The Honor of the Qween

'Yes, Sir.' Carstairs sounded a bit peeved with himself for letting the astrogator get in with the information first. 'Lighting off their impellers was what attracted my attention to them in the first place, Captain.'

'Um.' McKeon rubbed the tip of his nose, unconsciously emulating one of Honor's favorite thinking mannerisms. Troubadour was up to barely twenty-six hundred KPS, still building velocity from translation. The closing rate was a little higher, given the LACs' turn to meet her, but what were they up to?

'How do they differ from your profile, Tactical?'

'Almost across the board, Captain. Their drive strength is too high, and their radar's pulse rate frequency is nine percent low. Of course, we haven't seen everything Grayson has, Sir, and I don't have anything at all on a LAC class of this mass, much less details on its sensor suite.'

'Well, we may not have seen them before, but LACs are intrasystemic,' McKeon thought aloud, 'so these have to be from Grayson. I wonder why they never mentioned them to us, though?' He shrugged slightly. 'Com, ask Captain Harrington if she wants us to investigate.'

* * *

Commander Isaiah Danville sat very still on Bancroft's deathly silent bridge. He could feel his crew's fear, but it was overlaid by resignation and acceptance, and in a way, their very hopelessness might make them even more effective. Men who knew they were about to die were less likely to be betrayed into mistakes by the desire to live.

Danville wondered why God had chosen to kill them all this way. A man of the Faith didn't question God's Will, but it would have been comforting to know why He'd placed his small squadron square in the invaders' path. Anywhere else, and they could have lain low, impellers shut down. As it was, they were bound to be seen. And since it was impossible for them to survive anyway... .

'Range?' he asked softly.

'Coming down to six hundred thousand kilometers, Sir. They'll enter our missile envelope in thirty-two seconds.'

'Stand by,' Danville almost murmured. 'Don't engage until I give the word. We want them as close as they'll come.'

* * *

Honor wrinkled her forehead. She had the LACs on her own sensors, and she was as puzzled by their presence as Alistair.

'Reaction, Andy?'

'They're only LACs, Ma'am,' Venizelos replied. 'It's not like they were big nasties, but I've been running the military download Grayson gave us. They're not in it, and I'd feel better if they were.'

'Me, too.' Honor nibbled the inside of her lip. There might be any number of reasons Grayson had inadvertently omitted a single light warship class from its download, but she was darned if she could think of one for LACs to be swanning around this far out-system. 'Hail them, Com.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Hailing now.' Lieutenant Metzinger transmitted the hail, then sat back. Four seconds passed. Five. Then ten, and she shrugged.

'No response, Ma'am.'

* * *

'They're hailing us, Captain.' Bancroft's communications officer sounded calmer than Danville knew he could possibly be. 'Their hail confirms Tactical's ID. Shall I respond?'

'No.' Danville's lips thinned. So it was the Manticore escort force and its bitch of a commander. There was a certain satisfaction in that. If God had decided it was time for his men to die, what better way could they to do so than striking at a woman who blasphemed against His Will by assuming a man's role?

'They may be suspicious if we don't reply, Sir.' His exec's voice was pitched too low for anyone else to hear. 'Maybe we should try to bluff them?'

'No,' Danville replied just as quietly. 'We didn't recover enough of their secure codes to avoid giving ourselves away. Better to leave them a puzzle they can't quite figure out than give them a clear clue.'

The exec nodded, and Danville kept his eyes on the plot. The Manticorans had much more range than he did, and their defenses were far better ... yet none of those defenses were active, and they were already inside the extreme limit of his powered missile envelope. The temptation to fire was great, but he thrust it aside once more, knowing he must wait for the shortest possible flight time. And they'd been out of the system too long to know what was happening, he told himself. No, they'd try to talk to him again, try to figure out why he wasn't responding, and every second they delayed brought them thirty-three hundred kilometers closer to his missiles.

* * *

'Get me Commander McKeon,' Honor said with a frown, and Alistair McKeon appeared on her com screen.

'I don't know what's going on,' she told him without preamble, 'but you'd better take a look.'

'Yes, Ma'am. It's probably just some kind of communications failure. They're still accelerating towards us, so they must want to make contact.'

'It'd take something pretty drastic to affect communications aboard all three of them. Hail them again when you reach one light-second.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.'

* * *

'The destroyer is hailing us, Sir.'

The com officer sounded harsh and strained this time, and Danville didn't blame him. Troubadour had cracked on a few more MPS? of acceleration directly towards Bancroft, and the range was down to a single light-second. That was far closer than he'd dared hope God would let them come. In fact, the destroyer was inside energy range now, still without a sign he suspected a thing. Even the cruisers were now inside the LACs' effective missile envelope.

'Stand by, Lieutenant Early.' He spoke very formally, though his own voice was less calm than he might have wished. 'We'll go for the destroyer with our lasers. Lay your missiles on the cruisers.'

His tactical officer passed orders over the squadron net, and Danville bit his lip. Come a little closer, he told the destroyer. Just a little. Bring the flight time to your cruisers down just a little more ... damn you.

* * *

'This is ridiculous,' McKeon muttered. The LACs were less than a light-second away and still not saying a word! Unless he wanted to assume Grayson had suffered some sort of fleet-wide communications failure, these turkeys had to be up to something. But what? If this was some sort of oddball exercise, he was less than amused by it.

'All right, Tactical,' he said finally. 'If they want to play games, let's play back. Get me a hull map off their lead unit.'

'Aye, aye, Sir!' There was a grin in Carstairs' normally cold voice, and McKeon's lips twitched as he heard it. The radar pulse it would take to map a ship's hull at this range would practically melt the LACs' receivers, and most navies would understand the message he was about to send as well as Carstairs did—it was a galaxy-wide way of shouting 'Hey, stupid!' at someone. Of course, these people had been isolated for so long they might not realize how rude Troubadour was being ... but he could hope.

* * *

'What the—?!' Early gasped, and Danville winced as a threat receiver squealed in raucous warning.

'Engage!' he snapped.

* * *

HMS Troubadour had no warning at all. Lasers are light-speed weapons; by the time your sensors realize someone has fired them at you, they've already hit you.

Each of the Masadan LACs mounted a single laser, and if Troubadour's sidewalls had been up, the crude, relatively low-powered weapons would have been harmless. But her sidewalls weren't up, and Commander McKeon's face went whiter than bone as energy fire smashed into his ship's starboard bow. Plating shattered, damage and collision alarms shrieked, and Troubadour lurched as the kinetic