by David Weber
Thomas Theisman had known better, but Annette Reichman had never fought Manticorans before. And because Theisman had lost when he fought them, she'd ignored his warnings with barely veiled patronization.
"Orders, Ma'am?" he asked now, and Reichman swallowed.
"We'll take them head-on," she said after a moment. As if she had a choice, Theisman thought in disgust.
"Yes, Ma'am. Do you wish to change our formation?" He kept his tone as neutral as possible, but her nostrils flared.
"No!" she snapped.
Theisman raised his eyes over her shoulder. His cold glance sent her staff and his own bridge officers sidling out of earshot, and he leaned toward her and spoke quietly.
"Commodore, if you fight a conventional closing engagement with your chase armaments, they're going to turn to open their broadsides and give us everything they've got at optimum range."
"Nonsense! That would be suicide!" Reichman snapped. "We'll tear them apart if they come out from behind their sails!"
"Ma'am," he spoke softly, as if to a child, "we out-mass those ships seven to one, and they have to close to energy range. They know what that means as well as we do. So they'll do the only thing they can. They'll open their broadsides to bring every beam they can to bear, and they'll go for our forward alpha nodes. If they take out even one, our own foresail will go down, and this deep into a grav wave—"
He didn't have to complete the sentence. With no forward sail to balance her after sail, it was impossible for any starship to maneuver in a grav wave. They would be trapped on the same vector, at the same velocity. They couldn't even drop out of hyper, because they couldn't control their translation attitude until and unless they could make repairs, and even the tiniest patch of turbulence would tear them apart. Which meant the loss of a single sail would cost Reichman at least two ships, because any ship which lost a sail would have to be towed clear of the wave on a consort's tractors.
"But—" She stopped and swallowed again. "What do you recommend, Captain?" she asked after a moment.
"That we do the same thing. We'll get hurt, probably lose a few ships, but it'll actually reduce our sails' exposure and give us far heavier broadsides and a better chance to take them out before they gut our sails."
He met her gaze levelly, strangling the desire to scream at her that he'd told her this would happen, and her eyes fell.
"Very well, Captain Theisman," she said. "Make it so."
* * *
Anton Zilwicki sat on the padded decksole, eyes closed, arms tight around the four-year-old girl weeping into his tunic. She was too young to understand it all, but she understood enough, he thought emptily as he listened to the voices behind him: the voices of Carnarvon's taut-faced bridge officers, clustered around the huge transport's main display.
"My God," the exec whispered. "Look at that!"
"There goes another one," someone else said harshly. "Was that one of the cruisers?"
"No, I think it was another can, and—"
"Look—look! That was one of the Peep bastards! And there goes another one!"
"Oh, Jesus! That was a cruiser!" someone groaned, and Zilwicki closed his eyes tighter, fighting his own tears for his daughter's sake. He knew Carnarvon was piling on every scrap of drive power she had, running madly away from her sisters, seeking the elusive safety of dispersal. If two of the Peeps were gone, then at least one merchantman would live . . . but which one?
"My God, she got another one!" a voice gasped, and his arms tightened about his child.
"What about that one?" someone asked.
"No, he's still there. It's just his sail, but that should— Oh, God!"
The voices cut off with knifelike suddenness, and his heart twisted within him. He knew what that silence meant, and he raised his head slowly. Most of the officers looked away, but not Carnarvon's skipper. Tears ran down the woman's face, yet she met his gaze without flinching.
"She's gone," she said softly. "They all are. But she killed three of them first, and at least one survivor's lost a sail. I . . . don't think they'll continue the pursuit with just one ship, even if she's undamaged. Not with a cripple to tow clear."
Zilwicki nodded, and wondered vaguely how the universe could hold so much pain. His shoulders began to shake as his own tears came at last, and his daughter threw her arms around his neck and clung tightly
"W-what's happening, Daddy?" she whispered. "Are . . . are the Peeps gonna hurt Mommy? Are they gonna get us?"
