by David Weber
At the moment, however, her attention was entirely focused on Hallowell. They both wore heavier protective gear than the Marines usually did, and they bowed formally before they fell into their set positions.
All other activity had ceased as the rest of the Marines gathered silently around the central mat, and Aubrey joined them. The Captain's treecat lay stretched out along the uneven parallel bars, ears cocked as he watched, and Aubrey felt himself holding his breath as the Captain and Hallowell faced one another in absolute motionlessness. Tall as the Captain was, the Marine was ten centimeters taller, and Aubrey knew from painful experience just how fast he could be. But seconds ticked past with neither so much as twitching. They simply watched one another, with an intensity so focused Aubrey felt he could almost have reached out and touched it.
And then they moved. Despite the concentration with which he'd watched, Aubrey was never certain who initiated the movement. It was as if they'd moved absolutely simultaneously, their muscles controlled by a single brain, and their hands and feet struck with a speed and power he'd never imagined possible. He'd thought Major Hibson was greased lightning, and she was, but the Captain and the Sergeant Major were at least as fast, and both of them were far larger.
Coup de vitesse lacked the elegance of judo or akido. It was an offensive hard style which borrowed shamelessly from every source, from savate to t'ai chi, and distilled them all down into sheer ferocity. Aubrey knew some people regarded the coup as crude or pointed out that its offensive emphasis was far more wasteful of energy than akido, that most perfect of defensive arts. But as he watched the Captain and the Sergeant Major, he knew he was in the presence of two killers... and why Honor Harrington preferred the coup over all other forms. It was a moment of strange insight into his captain, an instant in which he realized she would never be content with the defense if she could possibly take the offense, and that no one had ever taught her how to back up. She moved directly into Hallowell, and despite his greater reach and strength and his higher rating, it was she who pushed the attack.
Mittened hands and padded feet thudded on their protective gear, and he watched them execute combinations he couldn't even have described, much less, laughable thought!, executed himself. Their faces were blank with concentration, and then he winced as Hallowell’s left foot slammed its sole into the Captains midriff.
But she'd seen it coming. She couldn't evade it, so she moved into it, striking down with her right elbow an instant before his foot made contact. Aubrey heard the sharp crack! as her padded elbow hammered the Sergeant Majors thinly fleshed shin, and Hallowell grunted as the blow negated much of his kick's force. Enough got through to make the Captain grunt in turn, but her expression didn't even flicker as her striking arm rebounded and straightened. Her fist struck straight for Hallowell’s solar plexus, but his own arm came down to block. It deflected her strike, but while he was blocking that hand, her left hand came up in a vicious chop to the back of his still-extended leg's knee. The knee bent sharply in reflexive response, and she spun to his right on one foot while the other swept for his right ankle and her right arm flailed around in what looked like an uncontrolled windmill but was nothing of the kind. Hallowell moved his head, snapping it out of the path of her blow even as an arm flew up to block, but her fist dropped instantly under the block and hammered his rib cage just as her scything foot found his ankle. He went down, deliberately throwing his weight towards her legs in a bid to take her down with him, and he almost succeeded. He did bring her down, but she folded in a move so controlled it looked as if she'd wanted him to.
Her left arm shot out, snaking through his left armpit from behind, then down to catch his wrist. She half-turned away from him and jerked up on his wrist, straining his elbow backward and leaning hard to her left to force him over onto his right side, which pinned that arm beneath him, and her own right hand flashed down in a chop that stopped dead the instant it touched the side of his exposed neck. "Point," Hallowell acknowledged in unruffled tones, and they rolled apart and came back to their feet.
The Marine worked his left arm, flexing the fingers of that hand, and smiled. "Iris Babcock taught you that one, didn't she, Ma'am?"
"As a matter of fact, she did," the Captain agreed with an answering smile.
"She always was a sneaky one," Hallowell observed. He finished working his arm and bowed again. "On the other hand," he added, "so am I," and the two of them came set once more.
