She hadn't thought clearly enough when she realized what was going on, she told herself. Not that there'd been time to change her plans once Sirius began to move even if she had thought it through. Depriving Dame Estelle and Barney Isvarian of a third of Papadapolous's Marines with a full-fledged native war under way would have been criminal. But she should have considered the possibility in advance.
"Mr. Webster," she said.
"Yes, Captain?"
"Record this. 'Captain Coglin, if you refuse to heave to, I will have no option but to fire into your ship. I repeat. You are requested and required to cut your drive immediately.'"
"Recorded, Captain." Webster's voice was soft with suppressed tension.
"Transmit immediately."
"Transmitting now, Captain."
"Mr. Cardones."
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"Prepare to fire a warning shot. Set it for detonation at least five thousand kilometers clear of Sirius."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Setting for detonation five-zero-zero-zero kilometers clear of target."
"Thank you."
Honor leaned back in her chair and prayed Coglin would listen to sanity.
". . . fire into your ship. I repeat. You are requested and required to cut your drive immediately."
Coglin grunted as he listened to the message, and his first officer looked up from his own instruments.
"Any reply, Captain?"
"No." Coglin frowned. "She'll fire at least one warning shot first, and the further out we are when she decides to do something more drastic, the better."
"Should we prepare to turn back towards her, Sir?"
"No." Coglin considered for a moment, then nodded to himself. "We'll keep running, but blow the after panels," he ordered.
"Aye, Sir. Blowing after panels now."
"No response, Captain," Webster said very quietly.
"Thank you, Lieutenant. Mr. Cardones, I—" Honor broke off, frowning at her own tactical display as something tumbled away from Sirius.
"Captain, I'm picking up—"
"I see it, Mr. Cardones." Honor forced her frown away and looked at McKeon. "Comments, Exec?"
"I don't know, Ma'am." McKeon replayed the tactical readouts and shook his head. "Looks like some kind of debris. I can't think of what it might be, though."
Honor nodded. Whatever it was, it was unpowered and far too small to be any sort of weapon. Could Sirius be jettisoning some sort of incriminating cargo?
"Run a plot on it, Mr. Panowski," she said. "We may need to run it down for examination afterwards."
"Aye, aye, Captain." Panowski tapped commands into his panel, feeding the debris' trajectory into his computers.
"Mr. Cardones. Range and time to target?"
"Two-five-point-six-two light-seconds, Ma'am. Flight time one-niner-two-point-eight seconds."
"Very well, Mr. Cardones. Fire warning shot."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Missile away."
The missile belched from Fearless's number two missile tube and sped ahead at an acceleration of 417 KPS2, building on Fearless's own velocity of just over eighteen thousand kilometers per second. It could have accelerated twice as fast, but reducing its acceleration to 42,500 g raised its small impeller's burnout time from one minute to three, which not only gave it three times the maneuvering time but increased its terminal velocity from rest by almost fifty percent.
It raced after Sirius, seeming to crawl, even at its speed, as the freighter continued to accelerate. At three minutes, more than ten million kilometers from launch and with a terminal velocity of just over ninety-three thousand KPS, its impeller drive burned out and it went ballistic, overhauling its target on momentum alone.
Captain Coglin watched it come. He'd been certain it would be no more than a warning shot, and its vector quickly proved it was. Even if it hadn't been, he would have had almost thirteen seconds after burnout to take evasive action, during which his ship would move almost two hundred and forty thousand kilometers. His maximum possible vector change was barely over four KPS2, but the missile was no longer able to follow his maneuvers, and the cumulative effect would have made Sirius an impossible target at such a range.
Yet there was no need. He watched the missile race up alongside, five thousand kilometers clear of his ship. It detonated in a savage pinprick of thermonuclear fire, and he grunted.
"Jamming ready, Jamal?"
"Aye, Sir," his tactical officer replied.
"Stand by. I doubt she'll waste another warning shot, but we've got twenty minutes yet before she can reach effective firing range."
"Aye, Sir. Standing by."
Coglin nodded and turned his eyes to the chronometer.
"Nothing, Captain," McKeon said quietly, and Honor nodded. She hadn't really expected there to be any change in Sirius's course. She checked her maneuvering display. Another nineteen minutes before even the longest range shot could reasonably hope to hit the freighter. Tension wrapped itself around her nerves as she realized she was committed, but something else poked at the back of her brain. Something about that debris Sirius had jettisoned. If her captain had no intention of halting anyway, why jettison cargo so soon? He had almost a full hour before Fearless could physically overhaul him and board. It just didn't make—
She stiffened in her chair, eyes wide. Dear God, perhaps it did make sense!
"Mr. McKeon." The exec looked up, and Honor beckoned him over to her chair.
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"That debris from Sirius. Could it have been hull plating?"
"Hull plating?" McKeon blinked in surprise. "Well, yes, I suppose it could have been, Skipper. But why?"
"We know that ship has a military grade drive and compensator," Honor said very softly. "Suppose it has something else military grade aboard? Something that was hidden behind false plating?"
McKeon stared at her, and then his face slowly paled.
"A Q-ship?" he half-whispered.