"Shssssh, Helen," he got out through his tears. He pressed his cheek into her hair, smelling the fresh, little-girl smell of her, and closed his eyes once more as he rocked her gently.
"The Peeps won't get us, baby," he whispered. "We're safe now." He drew a ragged breath. "Mommy made it safe."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Nike altered course for home, and Mike Henke hid a grin as she glanced across the bridge at her captain. Honor seldom displayed satisfaction with her own efforts, especially on the bridge. Satisfaction with the performance of her officers and crew, yes; yet her own competence was something to be taken for granted. But today she leaned back against her command chair's contoured cushions, legs crossed, and a small smile played about her lips while Nimitz preened shamelessly on the chair's back.
Henke chuckled and looked over to Tactical to bestow a wink of triumph on Eve Chandler. The diminutive redhead grinned back and raised her clasped hands over her head, and Henke heard someone else snort with laughter behind her.
Well, they had every excuse to be insufferably pleased with themselves—and their captain, Henke reflected. The squadron had worked hard in the week since Vice Admiral Parks' departure. Its steadily developing snap and precision had actually brought smiles of approval from Admiral Sarnow, and Nike's escape from the repair slip couldn't have come at a better time.
Henke wasn't the only one of Honor's officers who'd heard about Captain Dournet's concern that the flagship's enforced inactivity might have made her rusty enough to embarrass his own Agamemnon, but she'd been better placed than most to do something about it. Honor had been too submerged in squadron affairs to take on Nike's day-to-day training efforts. Besides, that sort of ongoing activity was really the exec's responsibility, and all the long, grueling simulator hours Henke had inflicted on Nike's crew had paid off handsomely in yesterday's maneuvers. Nike hadn't embarrassed Agamemnon. In point of fact, Dournet's ship had had all she could handle just to stay in shouting distance of her division mate, and Henke looked forward to her next meeting with Agamemnon's exec.
Nike had turned in the best gunnery performance of the exercise, as well, outshooting Captain Daumier's Invincible by a clear eight percent, much to the disgust of Daumier's crew, but that hadn't been the best part. No, Henke thought with a lazy smile, the best part had come when Admiral Sarnow divided his small task group in half for war games.
Commodore Banton had commanded the squadron's second and third divisions and their screen while Sarnow commanded the first and fourth, but that was only for the record. In fact, Sarnow had informed Honor five minutes into the exercise that both he and Captain Rubenstein, Division 54's senior officer, had just become casualties and that she was in command.
That was all the warning she'd gotten, but it was obvious she'd been thinking ahead, for her own orders had come without any hesitation at all. She'd used the FTL sensor platforms to locate Banton's ships, split her own force into two two-ship divisions, accelerated to intercept velocity, then killed her drives and gone to the electronic and gravitic equivalent of "silent running." But she hadn't stopped there, for she'd known Banton's Achilles had the same ability to spot and track her. And since Honor knew the commodore had plotted her base course before she closed down her emissions, she'd launched electronic warfare drones, programmed to mimic her battlecruisers' drives, on a course designed with malice aforethought to draw Banton into a position of her choice.
The commodore had taken the bait—partly, perhaps, because she didn't expect
anyone to use up EW drones (at eight million dollars a pop) in an exercise—and altered course to intercept them. By the time she realized what was really going on, Honor had brought both her own divisions slashing in on purely ballistic courses, wedges and sidewalls down to the very last instant and still operating separately in blatant disregard of conventional tactical wisdom. She'd hit Banton's surprised formation from widely divergent bearings, and her unorthodox approach had used Banton's more traditional formation against her, pounding her lead ships with fire from two directions, confusing her point defense, and using her own lead division to block the return fire of her rearmost ships for almost two full minutes. And, just to make it even better, she'd had Commander Chandler reprogram their screen's antimissile decoys so that the heavy cruisers suddenly looked like battlecruisers.