Twenty minutes later, Aubrey Wanderman knew he never, and he meant never, wanted to get the Captain or Sergeant Major Hallowell pissed at him. The Sergeant Major had out-pointed the Captain by seven to six, but even Aubrey knew it could have gone the other way just as easily. She'd also managed something else Aubrey never had; Gunny Hallowell was actually sweating and out of breath when they exchanged bows at the end of the session. Of course, the Captain was, too, and she had an interesting bruise developing on her right cheek.
"Thank you, Gunny," she said quietly as they stepped off the mat and the rest of the gym came back to life. "I haven't had a bout that good since the last time Iris and I sparred."
"You're welcome, My Lady," Hallowell rumbled back, massaging an ache in the back of his neck. "Not too shabby for a Navy officer, either, if the Captain will permit."
"The Captain will permit," she agreed with a dimpled smile. "We'll have to try it again."
"As the Captain says," Hallowell agreed with a grin. She nodded, then glanced at Aubrey.
"Hello, Wanderman. I understand you've been working out with the Sergeant Major and Senior Chief Harkness."
"Uh, yes, Ma'am" Aubrey felt his face flaming, but she only cocked her head and regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then looked back to Hallowell.
"How's he shaping up, Gunny?"
"Fair to middling, Milady. Fair to middling. He was a little hesitant when we started, but he's coming in like he means business now." Aubrey felt his blush deepen, but Hallowell gave him a wink as he smiled at the Captain. "We're still working on basic moves, but he's quick and I don't think he makes the same mistake twice very often."
"Good." The Captain mopped her face with a towel then draped it around her neck and bent to pick up her treecat as he scampered across to her. She held him in her arms and smiled at Aubrey. "I'd say you're putting on some muscle, too, Wanderman. I like that. I always like to see my people stay in shape... and I like to think they can take care of themselves if they have to."
Her 'cat cocked his head at Aubrey, and the young man felt his pulse stop. She knew, he thought. She knew the real reason he was here, what he was trying to get into shape for. And then the second part of it hit him. She not only knew, she approved. No captain could come right out and tell a member of her crew she wanted him to kick the shit out of another member of her crew, but she'd just told him so anyway, and he felt his shoulders straighten.
"Thank you, Milady," he said quietly. "I'd like to think I could do that, if I had to. Of course, I still have an awful lot to learn from the Gunny and Senior Chief Harkness."
"Well, they're both good teachers," the Captain said lightly, and slapped him smartly on the shoulder, brown eyes bright with a curiously serious twinkle. "On the other hand, I've done all I can for you by trying to wear the Gunny out. From here on, you're on your own."
"I understand, Milady." Aubrey eyed the smiling Hallowell and felt a crooked grin on his own face. "Just as long as you didn't make him decide to take it out on me, Ma'am!" he added.
"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, Wanderman," Hallowell said. "After all," he added, and gave the Captain a huge smile as he and Aubrey ended in unison, "this ship has a fine doctor!"
"Have a seat, Rafe." Honor tipped her own chair back and pointed to the one on the far side of her desk. Nimitz and Samantha sat side by side on the perch above it, and Cardones smiled wryly at them as he sat. Honor followed his glance and shrugged. Samantha was just as capable of operating lifts as Nimitz was, and the 'cats appeared to be trying to spl
it their time so that neither had to abandon his or her person for too extended a period.
"You said you had something new, Ma'am?" the exec said, and she nodded.
"We didn't realize it right away, but we hit a minor gold mine aboard Vaubon after all. You know Carol's been working her way through everything we took off her?" Cardones nodded. Lieutenant Wolcott had wound up filling the slot of Honor's intelligence officer, and she'd shown a gratifying flair for the position. "Well, last night she and Scotty were going over some of the personal memo pads we recovered, and they turned up something very interesting."
"Carol and Scotty, hm?" Cardones glanced back up at the treecats, then cocked an eyebrow at his captain, who shrugged. Regulations forbade liaisons between officers in the same chain of command, but Tremaine and Wolcott held the same rank, though Scotty was senior, and they were in different departments. "So what did they find?" Cardones asked.
