Honor Among Enemies

back off at the conclusion of its programmed burst of power. The ship slid forward once more, this time riding out of the terminus instead of into it, and Honor nodded in pleasure at how smoothly it had gone.

'Transit complete,' Chief O'Halley announced, and Honor nodded again.

'Thank you, Chief. And you, Mr. Kanehama. That was well executed.' She saw the astrogator's pleasure at her complement and looked back at Tschu.

'Reconfigure to impeller, Mr. Tschu.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Reconfiguring to impeller now.'

Wayfarer folded her wings as she slid free of the grav wave, and Chief O'Halley needed no instruction to bring her wedge up quickly. The ship accelerated clear of the transit threshold, clearing the way for Parnassus to follow her as she headed down the Gregor arrival lane, and Honor checked her plot once more. The Gregor terminus had its own fortresses, although they were far smaller and less numerous than those in Manticore, and Lieutenant Cousins cleared his throat.

'Gregor Defense Command is challenging, Milady.'

'Send our number,' Honor replied.

Every ship was subject to the same challenge, even though it was largely a formality. Ships could move to or from Manticore via any of the Junctions termini, but it was impossible to move directly from one secondary terminus to another, so any arrival here must have been cleared by Junction Central. But Gregor Defense had its own responsibilities, and Honor approved of how promptly the challenge had come.

'We're cleared, Milady,' Cousins reported. 'Rear Admiral Freisner welcomes you to Gregor and regrets the fact that you won't be able to dine with him,' he added, and Honor smiled.

'My compliments to the Admiral. Thank him for the thought and tell him I'll look forward to dining with him on the way home.'

'Yes, Milady.'

Honor watched her plot as Parnassus flicked into existence behind her, accelerating down Wayfarer's wake, and wished she could have accepted Freisner's hospitality. Unfortunately, as far as anyone outside Gregor Defense Command knew, the squadron was simply a small, four-ship convoy, and it would have been totally outside the profile for Gregor's CO to invite a passing merchant skipper to dine with him. Besides, the rest of the convoy TG 1037 was slated to join for the trip to Sachsen, the closest nodal system of the Confederacy, was waiting for her. The senior officer of the convoy's two- destroyer escort knew what Honor's ships truly were, but she was the only person in the convoy who did, and Honor hoped Commander Elliot would remember to treat her with the sort of brusquely impatient courtesy she would show to any other merchie.

'Do you have the convoy beacon, Ms. Hughes?'

'Yes, Milady,' Lieutenant Commander Jennifer Hughes, Wayfarer's tactical officer, replied. 'Beacon bears zero-one-three by one-zero-one. Range two-point-three million klicks.'

'Thank you. Take us to join the neighbors, Mr. Kanehama.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Helm, come to zero-one-three one-zero-one at fifty gravities.'

'Coming to zero-one-three one-zero-one at fifty gravities, aye,' Chief O'Halley responded, and Honor Harrington crossed her legs while anticipation hummed in the back of her brain. Despite all the rush, all the thousands of details, all the still unanswered questions about the quality of her crew or the exact nature of the threats she must face and overcome, she was on her way, once more in the Queens uniform, and she allowed herself to luxuriate in the feeling of homecoming as her ship moved to meet whatever lay ahead.

Chapter TEN

'They're coming around again!' Lieutenant Commander Hughes snapped as a fresh salvo of missiles ripped down on Gudrid. 'Get those gravitics back now!'

ET/1c Wanderman felt sweat dripping down his face as he crouched over his diagnostic probe, and the harsh flow of combat chatter washed over him as the surviving LAC skippers maneuvered hard to intercept the raiders' latest pounce. The attack had come as a complete surprise, and it was obvious they were up against an entire squadron of privateers, not run-of-the-mill pirates. Hughes' tac team’s first warning had been the missile salvo which blew one of their escorting destroyers to splinters, and then the enemy had come charging down his missiles' wake.

'I know they're out there,' Lieutenant Wolcott, Wayfarer's assistant tac officer, snarled, and Aubrey felt a stab of inadequacy. Whoever these people were, they had excellent electronic warfare systems of their own, and that EW was playing merry hell with Wayfarer's active sensors. They also had at least one heavy missile platform, which was engaging the convoy escorts from beyond Wolcott's active detection envelope. Sensor range was always degraded in hyper-space, and Wolcott needed her gravitics to pick her enemies' impeller signatures out of the background hash of charged particles, jamming, and the EMP of detonating laser heads. But the entire gravitational detection system was down, and he couldn't get it back.

'We've lost Thomas!' someone announced, and this time Hughes swore out loud. Three raiders were already dead, but that was the fourth LAC the enemy had picked off, and Captain MacGuire’s Gudrid had taken a beating, as well.

'Targeting change! Stand by port!' the tac officer snapped, punching keys at her console, and Wayfarer's massive energy batteries quested hungrily as someone finally entered their range.

'Breakdown on Graser Five!' someone barked, and Aubrey heard terminal keys rattle. 'Damn, damn, damn! It's operator failure!'

'Crap!' Hughes bent over her terminal. Wayfarer's people were still too raw, and it was showing. She input a query and spat a silent curse. 'Override Five! Try to slave it to central!'

'Slaving,' the first voice announced. 'Coming in, now! Back on-line in central control!'

'Tracking!' Hughes' chief yeoman said. 'Tracking... tracking... lock!'

'Fire!'

Eight grasers, each as heavy as any ship of the wall might mount, fired as one, blazing away through the 'gun ports' in Wayfarers sidewall, and a battlecruiser-sized raider vanished in the brilliant flash of a failing fusion bottle.

'That's one!' someone snarled.

'Yeah, but now they know what we're armed with,' someone else said grimly.

'Permission to deploy pods?' Wolcott called, but Hughes shook her head violently.

'Negative. We still haven't found their missile platforms.'

Wolcott nodded unhappily. Gudrid had lost her after cargo doors to a freak hit early in the attack, crippling her missile pod system. That meant Wayfarer had the only heavy missile capacity left to Hughes, but if she revealed it against the targets she could see, the ones she couldn't see would concentrate all their fire on her.

Given Wayfarer's fragility, that would be disastrous, and Aubrey swore under his breath as the panel of his diagnostic flickered. Numbers and schematics cascaded across it as it interrogated the gravitic systems software and test programs examined the hardware. He needed Ginger and her instinct for troubleshooting, but Ginger was a casualty down in Gravitic One, and...

A red light flashed, and his display froze. His eyes darted across the schematic, and he swore again. The hit which had destroyed Gravitic One had spiked the main array. The fail-safes had protected the array itself, but the spike had bled back through the data transmission chain and burned out the primary data coupling from Gravitic Two. Fixing the problem was going to require complete replacement, and that would take hours.

'There goes Linnet!' a plotting rating announced as the convoys last regular