Honor Among Enemies hh-6

by David Weber

  He glowered at the repeater for a few more moments, and then his expression changed. His glower turned into a wicked grin, and he punched a code into his com.

  "Exec," Lieutenant Commander Alicia Marcos' voice responded almost instantly, and Usher tipped his chair back to turn his wicked smile up at the deckhead.

  "Sorry to disturb you when you're off watch, Alicia, but I've just had a thought."

  "A thought, Skipper?" Marcos had served with him long enough to recognize that tone, and her own was suddenly wary.

  "Yes, indeed," Usher said, fairly beaming at the deck-head. "Since we've got all this, ah, unanticipated time on our hands, don't you think we should put it to best use?"

  "In what way, Captain?" Marcos inquired even more warily.

  "I'm glad you asked that," Usher said expansively. "Why don't you and Ed come on up to my briefing room so we can discuss it?"

  "Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!" Margaret Fuchien’s head jerked up so suddenly her second cup of coffee sloshed over her second-best uniform trousers. The brown tide was scorching hot, but she hardly noticed as she vaulted out of her chair at the head of the breakfast table and ran for the lift.

  "Captain to the bridge!" the urgent voice repeated, and she swore as she skidded into the lift, for her standing orders were crystal clear. Unless it was a true emergency, and a time-critical one, at that, the passengers were not to be panicked by broadcast messages, and there'd been plenty of stewards available to murmur discreetly in her ear.

  She hit the emergency override to slam the lift doors shut and whirled to the intercom pad.

  "Captain to th..."

  "This is the Captain! Shut down that goddamned message!" she snarled, and the recorded voice died in midword. "Better! Now what the hell is so damned urgent?"

  "We're under attack, Ma'am!" her second officer replied with an edge of panic.

  "Under at...?" Fuchien stared at the com panel, then shook herself. "By who and how many?" she demanded.

  "We don't know yet." Lieutenant Donevski sounded marginally calmer, and she pictured him inhaling deeply and getting a grip on himself. "All we know is Hawkwing broadcast an attack alert, ordered us onto a new heading, and then peeled off to starboard."

  "Damn." Fuchien’s mind raced. It would have been nice of Usher to tell her what the problem was! Artemis did have the missile armament of a heavy cruiser, after all, and the trained personnel to use it. Those missiles would have been a hell of a lot more useful if Fuchien had some idea of the parameters of the threat.

  But Usher was Navy, and the law was clear. In any case of attack, the decisions of the senior Navy officer present took absolute precedence.

  "Come to the heading ordered. I'll be on the bridge in two minutes."

  "Aye, Ma'am!"

  Fuchien released the "send" button, stood back with a sour expression, and tried to tell herself she wasn't afraid.

  The lift slid to a halt almost precisely two minutes later, and Fuchien stormed onto her bridge. The relief on Donevski's face was painfully obvious, and she waved him off as she strode briskly across to the plot.

  Artemis' bridge was a peculiar hybrid. Civilian vessels required fewer watch officers, yet civilian bridges were usually larger than those aboard warships, where internal space was always at a premium. That normally made a merchant ships bridge seem almost ostentatiously spacious to a naval officer, but Artemis' command deck was more crowded than most. A naval-style tactical plot, manned by Lieutenant Annabelle Ward and her tactical crews, was placed right beside it.

  Fuchien came to a halt at Ward's shoulder and glared at the plot. All she could see were the freighters and her own ship, all accelerating at their best speed, close to two thousand gravities, thanks to the grav wave, at right angles to their previous heading. Hawkwing was also visible, on an exactly reciprocal heading at over fifty-two hundred gravities. The range between them was opening at over fifty-one KPS?, and the destroyer was already 3.75 light-seconds, over a million kilometers, astern of the merchantmen.

  "What the hell is she going after?" Fuchien wondered aloud.

  "Damned if I know, Skipper," Ward replied in a strong Sphinx accent. "She just took the hell off like a wet treecat and ordered us to run for it. I can't see a damned thing on that bearing."