"This." Honor laid a pad on the desk. "It seems Lieutenant Houghton keeps a diary."
"A diary?" Cardones eyes narrowed. "Does Caslet know?"
"I don't know, and I don't intend to tell him," Honor replied. "Obviously we'd just as soon not let him know how much we know, but I don't want him coming down on Houghton for it, either. For one thing, he likes the man, and, in fairness to Houghton, I don't think he put any classified elements into writing. But a little reading between the lines tells us a lot."
"Such as?" Cardones leaned forward, face intent.
"Most of it's as personal as you'd expect, but there are several references in here to 'the squadron,' though he was careful never to give its strength. There's also a rather pungent comment on orders to assist Andy merchies, which suggests an effort at diplomatic spin control in the event their activities get blown, and a reference to a Citizen Admiral Giscard. I didn't really expect to find anything, but I checked our database anyway, and we do have a little on Giscard. He was only a commander before the coup attempt, but we've got excerpts from the package ONI put together on him because he'd served as a naval attache on Manticore... and because he'd served as an instructor at their war college."
"A commander?" Cardones blinked, and Honor nodded.
"I suspect he'd have held higher rank if he'd been a Legislaturalist. You know how hard it was for anyone else to break into flag rank, they only made Alfredo Yu a captain, for goodness sake! But it seems Javier Giscard was one of the PN's foremost advocates of commerce warfare."
"That would make him a logical choice to send out here then, wouldn't it?" Cardones murmured.
"Indeed it would. I wish we had more details on him, though I suppose we're lucky to have even this much on someone who was so junior under the old regime. I also wish we'd known about this before we sent Vaubon off.. There's a note in our file on him that ONI has a good bit more information than we do," Cardones nodded; even with modern data-storing technology, there was no way everything from ONI's massive files on enemy officers could have been crammed into a single ship's memory, "but what we do have suggests that he advocated deploying heavy forces for systematic operations. He also insisted on the necessity of a proper scouting element for the main force. Apparently, he believes in monitoring target systems in some detail before moving in, which is probably what Vaubon was up to when Caslet stumbled across Sukowski and found out about Warnecke."
"I don't like the sound of that." Cardones rubbed an eyebrow. "If they picked him to put his theories into practice, then they probably let him build the kind of force he wanted."
"Exactly. I'd say we've got an excellent chance of being up against at least a squadron of CAs, possibly even battlecruisers, with light cruiser scouting elements. CLs would be bad enough, but heavy cruisers or battlecruisers could blow away almost any of our convoy escorts, given our general drawdown of forces."
"And then there's us," Cardones said quietly.
"And then there's us." Honor toyed with the memo pad while she frowned down at it. "If Giscard is out here," she said at last in the tone of one thinking aloud, "and if he's got all those Peep legations and trade missions for an intelligence net, then he's bound to have gotten a feel for local shipping patterns, right?"
"Yes, Ma'am." Cardones nodded, wondering where she was headed, and she grimaced.
"All right, let's go further and assume he already has, or shortly will have, picked up on the fact that we have Q-ships in the area. From our existing loss patterns, allowing for the Peeps' involvement in them, he must have been operating spread out in detachments. He may have been operating his heavy ships solo, but its more likely he's kept them in at least two-ship divisions, his war college lectures were fairly emphatic about the necessity of never taking your security for granted and keeping your assets concentrated. But if you were Giscard and someone told you there was a squadron of Manticoran Q-ships in the area, would you change your ops pattern?"
"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones replied after several moments of thought. "If he stressed concentration of force for routine raiding, then he'd pull into larger forces. He couldn't cover as much ground, but he'd be better placed to deal with one or two of us. And, of course, he couldn't count on us operating solo, which would increase his own need to concentrate."
"Agreed, but I was thinking of something a bit more extreme than that."
"More extreme?" Cardones frowned. "How, Ma'am?"
