Echoes Of Honor

* * *

'I'm picking up something a little odd, Citizen Cap—' Diamato began, then interrupted himself. 'Unknown ship astern of us!' he announced sharply. 'She's running under stealth, Citizen Captain!'

'What is she?' Citizen Captain Hall's deliberate tone was pitched to remind him to calm himself, and he drew a deep breath.

'I can't say for certain, Citizen Captain,' he told her in a more nearly normal voice. 'She's extremely hard to hold even now. I don't think we've encountered ECM this good before. She's about to cross our course about eight million klicks back, but it looks like she's altering heading to follow us in. CIC's calling her a dreadnought, but that's tentative.'

'And she's all alone back there?' Hall's eyebrows rose in surprise, and Diamato nodded.

'She's all we see, Citizen Captain.'

'Well, she's too far back to engage us even if she wasn't alone,' the Citizen Exec murmured from the com screen. Hall had it in split-screen mode, with Hamer on the left side and Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet on the right.

'I agree with Citizen Commander Hamer,' Kellet said now, 'but what the hell is she doing swanning around all by herself? Why not shape a course to join the rest of them ahead of us? If her ECM's this good, she should have been able to do that.'

'Unless she's coming in from the outer system,' Hall pointed out, and tugged at the lobe of one ear, frowning down at her own plot. She didn't like the timing on this. The Manties coming out from the base had reversed course after all. At the moment, they were six-point-eight million kilometers directly ahead of TF 12.3, allowing the Republican ships to overtake them at a little over ninety-four hundred kilometers per second. That would let her into extreme missile range of them in another twelve minutes, and now this...

'They're up to something, Citizen Admiral,' she said softly, but try though she might, she couldn't figure out what that something was. Yet that was hardly her fault, for Manticoran security had held. No one in the People's Navy had yet heard even a whisper about the Shrike-class or HMS Minotaur and their capabilities.

'Agreed,' Kellet said flatly, and looked over her shoulder. 'Pass the word to finish prepping the decoys, Olivia,' she ordered. 'I want them ready to go on-line in five minutes.'

'Aye, Ma'am. Shall I initiate jamming?' Citizen Commander Morris asked.

'Not yet,' Kellet said after a moment's thought. 'They haven't begun jamming yet, either—or deployed their own decoys, for that matter. Given the difference in the number of birds we've each got, I don't want to push them into starting to screw with our tracking capability any sooner than necessary.'

'Understood, Citizen Admiral,' Morris said.

'And in the meantime, Citizen Captain,' Kellet went on, glancing back at Hall, 'I think I want to have a little talk with Citizen Rear Admiral Porter.' The two women didn't—quite—grimace at one another. That would have been prejudicial to good discipline, after all, for Porter was Kellet's official second-in-command... even if he did need an instruction manual to pour piss out of a boot.

'If you'll excuse me?' Kellet said. Hall nodded, and TF 12.3's CO looked at her com officer. 'Get me Citizen Rear Admiral Porter.'

* * *

'By God, it's going to work!' Alice Truman whispered to herself. She hadn't really believed it would when she'd thought it up, but it had seemed the only possibility worth trying, and so she'd done it. And to her astonishment, Rear Admiral Truitt had accepted her recommendation. He must have, although he hadn't commed her to say so, for his ships were doing precisely what she'd suggested.

Passing that suggestion had worried her. Not the mechanics of the transmission; Minotaur had been within less than two light-seconds of one of the FTL com platforms, easily close enough to hit it with a whisker laser and let it transmit her message in-system. Nor had she worried about the Peeps detecting the grav-pulse message and realizing someone was behind them. By now they had to be able to recognize such transmissions—any decent gravitic sensor could detect them; the trick was learning how to generate them... or read them—but the entire FTL scanner net had been yammering away with enough data transmissions to hide a broadcast of the annual Address from the Throne in the background chatter.

No, what had worried her had been that she'd had to commit her ship and Jackie Harmon's LACs to her plan immediately if they were to get into position. And that meant that if Truitt had rejected her suggestion, the LACs could have found themselves pitted against the Peeps all alone. But that wasn't going to happen, and she smiled evilly as she watched the time display tick downward.

* * *

'Got 'em, Skipper!' Ensign Thomas announced.

'Well enough to guarantee lock-on?' Harmon asked sharply.

'I'll have to go active to guarantee that, Ma'am,' Thomas said a little less exuberantly, and Harmon grunted. Her LACs were almost at their prebriefed attack points, coasting in ballistically with their wedges up but at minimum power. The range was a little under a light-second, and grasers were light-speed weapons. If everything worked perfectly, the Peeps would have no more than two seconds— certainly no more than four—to realize what was coming.

'All right,' she said. 'Stand by for energy weapons and missiles. Mike, I want the bow sidewall first, then full power to the rest of the wedge. Bring the wall up the instant Tommy gets his missiles away.'

'Understood, Skipper,' Gearman replied tautly.

* * *

A light began to blink on Citizen Commander Diamato's panel, and he frowned. He punched a query into the board, and his frown deepened as CIC responded.

'We're picking up something to port, Citizen Captain,' he said.

'Something?' Citizen Captain Hall spun her command chair to face him. 'What sort of 'something'?'

'I don't really know, Citizen Captain,' he admitted. 'It's too weak to be a ship's impeller signature or an incoming missile, and we're picking up at least a dozen point sources... unless it's some sort of scatter?' He frowned, then shook his head. 'No, Ma'am,' he said, this time using the old style address without even thinking about it. 'It's definitely separate sources; I'm confident of that. But there's nothing like it in our sensor or threat files.'

'Could it be some sort of drone?' Hall asked intently.

'That's what CIC thinks, Ma'am,' Diamato said. 'But I don't think so. It doesn't... feel right, somehow. And faint as it is, it's too strong for a stealthed Manty recon drone.'

'Bring the jammers and decoys up now!' Hall snapped, and Diamato's thumb jabbed at the button.

* * *

'What the—?' Citizen Captain Hector Griswold, CO of PNS Citizen Admiral Tascosa, frowned as Tascosa's sister ship Schaumberg suddenly brought her defensive electronic systems fully on-line. He looked at the readouts for a second or two, then switched his eyes to his com officer.

'Anything from the Flag?' he asked.

'No, Citizen Captain,' the com officer replied, and he turned towards Tactical.

'Why did the flagship bring her EW on-line?' he demanded.

'I don't know, Citizen Captain,' the tac officer replied.

* * *

'Damn!' Ensign Thomas swore as a single Peep battleship suddenly lit off every defensive electronics system she had. Those systems remained considerably inferior to the Manticoran equivalents, but they were an awful lot better than they'd been eighteen or twenty T-months earlier, and he swore again as the single ship vanished into a ball of electronic fuzz which made it impossible to see anything as small as a train of towed missile pods.

He started to report it, but Jacquelyn Harmon had already seen it.

'Engage now!' she barked.

* * *

'She did what?' Citizen Rear Admiral Kellet looked up from the com screen and blinked at Citizen