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Of course, she thought wryly, she's probably had one helluva lot more experience dealing with primitive sexists than I ever have! There's probably quite a few of them in her own family, for that matter.
She snorted at her own reflections, and checked the time.
Nine hours since the remote arrays had first detected the intruders, and so far, everything was ticking along right on schedule.
"Ma'am, I think you should look at this," Helen said after rechecking her data twice, very carefully. It had come out stubbornly the same each time, however preposterous it seemed.
"What is it?" Lieutenant Commander Kaplan said.
"The Alpha-Twenty array just picked Bogey One back up, Ma'am. It got a good look at her, too, and I don't think she's exactly what anyone's been expecting."
Kaplan looked up from the missile attack profile she'd been reviewing and turned until she could see Helen's plot. She'd had Helen monitoring the sensor arrays-largely to give her something to do, Helen suspected. But now she looked at the data codes and the library entry sidebar CIC had thrown up on the plot at Helen's request, and her eyebrows rose.
"Well, Ms. Zilwicki," she said dryly, "I see you have a true Gryphon's gift for understatement."
She studied the display for another few moments, and Helen watched her as unobtrusively as possible.
The data had come in on a laser, not FTL, to insure that the bogeys didn't pick anything up, so it was several minutes old. But that didn't matter for ID purposes, and after a moment, the TO shook her head and reached for her com key. She pressed it and waited two or three seconds until a voice spoke in her own earbug.
"Captain speaking."
"Sir, it's Kaplan. We just got a positive relocation on Bogey One. She's right where we'd expected her to be, and the array got a pretty good look at her. Ms. Zilwicki-" she gave Helen a quick smile and a wink that made her feel astonishingly good "-patched the data through to CIC, and we have a tentative identification."
"And?" Terekhov asked when she paused.
"Skipper, according to CIC, this is a Mars -class heavy cruiser."
"A Peep?"
There was something in the Captain's voice. A sharper edge, or a pause. A fleeting break, perhaps. Something. But Kaplan couldn't quite put her finger on it, whatever it was. And if she'd actually heard it at all, it had disappeared by his next sentence.
"CIC is confident of that?" he asked.
"Reasonably, Sir. They're still calling it tentative, but I think that's just ingrained caution. There is one weird thing about it, though, Skipper. The sensor array crossed astern of Bogey One, right through her stealth field's keyhole, and got a read on her emissions. That's how we were able to ID her. But according to CIC's analysis of the neutrino data, this ship appears to have the old Goshawk-Three fusion plants."
"Goshawk -Three? "
"Yes, Sir. And according to ONI, their yards upgraded to the Goshawk -Four at the construction stage with the third flight for the class, and they've systematically updated the surviving older members of the class-there aren't many of them left-since the armistice. There were some serious design flaws in the Goshawk-Three, and the Four not only corrected those but boosted output by over fifteen percent, so they've made a real effort to upgrade across the fleet. According to ONI, they shouldn't have any of the old Threes left."
"That's... very interesting, Guns." Terekhov's voice was slow and thoughtful. He was silent for a few moments, then said, "There's no indication that they picked up the array as it passed?"
"None that I can see, Sir. They're still just drifting along, exactly the way they were. That's a very stealthy array, Skipper, and we've got the grav-pulse transmitters locked down on all the platforms. I think it's extremely unlikely they've seen a thing yet."
"Agreed," he said. "All right, Guns. Thanks for the update."
"We strive to keep the customer satisfied, Skipper." Kaplan heard him chuckle as she cut the circuit, and she smiled herself, then looked back across at Helen.
"That was good work, Ms. Zilwicki. Very good work, indeed." Which , she didn't add aloud, is why I made certain the Skipper knew who did it in the first place .
"Thank you, Ma'am," Helen said. And , she didn't add aloud, thanks for telling the Captain I did it.
Aivars Terekhov's forced chuckle faded, and he returned his eyes to the book viewer, but he didn't really see it. His mind-and memories-were too busy. Too... chaotic.
