'This is going to have to be smartly done, Chief,' she told him quietly, and her helmsman nodded his understanding. Artemis was so close the safety perimeter of her impeller wedge cleared Wayfarer's by barely sixty kilometers. She had to be, if she was going to hide her own impellers from the Peep battlecruiser behind the Q-ship's, but Wayfarer was still accelerating at over a hundred gravities. The tiniest helm error on her part when Artemis' wedge went down and Honor executed her breakaway maneuver could bring her own wedge into direct contact with the liners hull, which would tear the other ship apart instantly.
'Understood, Ma'am,' O'Halley said far more calmly than he could possibly feel, and Honor raised her eyes to the main plot, watching as Artemis settled exactly into the agreed upon position, then drew a deep breath and looked at Fuchien. 'Good luck, Captain,' she said.
'God bless, Milady,' Fuchien said softly, and the two captains, each with eyes filled by the pain of what duty required of them, nodded to one another.
'Very well,' Honor Harrington said crisply, turning back to her own bridge. 'Execute!'
Citizen Commodore Abraham Jurgens glared at the two light beads in his flag bridge plot. He'd known Marie Stellingetti and John Edwards well, known how good they'd been, and Achmed had had Kerebin on gravitics when the battlecruiser vanished. As far as Jurgens had been able to tell, she'd done everything right... yet she'd been destroyed, and he had no idea what the hell had happened. Nothing weaker than a starship’s impeller signature would have been detectable at that range, and all he knew was that Kerebin had suddenly gone to evasive maneuvering, then vanished.
It wasn't supposed to be like this! he thought savagely. Like many of the PN's officers, he hated the Royal Manticoran Navy for what it had done to them. He wasn't like that idiot Waters, who saw butchering even merchant spacers as his holy duty in the Republic’s cause, but he would shed no tears over them, either, and he'd seen the value of raiding Manty merchant shipping. He'd also expected it to be a relatively safe operation, yet half his battlecruiser division had just been wiped from the face of the universe, and he didn't even know how it had been done!
But you do know, don't you? he told himself. Or, at least, you know who must have done it. That extra 'merchantman' has to be a Manty Q-ship. God only knows what it's doing here, and he's also the only one who knows what the hell it could be armed with to punch Kerebin out that way, but you know that's what it is.
He'd picked up enough information from Durandel as he passed to know Stellingetti’s 'Target One' hadn't done the job; if it had that kind of firepower, it would have used it before Kerebin snuffed its destroyer consort. No, it had to have been the second ship, and that ship had a civilian-grade compensator, or it would have been running a hell of a lot faster than it was. So it had to be one of the Manties' 'merchant cruisers,' which meant it was far more fragile than his flagship. But it obviously carried something extraordinary in the way of armament, and the range had been eight hundred thousand kilometers when Kerebin died, well beyond energy range. More of their damned missile pods? he wondered. It could be, but how could a merchie put enough of them on tow? Even their SD’s are limited to ten or so, and that shouldn't have been enough to just wipe Kerebin out that way. But even if that was what they did to her, they never slowed down enough to deploy more of them, so they can't do it to me.
That was not his estimate alone. Citizen Captain Holtz, Achmed's CO, and his own ops officer shared it. Yet Jurgens had no intention of walking into anything. He would approach carefully, with every missile defense system on-line. He would treat this ship as cautiously as if it were another battlecruiser, even a battleship, until he knew for certain that it couldn't do to him whatever it had done to Kerebin. But once he was certain...
'Target One shouldn't have slowed down,' Peoples Commissioner Aston said quietly.
Jurgens turned his head to look at the chubby man in the uniform with no rank insignia. By and large, the task force had been fortunate in its people's commissioners. Eloise Pritchart had been allowed a remarkably free hand in their selection, and aside from one or two fools who'd been forced on her by their own sponsors, like Frank Reidel, the sole survivor from Kerebin's entire company, most of them were surprisingly competent and unusually human. Kenneth Aston was both of those things, and Jurgens nodded.
'You're right. The Q-ships got a civilian compensator, so she's pulling close to her max accel, and she's probably only got civilian-grade particle shielding, too. But Target One...' He shook his head. 'She has to be a liner to produce the kind of accel we've already seen out of her, and they should have let her run for it. She's probably got the legs to get away, especially if the Q-ship can slow us down, and we're the only ship close enough to have either of them on sensors now. If they'd split up, we'd never have caught her.'
'Unless they couldn't split up for some reason,' Aston suggested.
'Unless they couldn't,' Jurgens acknowledged. 'I suppose it's possible Kerebin got a piece of her drive, but her acceleration was much higher before the Q-ship joined up. No,' he shook his head. 'Whoever's in command of the Q-ship has screwed up. He's trying to keep her close enough to 'protect' her.'
'I agree.' Aston nodded, but he also rubbed his double chin thoughtfully. 'At the same time, he did destroy Citizen Captain Stellingetti's ship with remarkable speed, and if he has military-grade sensors, he may know we're the only ship which still has them on its plot. Could he be expecting to do the same thing to us?'
'He may,' Jurgens said grimly. 'If he took us out, then both of them could break contact, and we'd never find them again in all this garbage.' He waved a hand at the flickering energy flux of hyper-space on the flag bridge’s view screens. 'We've even lost Durandel now, and the rest of the pickets who were close enough to respond are off chasing freighters. But if he thinks he's going to take my flagship without losing his ass in the process, he's sadly mistaken!'
'He's found another few gees of acceleration somewhere, Skipper,' Jennifer Hughes said. 'Revised time to missile range is now one hour, seventeen minutes.'
Honor simply nodded acknowledgment. She'd done all she could. Tschu was laboring frantically in Cargo One, but the damage was worse than he'd initially thought, and he'd already lost six of his people: two crushed to death and four 'merely' injured by one of the dismounted pods before it could be tied down. His original time estimate had been revised upward twice, and badly as she wanted to com him to urge him on, she knew it would have achieved nothing except to distract and delay him further. He'd tell her the moment he had anything to report.
Other damage control people had managed to put Missile Seven back into the central fire control net, and Ginger Lewis was doing an outstanding job in Damage Control Central. DCC was no job for any petty officer, however experienced she was, but Tschu needed every man and woman he could get for other jobs, and Lewis' voice was confident whenever she buzzed the bridge with another report. Harry was certainly right about her ability, Honor thought with a slight smile, and glanced at her repeater plot once more.
They were on their second EW drone now, and they'd need number three shortly. The drone's transponders required a fearsome amount of power to simulate the drive strength of an Atlas-class liner, and no drone could keep it up forever. But that was one reason Honor was holding the drones in so tight. It was also why she had Carolyn Wolcott maneuvering them in and out of Wayfarer's grav shadow at random intervals. It must look like sloppy station keeping to the Peeps, but it also let Honor bring 'Artemis' squarely back in front of her for each drone changeover. It probably wasn't
