nervousness. 'The Salamander' was at her most dangerous when an opponent was most certain he knew what she had in mind.
Let's not double-think ourselves into a panic, there, Lester, he told himself dryly. Yeah, she's sneaky. And smart. But she doesn't really have a lot of options here. And besides . . .
'It may just be that she's still hoping to get out of this without anyone shooting at anybody,' he murmured aloud, and DeLaney's eyebrows rose.
'That seems . . . unlikely, Sir,' she said, and Tourville grinned at her tone of massive restraint.
'I didn't say it was likely, Molly. I said it was
'Do you think she'll actually let us into range because she doesn't want to fire the first shot, Sir?'
'I doubt very much that she's going to be that obliging,' Tourville said dryly. 'We are in violation of the territorial space of a Manticoran ally at the moment, you know. That means she's in a very strong position under interstellar law if she decides to shoot some dumb son-of-a-bitch who's too much of an idiot to even reply to her communications attempts!'
He flashed his teeth in a white smile under his bristling mustache, and DeLaney heard someone chuckle.
'On the other hand, if NavInt is right and the Manties still haven't confirmed that we have MDMs of our own, she may let us get in a lot closer before she gets around to opening fire. She knows we have SD(P)s, but she also knows by now that at least some of the SDs we brought with us are pre-pod designs. On top of that, she has to suspect from our acceleration rates that our older ships are towing heavy pod loads. She, on the other hand, isn't, even though NavInt says that she has only six SD(P)s of her own. She may have some pods tractored inside her other superdreadnoughts' wedges, but she can't have as many of them there as we're towing. Combined with how openly she's coming to meet us, that suggests to me that she still believes she has a decisive range advantage. That she can open fire at a range of her own choosing, from outside our effective reach, and hold it there.'
'Do you think she knows about the new compensators, Sir?'
'I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she's figured out that we've improved our performance, whatever her ONI reports might be telling her,' Tourville said. 'She's certainly smart enough to realize that we must have made overcoming their acceleration advantage a very high priority. Unfortunately, for all their improvements, our compensators still aren't anywhere near as efficient as theirs are . . . and she's smart enough she's probably figured that out, too. So if she thinks she has the range advantage, she'll expect to be able to prevent us from closing with her.'
'So you think she's basically hoping to bluff us into breaking off,' DeLaney said.
'I suppose you might put it that way,' Tourville conceded. 'I wouldn't express it quite that strongly, myself. I think she intends to continue to give us the opportunity to decide this was a bad idea, break off, and go home right up to the last minute. It's not a 'bluff,' Molly, because I don't think she actually expects us to break off for a moment. But knowing Harrington, she figures that it's her responsibility to give us the option, and she's determined to do it. Which,' he added almost regretfully, 'probably also means that she'll hold her fire until the range drops to what she believes is just outside the maximum at which we could engage her effectively.'
'The range is down to three light-minutes, Your Grace,' Mercedes Brigham said in the tone of voice of someone politely reminding someone else of something she might have forgotten.
'So I see,' Honor replied with a slight smile, despite the tension coiling inside her. At fifty-four million kilometers, they were well inside her own maximum powered-attack missile range.
'Still no response to our challenges, either, Ma'am,' Brigham pointed out, and Honor nodded.
'How good is your targeting information now, Andrea?' she asked.
'It's still not anything I'd call satisfactory, Your Grace,' Jaruwalski responded promptly in a slightly sour tone. 'Whatever else they may have managed, they've improved their ECM significantly. It's still not as good as ours is—or, for that matter, quite as good as what we've seen out of the Andies over the last few months. But it's a lot better than it was during Operation Buttercup. I'd estimate that we should expect at least a fifty or sixty percent degradation in accuracy at this range. Possibly a little bit more.'
'And even without worrying about ECM, accuracy against a target under power isn't anything to write home about at this range,' Brigham observed.
'No, but theirs is probably worse,' Honor said, and Brigham nodded in unhappy agreement.
Honor knew that Mercedes still thought that her own insistence that they operate on the assumption that the Republic's new SD(P)s' missiles could match the full range of their own MDMs was unduly pessimistic. On the other hand, Honor would far rather find out that she had, in fact, been overly pessimistic than suddenly find herself under fire at a range which she had assumed would give her ships immunity from attack.
'And whatever their base accuracy might be, Your Grace,' Jaruwalski put in, 'from everything I've seen so far, our ECM is going to degrade their accuracy a lot more than theirs is going to do to us. That's even assuming that they've managed to improve their missile seekers as much as they have their EW capabilities.'
'Well, given that it looks like they have at least twice as many SD(P)s as Admiral McKeon does, that's probably a good thing,' Honor replied with another smile, and Jaruwalski chuckled in appreciation as Honor turned to Lieutenant Kgari.
'How far are they from Suriago's point of no return, Theophile?' she asked.
'They've been inbound for about two and a half hours at two hundred and seventy gravities, Your Grace. Their base velocity is up to two-six-point-seven thousand KPS. Assuming they maintain heading and acceleration, they'll hit no return in another eleven-point-five minutes, Your Grace,' her staff astrogator told her.
'Then I suppose it's about time,' Honor said almost regretfully. 'Harper, pass the word to
'Aye, aye, Your Grace.'
Twelve more minutes passed. Second Fleet's base velocity rose to just over 28,530 KPS and Task Force 34's velocity reached 19,600 KPS. The range continued to fall, gnawed away by a closing velocity of almost sixteen percent of light-speed. It dropped from fifty-three million kilometers to barely thirty-seven and a half million, and then HMS
Twenty-six seconds later, the Protector's Own, Grayson Space Navy, made its alpha translation out of hyper, directly behind Second Fleet, and began accelerating furiously in-system in its wake.
'Hyper footprint!' Commander Marston announced. 'Multiple hyper footprints, bearing one-eight-zero, zero-two-niner, range approximately one light-minute!'
Lester Tourville snapped upright in his chair and spun to face the ops officer. Marston stared at his readouts for a few more seconds, then looked up to meet his admiral's eyes.
'They're more Manties, Sir,' he said in a tone of disbelief. 'Either that . . . or Graysons.'
'They can't be,' DeLaney protested almost automatically and waved one hand at the plot. 'We've got positive IDs on all of Harrington's ships. They can't have fooled the RDs at such close range—not even with their EW!'
Tourville's mind fought to grapple with Marston's impossible announcement. DeLaney was right. The range to Harrington's ships was less than two light-minutes. It might have been possible for Manticoran electronic warfare systems to fool shipboard sensors even at that short a range, but Second Fleet's recon drones had closed to within less than three light-seconds. At that range, they could make