The decoys had come on-line at the worst possible moment for Banton's tac officer. With no running plot on Honor's "invisible" ships until their drives suddenly came back up, he'd had to sort out who was who before he engaged, and the decoys had confused him just long enough for Nike, Agamemnon, Onslaught, and Invincible to "kill" Banton's flagship and "cripple" her division mate Cassandra with no damage of their own. Defiant and intolerant had done their best after that—indeed, Captain Trinh's stellar performance had gone far to redeem his earlier problems—but they'd never had a chance. The final score had shown the complete destruction of Banton's force, moderate damage to Agamernnon and Invincible, and a mere two laser hits on Nike. Onslaught had escaped completely unscathed and even recovered all but two of the EW drones Honor had used. The drones would require overhaul before they could be reused, but their recovery had saved the Navy something like forty-eight million dollars, and Henke suspected Rubenstein's crew was going to do even more gloating than her own people.
Admiral Sarnow hadn't said a word, but his grin when he ambled onto Nike's bridge for the closing phase of the "battle" had been eloquent. Besides, Commodore Banton was a fair-minded woman. She knew she and her people had been had, and she'd commed her personal congratulations to Honor even before the computers finished calculating the final damage estimates.
A most satisfactory two days, taken all together, Henke decided. A whole week had passed without incident since Admiral Parks disappeared over the hyper limit, which had produced a deep sense of relief but hadn't lessened the squadron's determination to disprove any reservations Parks might entertain about their admiral and his flag captain . . . and the last couple of days' successes looked like an excellent first step.
Of course, she thought smugly, it had been an even better step for some than for others. Eve Chandler was already licking her chops in anticipation of her next conversation with Invincible's tac officer. Queen's Cup for gunnery, indeed! And Ivan Ravicz was as happy as a treecat with his own celery patch. His new fusion plant had performed flawlessly, and Agamemnon had been pushed to the limit matching the acceleration of Nike's superbly tuned drive. Even George Monet had been seen to crack a smile or two, and that constituted an historic first for the com officer.
Besides, Commodore Banton had already promised that her ships' companies were buying the beer.
* * *
Honor noted the gleam in Henke's eyes and smiled fondly as her exec turned back to her own panel. Mike had a right to be pleased. It was her training programs which had kept Nike in such top-notch fighting trim, after all.
But there was more to it than training alone. Exercises and simulations could do many things, but they couldn't provide that indefinable something more that separated a crack crew from one that was simply good. Nike had that something more. Perhaps it came from the mysterious esprit de corps which always seemed to infuse the ships of her name, the sense that they had a special tradition to maintain. Or perhaps it came from somewhere else entirely. Honor didn't know, but she'd felt it crackling about her like latent lightning, begging her to use it, and she had. She hadn't even thought about her maneuvers—not on a conscious level; they'd simply come to her with a smooth, flawless precision. Her people had executed them the same way, and they had every right to feel pleased with themselves.
It helped that Commodore Banton was a good sort, of course. Honor could think of several flag officers who would have reacted far less cheerfully to the drubbing Banton had just taken, especially when they discovered they'd been beaten not by their admiral but by his flag captain. But she suspected Banton shared her own suspicions about the Admiral's motive for declaring himself a casualty. Honor might be his flag captain, yet she was also junior to six of the seven other battlecruiser captains under his command, and it was the first chance she'd had to show her stuff anywhere but in the simulators. Sarnow had deliberately stepped aside to let her win her spurs in the squadron's eyes, and she wanted to preen like Nimitz at how well it had gone.
In fact, she thought, leaning back to steeple her fingers under her pointed chin, "preen" was exactly what she intended to be doing very shortly . . . among other things. It was Wednesday, and the squadron was going to rendezvous with the repair base well before supper. She intended to arrive in Paul's quarters with a bottle of her father's precious Delacourt and find out just what his laughing hints about hot oil rubdowns were all about.