  Fuchien studied the blandly uninformative plot for another handful of seconds, then spared a single fulminating glance at the visual display. Particle densities were higher than normal, even for h-space, along this particular wave, and the glorious frozen lightning of hyper-space was more beautiful than usual. But that same beauty also cut her sensor range considerably, and Margaret Fuchien didn't like the thought of what might be headed her way from just over her sensor horizon. But, damn it to hell, what could be out there? Her sensors were as good as Hawkwing's, so how could anything she couldn't see have picked them up?

  "Anything further from Hawkwing?" she demanded, turning to Donevski.

  "No, Ma'am."

  "Play back the original message," she directed. Donevski nodded to the com officer, and five seconds later, Commander Usher's voice crackled over the bridge speakers.

  "All ships, this is Hawkwing! Condition Red! Come to two-seven-zero immediately, maximum convoy acceleration! Maintain heading until further notice! Hawkwing out!"

  "That's all?" Fuchien demanded incredulously.

  "Yes, Ma'am," Donevski said. "We copied his message, but before we could respond he took off like a bat out of hell, and Anna caught his sidewalls and fire control coming up."

  Fuchien turned to crook an eyebrow at Lieutenant Ward, who nodded.

  "I don't know what Ushers picked up, Skipper, but he's not fooling around with it," the tactical officer said. "His combat systems came on-line in less than twelve seconds from the moment he started transmitting, and he was on his new heading before he finished talking."

  Fuchien nodded and turned her attention back to Ward's plot. The destroyer was a full thirty light-seconds astern now, with a relative velocity of over thirty thousand KPS, and she was already deploying missile decoys. That was an ominous sign, and Fuchien swallowed a sudden lump of fear. Why was Usher doing that? Missiles were useless in a grav wave, and no one could possibly be in the energy range without showing up on Artemis' scanners!

  "Why deploy decoys so soon?" she asked Ward tautly.

  "I don't know, Skipper." The tac officer had herself well under control, but an edge of uncertainty burned in her crisp reply.

  "Could somebody be out there under stealth?"

  "Possible, but if they're already in missile range, we should have a sniff of them on gravitics by now however good their systems are." Ward tapped a sequence of commands into her console, then sat back with an unhappy sound and shook her head. "Nothing, Skipper. I don't see a single damned thing out there for..."

  Her voice chopped off abruptly as Usher threw Hawkwing into a violent turn to port. The destroyer screamed around, and even as she turned, every laser mount in her starboard broadside went to continuous, concentrated fire. Deadly energy sleeted over whatever she was shooting at, and Ward paled. What in Gods name was out there to draw that kind of fire? And where the hell was it?!

  "Skipper, Mr. Hauptman's on the com," Donevski announced. Fuchien started to snarl a command not to bother her, but then she drew a deep breath and gestured sharply.

  "Yes, Mr. Hauptman?" She couldn't quite keep her anger at his timing out of her voice. "I'm just a bit busy up here right now, Sir!"

  "What's happening, Captain?" Hauptman demanded.

  "We appear to be under attack, Sir," Fuchien said as calmly as she could.

  "Under attack? By what?!"

  "I don't have an answer to that question just yet, Sir. But whatever it is, Hawkwing's engaging it now, so it must be close."

  "My God." The quiet words were squeezed out of the magnate almost against his will, and he closed his eyes at the far end of the com link. "Keep me informed, please," he said, and signed off. Which, Fuc
hien reflected, showed more common sense than she'd expected from him.

  "What the hell is she shooting at?" Ward fumed. "I still can't see a damned thing!"

  "I don't know," Fuchien said quietly, "but whatever it is, it's..."

  Hawkwing's lasers maintained their deadly, converging fire, slashing at something no one on Artemis' bridge could even see. There was absolutely nothing there according to their sensors, yet the destroyer threw continuous fire at whatever it was for five full minutes.

