In Enemy Hands

It's going to be tight. Probably too tight, but there's no other way, is there? she thought, still with that inexplicable inner calm, looking at the results of her efforts. She felt something very different, something harsh and ugly with fear, gibbering on the far side of that calm, but she refused to let it affect her as she gazed at the last of the evasion courses she'd tried.

Had Prince Adrian been operating solo, Honor would already have ordered her to begin accelerating straight 'up' from the ecliptic on a course which would have given her an excellent chance, not a certainty, but a chance any bookmaker would have taken, of getting away clean from all of her enemies. But she cruiser wasn't operating solo, which meant that simply running away, however tempting, was an unacceptable option.

'Commander Metcalf,' she said into the silence about her.

'Yes, Milady?'

'When will Bandit One cross the hyper limit at his present acceleration?'

'In approximately... seventy minutes, Milady,' Metcalf replied, and Honor heard McKeon inhale sharply as his tac officer confirmed what Honors own calculations had already told her. She sat quietly for a moment longer, then stood and nodded to DuChene.

'Thank you, Commander. I'm finished now,' she said quietly, and another nod of her head drew McKeon back over to the captains chair. She stood for several seconds, looking into her old friend's eyes, then sighed.

'I don't know why Bandit One delayed his pursuit so long, either,' she said, 'but it's certainly working for him. Do you suppose he's clairvoyant?'

'That's one explanation, at least.' McKeon tried to match her feeble attempt at humor, but his eyes were worried. 'He's going to be right on top of the convoy at the moment it makes transit.'

'Exactly.' Honor nodded and pinched the bridge of her nose. On its present course, Bandit One would cross the hyper limit within less than a minute of the moment Thomas Greentree brought the rest of the convoy out of hyper... and the convoy would emerge right in the heart of the Peep's missile envelope.

It was unlikely Greentree would have time to realize what was happening before the first broadsides arrived. The odds might be five-to-one in favor of the convoy escorts, but the overwhelming advantage of surprise would go a long way towards canceling that numerical edge even in a stand-up fight. And the Peep might not even choose to engage the escorts at all, might not even see them with all those fat, defenseless merchantmen and transports on his targeting display. There were almost a hundred thousand garrison troops and technicians aboard the personnel ships of JNMTC-76, and every one of them could die in a matter of seconds if Bandit One chose to ignore the escorts.

That could not be allowed to happen. It must not be allowed to, and Honor dared not assume the Peeps were any stupider than she was. Indeed, their presence here, and the ominous absence of Commodore Yeargin's command, was a clear indication that this batch of Peeps, at least, knew what it was about. Which was the reason why Prince Adrian couldn't simply run for it.

If Prince Adrian came to a heading which made it impossible for Bandit One to overhaul, the Peep might do one of several things. He might continue the pursuit anyway, however unlikely that he could overtake his prey, on the principle that someone else might head Prince Adrian off and force her to break back towards him. Or he might simply give up, decelerate, and return to his original station, leaving his consorts to deal with her. Or he might do what Honor would do in his place: head for the point at which Prince Adrian had made her alpha translation. Bandit One would have to consider the possibility that Adrian was a singleton, but a captain with imagination would also allow for the possibility that she wasn't. That she had, in fact, arrived as exactly what she was: the lead scout of a convoy which would follow her into normal-space shortly.

And that was why Honor had to throw away her best chance to avoid action.

'We can't let that happen, Alistair,' she said, still quietly. 'And I'm afraid I see only one way to guarantee that it doesn't.'

'We make him chase us,' McKeon said flatly.

'Yes.' Honor reached out to the arm of his command chair and tapped a function key, throwing one of the evasion patterns she'd entered at DuChene's station onto McKeon's repeater plot. 'If we alter course about thirty- five degrees to port and go to five hundred gravities for fifteen minutes, then break back for the limit in the same plane,' she said, 'we'll swing away from Two, Three, and Four. Two will still have a chance to overhaul us, but only if she's got some accel in reserve. But we'll be giving One a chance to cut the angle on us and bring us to action short of the limit. Not by much. I estimate we'll be in his engagement envelope for no more than twenty-five minutes. To get the shot, though, he'll have to conform to our movements... which should put the convoy's translation point outside his range on emergence.'

'I see.' McKeon studied the vectors on his plot, then cleared his throat. 'I can't fault your logic, Ma'am,' he said quietly, 'and if he's the only one with a shot at us, he'd almost have to take it on the theory of a bird in the hand's being worth two in hyper. But suppose he doesn't?'

'If he doesn't, he doesn't,' Honor replied, 'but it's all we can do. Even if we turned immediately to engage him, we'd need over an hour just to decelerate to rest relative to Adler... and we'd be another forty-three million klicks further in-system. He'd certainly maintain his present course and acceleration until he was inside the hyper limit, and Bandit Two would have so much overtake by the time we started back out-system that he'd run right up our backside before we ever engaged Bandit One.'

McKeon rubbed his chin for a moment, then decided not to ask what she intended to do if her proposed course took them into the clutches of yet another Peep, one which hadn't brought its drive up and so had no impeller signature to warn them it was waiting for them. She would have considered that just as he had, and, also as he had, come to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do about it if it happened.

'If I may, Ma'am,' he said instead, 'I'd suggest we also deploy an RD and program its grav transmitters to order Captain Greentree and the rest of the convoy to hyper back out immediately.'

'Agreed.' Honor nodded crisply and stepped back from his command chair. He smiled crookedly at her courtesy and seated himself.

'I wish you were still aboard Alvarez,' he said very, very quietly, and then turned his chair to face Commander Gillespie.

'Very well, Tony,' he said calmly. 'Bring us to battle stations and come thirty-five degrees to port at five hundred gravities.'

Chapter Sixteen

'Well I'll be damned.' Citizen Captain Helen Zachary leaned back in her command chair and gave the people's commissioner seated beside her a tight smile. 'It looks as if we're about to have company, Citizen Commissioner.'

'So I see.' Timothy Kuttner nodded, but he also frowned, and the fingers of his right hand drummed a fretful tattoo on his helmet. Like everyone else on Katana’s bridge, Kuttner wore his skinsuit, but rather than rack his helmet on his command chair in proper naval fashion, he had it in his lap. Zachary had tried to explain (tactfully) to him why that was a bad idea, the shock of a hit could easily throw an unsecured helmet clear across a compartment, with potentially fatal consequences for its owner, but Kuttner liked to play with the thing. And, Zachary admitted, she hadn't really tried all that hard to convince him not to. He wasn't as bad as some commissioners, but he was a lot worse than others, and at the moment his expression was the one she least liked: that of a man looking hard for some suggestion he could make to prove he was on top of the situation. She'd had sufficient experience of that expression’s consequences in the past, and she turned her attention quickly to Citizen lieutenant Allworth in an effort to preempt Kuttner.

'How long until she enters the bag, Tactical?'

'Roughly another twenty-three minutes, if present headings and decelerations remain constant, Citizen Captain,' Allworth said promptly, and Zachary nodded. She pondered for a moment, still carefully not meeting Kuttner’s gaze while she did so, then beckoned her exec over before she finally looked back at the people’s commissioner.