In Enemy Hands

The task group had too few ships to set up complete coverage, so Sha

Like Katana, PNS Dirk, the ship responsible for the middle interception zone in Turner’s sector, was one of the older Sword-class ships. That was why the ops plan relegated her to the i

But however powerful Nuada was, her hardware faults meant she didn't know what Katana had just discovered. Without that knowledge, she wouldn't leave her station to pursue the possible contact, which would leave Dirk to cope with whatever it was on her own, and that could be bad. Not only could she find herself outclassed in a single-ship action, if in fact the contact was a Manty warship, but unlike Katana, the ships in the i

"What's the current com delay to Nuada?" he asked after a moment.

"Twenty-two minutes, Citizen Exec."

"And the range from the target to Dirk?"

"Approximately eighteen-point-three light-minutes." Luchner nodded again, then walked back to the command chair at the center of the bridge. He leaned over without seating himself, punched a com key, and waited until the small screen flicked alight with the image of Citizen Captain Helen Zachary. A moment later, the screen divided neatly in half down the center as Citizen Commissioner Kuttner dropped into the circuit. "Yes, Fred?" Zachary said.

"We've got a possible contact in Nuada's sector, Citizen Captain," the exec replied. He summarized Allworth's report, then went on, "With your permission, Citizen Captain, I'd like to alert Nuada and Dirk for an Alpha Intercept. We're only fifteen light-minutes from Dirk, so our transmission should reach her long before a ship accelerating after translation enters her sensor range, and if Nuada cuts her pods loose and goes to max accel as soon as she gets the word, she should have a pretty fair chance of intercepting the bogey if it tries to break back out across the limit. But since she will have to leave her pods behind to have a shot, I'd also like to alert Raiden and Claymore to support her and Dirk in case this is a battlecruiser or something even heavier."

"Hm." Zachary scratched the tip of her nose. "How much delay would we build in if we simply alerted Turner and let him handle it?' she asked. She and Luchner both already knew the answer to that; she was asking it only to be sure the answer was officially on record before they stuck their necks out.

"Nuada's about twenty-two light-minutes from us and eighteen from Dirk," Luchner replied. "It would take Turner at least forty minutes from the moment we send him the alert to pass it on to Dirk, and another two minutes to hit Raiden and Claymore. If we pass the word to the others at the same time we inform Nuada, we'll cut a minimum of thirteen minutes off the time for every one of the other ships, but our current geometry will let us take a full nineteen minutes off the time for Dirk."

"That sounds to me like ample justification for sticking our oar in," Zachary said, and shifted her eyes to meet Kuttner’s on her own com screen. "Citizen Commissioner?"

"I agree. And we should probably alert Count Tilly, as well."

"Yes, Sir," Luchner said respectfully, forbearing to mention that standing orders required any contact to be reported to the flagship. Kuttner ought to know that, he'd certainly been present often enough when it was discussed, but it could be unwise to remind people's commissioners of things they were supposed to know.

"Very well, Fred. See to it. And keep us informed of any further developments," Zachary said.

"Yes, Citizen Captain." Luchner killed the circuit and turned to the com officer of the watch. "Fire up your transmitter, Ha

Chapter Fifteen

"Still nothing from Commodore Yeargin?" Alistair McKeon asked. Forty minutes had passed since Prince Adrian's translation back into normal-space. She'd moved almost two and a quarter light-minutes deeper into the Adler System, her velocity was up to 21,400 KPS, and the silence of her com section had become more than merely puzzling a half-hour ago.

"No, Sir." Lieutenant Sanko's reply was tense, despite its professional crispness, and McKeon turned his head to look at Honor. His gray eyes were worried, and Honor felt Nimitz twitch his tail uneasily as the emotions of those around him seeped into him.

The tension on the cruisers bridge had begun as little more than vague disquiet, a sort of itch no one knew how to scratch, at the absence of any challenge from the system pickets, but it had grown steadily as Prince Adrian continued to accelerate in-system at a constant four hundred gravities. She might not be capable of transmitting FTL herself, but the ships of Task Group Adler were, and Sarah DuChene’s course had been plotted to emerge from hyper within the envelope of one of Commodore Yeargin’s limited numbers of sensor platforms. As such, Prince Adrian should have been detected, identified, and reported to Yeargin’s flagship via the platform’s grav pulse transmitter... and she should have picked up an FTL challenge from Enchanter within ten minutes of arrival.

She hadn't, and Honor had done her best to look unworried as the minutes stretched out. There was almost certainly a simple explanation, she told herself. Yeargin doesn't have all that many sensors, so maybe she decided to change the deployment of the ones she does have from the pattern we were told about. But if she were going to do that, why didn't she post a picket to cover the hole? We're right on the most logical approach from Clairmont. Surely she'd want to be certain it was covered, wouldn't she?

For that matter, it was possible Yeargin had picked Prince Adrian up and simply saw no reason to challenge a ship her sensors had already identified. If that were the case, however, it displayed an appallingly casual approach to the security of her command area. Honor would never have assumed a contact was in fact what it seemed to be until she'd absolutely confirmed its identity, and she found the thought of a system commander who would make such an assumption distasteful. Yet there was only one way to find out what Yeargin thought she was doing, and that was to go see.

But cautiously, Honor told herself. Very cautiously. Better to be paranoid and wrong than overconfident and dead.