  And then, suddenly, she ceased fire, turned another ninety degrees to port, and came loping after the merchantmen.

  Fuchien stared at the plot in total confusion, then turned to meet Wards gaze. The tac officer looked just as confused as Fuchien was and raised her hands in baffled ignorance.

  "Beats the hell out of me, Skipper. Never saw anything like it in my life."

  "Burst transmission from Hawkwing, Captain," the com officer announced.

  "On speaker," Fuchien said tautly.

  "All ships resume original heading," Gene Ushers voice said pleasantly. "Thank you for your cooperation and excellent response time, but this concludes our unscheduled exercise."

  Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

  Honor leaned back on the couch in her day cabin with her legs curled comfortably under her and a book viewer in her lap. Her right hand held a long-stemmed glass of her prized Delacourt, an open box of chocolates sat beside her, and she smiled as she pressed the page advance with her left forefinger.

  Like the wine, the novel in her lap was a gift from her father. She hadn't had much time to read over the past arduous months, and she'd decided to save it for a special treat, a reward to herself, which she would know she'd earned when she actually had time to read it anyway.

  It was a very, very old book, and despite the way printed and audio recordings had frozen the language, its pre-space English was hard to follow, especially when characters used period slang. It had also been written using the old English system of measurement. Math had never been Honor’s strong suit, and all she knew about English measurement was that a "yard" was a little shorter than a meter and that a "mile" was a little less than two kilometers. She had no idea how many grams there were in a "pound," which was of considerable importance for this particular novel, and the situation was complicated by the fact that "pounds" (and also "guineas" and "shillings") seemed to be monetary units, as well. She remembered pounds (and "francs") from her study of the Napoleonic Wars, but her texts had converted most monetary amounts into present-day dollars, which left her only a vague notion of how much a pound had been worth, and she'd never heard of "guineas" or "shillings" in her life. It was all very confusing, though she was fairly confident she was catching most of it from context, and she considered, again, querying her desk computer for English measurement equivalents and a table of pre-space currencies.

  For the moment, however, she was entirely content to sit exactly where she was. Not only was her fathers gift proving an extraordinarily good read in spite of its archaisms, but she was also aware of a rare and complete sense of satisfaction. Wayfarer might not be a ship of the wall, but she'd cut quite a swath, and after the better part of six months, her crew had come together as well as any Honor had ever seen. The newbies had their feet under them, the best of the experienced hands had been given time to pass along their own skills, the bad apples were in the brig, reformed, or keeping a very low profile, and department efficiency ratings were closing in on a uniform 4.0. She felt certain the rest of TG 1037 was doing equally well, though it would be nice to have confirmation when they checked in at Sachsen on their way back from New Berlin, and, best of all, she was back in Manticoran uniform. And, she thought, turning another page, what we've accomplished so far should go a long way to completing my "rehabilitation."

  Even the fact that she'd ever needed "rehabilitating" no longer had the power to disturb her, and, she admitted, she actually preferred Wayfarer to the battle squadron she'd commanded in Grayson service. She'd been born to be a captain, she thought wistfully, commander of a starship, mistress after God and all alone on her own responsibility. It was, without a doubt, the loneliest job in the universe, but it was also the proper task, the proper challenge, for her... and one she would have to give up all too soon.

  She thought about that last point fairly often. She was a captain of the list with almost nine years' seniority. Even if the Opposition managed to block any Admiralty plans to promote her out of the zone, time in grade would make her a commodore within another four or five years, probably less; wars gave ample opportunity to step into a dead man's shoes. And from what Earl White Haven had said on Grayson, she'd probably be dropped into an acting commodore's slot much sooner.

  When that happened, her days as a captain would be over. A part of her looked forward to it as she always looked forward to the next challenge, with anticipation and an eagerness to be about it, and for once she didn't feel the nagging uncertainty that this time she might not be equal to the task. She'd proven she could command a squadron of the wall, or, for that matter, an entire heavy task force, in Yeltsin. More than that, she knew she'd done it well. Her abilities as a strategist had not yet been tested, but she knew she could hack the tactical side of it.

