In Enemy Hands

Chapter Seventeen

Honor managed to keep the exultation out of her expression, yet she felt as if the entire universe had just been lifted from her shoulders. An echo of her own enormous relief flowed into her from the rest of Prince Adrian's bridge crew as the convoy blinked safely back into hyperspace, and she turned her head to exchange a satisfied look with McKeon. Now all they had to do was deal with the one enemy between them and escape, and while anything could happen in a deep space engagement, Honor was more than willing to take her chances in an eleven-minute, maximum range ru

An alarm buzzed harshly, and her head snapped around to the tactical station as a brilliant red icon glared in Metcalf's main display, thirty degrees off Prince Adrian's port bow but accelerating to cross her base course.

"New unidentified contact!" Surprise sharpened the tac officers voice. "Designate this contact Bandit Ten. She must've been holding her accel down to hide from us," Metcalf continued, but then her tone changed as initial surprise gave way to puzzlement. "Skipper, CIC calls it a Sword-class cruiser from its impeller signature and emissions fingerprint, but there's something wrong with the drive numbers."

"What d'you mean, 'wrong'?" McKeon demanded.

"She's not accelerating nearly fast enough for the amount of energy she's radiating," Metcalf replied. "She should be turning up at least five KPS-squared with that strong a drive signature, and she's barely making a good four and a quarter."

McKeon frowned, but he had much more to worry about than an unexplained drive ambiguity, and he shook that concern aside to concentrate on more pressing ones.

"Assume constant accelerations and headings and project time to missile range and our time to the hyper limit," he said crisply.

"Aye, aye, Sir." Metcalf's hands danced across her panel while McKeon frowned down at his plot. Honor frowned at it, as well, but she also gnawed the inside of her lip, for she could think of at least one all too likely reason for the Peep's low acceleration.

"On the assumptions you specified, Skipper, we're thirty-one minutes from the limit," Metcalf reported after several seconds. "The missile geometry will give Bandit Ten a maximum powered engagement range of just under eight million klicks, and we'll enter her envelope in seventeen and a half minutes. Assuming our course and accel remain constant, but she alters to maximize her engagement time, she can stay with us all the way to the limit, call it thirteen-point-five minutes from the time she opens fire."

"Can we avoid her?"

"Negative, Sir. We can reduce her engagement window, but we can't stay out of her reach. And she's positioned herself just about perfectly, Skip. With her coming in high from the left and Bandit One coming in from starboard and low, she's got us boxed. The further away from her we stay, the closer we come to Bandit One. As it is, we'll be in range of both of them simultaneously for at least eleven minutes."

"I see." McKeon rubbed his jaw, then punched numbers into his plot. He considered them briefly, tried another combination, and looked up at Honor. "Gerry's right, Ma'am," he said quietly. "We're between Scylla and Charybdis. I can reduce Bandit Ten's engagement window to a maximum of ten minutes, but only if I increase Bandit One's to a minimum of fifteen. Or I can leave Bandit One at eleven minutes and accept the thirteen-plus-minute engagement from Bandit Ten."

Honor nodded and gripped her hands together behind her. She pursed her lips for a moment, then sighed.

"You do realize the most likely explanation for Bandit Ten's low observed accel, of course," she said.

"Missile pods," McKeon replied grimly.

"Probably," Honor agreed. She gazed at her old friend for several seconds, but she said nothing more. She might be the commodore of CruRon Eighteen, but Alistair McKeon was the captain of HMS Prince Adrian. The responsibility for what happened to his ship was his, and so was the decision on how he fought her. Honor was as aware as McKeon that many flag officers would have refused to admit that in their own desperate need to do something, but this was no squadron-level decision, for there was no squadron. There was only Prince Adrian, on her own in a single-ship engagement, and even if she hadn't been, Honor had complete faith in Alistair McKeon's judgment. She would not insult him by interfering with his orders or second-guessing his decisions, and she saw a flicker of gratitude in his eyes before he turned back to his officers.

"Chief Harris, roll us a hundred degrees to starboard but maintain heading and acceleration," he told his helmsman crisply, and then swiveled his chair to face Metcalf. "From his accel, Bandit Ten is probably towing missile pods, Gerry, but Bandit One's accel has been too high for that all along. We could cut Ten's engagement time by altering course to starboard and diving away from him, but there's not much point. Ten minutes or thirteen, he's still going to get his initial salvo off, and there's nothing we can do about it, but Bandit One's probably got more sustained missile capacity. So we'll stay low, take Ten's best punch, and keep as far from One as we can for as long as we can."

"Understood, Sir," Metcalf replied tensely.

"Well, she's made up her mind," Helen Zachary said softly. The Manticoran cruiser had rolled ship, turning the belly of her wedge to Katana, and her EW had come online. With the enemy accelerating steadily towards Katana, the theoretical maximum powered range of the bigger, more powerful missiles in Zachary's pods was on the order of eight and a half million kilometers, but the Manty’s ECM and decoys would reduce their effective range to barely seven million. That should still be enough, however.

"What do you mean, 'made up her mind'?" Kuttner demanded. "He hasn't done a thing except bring up his EW. He certainly hasn't altered course!"

"No, she hasn't," Zachary agreed. "And she's not going to. Her original heading will expose her to a total of just under twenty-five minutes of fire: thirteen and a half from us, and eleven from Nuada. Any course alteration would decrease the engagement window for one of us, but only by increasing it for the other. She's playing the odds, but notice the fact that she's rolled ship away from us."

"So what?" Kuttner asked, and Zachary managed not to sigh.

"By rolling her port sidewall away from us, Sir, she rolls it towards Citizen Captain Turner. It doesn't give him a very good shot, but it gives him a better one than it gives us, and she's also staying low, keeping the belly of her wedge towards us. In other words, she's more worried about protecting herself from our fire than Nuada's, which suggests she's figured out we're towing pods." Zachary shook her head. "I told you that was a sharp customer over there, Citizen Commissioner."

Seconds dragged on Prince Adrian's bridge even as the digital time displays raced downward. There was no brilliant, last-minute maneuver this time. The elements of the equation were brutally clear, and most of Prince Adrian's officers had seen Allied missile pods in action. They knew what was coming, and the only real question was how many missiles Bandit Ten had available. Oh, it also mattered how good they were, and when the Peeps would choose to fire them, but if Bandit Ten had enough of them, quality and timing became secondary. Even under ideal conditions, EW could expect to fool only so many missiles. Those that got through would have to be intercepted by active defenses, and there was, quite simply, an absolute upper limit to the number of targets Prince Adrian's defensive fire control and weapons could handle before they became saturated. And without her squadron mates to lend their weight to her defensive fire, that number was lower than Alistair McKeon or Honor Harrington wanted to think about.