Honor Among Enemies

designers wouldn't accept the expense and mass penalties of generators that powerful. As a consequence, merchantmen were limited to a maximum n-space velocity of about .7 c and a max h-space velocity of no more than .5 c... and Wayfarer was a merchant design.

The fact that an impeller wedges throat was almost three times as 'deep' as its stern aspect also explained why every tactician's dream was to cross an opponent's 'T,' since the wedge itself was impenetrable by any known weapon and its sides were protected by weaker but still extremely powerful gravity sidewalls. Energy weapons could burn through a sidewall at close enough range, but a raking shot down the wedge's throat both exposed one to far less return fire and also gave one an unobstructed shot at ones target. But Honor’s greatest concern was her ships' sluggishness, for they were going to be slower in sustained flight than any warship they met... and they were also going to be slower to accelerate.

A ship's maximum acceleration rate depended upon three factors: its impeller strength, its inertial compensator's efficiency, and its mass. Like impellers, military-grade compensators were more powerful than the far cheaper installations merchantmen mounted, and the Caravan-class were the size of many superdreadnoughts. Given equal compensator efficiency, a smaller ship could dump a higher proportion of the inertial forces of its acceleration into the 'inertial sump' of its wedge, which explained why lighter warships could run away from heavier ones despite the fact that their maximum velocities were equal. The smaller ship couldn't go any faster, but it could reach maximum speed more quickly, and unless its heavier opponent was able to close the range before it did so, it could never be forced into action. The situation was even worse for Wayfarer than it would have been for a ship of the wall, however, for an SD her size could have pulled over twice her acceleration.

All of which meant that Wayfarer maneuvered like an octogenarian turtle and that bringing an enemy to action would require guile and cunning.

Honor smiled wryly at the thought. It would take some getting used to, but she and her captains had spent hours discussing possible tactics and then trying them out in simulations and the limited time their rushed deployment had allowed for maneuvers. No doubt some of their ideas would prove impractical in action, but she'd been conscious of a growing confidence as they explored their ships' capabilities, and they did have one major advantage. If the bad guys thought they were merchantmen, then they could pretty much count on the enemy's closing the range for them. Which was where the cunning and guile came in, for it would be up to her to convince the enemy Wayfarer truly was a fat, juicy, defenseless prize until it was too late for him to avoid her.

Honor let her eyes run over the displays deployed about her command chair with a sense of satisfaction. Parnassus and Scheherazade hung neatly off Wayfarers port and starboard quarters, holding station clear of her hundred-kilometer- wide wedge, while Gudrid brought up the rear of their diamond-shaped formation. Their intervals were professionally tight, and given the time constraints, Honor was pleased with how well their working up had gone. Not that she wouldn't dearly have loved just a little more time. Wayfarer had completed her acceptance trials with flying colors three weeks before, closely followed by Parnassus and Scheherazade, but Gudrid had been allowed less than two weeks from trials to deployment. Captain MacGuire had done wonders, and he and Commander Stillman projected a confident attitude, but Honor knew both of them were concerned over the potential weaknesses, human and hardware, which they might simply have had too little time to find. For that matter, Honor shared their concerns. She'd deliberately had the old sweats with the worst records assigned to Wayfarer and Parnassus, where she and Alice could ride herd on them, yet she was acutely aware of the potential weakness of her mix of newbies and embittered rejects. Virtually all her departments were still shaking down, and she would have given two fingers off her left hand for even one more week to drill and train her people. But the Admiralty had been emphatic about the need to get TG 1037 into Breslau space, and, given her own intelligence briefings, she couldn't disagree.

Worse, other sectors were beginning to report alarming loss rates as well, and the latest assessment of Silesian conditions from Second Space Lord Givens Office of Naval Intelligence had been blunt: the RMN's failure to respond to the Star Kingdom’s rising losses was emboldening even raiders who previously steered clear of Manticoran vessels. Under the circumstances, the Admiralty had decided it was almost as important for the squadron to make its presence known to the Confederacy's space-borne vermin as it was for Honor to actually start killing pirates. They hadn't ordered any changes in her mission profile, but Admiral Caparelli had made it quite clear that he needed Honor and her ships in Breslau at the earliest possible moment.

It was odd, she thought as the icon marking the invisible portal of the Junction grew in her maneuvering display. She'd never before been involved in a project with this much urgency, even when she'd helped organize the Fifth Battlecruiser Squadron on the eve of the war. The unremitting time pressure had driven her to take shortcuts she'd never taken before, and she'd never felt quite so anxious about the quality of her own crew. She'd been so busy organizing the squadron that she'd had virtually no opportunity to get to know any of her non-bridge personnel, nor had they had an opportunity to come to know her. Still, they'd performed fairly creditably in the limited maneuvers she'd been able to carry out. There were still far too many rough edges, and she harbored no illusion that she and Cardones wouldn't come up against more that they simply didn't know about yet, but despite Admiral Cortez's worries and her own concern over one or two specific personnel files, the raw material of her crews seemed fundamentally sound.

'We'll cross the fortress perimeter in eighteen minutes, Milady,' Lieutenant Kanehama announced from Astrogation, and Honor nodded.

'Very good, Mr. Kanehama. Mr. Cousins, contact Junction Central and request transit clearance and priority.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.' The black-skinned communications officer spoke briefly into his boom mike, then looked back at Honor. 'We're cleared to transit, Ma'am. Wayfarer is number twelve in the Gregor queue. Priorities for the rest of the squadron are at your discretion.'

'Thank you. Inform the squadron that we'll transit in descending order of seniority, please.'

'Yes, Ma'am.' The lieutenant turned back to his panel, and Honor glanced at her helmsman.

'Slip us into the queue, Chief O'Halley.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Coming into the approach lane now.

Honor nodded. A Junction transit wasn't a battle maneuver, yet neither was it as simple as the casual observer might believe, and her bridge crew had had only a few weeks to drill, even in sims. But they moved with a quiet efficiency that was vastly reassuring, and she sat back, stroking Nimitz while she watched the green beads of her squadron track steadily through the Junction's protective fortresses.

The smallest of those mammoth forts massed over sixteen million tons; the space between them was thickly seeded with mines; and a quarter of them were always at full general quarters readiness. They changed off every five and a half hours, cycling through their readiness states once per Manticoran day, and the cost in wear and tear on their equipment was sobering.

Unfortunately, it was also necessary... at least until Trevor's Star was taken, and that underscored the absolute priority Sixth Fleets operations held.

Those fortresses were individually more powerful than any superdreadnought, but not even Manticore Astro Control's traffic managers could know a ship was about to use the Junction inbound until it actually arrived. That meant a hostile mass transit would always take the forts by surprise, and losses among them would be heavy. The attacker's losses would probably be total, yet the new Peep regime had amply demonstrated its ruthlessness, and no one could afford to ignore the possibility that it might launch what amounted to a suicide attack.

Honor had once participated in a Fleet maneuver built around the assumption that the PN might employ some of the enormous number of battleships it had built for area defense to do just that. Everyone knew BBs were too weak to engage superdreadnoughts or dreadnoughts, as Honor had demonstrated once again in the Fourth Battle of Yeltsin, which was why Manticore had none. The RMN could afford to build and crew only ships that could lie in the wall of battle, but if a navy had them, BBs were ideal for covering rear areas against raiding squadrons of cruisers or battlecruisers. They were also potent tools for keeping restive systems from asserting their independence, a major reason the old regime had built them and a task upon which the new one was currently employing something like two-thirds of them.