The Honor of the Qween

and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.

Her readouts stopped blinking. The visual display was suddenly still, filled once more with the unwinking pinpricks of normal-space stars, the sense of nausea faded almost as quickly as it had come, and HMS Fearless's velocity had dropped in less than ten minutes from ninety thousand kilometers per second to a bare hundred and forty.

Honor drew a deep breath and suppressed the automatic urge to shake her head in relief. One or two people around the bridge were doing just that, but the old hands were as purposely blase about it as she herself. It was silly, of course, but there were appearances to maintain.

Her lips twitched at the familiar thought, and she glanced at her astrogation repeater. Stephen had done his usual bang-up job, and Fearless and her charges floated twenty-four light-minutes from Yeltsin's Star, just outside the F6's hyper limit. Even the best hyper log was subject to some error, and the nature of hyper space precluded any observations to correct, but the voyage had been relatively short and DuMorne had shaved his safety margin with an expert touch.

She pressed a com stud on her chair arm while he took normal-space fixes to refine their position, and the voice of her chief engineer answered.

'Engineering, Commander Higgins.'

'Reconfigure to impeller drive, please, Mr. Higgins.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Reconfiguring now,' Higgins acknowledged, and Fearless folded her Warshawski sails into her impeller wedge.

There was no internal sign of the change, but Honor's engineering readouts and visual display told the tale. Unlike Warshawski sails, which were invisible in normal space except for the brief moment in which they radiated the energy bleed of a translation, the stressed gravity bands of an impeller drive were almost painfully obvious. Now they sprang into existence above and below Fearless, angled towards one another in a wedge open both ahead and astern, and stars red-shifted as a gravity differential of a hundred thousand MPS? grabbed at their photons. The cruiser floated within her wedge, like a surfer poised in the curl of a wave which hadn't yet begun to move, and Honor watched her communications officer.

Lieutenant Metzinger pressed the fingers of her right hand gently against her earbug, then looked up.

'All ships report reconfigured to impeller, Ma'am.'

'Thank you, Joyce.' Honor's eyes moved to the blue-green light code of the planet Grayson, ten and a half light-minutes further in-system, and then to DuMorne. 'May I assume, Mr. DuMorne, that, with your usual efficiency, you now have a course worked out for Grayson?'

'You may, Ma'am.' DuMorne returned her smile. 'Course is one-one-five by—' he double-checked his position and tapped a minute correction into his computers '—zero-zero-four-point-zero-niner. Acceleration is two- zero-zero gravities with turnover in approximately two-point-seven hours.'

'Lay it in, Chief Killian.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Coming to one-one-five, zero-zero-four-point-zero-niner.'

'Thank you. Com, pass our course to all ships, please.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.' Metzinger dumped figures from DuMorne's computers to the rest of the convoy. 'Course acknowledged and validated by all units,' she reported a moment later. 'Convoy ready to proceed.'

'Very good. Are we ready, Helm?'

'Yes, Ma'am. Standing by for two-zero-zero gravities.'

'Then let's be on our way, Chief.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Underway.'

There was no discernible sense of movement as Fearless gathered speed at just under two kilometers per second per second, for her inertial compensator allowed her to cheat Newton shamelessly.

Two hundred gravities was a leisurely lope for Fearless, less than half of what she could have turned out even at the eighty percent 'max' power settings the Manticoran Navy normally used, but it was the highest safe acceleration for Honor's freighters. Merchantmen were far larger yet had much weaker impeller drives than warships, with proportionately less powerful compensators.

She looked back at Metzinger.

'Hail Grayson Traffic Control, please, Joyce.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Transmitting now.'

'Thank you.' Honor leaned back in her command chair, propped her elbows on its arms, and steepled her fingers under her pointed chin. It would take her hail over ten minutes to reach Grayson, and as she watched the distant, gleaming marble swell with infinitesimal speed in the visual display, she wondered how much of a problem her gender would actually be.

* * *

High Admiral Bernard Yanakov looked up from his reader as his aide rapped gently on the frame of the open door.

'Yes, Jason?'

'Tracking just picked up a hyper footprint right on the limit, Sir. We don't have impeller confirmation yet, but I thought you'd want to know.'

'You thought correctly.' Yanakov switched off the reader and rose, twitched his blue tunic straight, and picked up his peaked cap. Lieutenant Andrews moved out of his way, then fell in beside and slightly behind him as he strode briskly towards Command Central.

The chatter of voices and old-fashioned impact printers met them as they stepped through the soundproofed door, and Yanakov hid a grimace, for the clattering printers were even more primitive than those the original colonists had brought from Old Earth. They did the job, but they were one more indication of how far Grayson's technology had backslid. It wasn't something that usually bothered the Admiral, but today wasn't usual. That footprint almost had to be the Manticoran convoy, and his planet's backwardness would be embarrassingly apparent to their visitors.

Crimson status lights caught his eye, and he nodded in satisfaction. Until they knew for certain that that footprint was the convoy, the Grayson Navy would assume it was a Masadan attack force. The unscheduled drill would do all hands good ... and given the current levels of tension, Yanakov had no intention of taking any chances with his home world's security.

Commodore Brentworth looked up as Yanakov crossed to him.

'Passive sensors just registered incoming impeller drives, Admiral,' he said briskly, and a light glowed on the master system display behind him. Tiny letters and numerals beside it detailed numbers and accelerations, and Yanakov grunted softly as he studied them.

'Numbers and formation match the Manticoran convoy, Sir. Of course, we only have them on gravitics now, not light-speed sensors. We won't hear anything from the com for another eight minutes or so.'

'Understood, Walt.' Yanakov watched the board a moment longer, then glanced at his aide. 'Alert my cutter for immediate liftoff, Jason, and inform Grayson I'll be arriving aboard shortly.'

'Yes, Sir.' Andrews vanished, and Yanakov turned back to the board. Austin Grayson would be small and antiquated beside the Star Knight cruiser heading the Manticoran escort, but she was still the flagship of the Grayson Navy, and he would greet their guests from his flag deck, where he belonged.

* * *

Grayson looked oddly patchy in the visual display as Fearless and her brood settled into their parking orbit, and Honor had been amazed on the trip in-system by the scale of Grayson's spaceborne industry. For a technically backward system, Yeltsin's Star boasted an amazing number of bulk carriers and processing ships. None of them appeared hyper capable, and the largest massed barely a million tons, but they were everywhere, and some of the orbital structures circling Grayson itself were at least a third the size of Hephaestus or Vulcan back home. No doubt the scale of the orbital construction projects also explained the plethora of energy sources and drive signatures plying between Grayson and the local asteroid belt, but the sheer numbers of them still came as a shock.