War Of Honor

'I'm not questioning your observation, Shawn,' the captain told him in a deceptively mild voice. 'I'm just not very happy to hear what you're telling me.'

'I'm not very happy to be telling it to you, Skipper,' Harris admitted, smiling ever so faintly as her warmer tone suggested that he wasn't about to be blasted to cinders after all.

Ferrero allowed herself a small smile in return, but her brain was busy as she gazed at the bland light icon representing Hellbarde. The Andermani cruiser had become something of a constant companion of Jessica Epps' over the past few weeks, and she didn't like it. This Captain Gortz—and she still didn't know even whether Gortz was a man or a woman—couldn't possibly be getting in Jessica Epps' way so often and so thoroughly by accident. She (or he) was deliberately following Ferrero's ship from system to system for the express purpose of harassing her. That was the only possible explanation, and the other ship's increasingly offensive behavior was not only doing bad things to Ferrero's blood pressure but also suggested her captain was working to an orchestrated plan. The question, of course, was whether the plan was the personal property of Captain Gortz or if it had been handed to her (or him) by higher authority.

But what Harris was telling Ferrero now added yet another dimension to whatever it was the other ship thought she was accomplishing.

Impeller signatures were the only normal-space phenomenon which propagated at what was effectively faster than light speed. That wasn't exactly what really happened, of course. What really happened was that the intense gravity distortion associated with an impeller wedge created a 'ripple' along the interface between the lowest alpha band of hyper-space and normal-space. It was that ripple, which was actually little more than a resonance from a hyper-space signature, which a starship's Warshawskis picked up.

But the mechanics of what happened weren't really important at the moment. What was important was the fact that impeller signatures could be detected and tracked in real-time across the effective range of shipboard sensors. Which was all well and good, except that as Harris had just reminded her, they were well beyond shipboard detection range from the Andy cruiser. Which meant that it didn't matter that gravitic sensors were effectively FTL. For Hellbarde to be reacting that quickly to Jessica Epps's heading changes, the communications links between her and her remote sensor platforms had to be FTL, as well.

Which meant the Andermani Navy had not only managed to produce its own grav-pulse communicator, but also engineered it down to a size it could fit into something as small as a recon drone.

And a drone which is so stealthy, and has such a good shield against backscatter from its transmitter, that Shawn can't find it even when he knows it has to be out there, she thought unhappily.

And Gortz is showing us that, too.

'You've been looking for drones only on passives, right?' she asked after a moment.

'Yes, Ma'am. Until I realized what was happening, I didn't see any reason to go active. Do you want me to do it now?'

'No. Let's not advertise the fact that we didn't even realize she had drones on us. But I want to know where they are. So if we're not spotting them with our shipboard passives, let's put a few more drones of our own out there to hunt for them.'

'When they spot the drone launches they'll have a pretty good idea of what we're up to, Skipper,' Harris pointed out.

'Understood. But I think it's time to put Ghost Rider to work.'

Harris looked up sharply, as if he were about to ask her if she was certain about that decision. But he wasn't quite foolhardy enough to do that, despite his surprise, and she hid a lopsided mental grin at his expression.

'Don't worry, Shawn,' she reassured him. 'I haven't lost my mind. But Ghost Rider's mere existence isn't on the Official Secrets List anymore. Everybody knows at least a little about its capabilities, and I'm sure Andy intelligence knows more than 'a little.' I don't intend to flash the system's full capabilities, but I want to know where those remotes are, and I want to find them without letting the Andies know how long it took us to realize they were out there.'

'Understood, Skipper,' he acknowledged, although she rather doubted that he did understand fully what she had in mind. On the other hand, he obviously understood enough of it, as his next remark made clear.

'I'll 'swim' them out of the tubes and program them for a strength-one wedge after, say, ten minutes. If we could cut our accel to a couple of hundred gravities about four or five minutes after launch and leave it there for a while, that should be enough to let them make up on us gradually without generating a signature powerful enough to burn through their stealth systems.'

'That's excellent thinking, Shawn,' she approved warmly, and looked at her astrogator. 'You heard, James?'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' the Sidemore lieutenant acknowledged. 'Five minutes after Mr. Harris confirms launch, I'll cut our acceleration to two hundred gravities. Should I maintain the same heading?'

'No,' Ferrero said thoughtfully. 'I don't want him wondering why we should suddenly reduce power if we're just going to go right on bumbling along on the same course.' She drummed on her chair arm for a moment, then smiled. 'Page the Exec for me, Mecia,' she said.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Lieutenant McKee said, and a moment later the slightly sweaty face of Commander Robert Llewellyn, Jessica Epps' sandy-haired executive officer, appeared on Ferrero's small com screen.

'You rang, Skipper?' he inquired.

'Yes, I did. Where are you?'

'I'm up in Number Four Magazine with a work party,' Llewellyn replied, and gestured at something beyond the limited range of the bulkhead com pickup. 'Chief Malinski and I think we've finally isolated the fault in the feed tube auxiliary cable harness, and we've been pulling up deck plates to get at it.'

'I'm glad to hear you've found it, but something else has come up, Bob. I'm afraid you're going to have to leave the Chief to deal with the feed tube, because I need you in the boat bay.'

'The boat bay?' Llewellyn repeated.

'Yes. I need to keep an overly inquisitive Andie heavy cruiser from figuring out the real reason I'm about to reduce accel. So I've decided that what we need to do is to set up a series of exercises against one or two of our own small craft, and I want you to coordinate them. I know it's short notice, but I figure you can start by running a simulated Dutchman search. By the time we complete that, you can probably have at least another couple of problems worked out for the pinnace crews. And while you're at it, come up with some sort of interception exercise that will give us an excuse to deploy a couple of tractor-tether EW drones. Think you can manage that?'

'I don't see why not,' the exec agreed, although he clearly felt more than a bit mystified by whatever she was up to. Well, there'd be plenty of time to bring him up to speed.

'Good. Com me again when you get to the boat bay. I'll have Mecia warn them you're on your way.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.'

Llewellyn's face disappeared from her screen as the exec cut the circuit, and Ferrero gestured to McKee to send word of his impending arrival to the boat bay personnel. Then she looked at Harris and McClelland.

'All right. When the Exec tells us he's ready, I want the acceleration reduction we discussed, and a thirty or forty degree change of heading for the 'pinnace exercises.' And I want the drones dropped five minutes before that. Understood?'

Both of her subordinates nodded their understanding, and she leaned back in her command chair to smile at Hellbarde's dot of light on her plot.

* * *

'That's it, Ma'am,' Lieutenant Commander Harris said finally. 'Four of them.'

'Good work, Shawn,' Ferrero said sincerely as she stood looking over his shoulder at his detailed plot. There were, indeed, four of the Andy drones, placed so as to bracket Jessica Epps regardless of any course changes the Manticoran cruiser might make. They were within a few thousand kilometers of where Ferrero would have placed them herself, which only underscored how difficult it had been for Harris to nail them down. They'd started looking for them where they'd expected to find them, and despite that it had taken almost four and a half hours for the tac officer to positively confirm locations on all of them. Even then, he might not