"ONI says they've got some heavily armed fleet colliers," Honor said in that same, soft voice. "She might be one of them, but we know they used disguised merchant raiders when they went after Trevor's Star and Sheldon." Her eyes held his levelly. "And if that is a Q-ship, she could be armed more heavily than we were before they modified our armament."
"And she's a lot bigger than we are," McKeon agreed grimly. "That could mean she's got one hell of a lot more magazine space than we do."
"Exactly." Honor drew a deep breath, her thoughts racing like honed shards of ice. "Warn Rafe, then punch up our data base and see what if anything we have on file about the Q-ships we know Haven's used in the past."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"And warn Dominica, too." Honor smiled a cold, bitter smile. "Our damage control officer may have her hands full shortly."
CHAPTER THIRTY
"I'm afraid we don't have much on their merchant raiders, Skipper." The air-conditioned bridge was cool, but Alistair McKeon scrubbed irritably at a drop of sweat on his forehead as he downloaded what he did have to Honor's secondary tactical display.
"We don't have anything at all to indicate they've modified Astra-class ships like Sirius, so there's no telling what they did to her, but some of the refugees from Trevor's Star gave ONI pretty good stats on a Q-ship built on a Trumball-class hull. She was over a million and a half tons smaller than Sirius, but it's all we've got."
Honor nodded, studying the readout and trying not to show her dismay. Smaller than Sirius or not, the Trumball-class Q-ship had been more powerfully armed than most modern heavy cruisers, and she scrolled through the data till she found the notes on its chase armament. Three missile tubes and a pair of spinal mount lasers fore and aft. If Sirius's chasers had simply been scaled up proportionally, her fire would be twice as heavy as anything with which Fearless could reply.
She leaned back in her chair and felt her bridge crew's tension. This was no Fleet maneuver, and even if it had been, there was no brilliant ploy to let them ambush Sirius. A stern chase sliced a
way the options, and Fearless's sole, tiny advantage was that she was a smaller target. Even that was offset by the fact that the open front of her impeller wedge was twice the size of the after edge of Sirius's wedge, and despite her lower acceleration, the "freighter's" greater mass gave her wedge more powerful stress bands and, probably, sidewalls, as well.
She bit her lip while her mind raced, searching for an answer, but her thoughts slithered like a groundcar on ice. Once her overtake velocity was high enough, she could try turning from side to side. At anything above two or three million kilometers, she couldn't turn far enough to completely interpose her sidewalls—not without giving up too much of her acceleration advantage, if she meant to stop the other ship short of the hyper limit—but at least she might deny Sirius straight down-the-throat shots by zig-zagging across her wake. It wasn't much, but it was absolutely all she could do, and her mouth tried to twist bitterly. All those clever maneuvers at ATC, all that sneaky forethought she'd put into ambushing Admiral D'Orville's flagship, and all she could think of to do now was writhe like a worm in hot ashes to avoid destruction.
She glanced back at McKeon, trying to get behind his eyes and read his thoughts. He was a tac officer by training, too; what did he think she should do? Had it occurred to him that all she had to do was break off the pursuit? Fearless was the pursuer, not the pursued. If Honor let Coglin go, Sirius would simply vanish into hyper-space, and Fearless would survive.
But it wasn't an option. She might well be wrong about Sirius's mission. She was preparing to throw away her ship and her crew's lives in pursuit of a foe at least five times as powerful as they were when it was entirely possible that foe posed no threat to the Kingdom at all. Yet she couldn't know that, and she did know that if Haven was prepared to risk open war to secure Basilisk, Coglin's freighter might bring overwhelming firepower into the system before Home Fleet could respond.
Which meant she had no choice at all.
She checked the chronometer again. Sixty-three minutes into the pursuit. She'd come thirty-six and a half million kilometers, and the range was down to seven-point-six million kilometers. Another thirteen-plus minutes until her missiles could reach Sirius before burnout. She looked down at the Havenite's light dot and wondered what he was thinking.
"What's the range, Jamal?"
"Two-five-point-three-five light-seconds, Captain."
"Time to hyper limit?"
"Ninety-four-point-six minutes."
"Their overtake speed?"
"Four-five-eight KPS, Sir."
"Missile flight time?"
"Approximately one-eight-nine seconds, Sir."
Coglin nodded and rubbed his lower lip. His missiles would still burn out nine seconds before they reached Fearless, and part of him wanted to wait. To conceal the fact that Sirius was armed until Fearless was close enough that his birds' drives would last all the way to their target. The chance of a hit would be marginally greater if they retained their power to maneuver and follow Fearless's evasion, but only marginally at such a range. And, truth to tell, it probably wouldn't really make a good goddamn's difference. Under power or ballistic, the flight time would be long enough to give the cruiser's point defense plenty of time to engage them.
Then again, he thought sourly, it was possible Harrington already suspected Sirius was armed. She certainly seemed to have figured everything else out! If she did suspect, holding his fire to try to surprise her would be pointless, yet even if she did suspect the truth, it was unlikely she realized quite how heavily armed the big Q-ship actually was. Coglin had come to possess a lively respect for the Manticoran officer's sheer guts as he watched her actions in Basilisk, but this was entirely too much like a mouse chasing a cat.
