by David Weber
All of which meant that she was running even harder now than she had during her final form at Saganami Island. Which seemed dreadfully unfair, given how much smaller a campus War Maiden was!
“You really are bushed, aren’t you?” Audrey asked after a moment, and the amusement in her voice had eased back a notch.
“No,” Honor said judiciously. “ ‘Bushed’ is far too pale and anemic a word for what I am.”
She was only half-joking, and it showed.
“Well, in that case, why don’t you just kick off your boots and stay where you are for a while?”
“No way,” Honor said, opening her eyes once more. “We’ve got quarters inspection in less than four hours!”
“So we do,” Audrey agreed. “But you and Nassios covered my posterior with Lieutenant Saunders on that charting problem yesterday, so I guess the three of us could let you get a few hours of shut-eye while we tidy up. It’s not like your locker’s a disaster area, you know.”
“But—” Honor began.
“Shut up and take your nap,” Audrey told her firmly, and Nimitz bleeked in soft but equally firm agreement from beside her head. Honor considered protesting further, but not for very long. She’d already argued long enough to satisfy the requirements of honor, and she was too darned exhausted to be any more noble than she absolutely had to.
“Thanks,” she said sleepily, and she was already asleep before Audrey could reply.
“There she is, Sir,” Commander Amami said. “Just as you expected.”
“There we think she is,” Anders Dunecki corrected meticulously. Whatever Bajkusa might have thought, the commodore was far from blind to Amami’s tendency to accept his own theories uncritically, and he made a conscious effort to keep that in mind at times like this. “She could still be a legitimate merchantman,” he added, and Amami rubbed gently at his lower lip in thought.
“She is on the right course for one of the Dillingham supply ships, Sir,” he conceded after a moment. “But according to our intelligence packet, there shouldn’t be another Dillingham ship in here for at least another month, and there really isn’t a lot of other shipping to the system these days.”
“True,” Dunecki agreed. “But the flip side of that argument is that if there isn’t much other shipping in the first place, then the odds are greater that any additional merchies that come calling are going to slip through without our intelligence people warning us they’re on their way.”
“Point taken, Sir,” Amami acknowledged. “So how do you want to handle this?”
“Exactly as we planned from the beginning,” Dunecki said. “I pointed out that this could be a merchantman, not that I really believed that it was one. And it doesn’t matter if it is, after all. If we treat it as a Confed cruiser from the outset, then all we’ll really do if it turns out to be a merchie is to waste a little caution on it. But if it turns out to be a cruiser and we assume otherwise, the surprise would be on the other foot. So we’ll just close in on the contact all fat and happy—and dumb. We won’t suspect a thing until it’s got us exactly where it wants us.”
He looked up from his plot to meet Amami’s eyes, and their thin, shark-like smiles were in perfect agreement.
“The contact is still closing, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Hirake reported from the com screen at Captain Bachfisch’s elbow.
War Maiden’s senior tactical officer was once again in Auxiliary Control with Commander Layson, but Honor was on the command deck. She would have liked to think that she was there while the lieutenant commander was in AuxCon because the Captain had so much faith in her abilities. Unfortunately, she knew it was exactly the other way around. He wanted her under his own eye, and if something happened to the bridge, he wanted to be sure that Layson would have the more experienced tactical officer to back him up.
“I noticed that myself,” Bachfisch replied to Hirake with a small smile. “May I assume that your latest report is a tactful effort to draw to my attention the fact that the contact seems to be an awfully large and powerful ‘pirate’?”
“Something of the sort, Sir,” Hirake said with an answering smile, but there was a hint of genuine concern in her expression. “According to CIC, she outmasses us by at least sixty thousand tons.”
