War Of Honor

Chief.'

'Well, there's a lot to wade through,' Harkness told him. 'And I have to admit the indexing system they used seems kinda skewed. This one was tucked away under an engineering head, not tactics, which is probably why I noticed it and you didn't.'

'Thanks, but stop making excuses for me and tell me what it said,' Tremaine commanded with a lopsided grin, and Harkness shrugged.

'Like everything else, it's all a matter of interpreting a mighty slim data sample, Skip. But the Graysons managed to 'acquire' access to a confidential report from the Confed Navy. Looks to me like they probably crossed a couple of palms with good old-fashioned dollars.

'Anyway, however they got it, it's a report from one of the Sillies' cruiser captains. Seems he happened along just as a 'privateer' the entire Confed Navy had been trying to catch up with for over six months sailed straight into an Andy ambush. This particular Confed skipper seems to me to've been a couple of cuts above the average for a Silly officer. He'd already IDed the pirate, and he was busy sneaking up on it, using his own stealth systems, when a pair of Andy destroyers and a heavy cruiser just 'suddenly appeared' and blew the raider into dust bunnies.'

''Suddenly appeared'?' Tremaine repeated, and Harkness nodded.

'His exact words, Skip. Now, I know the Sillies' sensors aren't worth a hell of a lot, and I know their sensor techs aren't usually up to our standards, or even the Peeps'. But from his report, this bird runs a mighty taut ship for a Silesian, and he was real careful to emphasize that none of his people got so much as a sniff of the Andies until all three dropped their stealth and opened fire.'

'What was the range?' Tremaine asked intently.

'That's what bothered me the most,' Harkness admitted. 'It looked to the guy writing the report like the pirates never saw the Andies at all, but those bastards tend to be even slacker than most Confed navy crews, so that don't necessarily prove a thing. But the Silly cruiser was only about four light-minutes from the nearest Andy ship when she opened fire, and she hadn't seen a damned thing, either.'

'Four light-minutes, huh?' Tremaine chewed his lower lip unhappily for a moment. 'I can see why you didn't much care for that one, Chief,' he said after a moment. 'Go ahead and copy the same reports to my mail queue, would you?'

'No problem, Skip.'

'I'll probably need to flag it to be sure the Old Lady and Admiral McKeon and Admiral Truman get a copy of it, too. If they've improved their EW as much as your cruiser captain seems to be suggesting . . .'

'Absolutely, Skip,' Harkness agreed, and nodded at the display, where Commander Baker had gotten his revamped attack formation organized and was closing in on his prey. 'Might just turn out that having our boys and girls working out against first-string EW is an even better damned idea then you thought,' he said quietly.

Chapter Twenty Three

'You know,' Erica Ferrero remarked to her bridge crew, 'I'm getting really tired of these jokers.'

No one replied to her observation. In part that was because her tone suggested that anyone unwise enough to draw her ire at this particular moment might live to regret it. But that was only a relatively minor consideration, compared to the fact that every one of Jessica Epps' bridge officers agreed with her.

'Do we have any particular idea just what they think they're doing this time around, Shawn?' the captain continued.

'Actually, Skipper,' Lieutenant Commander Harris replied in a slightly hesitant voice, 'I think I know exactly what they're doing.'

Ferrero turned her command chair to face the tactical section and tilted her head in a 'tell me more' gesture, and Harris shrugged.

'Unless I'm badly mistaken, Captain,' he said more formally, 'they're conducting a tracking exercise . . . on us.'

'Oh, they are, are they?' Ferrero's conversational tone set alarm bells ringing inside most of her officers.

'Yes, Ma'am.'

'And you think this because—?' the captain invited.

'Because they're altering course and acceleration every time we make a helm change, Skipper,' Harris told her. 'Whenever our vector changes, so does theirs. They're running a constantly updated mirror course on us.'

'I don't suppose they happened to inform us of their intentions and you simply neglected to tell me about it, Mecia?' Ferrero said dryly with a glance at her com officer.

'No, Ma'am,' Lieutenant McKee assured her.

'Somehow, I didn't think so,' the captain replied.

It wasn't uncommon for a warship to run sensor and tracking drills on merchantmen and even the warships of other navies. But common courtesy—and common sense, as well—mandated that one inform another warship when one intended to track and shadow her. Unless, of course, one's intentions were less than friendly . . . which was the reason that practical-sense caution suggested that one request permission ahead of time. It was the only way to be certain of avoiding misunderstandings which could lead to unpleasant consequences, particularly at times when interstellar tensions were already running high.

'Any sign of active sensors?' she asked the tac officer after a moment.

'No, Ma'am.' It wasn't as foolish a question as it might have sounded. Ferrero knew as well as Harris that they couldn't possibly have been taking hits from any shipboard sensors at this range, but that wasn't what she was asking about. 'I'm not picking up any sign of remote platforms,' Harris continued, answering the question she'd really asked.

'I see,' Ferrero said sourly. Given the current range between the two ships, Harris was only able to keep tabs on the other by using the remote scansats Jessica Epps had set up to cover the system periphery when Ferrero moved her anti-pirate operations into the Harston System. The remote platforms' grav-pulse transmitters allowed him to effectively real-time sensor data from most of the outer system without using all-up Ghost Rider recon drones. Those drones were not only expensive, but also something which the Royal Manticoran Navy didn't go out of its way to flaunt, on the theory that what other navies didn't see, they couldn't acquire sensor data on.

The scansats also had much greater endurance than the more costly drones, since they simply sat in place rather than being compelled to maintain impeller wedges. Because of all those factors, the fact that patrolling RMN cruisers now routinely seeded the outer volumes of their star systems of responsibility with FTL scansats was well understood, however, and their stealth systems were fairly rudimentary. That meant people knew to look for them and that they were relatively easy for shipboard sensors to spot, so there wasn't too much question that the other cruiser had known for some time that Jessica Epps was aware of her presence, in general terms, at least. But it was equally obvious that at this distance extended-range remote drones were the only way the other ship could be tracking Jessica Epps in return, and Ferrero didn't like the fact that they were clearly so stealthy that even Manticoran shipboard sensors couldn't find them. But Harris wasn't quite finished with his report.

'Uh, excuse me, Ma'am, but I'm not certain you do see. Not entirely, that is,' he amended hastily as she shot him a sharp glance.

'Then suppose you enlighten me, Mr. Harris,' she suggested coolly.

'Ma'am, they're almost seventeen light-minutes away from us,' he reminded her respectfully. 'But they're making their course corrections on average within three minutes of each of our helm changes.'

Ferrero stiffened, and the tac officer nodded and tapped his display.

'I've been running a passive track on their impeller wedge for the last eighty minutes, Ma'am. The longest interval so far has been six-point-seven minutes. The shortest was less than two. The data's on the chip if you want to review it.'