"Let's grant that Giscard is at least as smart as we are, but that he doesn't know we've taken one of his ships or that we have any reason to suspect his presence. Given that, in his place I'd assume my Manticoran counterpart would do precisely what we have been doing: move into the area of maximum threat and patrol it."
She glanced at Cardones, who nodded, then went on "All right. Now, if I were he and operating from those assumptions, I think I might just decide to look some where else. Somewhere where I could swat a lot of ships, for relatively little risk, while all the Q-ships were busy looking elsewhere for me."
"I suppose that makes sense," Cardones agreed studying his COs face. "The question would be where you could find a target like that."
"Right here," Honor said quietly, and lit a holo chart. It showed the approaches to the Confederacy's south-western quadrant, and she threw a light dot into it about twenty light-years short of Sachsen. Cardones looked at it for a moment, and then his eyes narrowed in understanding, for the light dot was in the area known as the Selker Rift. "Rifts" were volumes of hyper-space between gravity waves. They weren't uncommon; in fact, most of h-space was one huge rift, since grav waves tended to be quite narrow in interstellar terms. Unfortunately, the waves' crazy-quilt patterns meant most voyages required a starship to cross at least one. And since each wave was more powerful than anything man could generate and had its own unique frequency and flux, interference between it and an impeller wedge instantly generated an energy release sufficient to destroy any ship ever built.
That was the reason colonizing expeditions had continued to use cryo-equipped sublight, normal-space vessels, despite voyages which might last centuries, before the invention of the Warshawski sail and gravitic anomaly detector. Survey ships crewed by daredevil specialists had used hyper to explore the universe, yet the death toll had been heavy. Crews had continued to come forward, drawn by a combination of wanderlust, adrenaline addiction, and incredible salaries, but people taking their families to the stars had settled for n-space and cryo.
In 1273 p.o., however, hyper-physicist Adrienne Warshawski had mounted radically redesigned and much more powerful drive nodes, which she'd dubbed "alpha nodes", on the test ship Fleetwing and produced the very first Warshawski sails. On the gross scale, they were simply the two stressed-space bands of a normal impeller wedge, but Fleetwing had projected them as enormous disks, perpendicular to her central axis, not as a wedge. The real sorcery had lain in what Warshawski had managed to do with those sails, for what she'd done was to give them a "tuning" ability that allowed them to adjust phase and merge with a naturally occurring grav wave. They stabilized Fleetwing relati
ve to the grav wave, and by making subtle adjustments to their strength and frequency, they generated a "grab factor" which allowed her to use the wave itself, in conjunction with her inertial compensator, to generate stupendous rates of acceleration. And just as a side benefit, the interface between sail and wave produced eddies of preposterously high energy levels which could be tapped by a ship underway, allowing her to enjoy enormous savings in reactor mass.
Needless to say, the Warshawski sail revolutionized interstellar travel. Rather than avoid grav waves like the plague, captains began seeking them out, aided by the gravitic detectors she'd already produced (and which were still known as "Warshawski’s" in her honor), for they had changed from death traps to the most efficient means of transportation known to man. A ship could generate the same sustained velocities under impeller drive, but the evasive routing required to avoid waves added enormously to voyage times, and the consequences of encountering an unexpected wave remained fatal. By riding the waves, however, a starship accelerated faster, cost less to operate, and eliminated the danger of running into one of them.
At the same time, it was almost always necessary for a ship to make at least one transition (and usually more between grav waves on any extended voyage, and those transitions were made, very cautiously, under impeller drive.
Especially, Cardones thought, in the Selker Rift.
The major interstellar routes had been worked out to avoid the wider rifts. It added a bit of length to several such routes, but that was considered well worthwhile in terms of safety and cost efficiency. The Selker Rift, however, was impossible to avoid. There simply was no way around it for vessels bound from the Empire to Silesia. And just to make things worse, it was also home to the rogue grav wave known as the Selker Shear.
Most grav waves were "locked," part of a web of mutually anchored and anchoring stress patterns which forced its strands to retain fixed relationships to one another. They moved over the years, but slowly and gradually, as a whole and in predictable fashion.