“So she does,” Bachfisch agreed. “But she obviously doesn’t know that we aren’t just another freighter waiting for her to snap us up. Besides, if she were a Peep or an Andy, I’d be worried by her tonnage advantage. But no regular man-of-war would be closing in on a merchie this way, so that means whoever we have out there is a raider. That makes her either a straight pirate or a privateer, and neither of them is likely to have a crew that can match our people. Don’t worry, Janice. I won’t get cocky or take anything for granted, but I’m not scared of anything short of an Andy that size—certainly not of anything armed with the kind of crap available from the tech base here in the Confederacy! Anyway, pirates and privateers are what we’re out here to deal with, so let’s be about it.”
“As you say, Sir,” Hirake replied, and Honor hid a smile as she gazed down at her own plot. The lieutenant commander had done her job by reminding her captain (however tactfully) of the enemy’s size and potential firepower, but the confidence in her voice matched that of the Captain perfectly. And rightly so, Honor concluded. The contact closing so confidently upon them obviously didn’t have a clue of what it was actually pursuing, or it would have come in far more cautiously.
“Captain, I have a hail from the contact,” Lieutenant Sauchuk reported suddenly.
“Oh?” Bachfisch arched one eyebrow. “Put it on the main screen and let’s hear what he has to say, Yuri.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
All eyes on War Maiden’s bridge flipped to the main com screen as a man in the uniform of the Silesian Confederacy’s navy appeared on it.
“Sylvan Grove,” he said,addressing them by the name of the Hauptman Cartel freighter whose transponder ID codes they had borrowed for their deception, “this is Captain Denby of the Confederate Navy. Please maintain your present course and attitude while my ship makes rendezvous with you.”
“Oh, of course you are,” Honor heard Senior Chief Del Conte murmur all but inaudibly behind her.
“I think we owe the good captain a reply, Yuri,” Bachfisch said after a moment. “Double-check your filters, and then give me a live pickup.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Sauchuk replied. He checked the settings on his panel carefully, then nodded. “You’re live, Skipper,” he said.
“Captain Denby, I’m Captain Bullard,” Bachfisch said, and Honor knew that War Maiden’s computers were altering his image to put him into a merchant officer’s uniform, rather than the black and gold of the RMN, just as the raider’s computers had put him into Confed naval uniform. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” Bachfisch went on, “but this isn’t exactly the safest neighborhood around. It’s not that I don’t believe you’re who you say you are, but could I ask just why it is that you want to rendezvous with us?”
“Of course, Captain Bullard,” the face on his com screen replied in the slightly stiff tone of an officer who didn’t particularly like to be reminded by a mere merchant skipper of how pathetic his navy’s record for maintaining order within its own borders was. “I have aboard seventeen of your nationals, the survivors from the crews of two Manticoran freighters. We took out the ‘privateer’ who captured their ships last week, and it seemed to me that the fastest way to repatriate them would be to turn them over to the Dillingham manager here in Melchor.”
“I see,” Bachfisch replied in a much warmer and less wary voice. He felt a brief flicker of something almost like admiration for “Captain Denby’s” smoothness, for the other man had come up with what was actually a plausible reason for a merchantman here in Silesia to allow a warship to close with it. And “Denby” had delivered his lines perfectly, with just the right note of offended dignity coupled with a “see there” sort of flourish. “In that case,
Captain,” he went on, “of course we’ll maintain heading and deceleration for rendezvous.”
“Thank you, Captain Bullard,” the man on his com screen said. “Denby out.”
“Considerate of them to let us maintain course,” Janice Hirake observed to Abner Layson.
“He doesn’t have much choice if he’s going to keep us dumb and happy,” Layson pointed out, and Hirake nodded. Warships could pull far higher accelerations than any huge whale of a merchantman, and it was traditional for them to be the ones who maneuvered to match heading and velocity in the case of a deep space rendezvous.
“Still, it’s handy that he came in so far above the plane of the ecliptic. Keeps him well above us and on the wrong side of our wedge.”
“Somehow I doubt that they arranged things that way just to oblige us,” Layson said dryly. “On the other hand, sneaking up on somebody can sometimes put you in a less than optimal position yourself, can’t it?”
“Indeed it can,” Hirake said with a small, wicked smile.