  But for all the satisfaction that brought her, and for all her awareness that without flag rank she could never play a role on the larger stage of actually shaping the war's direction, she hated the thought of giving up the white beret of a starship's commander. She knew she'd been lucky to command as many ships as she had, and to have had two of them straight from the builders as a keel plate owner, but she also knew she would always hunger for just one more.

  She smiled wryly and sipped more wine, wondering why the thought didn't hurt more than it did. Why it was a thing of bittersweet regret mingled with pleasure rather than total unhappiness. Maybe I'm just a bit more ambitious than l'd like to admit?

  Her smile grew, and she glanced at the gently snoring ball of treecat on the couch beside her. Nimitz, at least, had no second thoughts at all. He understood her love for starship command, but he was also smugly confident of her ability to handle any task which came her way... and not at all shy about making it clear he thought she deserved to command the Queens entire Navy.

  Well, that was for the future, which had a pronounced gift for taking care of itself in its own good time, however much humans dithered in the process. Meanwhile, she had an excellent glass of wine and a novel which was thoroughly enjoyable. This Forester guy writes a darned good book!

  She'd just turned another page when the admittance chime sounded softly. She started to set her novel aside, but MacGuiness padded into the compartment, and she settled back as he crossed to her desk and pressed the com key.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "The Chief Engineer to see the Steadholder," Eddy Howard announced, and MacGuiness glanced at his captain with a raised eyebrow.

  "Harry?" Honor glanced at the chrono. It was late in Wayfarer's day, and she wondered why Tschu hadn't simply screened her. But he probably had his reasons, and she nodded to MacGuiness, who punched the hatch button. Tschu stepped into the compartment with Samantha on his shoulder. The female 'cat looked unbearably smug, Honor blinked, wondering why that particular adjective had occurred to her, and Nimitz gave a soft snort and roused instantly. He sat up, then stretched with a long lazy yawn that stopped abruptly. He cocked his head, gazing very intently at Samantha, and Honor blinked again as she felt a deep, complex stir of emotion from him. She couldn't sort it all out, but the strongest component of it could only be described as delight.

  "Sorry to disturb you, Skipper," Tschu said wryly, "but there's something you should know."

  "There is?" Honor laid her novel aside as Samantha hopped down from the engineers shoulder. The 'cat scampered across the deck to jump up on the couch beside Nimitz, and the two of them sat so close together their bodies touched. As Honor watched in bemusement, Nimitz curled his prehensile tail around the smaller
'cat in an oddly protective gesture and rubbed his cheek against the top of her head with a deep, softly buzzing purr.

  "Yes, Ma'am," Tschu said with that same wry smile. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to put in for maternity leave."

  Honor blinked a third time, and then her eyes narrowed.

  "Yes, Ma'am," the engineer said again. "I'm afraid Sam is pregnant."

  Honor sat up very straight, jaw dropping, then whipped around to stare at the 'cats. Nimitz looked back with an absurdly complacent, and proud, expression, and his sense of delight soared. He held her gaze for several seconds, and then she shook her head with a slow smile of her own. Nimitz? A father? Somehow she'd never really believed that could happen, despite all the time he'd spent with Samantha. She'd considered the possibility intellectually, but it had been just the two of them for so long, aside from her brief, happy months with Paul Tankersley, that her emotions had assumed it would always be just the two of them.

  "Well," she said finally, "this is a surprise, Harry. I assume you're certain about it?"

  "Sam is," Tschu half-chuckled, "and that's good enough for me. 'Cats don't often make mistakes about things like that."

  "No, no, they don't." Honor glanced at MacGuiness, whose surprise seemed just as great as hers but who also stood there with a huge smile on his face. "I think we need another glass, Mac," she told him dryly. "In fact, make it two glasses, you're about to become an uncle. And, under the circumstances, a few stalks of celery probably aren't out of order, either."