In Enemy Hands

"I see." McKeon rubbed his chin. "Any better read on her mass?"

"It's firming up some as the range drops, Skip, but whatever she's using for EW is a lot better than anything the Peeps are supposed to have. CIC still wants to call her a battlecruiser, but I think this may be one of those new heavy cruisers ONI warned us about. Unless she's red-lining her compensator, and I don't see any reason for her to take that kind of risk just to catch a single Manticoran cruiser, her accel’s too high for a battlecruiser. If I had to bet money, I'd say Bandit Four's the same class, whatever it is."

"I see," McKeon repeated. He patted her lightly on the shoulder and turned back towards his own command chair, then paused. Honor stood beside that chair, hands clasped behind her. Her spine was ramrod straight, and her expression was composed, but she, Andreas Venizelos, and Andrew LaFollet, unlike anyone else on the command deck, wore no skinsuits, and McKeon's stomach muscles tightened once again at the sight.

He drew a deep breath and walked over to stand beside her, and she turned her head to regard him gravely.

"Eleven minutes," he said quietly.

"I heard," Honor replied, and took one hand from behind her to rub the tip of her nose. She glanced at the time readout in the corner of McKeon's command chair repeater plot, then gestured at the small icon that represented the convoy's projected arrival point.

"Ten minutes," she said softly, and McKeon nodded.

"Ten minutes," he agreed. "And Bandit One's not going to be able to range on them before they hyper back out."

"We also serve who run away," Honor replied with a small smile, and McKeon surprised them both with a genuine chuckle.

But his moment of humor was short lived, and his eyes returned to the plot as if drawn by magnetism. Prince Adrian's effort to lure Bandit One away from the convoy's translation point had worked, but it had also demonstrated just how much firepower the Peeps had deployed to ambush them. In addition to the four ships Metcalf had originally picked up, she and her recon drones had since located five more, including three destroyers, a light cruiser, and what could only be a battlecruiser. None of the additional units she'd picked up had any chance of overhauling Prince Adrian, but their sheer numbers and the fact that they were trying to overtake her said ominous things about the person who'd set this ambush up. Whoever was in command over there had positioned his ships with such care that even with her early detection, Prince Adrian would have found it all but impossible to evade all of them.

Having done that, the enemy commander obviously intended to bring all the strength he could to bear. He wanted not equality or a simple advantage in firepower but a crushing superiority, and where many a CO would have given up and whistled his rearmost units back to their initial positions, this one had done nothing of the sort. The numbers said they would never catch Prince Adrian, but those numbers didn't include the possibility that the Manticoran ship might be damaged in the coming clash with Bandit One, now bearing down on her from starboard. If Adrian took heavy impeller damage or some other freak hit, or even if she was simply forced to turn sharply away from her opponent, one or more of the trailers might conceivably get into range to engage her yet. The odds against it were long, but this character was going to keep coming with everything he had for as long as there was the smallest conceivable chance that it might do him some good, and that was a most un-Peep-like attitude.

McKeon drew his eyes from the plot and looked back at his commodore, and his lips tightened. He hesitated a moment, and then leaned close to her.

"Honor, will you please get out of here and into a rescue suit?" he demanded in a voice pitched too low for anyone else to hear but still harsh with concern.

She gazed at him with dark, chocolate-brown eyes, and he felt his teeth trying to grind together at her calm expression and quizzically arched eyebrow. She reached up to rub Nimitz’s ears, and the 'cat pressed against her fingers. McKeon needed no link to Nimitz to know the 'cat's deep, anxious purr urged Honor to take his advice, but she seemed as unmoved by Nimitz’s advice as by McKeon’s.

"I need to be here," she said mildly, and McKeon inhaled sharply. Part of him wanted to grab her by the scruff of the neck, haul her physically off the bridge, and hand her over to his Marines with orders to stuff her into a suit for her own good. The fact that any such attempt on his part would end in a swift and humiliating fiasco made it no less attractive... only impractical. Even assuming LaFollet didn't take his head off for laying hands on Steadholder Harrington, Honor herself could tie him up in a bow anytime she felt like it, and they both knew it. But commodore and steadholder or not, he wanted her off his command deck before they entered Bandit One's range, because neither she nor any other human member of her party had brought their skinsuits with them when they came over from Alvarez.

Navy and Marine skinsuits weren't something which could be ordered off the rack. They had to be very carefully fitted to their wearers, indeed, "fitted" was a barely adequate word, for in many respects they were custom built to suit the individual for whom they were intended. Other vacuum gear, like the heavy hardsuits that construction crews wore or the clumsy rescue suits which were part of any ship's lifesaving gear, could be worn by almost anyone but had limited utility. Hardsuits, for instance, were basically small, independent spacecraft designed for extended deep-space use or handling cargo in depressurized holds. They literally wouldn't fit into the internal spaces of a starship, and while rescue suits could be worn almost anywhere, they were little more than emergency environmental envelopes designed to be towed around by rescue crews.

In many respects, Honor and her party would have been better off aboard a civilian transport, for interstellar law required commercial ships to carry sufficient suits for all passengers. Sheer cost, not to mention the need for fitting time, made it impossible for liners to provide that many skinsuits, so passenger suits were a cross between a rescue suit and a skinsuit, almost a throwback to the clumsy suits of the early first-century Post Diaspora, though considerably less bulky. Even they would have been unsuitable for long-term wear, and their old-fashioned gloves lacked the miniaturized, biofeedback servomechs which made it possible for a skinsuited individual to thread a needle even in vacuum, but they were infinitely preferable to a rescue suit.

Unfortunately, Prince Adrian's equipment list didn't include any of them. Rescue suits were provided for those cases in which people were temporarily separated from their personal equipment, but the Navy assumed naval perso

"Look," McKeon said now, still careful to keep his voice low, "you're not the only one who's going to die if we lose pressure here." He twitched his head at Venizelos and LaFollet, who were busy ignoring the conversation. "They're not suited up, either."

Something flickered in those dark brown eyes, and Honor turned to look at her subordinates. LaFollet seemed to feel her gaze, for he looked up and met it levelly, and her eyes flicked back to McKeon.