* * *
“I wish we had a little better sensor angle on them, Sir,” Lieutenant Quinn muttered from one side of his mouth, and Lieutenant Commander Acedo glanced at him. Acedo was Annika’s tactical officer, and Quinn was the most junior commissioned member of his department. But the younger man had a nose for trouble which Acedo had learned to trust, or at least listen very carefully to.
“I’d like to have a better look at them myself,” the lieutenant commander replied. “But thanks to Javelin, we’ve already got a pretty good notion of what we’re up against. At this point, I have to agree with the Commodore—it’s more important to keep him guessing about us by avoiding the deeper parts of his sensor well. Besides, the fact that he’s got his wedge between him and our sensors should help keep him confident that we don’t know that he’s a warship, too.”
“I can’t argue with that, Sir,” Quinn acknowledged. “I guess I just want the best of both worlds, and sometimes you just can’t have that.”
“No, you can’t,” Acedo agreed. “But sometimes you can come pretty close, and the way the Old Man’s set this one up qualifies for that.”
Two cruisers slid inexorably together, each convinced that she knew precisely what the other one was and that the other one didn’t know what she was… and both of them wrong. The distance between them fell steadily, and Annika’s deceleration reduced the velocity differential with matching steadiness.
“Zero-zero interception in five minutes, Sir,” Honor announced. Her soprano sounded much calmer in her own ears than it felt from behind her eyes, and she raised her head to look across the bridge at the Captain. “Current range is two-one-six k-klicks and present overtake is one-three-three-one KPS squared. Deceleration is holding steady at four-five-zero gravities.”
“Thank you, Tactical,” Bachfisch replied, and his calm, composed tone did more than she would have believed possible to still the excitement jittering down her nerves. The fact that their sensors still had not had a single clear look at the contact made her nervous, but she took herself firmly to task. This, too, she thought was a part of the art of command. For all of his calm, the Captain actually knew no more about the contact than Honor herself, but it was his job to exude the sort of confidence his people needed from him at this moment. Captain Courvoisier had stressed more than once that even if she was wrong—or perhaps especially if she was wrong—a commanding officer must never forget her “command face.” Nothing could destroy a crew’s cohesion faster than panic, and nothing produced panic better than the suggestion that the CO had lost her own confidence. But it had to be harder than usual, this time. The raider was well within effective energy range already, and just as War Maiden’s own crew, her people must be ready to open fire in a heartbeat. At such short range, an energy weapon duel would be deadly, which would be good… for whoever fired first.
Of course, the raider was expecting only an unarmed merchantship. However prepared they thought they were, the sheer surprise of finding themselves suddenly broadside-to-broadside with a King’s ship was bound to shock and confuse them at least momentarily. And it was entirely possible that they wouldn’t even have closed up all of their weapons crews simply to deal with a “merchantman.”
“Stand ready, Mr. Saunders,” the Captain said calmly. “Prepare to alter course zero-nine-zero degrees to starboard and roll port at one hundred ten thousand kilometers.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Lieutenant Saunders acknowledged. “Standing by to alter course zero-nine-zero degrees to starboard and roll port at range of one hundred ten thousand kilometers.”
“Stand by to fire on my command, Ms. Harrington,” Bachfisch added.
“Aye, aye, Sir. Standing by to fire on your command.”
“Get ready, Commander Acedo,” Anders Dunecki said quietly. “At this range he won’t risk challenging us or screwing around demanding we surrender, so neither will we. The instant he rolls ship to clear his wedge, blow his ass out of space.”
“Yes, Sir!” Acedo agreed with a ferocious grin, and he felt just as confident as he looked. The other ship would have the advantage of knowing when she intended to alter course, but Annika had an even greater advantage. The commander of the enemy cruiser had to be completely confident that he had Annika fooled, or he would never have allowed her to come this close, and the only thing more devastating than the surprise of an ambush was the surprise of an ambusher when his intended victim turned out not to have been surprised at all.