A Peep. He remembered FitzGerald's earlier comment and shook his head. No Havenite warship should be this far from home. Not the next best thing to a thousand light-years from the Haven System.
He closed his eyes and rubbed them hard, trying to massage his brain into working, but it obstinately refused. It was trapped, caught in a hideous fragment of memory, watching the Mars -class cruisers rolling to present their broadsides. Watching that hurricane of death sweeping out towards HMS Defiant . His nostrils remembered the stench of blazing insulation and burning flesh, the screams of the wounded and dying, and a memory of maiming agony-a memory of the soul, deeper than bone and sinew-rolled through him. And the faces. The faces he'd known so well and condemned to the death he'd somehow cheated.
He inhaled deeply, fighting for control, and a soft soprano voice spoke suddenly.
" It's over ," Sinead said. " It's over ."
He exhaled explosively, blue eyes opening to gaze across the cabin at the bulkhead portrait. He felt her head on his shoulder, her breath in his ear, and the demon-memory retreated, banished by her presence.
A flush of shame burned dully over his face, and his right fist clenched on the book viewer. He hadn't realized his armor was that thin, hadn't dreamed it could hit him so hard, so suddenly. An icy stab of fear cut through the heat of his shame like a chill razor at the abrupt thought of what might have happened if it had slammed him that way in the middle of an engagement.
But it didn't, he told himself fiercely. It didn't. And it won't. It was the surprise, the unexpectedness. I can handle it, now that I know what's coming.
He stood up, laying the book viewer on the cushion of the huge, comfortable chair Sinead had picked out for him, and walked across to stand in front of her portrait, looking into her eyes.
I won't let that happen again, he promised her.
I know you won't , her green eyes said, and he nodded to her. Then he turned away, watching his right hand-his regenerated right hand-as he poured fresh coffee from the carafe Joa
He took the coffee back to his chair, moved the book viewer, and sat back down.
His mind was begi
His experiences at Hyacinth had left him with a fiery, burning need to know all there was to know about the ships which had slaughtered his division and his convoy. He'd haunted ONI, trading ruthlessly on his "war hero" status, until he'd learned the names of the task force commander and each of his squadron COs. He'd learned the enemy order of battle, which ships his people had destroyed, which they'd damaged. And in the process, he'd learned even more about the enemy's hardware than he'd known before the battle. Including the reason the Goshawk-Three had been retired with such indecent haste when the follow-on generation of fusion plants had become available.
The Goshawk-Three, like the heavy cruisers and battlecruisers in which it had originally been mounted, had been a typical product of the prewar Peep tech base: big, powerful, and crude. Unable to match the sophistication of the Star Kingdom, the People's Republic had relied on hardware designed for brute strength and far shorter intervals between overhauls, but the Goshawk-Three had been unusually crude, even for the Peeps. It had represented a transitional phase between their prewar hardware and the more sophisticated designs they'd managed to produce later, courtesy of Solarian tech transfers. It had been substantially more efficient than its predecessors, producing almost twice the output for a bare ten percent increase in size. But it had reduced the redundancy of its failsafes to save mass... and ended up with what turned out to be an extremely dangerous glitch in the containment bottle. At least two ships had suffered catastrophic containment failure in parking orbit under standby power levels. No one, the Peeps included, knew how many other ships had been killed by the combination of the same design fault and combat damage, but the number had undoubtedly been far higher than that.
So why should the Peeps send an obsolete ship, with notoriously unreliable power plants, a thousand light-years from home? Of all the people who might wish the Star Kingdom ill, the Republic of Haven had the least to gain from destabilizing the Talbott a
Yet it appeared that they'd done precisely that, and try as he might, Aivars Terekhov couldn't think of a single explanation for the decision that made any sense at all.
But even as he tried to think of one, another thought was ru
A Mars — class. Another Mars -class. And no light cruiser to kill it with, this time.
Oh no, not this time.