Honor Among Enemies

useless in a grav wave, and no one could possibly be in the energy range without showing up on Artemis' scanners!

'Why deploy decoys so soon?' she asked Ward tautly.

'I don't know, Skipper.' The tac officer had herself well under control, but an edge of uncertainty burned in her crisp reply.

'Could somebody be out there under stealth?'

'Possible, but if they're already in missile range, we should have a sniff of them on gravitics by now however good their systems are.' Ward tapped a sequence of commands into her console, then sat back with an unhappy sound and shook her head. 'Nothing, Skipper. I don't see a single damned thing out there for...'

Her voice chopped off abruptly as Usher threw Hawkwing into a violent turn to port. The destroyer screamed around, and even as she turned, every laser mount in her starboard broadside went to continuous, concentrated fire. Deadly energy sleeted over whatever she was shooting at, and Ward paled. What in Gods name was out there to draw that kind of fire? And where the hell was it?!

'Skipper, Mr. Hauptman's on the com,' Donevski announced. Fuchien started to snarl a command not to bother her, but then she drew a deep breath and gestured sharply.

'Yes, Mr. Hauptman?' She couldn't quite keep her anger at his timing out of her voice. 'I'm just a bit busy up here right now, Sir!'

'What's happening, Captain?' Hauptman demanded.

'We appear to be under attack, Sir,' Fuchien said as calmly as she could.

'Under attack? By what?!'

'I don't have an answer to that question just yet, Sir. But whatever it is, Hawkwing's engaging it now, so it must be close.'

'My God.' The quiet words were squeezed out of the magnate almost against his will, and he closed his eyes at the far end of the com link. 'Keep me informed, please,' he said, and signed off. Which, Fuchien reflected, showed more common sense than she'd expected from him.

'What the hell is she shooting at?' Ward fumed. 'I still can't see a damned thing!'

'I don't know,' Fuchien said quietly, 'but whatever it is, it's...'

Hawkwing's lasers maintained their deadly, converging fire, slashing at something no one on Artemis' bridge could even see. There was absolutely nothing there according to their sensors, yet the destroyer threw continuous fire at whatever it was for five full minutes.

And then, suddenly, she ceased fire, turned another ninety degrees to port, and came loping after the merchantmen.

Fuchien stared at the plot in total confusion, then turned to meet Wards gaze. The tac officer looked just as confused as Fuchien was and raised her hands in baffled ignorance.

'Beats the hell out of me, Skipper. Never saw anything like it in my life.'

'Burst transmission from Hawkwing, Captain,' the com officer announced.

'On speaker,' Fuchien said tautly.

'All ships resume original heading,' Gene Ushers voice said pleasantly. 'Thank you for your cooperation and excellent response time, but this concludes our unscheduled exercise.'

Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

Honor leaned back on the couch in her day cabin with her legs curled comfortably under her and a book viewer in her lap. Her right hand held a long-stemmed glass of her prized Delacourt, an open box of chocolates sat beside her, and she smiled as she pressed the page advance with her left forefinger.

Like the wine, the novel in her lap was a gift from her father. She hadn't had much time to read over the past arduous months, and she'd decided to save it for a special treat, a reward to herself, which she would know she'd earned when she actually had time to read it anyway.

It was a very, very old book, and despite the way printed and audio recordings had frozen the language, its pre-space English was hard to follow, especially when characters used period slang. It had also been written using the old English system of measurement. Math had never been Honor’s strong suit, and all she knew about English measurement was that a 'yard' was a little shorter than a meter and that a 'mile' was a little less than two kilometers. She had no idea how many grams there were in a 'pound,' which was of considerable importance for this particular novel, and the situation was complicated by the fact that 'pounds' (and also 'guineas' and 'shillings') seemed to be monetary units, as well. She remembered pounds (and 'francs') from her study of the Napoleonic Wars, but her texts had converted most monetary amounts into present-day dollars, which left her only a vague notion of how much a pound had been worth, and she'd never heard of 'guineas' or 'shillings' in her life. It was all very confusing, though she was fairly confident she was catching most of it from context, and she considered, again, querying her desk computer for English measurement equivalents and a table of pre-space currencies.

For the moment, however, she was entirely content to sit exactly where she was. Not only was her fathers gift proving an extraordinarily good read in spite of its archaisms, but she was also aware of a rare and complete sense of satisfaction. Wayfarer might not be a ship of the wall, but she'd cut quite a swath, and after the better part of six months, her crew had come together as well as any Honor had ever seen. The newbies had their feet under them, the best of the experienced hands had been given time to pass along their own skills, the bad apples were in the brig, reformed, or keeping a very low profile, and department efficiency ratings were closing in on a uniform 4.0. She felt certain the rest of TG 1037 was doing equally well, though it would be nice to have confirmation when they checked in at Sachsen on their way back from New Berlin, and, best of all, she was back in Manticoran uniform. And, she thought, turning another page, what we've accomplished so far should go a long way to completing my 'rehabilitation.'

Even the fact that she'd ever needed 'rehabilitating' no longer had the power to disturb her, and, she admitted, she actually preferred Wayfarer to the battle squadron she'd commanded in Grayson service. She'd been born to be a captain, she thought wistfully, commander of a starship, mistress after God and all alone on her own responsibility. It was, without a doubt, the loneliest job in the universe, but it was also the proper task, the proper challenge, for her... and one she would have to give up all too soon.

She thought about that last point fairly often. She was a captain of the list with almost nine years' seniority. Even if the Opposition managed to block any Admiralty plans to promote her out of the zone, time in grade would make her a commodore within another four or five years, probably less; wars gave ample opportunity to step into a dead man's shoes. And from what Earl White Haven had said on Grayson, she'd probably be dropped into an acting commodore's slot much sooner.

When that happened, her days as a captain would be over. A part of her looked forward to it as she always looked forward to the next challenge, with anticipation and an eagerness to be about it, and for once she didn't feel the nagging uncertainty that this time she might not be equal to the task. She'd proven she could command a squadron of the wall, or, for that matter, an entire heavy task force, in Yeltsin. More than that, she knew she'd done it well. Her abilities as a strategist had not yet been tested, but she knew she could hack the tactical side of it.

But for all the satisfaction that brought her, and for all her awareness that without flag rank she could never play a role on the larger stage of actually shaping the war's direction, she hated the thought of giving up the white beret of a starship's commander. She knew she'd been lucky to command as many ships as she had, and to have had two of them straight from the builders as a keel plate owner, but she also knew she would always hunger for just one more.