He considered his options carefully. The smartest thing to have done, he acknowledged grudgingly, would have been to obey Harrington's order to heave to. If he'd stopped, let the cruiser come into energy range, and then blown his panels, he could have wiped her out before she even realized what was happening. But he hadn't, and that mistake left him with a much less attractive range of choices.
Fearless was out-gunned by a factor of ten, whether Harrington knew it or not, but RMN cruisers were tougher than the numbers might suggest. If he turned on her, she would not only have the higher base velocity as they closed, but her higher acceleration and lower mass would make her far more maneuverable than Sirius in close combat. The way she'd taken out the courier boat's drive told him Harrington was no shiphandler to take lightly, and if his sidewalls were tougher than hers, her main impeller bands were just as impenetrable as his own. If he got drawn into a close-range dogfight against a more agile opponent, she might just get lucky and score a hit or two in the right place before she died. If she crippled his Warshawski sails, for example, it wouldn't even matter whether or not he could get into hyper. He'd get home eventually, no doubt, but he could never reach the rendezvous in time to stop the task force. Not under impeller drive alone, and especially not when he'd have to detour around the Tellerman rather than using it.
On the other hand, holding to his present course pointed his vulnerable stern straight at her, and it was always possible she might pop a missile past his point defense and through the rear of his wedge to score that same lucky hit. The odds were against it, given the angle at which any missile would have to come in, but it was possible. Yet his after firepower was three times as great as Fearless's forward armament, and he had missiles to burn, many times the number that could possibly be crammed into a Courageous-class cruiser's magazines. That meant he could start firing early and hope he got lucky, whereas Harrington's limited ammunition supply would force her to hold her fire until she could reasonably hope for a hit. And her ship's greater theoretical maneuverability wouldn't help her as long as he held the range open while he smashed at her.
The only drawback was that she might break off once she realized what she was up against, and if she did, he would have to let her go. He hated that. The instant he opened fire, she'd have proof he was armed. That would be bad. Not only would it give away the fact that Haven had armed some of its Astraclass ships as commerce raiders, but the fact that a Q-ship had been in the system would certainly be persuasive evidence that Haven had played a major role in fomenting the native unrest on Medusa. And if he opened fire before she did, then Haven would be guilty of committing the first overt act of war, as well. On the other hand, her only proof would be her instrument readings, and everyone knew data could be faked up. In effect, it would be Manticore's word against Haven's, and while that might be embarrassing to certain high-ranking jackasses who had planned this entire abortion, it wouldn't necessarily be disastrous to the Republic. More importantly, it wouldn't be disastrous to PMSS Sirius, the waiting task force, or Captain Johan Coglin.
No. Obliterating Fearless before she could tell Manticore—and the galaxy at large—that Sirius had been armed would be the best possible outcome, and if Harrington didn't break off or if an opportunity to destroy her without jeopardizing his primary mission presented itself, that was precisely what he would do. In the meantime, he'd concentrate on discouraging her and keeping her from reporting back in case he did get a chance to kill her, but he'd do it while he kept right on running away . . . even if he did have the more powerful ship.
"Inform me when missile flight time drops to one-eight-eight seconds, Jamal," he said. "And stand by to jam on my firing command."
"Yes, Sir."
The range continued to fall as Fearless's greater acceleration boosted her speed relative to Sirius. It wasn't a tremendous advantage at first, not when viewed against their absolute velocities, but it grew steadily, and a strange sort of tranquillity settled over Honor as it climbed.
She was committed. The first shot had yet to be fired—indeed, she didn't yet have any real proof Sirius was even armed—but she knew what was going to happen. Not how it was going to come out, perhaps, but how it was going to begin . . . and what she would do about it.
"Mr.
Cardones," she said quietly.
"Yes, Ma'am?" Cardones sounded tense, perhaps a bit breathless, and very young, and she smiled at him.
"I imagine we're going to be under fire for some time before we can reply, Guns," she said, and saw his quick flush of pleasure, the slight relaxation of his shoulders, at her choice of title. "I don't want to do anything to suggest we suspect Sirius is armed until and unless she actually opens fire—she may let us in closer if she thinks we're unaware of the danger—but be ready to bring up the ECM and point defense the instant something comes our way. Don't wait for my order."
"Aye, aye, Captain."
"Mr. Panowski."
"Yes, Captain?" The navigator sounded much more anxious than Cardones, perhaps because he was a bit older, a bit more aware of his mortality.
"We're committed to a stern chase. Once we close to two million kilometers, however, I will want to zig-zag randomly either side of his base course to interpose our sidewalls as far as possible. Set up your plot accordingly and maintain a running update for Chief Killian."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Panowski turned to his console with renewed energy, as if relieved to have something to do. Or, Honor thought, perhaps it was her suggestion that they would survive to within two million kilometers. She felt herself smile once more, and to her amazement, it felt completely genuine. She looked up to see McKeon smiling back at her and shook her head at him. He shrugged, his smile suspiciously like a grin for just a moment, and she returned her attention to the chronometer. Sixty-six minutes into the pursuit.