The corners of her mouth quirked at the thought, her right cheek dimpled, and she felt her face heating up, and she didn't care at all.
* * *
"Captain, I'm picking up a hyper footprint at two-zero-six," Commander Chandler announced. "One drive source, range six-point-niner-five light-minutes. It's too heavy for a courier boat, Ma'am."
Honor looked at the tac officer in faint surprise, but Chandler didn't notice as she queried her computers and worked the contact. Several seconds passed, and then she straightened with a satisfied nod.
"Definitely a Manticoran drive pattern, Ma'am. Looks like a heavy cruiser. I won't know for sure till the light-speed sensors have her."
"Understood. Keep an eye on her, Eve."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am."
A cruiser, hmmm? Honor leaned back in her chair once more. One cruiser wouldn't make much difference, but Van Slyke would be happy to see her. She would bring his squadron up to full strength at last, and the rest of the task group would probably see her as a harbinger of the far more powerful reinforcements they'd been promised. Besides, she'd probably have dispatches on board, and even the tiniest scrap of fresh information would be a vast relief.
She reached up and drew Nimitz down into her lap, rubbing his ears and considering the com conference the Admiral had scheduled for tomorrow morning. There were several points she wanted to make—not least how lucky she'd been to get away with that EW drone trick—and she slid further down in the chair as she considered the best (and most tactful) way to express them.
Several minutes ticked away, and the quiet, orderly routine of her bridge murmured to her like some soothing mantra. Her mind toyed with phrases and sentences, maneuvering them with a sort of languid, catlike pleasure. Yet her dreamy eyes were deceptive. The soft chime of an incoming signal from the com section brought her instantly back to full awareness, and her gaze moved to Lieutenant Commander Monet's narrow back.
The com officer depressed a button and listened to his earbug for a moment, and Honor's eyes narrowed when his shoulders twitched. If she hadn't known what an utterly reliable, totally humorless sort he was, she might actually have thought he was chuckling.
He pressed another sequence of buttons, then swiveled his chair to face her. His face was admirably grave, but his brown eyes twinkled slightly as he cleared his throat.
"Burst transmission for you, Captain." He paused just a moment. "It's from Captain Tankersley, Ma'am."
Faint, pink heat tingled along Honor's cheekbones. Did every member of her crew know about her . . . relationship with Paul?! It was none of their business, even if they did, darn it! It wasn't as if there were anything shady or underhanded about it—Paul was a yard dog, so even the prohibition against affairs with officers in the same chain o
f command didn't come into it!
But even as she prepared to glower at the com officer, her own sense of the ridiculous came to her rescue. Of course they knew—even Admiral Sarnow knew! She'd never realized her nonexistent love life was so widely noticed, but if she'd wanted to keep a low profile she should have thought of it sooner. And the twinkle in Monet's eyes wasn't the smutty thing it could have been. In fact, she realized as she sensed the same gentle amusement from the rest of her silent bridge crew, he actually seemed pleased for her.
"Ah, switch it to my screen," she said, suddenly realizing she'd been silent just a bit too long.
"It's a private signal, Ma'am." Monet's voice was so bland Honor's mouth twitched in response. She shoved herself up out of her chair, cradling Nimitz in her arms and fighting her rebellious dimple.
"In that case, I'll take it on my briefing room terminal."
"Of course, Ma'am. I'll switch it over."
"Thank you," Honor said with all the dignity she could muster, and crossed to the briefing room hatch.
It slid open for her, and as she stepped through it, she suddenly wondered why Paul was screening her at all. Nike would reach the base in another thirty minutes or so, but the transmission lag at this range was still something like seventeen seconds. That ruled out any practical real-time conversation, so why hadn't he waited another fifteen minutes to avoid it?
An eyebrow arched in speculation, and she deposited Nimitz on the briefing room table as she sat in the captain's chair at its head and keyed the terminal. The screen flashed a ready signal, and then Paul's face appeared.