Flag In Exile

exhaustion. Barely an hour before, she'd looked desperately forward to a period of rest and recovery; now she had this to deal with, and it was too much to expect of her. Let Command Central handle it. They were fresh. They hadn't been shot out of the sky, seen people they cared about blown into bloody meat, fought a duel on the floor of the Conclave Chamber, so let them make the decisions. That was what they were there for, wasn't it?

Shame twisted her, and she gritted her teeth, forced her eyes back open, and commanded her knees to support her as she glared down into the tank and cursed her own self-pitying cowardice. So she was tired, was she? Well, no rule required the enemy to wait till they were sure she was fresh as a daisy, did it? And while she was whimpering about how unfair it was to her, what about the Graysons? It was their star system which was about to be blown apart, and High Admiral Matthews had offered her this job because she had more experience than any of them did. How would he feel if she told him he'd been wrong after all? That she needed a little rest, that she'd get back to him after the battle, if there was still a star system to defend?

Humiliation straightened her spine, and she turned from the master plot. She crossed to her command chair and set Nimitz on its back, and the cat's nimble true-hands snapped the specially installed safety harness to its attachment points on his skinsuit while she racked her helmet. Then she seated herself and tapped the activation code into the keypad on the chair's right arm. Displays flickered to life before her, and she gazed at them for one more moment through almond eyes hard with contempt for her own cowardice. Then she drew a deep breath, leaned back in her chair, and turned it to face her chief of staff and her ops officer.

'All right, people.' Admiral Lady Honor Harrington's unflustered soprano went through the bridge like a magic wand of calm confidence. 'It seems it's time for us to earn our princely salaries.'

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Alexander Thurston crossed to Conquistador's master plot. He folded his hands behind him and stood gazing into its holographic depths with a thoughtful frown, then looked up as Citizen Commissioner Preznikov joined him.

'You have a concern, Citizen Admiral?' Preznikov asked too quietly for anyone else to hear, and Thurston shrugged.

'Not really, Citizen Commissioner. More of a mental side bet.'

'Side bet?' Preznikov repeated.

'Yes, Sir. I'm just making a little bet with myself on how soon we see the opposition.' The commissioner looked puzzled, and Thurston waved at the plot. 'They've known we're here for over thirty minutes, but all we've seen are a few destroyers and a dozen or so cruisers and battlecruisers, and half of them have been positively IDed as Manties. Intelligence says the Graysons alone have more light and medium combatants than that, and I'm fairly confident they left most of them behind to watch their home world when they pulled out their SDs. The question becomes where they are and when we'll see them.'

'Ah.' Preznikov turned his own gaze on the plot and wished, not for the first time, that he understood the drifting light codes as well as a trained naval officer. He was learning, but he still needed expert assistance to interpret them. At the moment, however, he saw perhaps thirty individual impeller wedges, the slowest of them accelerating at over five hundred gravities as they sped down converging courses which would intercept TF Fourteen's vector well short of Grayson, and he felt his face mirroring Thurston's frown.

'You think their main strength is in Grayson orbit, don't you?'

'Yes, Sir, I do.' Thurston was surprised by how quickly Preznikov had reached that conclusion. Despite himself, it showed as he nodded, but the commissioner chose to be amused rather than offended.

'And the nature of your bet?' he asked dryly.

'How soon they'll move out to join the ships we can already see.'

'Surely they'll do so at a time which permits them to rendezvous with these other forces?' Preznikov gestured at the moving impeller sources, and Thurston nodded once more.

'Of course, Citizen Commissioner, but the flight profile they choose to do that should tell us something about how good the opposing commander is.'

'How so?' The commissioner's eyes flickered with genuine interest, and the citizen vice admiral shrugged.

'We're still over a hundred and ninety million klicks, about ten-point-seven light-minutes, from Grayson. That's well within detection range for an impeller drive's grav signature, but our sensors can't pick up anything else unless its emissions are extremely powerful, and even the light-speed signals we can detect are almost eleven minutes old by the time they reach us. We're picking up some fairly powerful active emissions from their orbital forts, and there are a few more of them than Intelligence had predicted, by the way, but we won't know a thing about whatever starships and/or light attack craft they have in Grayson orbit until they light off their drives.'

He paused with an eyebrow raised, and Preznikov nodded to show he was paying attention.

'All right. Now, if our strength estimates are correct, they don't have anything heavier than a battlecruiser, and a battlecruiser can pull five hundred to five-twenty gees.

A DuQuesne—class SD, on the other hand, can pull a maximum accel of only about four hundred and twenty-five. Intelligence estimates the Manties' new inertial compensators increase their efficiency by two to three percent, which would up that to four thirty-three to four thirty-eight, assuming they've had time to refit with it. Intelligence calls that unlikely, but even if they have, those figures are for maximum military power with no safety margin, and the Manties don't like to do that any more than we do. So figure eighty percent as their normal full power setting, and you get roughly three forty-six to three fifty gees for an SD even with the new compensator. If we see anything in that envelope, it may mean Stalking Horse didn't actually get all their SDs out of the system, and that means we'll have to rethink our entire plan.'

Preznikov nodded yet again, and Thurston shrugged.

'On the other hand, how soon they head out to meet us will also give me a better read on their commander. It's hard to watch this much firepower coming at you and not start doing something, Sir, but a good CO will do just that. The critical factor is for his movements to unite his entire force before we make contact, but the longer he waits, the further committed we become. Given the disparity in force levels we anticipate, that shouldn't make any difference, but it's a matter of professionalism. A good CO will try to make us fully commit whether he figures he can stop us or not, almost by reflex action. And it's axiomatic, especially when you have an emplaced sensor net and the enemy doesn't, that you deny him any chance to gauge your strength, which means waiting to light off the drives we can detect, for as long as possible.

'But an inexperienced commander will want to get his entire force in motion as soon as possible. He'll feel the strain of waiting more, and if he's unsure of himself, he may be looking to react to an enemy's actions rather than initiate his own. In that case, it makes sense to show himself early so he can see what the enemy does and try to take advantage of it ... but that also lets the enemy dictate the conditions of engagement, which, by the way, is a mistake our own Navy's still making against the Manties. So,' Thurston turned away from the plot and started back towards his command chair, 'a good CO will probably wait until the last moment, then bring his ships out of Grayson orbit under high acceleration, and a nervous, or tentative CO will probably bring them out sooner, at a lower acceleration. And knowing which sort of commander you're up against, Citizen Commissioner, is half the trick of winning.'

'...still coming in at four-point-four KPS squared, My Lady,' Commander Bagwell said tautly, and Honor nodded.

She lounged back in her chair, legs crossed and spine curved in a pose of comfortable confidence. Her officers had to know that was a pretense, for she had nothing to be confident about. But what they didn't know (she hoped) was that it was also designed to hide the weary sag of shoulders she lacked the energy to hold erect. She knew how exhausted she was, but she had no intention of letting them guess.

Now she rubbed the tip of her nose and forced her tired mind to work.