Honor Among Enemies

'Spread Decoys Four and Five a little wider, Carol,' Hughes said. 'Lets see if we can pull these birds off high.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.' Wolcott made an adjustment on her panel, and Honor reached up to check Nimitz. Like her, the 'cat had his helmet sealed, and he'd secured the safety straps mounted on her chair to the snap rings on his suit. It wasn't as good as a shock frame, but no one made treecat-sized shock frames.

'Impact in niner-zero seconds,' Jansen announced, and pressed the key that sent his countermissiles out to meet the incoming fire.

'They've killed the birds, Skipper,' Holtz's tac officer reported as the third missile tore apart. None of them had even gotten as deep as the Q-ship's inner boundary laser defenses, Holtz noted in disgust. Well, it wasn't all that surprising, and at least their damned pod-launched missiles hadn't come back to kill his ship.

'Any sign at all of missile pods?'

'None, Citizen Captain. No return fire at all.' Holtz knew Citizen Commander Pacelot was irritated with him for asking the obvious whenever she called him 'Citizen Captain' instead of 'Skipper.' He grimaced, but he couldn't really blame her. He considered a moment longer, then nodded.

'All right. Let's go to sequenced fire, Helen.'

'Aye, Skipper,' she said, much more cheerfully, and punched the new commands into her console.

Honor's eyes narrowed as the Peeps' firing patterns changed. The battlecruiser was using her three bow- mounted tubes to fire the equivalent of a double broadside. It doubled the interval between incoming salvos and gave point defense longer to track, but it also increased the threat sources and allowed the battlecruiser to seed her fire with jammers and other penetration aids. Honor understood the logic behind that; what she didn't understand was why the Peeps were restricting themselves solely to their chasers. They had twenty tubes in each broadside and far higher acceleration. They could slalom back and forth across Wayfarer's wake, hammering her with salvos from each broadside in turn, and send in six times as many missiles in each wave.

She frowned, then dropped her suit com into Cardones' private channel.

'Why do you think he's sticking to his chasers?' she asked, and Cardones rubbed the top of his helmet.

'He's probing,' he said. 'This reduces the target he's offering to us, and he's trying to get a feel for what we can shoot back at him with.'

'Which is nothing at all,' Honor observed quietly, and Cardones gave her a lopsided grin.

'Hey, you can't have everything, Skipper.'

'True,' she said with an affectionate smile. 'But I think it might be a little more than that.' Cardones raised his eyebrows, and she shrugged. 'More than just probing. He had us on gravitics when we killed his consort, but he was too far out to see how we did it. He's probably deduced we had to have used missile pods, and he may be trying to goad us into firing off any we have left at extreme range.'

'Makes sense,' Cardones agreed after a moment, even as Lieutenant Jansen’s point defense dealt with the last missile of the most recent salvo. 'Of course, he's going to be figuring out pretty soon that we don't have any pods, or we would be shooting back.'

Missiles continued to bore in on Wayfarer, racing up from astern in groups of six. Carolyn Wolcott’s decoys and jammers played merry hell with their onboard seekers once they went into final acquisition, and Jansen’s countermissiles and laser clusters picked them off with methodical precision. But the laws of chance are inexorable. Sooner or later, one of those missiles was bound to ignore the decoys, burn through the jammers, and evade the active defenses.

Honor’s earbug buzzed, and she looked down to see Ginger Lewis' face on her small com screen.

'Message from Commander Tschu, Ma'am! He did it! He's got power to the port door and its opening! It's opening, Ma'am!'

Honor’s heart leapt. They could only launch two pods at a time, even if the port door functioned perfectly, but that might be enough. With the enemy still coming up astern, running directly into their fire when he hadn't seen even a single shot coming back at him, they might...

That was when a missile finally slithered past the countermissiles and slipped like a dagger through the desperate lattice of the last-ditch laser clusters. The single missile shrieked in to twenty-four thousand kilometers before it detonated, directly astern of Wayfarer, and sent five centimeter-wide X-ray lasers ripping straight up the wide open after aspect of her impeller wedge.

Wayfarer's megaton bulk bucked as energy seared through her unarmored plating with contemptuous ease. Beta Node Eight of her after impeller ring took a direct hit, and Nodes Five, Six, Seven, and Nine blew in a frenzy of energy which took Alpha Five with them. Generators exploded in Impeller Two, killing nineteen men and women and sending mad surges of power crashing across the compartment like caged lightning bolts. Point Defense Nineteen, Twenty, and Twenty-Two were blasted away, along with Radar Six, Missile Sixteen, and all the men and women who'd manned those stations.

But none of those were the cruelest thing that missile did.

A single laser slashed through Cargo One's port door. It blew the motors which had just begun to whine, blasted two complete missile pods into deadly, man-killing splinters, and smashed the control runs Honor’s engineers had fought so desperately to repair. And along the way, it killed seventy-one people, including Lieutenant Joseph Silvetti, Lieutenant Adele Klontz... and Lieutenant Commander Harold Tschu.

Honor felt Tschu's death. Felt it crash in on Samantha like a thunderbolt, felt it blast through her to her mate and from Nimitz into Honor herself. Rafael Cardones' head whipped around as his suit com carried him her animal sound of pain even over the wail of alarms, and he went white as he saw the loss and agony, the terrible, wrenching desolation, in her eyes. He didn't know what had happened; he only knew the woman upon whom every individual in Wayfarer relied had just taken a blow as shattering as her ship's, and he started to his feet in terror for her.

But Honor clenched her teeth and fought the agony down. She had to. Every strand of her being cried out to yield to it, to keen her grief as Samantha and Nimitz did, to reach out to her beloved friends in their moment of terrible loss. But she was a starship captain. She was a Queen's officer, and the bone-deep responsibility of thirty- two years in uniform and twenty years of command had her by the throat. She could not afford to be human, and so she was not, and her voice was inhumanly calm even as agony burned in her eyes.

'Bring her bow up, Chief O'Halley. Straight up, stand her on her toes!'

'Aye, Ma'am!' Senior Chief Coxswain O'Halley snapped, and Wayfarer drove straight upwards, rearing like a wounded horse to snatch her stern away from the enemy.

'We got a piece of her, Skipper!' Pacelot exulted. 'Drive power just dropped significantly, and look at her run!'

'I see it, Helen.' Holtz punched a query into his own plot, checking the spectrography, and gnawed the inside of his lower lip. They'd obviously gotten a good, solid hit on the Q-ship, but the atmosphere loss was low. He didn't know Cargo One had been depressurized; all he knew was that despite the Manty's antics, she was spilling far too little air.

His brain raced as he tried to guess why that was. The Manty's new course had robbed Achmed of a good missile target, but it also stole her forward acceleration from her. She was building delta vee perpendicular to Achmed's base course, but she was starting from scratch, which would let Holtz close on her rapidly if he chose to. But...

He thought a moment longer, then looked at the com screen tied to Jurgens' flag bridge.

'We're getting very little atmospheric loss from her, Citizen Commodore, and she hasn't fired a single shot at us, much less flushed any pods. I think...' He drew a deep breath, then committed himself. 'I think she's not firing because she can't. I can't conceive of any captain who could shoot back not doing it. She may not be trailing more air because Kerebin already got a much bigger piece of her than we thought and depressurized a lot of her spaces.'