Honor Among Enemies

necessary, by now, the Peeps must have it firmly fixed in their brains that they were chasing two ships, but there was no point being clumsy.

Especially now. Artemis had cut her drive, but she was still plunging ahead at the .39 c velocity she'd attained first, and her side vector was almost directly towards Wayfarer at well over thirty thousand KPS. The Peeps had passed her position less than ten minutes previously, and if they realized what had happened and decelerated for a search pattern, they might just find her after all. The odds were against it, but it was possible, and Honor would not permit that to happen. Not when she'd already decided to sacrifice her own ship to save Captain Fuchien’s.

She made herself face that, accept that she'd deliberately sentenced her own crew to death knowing they couldn't defeat their enemy. The Peep CO astern of her had to know she'd killed his consort with missiles. He wouldn't want to get in any closer than he had to, so he'd turn to open his broadside at maximum range and fire his own birds in to see how she responded. And when she didn't return a matching fire, he'd stay right there and pound Wayfarer to death without ever closing into the reach of her energy weapons.

She was going to die. She knew it, but if she could cripple the enemy too badly to catch Artemis even if they detected her, the sacrifice would be worth it. She accepted that, as well... but behind her calm face her heart bled at condemning so many others to die with her. People like Nimitz and Samantha. Like Rafe Cardones, Ginger Lewis, and James MacGuiness, who had flatly refused to evacuate the ship. Aubrey Wanderman, Carol Wolcott, Horace Harkness, Lewis Hallowell... All those people, people she'd come to know and treasure as individuals, many as friends, were going to die right beside her. She could no more save them than she could save herself, and guilt pressed down upon her. Those others would die because she'd ordered them to, because it was her duty to take them all to death with her and it was their duty to follow her. But unlike them, she would die knowing it was her orders which had killed them.

Yet there was no other way. She'd gotten another eight hundred people off Wayfarer, reducing the death toll to just over a thousand. One thousand men and women, and two treecats, who would die to save four thousand others. By any measure, that had to be a worthwhile bargain, but, oh, how it hurt.

She hid her pain behind serene eyes, feeling her bridge officers about her, knowing how they would focus on her, take their lead and their inspiration and their determination from her, when it began, and pride in them and grief for them warred in her soul.

Margaret Fuchien, Harold Sukowski, and Stacey Hauptman stood and watched Annabelle Ward's plot with haunted eyes. The battlecruiser had burned past them twelve minutes ago, never even noticing the liner or its protecting LACs. And why should it have? They were only seven inert pieces of alloy, radiating no energy and lost in h-space's immensity as Wayfarer deliberately sucked their enemy after her.

'Seventy-five minutes,' Ward murmured.

'Will they still be in sensor range, Captain Harry?' Stacey asked softly.

'We should still have their impellers, but it won't be very clear.' Sukowski closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. 'In a way, I'm just as glad. I don't want to see it. It's going to...' He met Stacey’s gaze squarely. 'It's going to be ugly, Stace. Her ship's already badly damaged, and if the bastards just stand off and pound her...' He shook his head again.

'Will she surrender?' Fuchien asked out of the silence, and Sukowski looked at her. 'When they open fire on her, will she surrender?'

'No,' Sukowski said simply.

'Why not?' Stacey demanded, her voice suddenly sharp. 'Why not? She's already saved us, why won't she surrender and save her own people?'

'Because she's still protecting us,' Sukowski told her as gently as he could. 'When they get close enough to engage her, they'll also be close enough to spot the drone. They'll know we aren't there, but they'll also know within an hour or two when we must have shut down our drive, and our vector when we did. That means they'll have a good idea of where we could be if they come back and look for us. The odds are against their finding us, but Lady Harrington intends to make certain they don't. She'll hammer them as long as she has a weapon left, Stace, to cripple their sensors and slow them down.' He saw the tears in Stacey's eyes and put his arm about her as he had about Chris Hurlman. 'It's her job, Stace,' he said softly. 'Her duty. And that woman knows about duty. I spent enough time aboard her ship to know that.'

'I envy you that, Harry,' Margaret Fuchien said softly.

'Missile range in twenty-one minutes,' Jennifer Hughes announced. 'Assuming constant accelerations, we'll enter energy range thirteen-point-five minutes after that.'

Honor nodded once more and keyed her com.

'DCC, Lewis,' the woman on her screen said, and Honor smiled crookedly.

'I don't want to joggle Commander Tschu's elbow, but I'd like to confirm his latest estimate on the cargo doors.'

'Current estimate is...' Ginger glanced at the chrono and did some mental math '...thirty-nine minutes, Ma'am.'

'Thank you,' Honor said quietly, and killed the circuit. So there it was. The pods would come back on-line just as the Peeps closed to energy range anyway. But there was nothing Honor could do about that. All she could do was continue to run as long as possible, drawing the Peeps after her, buying Artemis time, and she prepared to play the game out to its final, hopeless throw.

'We'll go with Alpha-One,' she said. 'Rafe, tell all hands, seal helmets in ten minutes.'

A curiously shrunken Klaus Hauptman stepped onto Artemis' bridge. The people clustered around the plot looked up at him, and his face clenched as he saw Sukowski's arm around Stacey. He should have been the one to comfort his daughter. But he'd forfeited that right, he thought drearily, when he proved himself so much less than she'd always thought he was in her eyes.

And in his own.

He crossed to the plot, making his gaze meet theirs. It was almost an act of penance, an ordeal deliberately inflicted upon himself and embraced. Fuchien and Sukowski nodded to him, their expressions neutral, but neither spoke, and Stacey never even looked at him.

'How soon?' he asked, and his normally powerful, confident voice was frayed and rough.

'Sixteen minutes to missile range, Sir,' Annabelle Ward replied.

'All right, Steve,' Abraham Jurgens told his flagship captain. 'I don't want to get in close until we're sure their teeth have been pulled.'

'Aye, Citizen Commodore.' Citizen Captain Stephen Holtz looked at his repeater plot and frowned. The Q- ship was putting out some damned effective decoys. Her EW was starting to play games with his sensors, too, and hypers natural sensor degradation made her efforts even more effective than usual, but he was five thousand kilometers inside the powered missile envelope.

Under normal conditions, he would have turned to open his broadside, but these weren't normal conditions. He had his own EW systems fully on-line, and the same conditions which hurt his fire control had to be hurting the Q-ship's, as well. Under the circumstances, it actually made sense to keep the vulnerable throat of his wedge towards the enemy, for it gave the Manty a weaker, fuzzier target than his sidewalls and the full length of his wedge would have.

Of course, it also restricted him only to the three tubes of his bow chasers, but that was all right. He wanted to sting the bastard, goad him. If he could get the Q-ship to fire off any pods it might have at extreme range, his point defense would be far more effective... and the Manty's target would be far harder to hit.

'Missile separation!' Jennifer Hughes announced. 'I have two, no, three inbound. Time of flight one- seven-zero seconds. Stand by point defense.'

'Standing by,' Lieutenant Jansen replied.