In Enemy Hands

good lock on the cargo shuttles, but that sense of being in someone else’s bird, of not quite having everything under perfect control, continued to jab at her like a sharp stick.

She'd logged thousands of hours in small craft, and if she wasn't as hot a natural pilot as Scotty Tremaine, she was immensely experienced. That was one reason she'd drawn this assignment, and intellectually she felt confident of her ability to carry it out. But that didn't keep her from wishing she'd had a month or two to familiarize herself with this big brute of a boat. She felt heavy and clumsy, which was purely an illusion but felt no less real because of it. And the truth was that she and DuChene would have been hopelessly outclassed in any sort of maneuvering dogfight. Their lack of experience with their craft would have shown quickly under those circumstances... but, then, the entire point of this operation was to keep it from ever turning into a dogfight, now wasn't it? Besides, those trash haulers over there weren't even armed.

'Any sign of external damage, One?' another voice asked over her earbug.

'Negative at this time, Base. I have some debris scatter, but no sign of hull ruptures. I'm assuming they must have blown a boat bay, maybe more than one, but I don't see any indication of anything worse than that. They're certainly not leaking any more air, and I don't have any life pod beacons. It's gotta be some sort of internal electronics failure.'

'Yeah?' Charon Base sounded dubious. 'I never heard of an electronics failure taking out a ship's whole com net and causing her boat bays to blow up, have you?'

'No, but what the hell else can it be? If they were in any kind of serious trouble, we'd have life pods and small craft evacuating all over the place up here!'

Metcalf smothered a chuckle at the Peep's exasperated tones. She couldn't fault the logic on either side, but that was only because neither of them had ever heard of an 'electronics failure' named Horace Harkness.

'Can't argue with that, One,' Charon Base admitted after a moment. 'What's your ETA for rendezvous?'

'I make it just under fifteen minutes, Base. Maybe a little longer. I want to do a low pass and get a look at her bays before we try to dock at one of the external points.'

'Your call, One. Let us know if you see anything interesting.'

'Will do, Base. One, clear.'

The voices died, and Metcalf watched the shuttles drift slowly closer. A soft, musical tone sounded, and she turned to look at DuChene.

'Acquired and locked,' her weaponeer said, and looked up to meet her eyes. It no longer really matter how good the shuttle's passives were, because the seekers in the missiles themselves had the Peeps now. They were locked on and ready to track, and the smile Geraldine Metcalf shared with Sarah DuChene could have frozen a star.

'Still nothing from Tepes?' Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville demanded.

'No, Citizen Admiral,' Fraiser replied so patiently that Tourville blushed. He let one hand rest lightly on the com officer shoulder for a moment by way of apology, then crossed back over to Shannon Foraker's station to glare down at the tac panel.

Count Tilly had reduced her velocity relative to Hades to 10,750 KPS, but she would need another thirty-five minutes to reduce it to zero, and by then she would be over seven light-minutes from the planet. To achieve even that much Citizen Captain Hewitt was running his ship flat out, with zero margin for error on her compensator. Tourville supposed many people would question the wisdom of doing that when there was a planetary base available to investigate, but no professional spacer could ignore a ship he suspected was in trouble. And as the minutes ticked away, each of them left him more and more confident that something was wrong, probably seriously. Too many systems must have failed simultaneously to produce this total silence, and he smothered another curse at the dilatoriness of Camp Charon's efforts. Damn it to hell, that was one of their ships up there! What the hell did those StateSec idiots think they were doing?

But there was no answer... and he was still an hour and twenty minutes away.

'I don't like it,' Honor said flatly, crouching to look at the memo board with the others. 'It's too exposed.'

'I'm not denying that it's exposed, Ma'am,' Venizelos replied in an equally flat voice, 'but we're running out of time.'

'What about detouring through these service ways?' Honor demanded, tapping one edge of the display.

'I don't think it'll work, Ma'am,' McGinley replied before Venizelos could. 'At least someone knows some of us are crawling around in the lift shafts and ducting. If they've managed to pass the word, the bad guys would expect us to go that way from our last point of contact with them. Besides, Andy's right; we're running out of time. We're going to have to make a dash for it, and this offers us the shortest total exposure.'

Honor frowned, kneading the dead side of her face with her fingertips and wishing she could feel it. She was closer to Nimitz now, and the 'cat's emotions crackled in their link. The dark shadows of his physical pain were stronger, but so was his excitement. She could get no clear picture of what was happening, but certainly Nimitz seemed to feel things were going according to plan, and she clung to that hope.

But whatever was happening in the boat bay, Venizelos and McGinley were right; they still had to get there somehow, and their options were narrowing. It was just that the route Venizelos had picked ran straight for the nearest lift connecting to Boat Bay Four, and if the Peeps did know there were stragglers trying to link up with the rest of the escapees...

'Andrew?' she asked, looking at her armsman, and LaFollet shrugged.

'I think they're right, My Lady. Certainly it's a risk, but not as big a one as going the long way 'round. If we take too long, Captain McKeon will either have to leave us behind... or, worse, wait for us until the Peeps get all of us.'

'All right,' she sighed, and the right side of her mouth managed a wry smile. 'Who am I to argue with the lunatics who planned this whole thing?'

'Here they come...' DuChene murmured, and Metcalf nodded. The Peep cargo shuttles were getting so close they'd have to spot the assault shuttle shortly, hiding spot or not. Besides, they were beginning to split up, and she couldn't have that.

She watched for another five seconds, then punched the button.

The range was less than sixty kilometers to the furthest shuttle as her impeller drive missiles kicked free of the racks and brought up their wedges. They couldn't match the eighty or ninety thousand gravities of acceleration all-up shipboard weapons could crank, but they could accelerate at forty thousand gravities. The longest missile flight lasted barely .576 seconds, and that was much too short a time for anyone to get a transmission off or even realize what was happening.

'What the...?'

Shannon Foraker jerked upright in her chair, staring at her display, then turned to call for her admiral. But Tourville had seen her jump, and he was already halfway across Flag Deck to her.

'What?' he demanded.

'Those three shuttles from Charon just blew the hell up, Sir,' she said quietly.

'What do you mean?' Bogdanovich demanded from behind Tourville.

'I mean they're gone, Sir. Their drive strengths peaked, and then they blew.'

'What the hell is going on over there?' Bogdanovich fumed.

'Well, Sir, if I had to make a guess, I'd say each of those shuttles just ate itself an impeller head missile,'