ahead of time, and telling herself— truthfully—that only the Aggressors' closing speed made it time-critical hadn't helped tremendously. Still, Lieutenant Venizelos, her tactical officer, had run the numbers five times, and Lieutenant Commander McKeon had double- checked them. And Honor had made herself check McKeon's calculations a dozen times in the privacy of her quarters. Now she watched the chrono counting off the last, fleeting seconds and double-checked her engineering displays. Everything on the green.

'You know, Sir,' Captain Lewis murmured, 'there's something a little weird about this.'

'Weird? How so?' D'Orville asked absently, watching the missile traces streaking towards Hemphill's wall of battle.

'Their counter-fire's mighty light,' Lewis said, frowning down at his own displays, 'and it's scattered pretty wide, not concentrated.'

'Umpf?' D'Orville craned his neck to glance at Tactical's target projections, and it was his turn to frown. Lewis was right. Sonja was a great believer in concentration of fire—it was one of her few real tactical virtues, in D'Orville's opinion—and given her numerical disadvantage, she ought to be pouring it on, hoping for a few lucky kills to decrease the odds. Only she wasn't, and the admiral's eyebrows drew together in puzzlement.

'Are you positive about the fix on her detached units?' he asked after a moment.

'That's what I was thinking about myself, Sir. I'm certain our fix was solid, but what if the transmitting ship was all alone out there? You think she could be leading us into a trap?'

'I don't know.' D'Orville rubbed his jaw and frowned harder. 'It wouldn't be like her, but Grimaldi might just have put her up to something along those lines. Bit risky if he did, though. She'd have to have them free-falling on the same base vector to pull it off, and we've got the edge in force levels even if her entire force were concentrated... .' He wrinkled his forehead, then sighed. 'Pass the word to Tactical to prepare for a radical course change just in case.'

'Yes, Sir.'

A single data code blinked angry scarlet amid the massive Aggressor formation in Honor's display, and she grinned. She didn't know if Admiral D'Orville's spies (unofficial and strictly against the rules, of course) had penetrated the security screen around Fearless, but Admiral Hemphill's spies had penetrated his own security. Not very deeply, but far enough to ID his flagship. That was one of the great potential weaknesses in any Fleet maneuver; each side had complete files on the electronic signatures of the other side's units.

The chrono sped downward, and she raised her head to glance at McKeon and Lieutenant Venizelos.

'All right, gentlemen,' she said.

'Sir! We've got a new bogey, bearing—'

Captain Lewis's frantic warning was far too late, and the range was far too short to do anything about it. Admiral D'Orville had barely begun to turn towards him when a crimson light glared on King Roger's main status board, and damage alarms screamed as the vastly understrength grav lance smashed into the superdreadnought's port sidewall. It was far too weak to inflict actual generator damage, but the computers noted it and obediently flashed their failure warning—just as an incredible salvo of equally understrength energy torpedoes exploded against the theoretically nonexistent sidewall.

The admiral jerked upright in his command chair while the visual display flickered and glared with the energy torpedoes' fury. Then the display went blank, and his strangled, incredulous curse echoed across the hushed flag bridge as every weapon and propulsive system shut down.

'Direct hit, Ma'am!' Venizelos screamed, and Honor permitted herself a fierce grin of triumph as the Aggressor flagship went ballistic. Other ships peeled out of formation to maintain safe separation, but King Roger was 'dead,' locked down by her own computers to simulate her total destruction at the hands of a lowly light cruiser! It was almost worth being Horrible Hemphill's handpicked hatchet woman just to see it.

But there was still the little matter of Fearless's own survival.

'Bring the wedge up now!' Honor's soprano was a bit higher than usual, if far calmer than her tac officer's voice, and Engineering's response was instantaneous. Lieutenant Commander Santos had been standing by for over an hour; now she closed the final circuit and Fearless's impeller wedge sprang to life.

'Helm, execute Sierra Five!'

'Sierra Five, aye,' the helmsman replied, and Fearless rolled madly on her gyros and attitude thrusters. She flipped up on her side relative to the Aggressor wall of battle, interposing her belly impeller bands just as the first Aggressor energy weapons began to fire. Incredulous fire control officers poured laser and graser fire at the tiny target which had suddenly materialized on their displays, but they were too late. The impeller bands bent and splattered their fire harmlessly, and Honor felt a huge smile transform her strong features.

'All right, Chief Killian.' She allowed herself an airy gesture at the forward visual display. 'That away—full military power.'

'Yes, Ma'am!' the helmsman replied with an equally huge grin, and HMS Fearless leapt to an instant acceleration of five hundred and three standard gravities.

Fifty years of self-discipline allowed Admiral D'Orville to stop cursing as the computers permitted his command chair's tactical display to come back up. His com systems were still locked, preventing him from doing anything about it, but at least he could see what was happening. Not that it made him feel any better. The light cruiser that had 'killed' his flagship with a single broadside held its course, speeding with ever-mounting velocity on