“Coming up on one hundred ten thousand kilometers, Sir!”
“Execute your helm order, Mr. Saunders!” Thomas Bachfisch snapped.
“Aye, aye, Sir!”
War Maiden responded instantly to her helm, pivoting sharply to her right and rolling up on her left side to swing her starboard broadside up towards the raider, and Honor leaned forward, pulse hammering, mouth dry, as the icons on her plot flashed before her. It almost seemed as if it were the raider who had suddenly altered course and position as the strobing amber circle of target acquisition reached out to engulf its blood-red bead.
“Stand by, Ms. Harrington!”
“Standing by, aye, Sir.”
The amber circle reached the glowing bead of the contact and flashed over to sudden crimson, and Honor’s hand hovered above the firing key.
“Fire!”
Both ships fired in the same instant across barely a third of a light-second.
At such a short range, their grasers and lasers blasted straight through any sidewall any cruiser could have generated, and alarms screamed as deadly, focused energy ripped huge, shattered wounds through battle steel and alloy. Surprise was effectively total on both sides. Commodore Dunecki had completely deceived Captain Bachfisch into expecting Annika to be fatally unprepared, but despite his discussion with Commander Bajkusa, Dunecki had never seriously considered for a moment that War Maiden might be anything except a Silesian warship. He was totally unprepared to find himself suddenly face to face with a Manticoran heavy cruiser. War Maiden’s tautly trained crew were head and shoulders above any SN ship’s company in training and efficiency. They got off their first broadside two full seconds before Dunecki had anticipated that they could. Worse, Silesian ships tended to be missile-heavy, optimized for long-range combat and with only relatively light energy batteries, and the sheer weight of fire smashing into his ship was a stunning surprise.
But even though Dunecki was unprepared for War Maiden’s furious fire, the Manticoran ship was still smaller and more lightly armed than his own. Worse, Captain Bachfisch had assumed that Annika was a typical pirate and anticipated at least a moment or two in which to act while “Captain Denby” adjusted to the fact that the “freighter” he was stalking had suddenly transformed itself from a house tabby to a hexapuma, and he didn’t get it. It was the equivalent of a duel with submachine guns at ten paces, and both ships staggered as the deadly tide of energy sleeted into them.
Honor Harrington’s universe went mad.
/> She’d felt herself tightening internally during the long approach phase, felt the dryness of her mouth and the way her nerves seemed to quiver individually, dancing within her flesh as if they were naked harp strings plucked by an icy wind. She had been more afraid than she had ever been in her life, and not just for herself. She had won friendships aboard War Maiden during the long weeks of their deployment, and those friends were at risk as much as she was. And then there was Nimitz, alone in his life-support module down in Snotty Row. Her mind had shied away from the thought of what would happen to him if his module suffered battle damage… or if she herself died. ’Cats who had adopted humans almost invariably suicided if their humans died. She’d known that before she ever applied for Saganami Island, and it had almost made her abandon her dream of Navy service, for if she put herself in harm’s way, she put him there, as well, and only Nimitz’s fierce, obvious insistence that she pursue her dream had carried her to the Academy. Now the reality of what had been only an intellectual awareness was upon them both, and a dark and terrible fear—not of death or wounds, but of loss—was a cold iron lump at the core of her.
Those fears had flowed through her on the crest of a sudden visceral awareness that she was not immortal. That the bloody carnage of combat could claim her just as easily as any other member of War Maiden’s company. Despite all of her training, all of her studies, all of her lifelong interest in naval and military history, that awareness had never truly been hers until this instant. Now it was, and she had spent the slow, dragging hours as the contact gradually closed with War Maiden trying to prepare herself and wondering how she would respond when she knew it was no longer a simulation. That there were real human beings on the other side of that icon on her plot. People who would be doing their very best to kill her ship—and her—with real weapons… and whom she would be trying to kill in turn. She’d made herself face and accept that, despite her fear, and she had thought—hoped—that she was ready for whatever might happen.