In Enemy Hands

had continued forming even as he spoke. His eyes flicked over them, and then he swallowed. 'Prince Adrian is drawing the Peeps into pursuing her, Captain,' he said in that same flat voice. 'She will proceed independently to rejoin the squadron at Clairmont. And...' his tonelessness wavered, and he looked back up to meet Greentree's eyes '...the order to hyper back out is repeated, Sir. Twice.'

Greentree stepped quickly to the lieutenant's side and gazed down at the display, and his lips were a thin, tight line. Chavez was right, and the captains lips thinned still further as one final sentence spelled itself out very slowly, letter by letter.

'These orders are nondiscretionary, Thomas,' it said, and his fists clenched. He looked up, meeting Chavez's eyes, and for just an instant he hovered on the brink of ordering the com officer to delete that final sentence from the message log. But he was a naval officer. However much his instincts might scream to go to Lady Harrington's assistance, he was a naval officer, responsible not just for himself but for all the ships of the squadron and all the merchantmen under their escort, and he had his orders.

'Sir,' Lieutenant Commander Terracelli said into the silence, 'I'm picking up incoming impeller signatures.'

'How many?'

'At least five, Sir. Two are probably battlecruisers.'

'How long?'

'Minimum of thirty-one minutes to extreme missile range for the closest, Sir.'

'Thank you.'

Greentree turned away, walked slowly back to his command chair, and lowered himself into it. Thirty-one minutes. It was plenty of time for the convoy to make its escape. Once back across into hyper, the grav wave they'd ridden to Adler would let them accelerate at thousands of gravities, and all his merchantmen were JNMTC ships. By the time the first Peep could translate in pursuit, they'd be too far down range for the Peeps even to track them, far less fire on them. All he had to do was abandon his commodore.

But he really had no choice, did he? He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked back at Chavez.

'General signal, Com,' he rasped. 'The convoy will reenter hyper in two minutes. Adrian,' he didn't even look at his astrogator, 'plot our course back to Clairmont and pass it to Lieutenant Chavez for transmission to all units. Santander will take point.'

'There they go,' Luchner said bitterly, and Zachary nodded in silent agreement. She shared his bitterness, a bitterness made all the worse because they'd figured out what was coming before it actually happened, but she also felt an unwilling professional admiration for the Manty cruiser skipper who'd sucked Nuada out of position to do anything about it. Not that she intended to let that stop her from destroying her opponent.

She watched the impeller signatures of the convoy vanish and raised her voice.

'How long were they in n-space, Tactical?'

'Approximately nine minutes, Citizen Captain, but their initial translation required over three minutes.'

'Thank you,' Zachary said absently, and looked at Luchner. 'Not bad at all for a convoy that size, was it Fred?' Luchner shook his head, and she smiled thinly. 'Well, now that they've put one over on us, let's just see if we can't give Ms. Cruiser a little surprise of her own. Pass the word to Engineering. I want maximum military power in four minutes.'

Chapter Seventeen

Honor managed to keep the exultation out of her expression, yet she felt as if the entire universe had just been lifted from her shoulders. An echo of her own enormous relief flowed into her from the rest of Prince Adrian's bridge crew as the convoy blinked safely back into hyperspace, and she turned her head to exchange a satisfied look with McKeon. Now all they had to do was deal with the one enemy between them and escape, and while anything could happen in a deep space engagement, Honor was more than willing to take her chances in an eleven-minute, maximum range running engagement with a Peep. The Allies' advantages in missile combat remained overwhelming, and even if that really was a battlecruiser over there, it wouldn't have the time or the firepower to...

An alarm buzzed harshly, and her head snapped around to the tactical station as a brilliant red icon glared in Metcalf's main display, thirty degrees off Prince Adrian's port bow but accelerating to cross her base course.

'New unidentified contact!' Surprise sharpened the tac officers voice. 'Designate this contact Bandit Ten. She must've been holding her accel down to hide from us,' Metcalf continued, but then her tone changed as initial surprise gave way to puzzlement. 'Skipper, CIC calls it a Sword-class cruiser from its impeller signature and emissions fingerprint, but there's something wrong with the drive numbers.'

'What d'you mean, 'wrong'?' McKeon demanded.

'She's not accelerating nearly fast enough for the amount of energy she's radiating,' Metcalf replied. 'She should be turning up at least five KPS-squared with that strong a drive signature, and she's barely making a good four and a quarter.'

McKeon frowned, but he had much more to worry about than an unexplained drive ambiguity, and he shook that concern aside to concentrate on more pressing ones.

'Assume constant accelerations and headings and project time to missile range and our time to the hyper limit,' he said crisply.

'Aye, aye, Sir.' Metcalf's hands danced across her panel while McKeon frowned down at his plot. Honor frowned at it, as well, but she also gnawed the inside of her lip, for she could think of at least one all too likely reason for the Peep's low acceleration.

'On the assumptions you specified, Skipper, we're thirty-one minutes from the limit,' Metcalf reported after several seconds. 'The missile geometry will give Bandit Ten a maximum powered engagement range of just under eight million klicks, and we'll enter her envelope in seventeen and a half minutes. Assuming our course and accel remain constant, but she alters to maximize her engagement time, she can stay with us all the way to the limit, call it thirteen-point-five minutes from the time she opens fire.'

'Can we avoid her?'

'Negative, Sir. We can reduce her engagement window, but we can't stay out of her reach. And she's positioned herself just about perfectly, Skip. With her coming in high from the left and Bandit One coming in from starboard and low, she's got us boxed. The further away from her we stay, the closer we come to Bandit One. As it is, we'll be in range of both of them simultaneously for at least eleven minutes.'

'I see.' McKeon rubbed his jaw, then punched numbers into his plot. He considered them briefly, tried another combination, and looked up at Honor. 'Gerry's right, Ma'am,' he said quietly. 'We're between Scylla and Charybdis. I can reduce Bandit Ten's engagement window to a maximum of ten minutes, but only if I increase Bandit One's to a minimum of fifteen. Or I can leave Bandit One at eleven minutes and accept the thirteen-plus-minute engagement from Bandit Ten.'

Honor nodded and gripped her hands together behind her. She pursed her lips for a moment, then sighed.

'You do realize the most likely explanation for Bandit Ten's low observed accel, of course,' she said.

'Missile pods,' McKeon replied grimly.

'Probably,' Honor agreed. She gazed at her old friend for several seconds, but she said nothing more. She might be the commodore of CruRon Eighteen, but Alistair McKeon was the captain of HMS Prince Adrian. The responsibility for what happened to his ship was his, and so was the decision on how he fought her. Honor was as aware as McKeon that many flag officers would have refused to admit that in their own desperate need to do something, but this was no squadron-level decision, for there was no squadron. There was only Prince Adrian, on her own in a single-ship engagement, and even if she hadn't been, Honor had complete faith in Alistair McKeon's judgment.