Echoes Of Honor

"You should be a little cautious about surprising your CO that way just before a battle, Warner!" She shook her head. "I'd actually forgotten the date."

"Well, you have been a bit busy for the last couple of years," he pointed out, "and I figure the Committee of Public Safety is going to be more than a little bit put out when it discovers how you've been spending your time. But it does seem appropriate somehow to kick some 'Peep' butt as an a

"So it does," she agreed, and he smiled at her again, then turned and headed back for his own station. She watched him go, then gave herself another bemused little shake and looked back at her plot.

You're so right, Warner, she thought. I do owe these people an "a

She pushed that thought back into its mental cubbyhole. One thing at a time, girl, she told herself. One thing at a time.

Seth Chernock was a much more experienced interstellar traveler than his colleague Citizen Major General Thornegrave. As a general rule, he rather enjoyed such trips. Unlike many of his fellow StateSec officers, he was a cerebral type, a man who treasured the chance to catch up on his reading, to think and ponder, and he was accustomed to turning what others saw as boredom into profitable—and enjoyable—time in which to do just that.

But there were times he agreed with his colleagues, and this was one of them. Not that he could call the slow, dragging approach to Hades boring, precisely. It was hard to feel bored when the acid of fury and the chill of a fear one couldn't quite suppress, however hard one tried, gnawed at one's stomach lining. Besides, this was a time for action, not thought. Thinking was what had alerted him to the problem and brought him here, but what he wanted now was vengeance.

He checked the time display. Another eleven minutes. And whoever was in control on Hades had begun to figure out what Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman had in mind, he thought with cold, vicious pleasure. They were still trying to bluff, but their "com officers" had grown increasingly nervous, questioning the task group's vector and asking for clarification of its intentions. They'd been doing that for the better part of two hours now, and at first, Yearman had dictated a series of glib responses, each of which had seemed to ease their minds a bit, at least temporarily. But for the last twenty minutes, the citizen rear admiral had simply ignored their transmissions, and the bastards had to be becoming frantic.

Good, he thought coldly. You go right ahead and sweat it, you pricks. You've killed my friend—I'm sure of it now—and for that, I'm going to kill you. So enjoy the minutes you've got left!

"Seven minutes to vector cross, Ma'am," Warner Caslet reported, and Honor nodded. They were right on one-point-three million klicks short of the invisible spot in space she had named "Point Trafalgar," and there was no sign that the enemy had noticed them yet. The capabilities of Peep electronic warfare systems were limited compared to those mounted in Allied ships, but her people were using the ones they had for all they were worth. And given the fact that their sensor hardware, active and passive alike, was identical to that of their opponents, they had a very clear idea of what the Peeps might be in a position to see. So far, the strength of the radar pulses being picked up by their threat receivers remained well below detection values, and unless something changed, they should stay that way until the range had dropped to no more than eight hundred thousand kilometers.

And my estimate of their flight path was just about on the money, too, she reflected. In fact, the intercept she was about to achieve would be a far better one than she'd dared hope for. With only minimal steering burns to adjust her own trajectory, her ships would split the interval between the two Peep forces almost exactly in half: seven hundred and seventy k-klicks from the lead force, and seven hundred and thirty from the trailer. She smiled at the thought, but then her smile faded as she raised her head and looked around her bridge once more.

So far, her plan appeared to be working almost perfectly. That was rare enough to make her automatically suspicious, with the irrational certainty that Murphy's Law had to be waiting to strike and she simply couldn't see it. But even if everything continued to go perfectly, she was very badly outnumbered by the Peeps' firepower, and her people were still hardly what she could call a well-drilled, efficient fighting force.

And most of us don't have skinsuits, either, she thought, then smiled once more, grimly. This seems to be becoming a habit for me. I suppose I'd better see about breaking it.

She snorted at the thought, and Nimitz laughed quietly with her in the back of her mind. Not that it was actually all that humorous. But since there was nothing she could do about it, she might as well laugh. It beat crying over it, at any rate!

The problem was that skinsuits, whether Peep or Allied, were essentially custom built for their intended wearers. They were permanently assigned equipment, and modifying one to fit someone else was a daunting task even for a fully equipped maintenance and service depot. But Hell didn't have an M&S depot for skinsuits, because it had never needed one. Her available techs had done the best they could, but they'd been able to fit no more than thirty-five percent of her crewmen; the remainder wore only their uniforms. If one of the Peep ships took a hit and lost pressure in a compartment, the people in it who survived the initial hit would survive the pressure loss; if one of her ships took a hit and lost pressure, two-thirds of the people in the compartment would die... messily.

And frantically though Alistair McKeon, Andrew LaFollet, and Horace Harkness had searched, they had not turned up a single Peep skinsuit designed for a one-armed woman a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall.

Despite her friends' anxiety, Honor was almost relieved that they'd failed. It was irrational, no doubt, but she preferred to share the risks of the people under her command, and she would have felt unbearably guilty if she'd been suited and they hadn't. And there was another point, as well—one she had chosen not to look too closely at even in the privacy of her own mind. Nimitz's custom-designed suit had been confiscated by StateSec and lost with Tepes, and he had no emergency life-support module. If pressure was lost, the 'cat would die, and the part of her mind Honor had decided not to examine shied like a frightened animal from the thought of not dying with him.

Nimitz made a small, soft sound, crooning to her as he sensed the darker tide buried deep in her emotions. He might not understand its cause—in fact, she hoped he didn't—but he tasted it in her and snuggled his muzzle more firmly into her tunic while his love flowed into her.

"We'll be coming up on our firing point in five minutes, Sir," Citizen Rear Admiral Yearman reported. "Do you wish to offer them a chance to surrender, or should I simply open fire?"

Chernock cocked his head and smiled at the Navy officer. Yearman had clearly accepted his own conclusions about what had happened on Hades, even if neither of them had the slightest idea of how the prisoners had pulled it off. And he'd become increasingly, if quietly, bloodthirsty as his ships headed in and the people on the ground kept lying to him.

"I believe Citizen Secretary Saint-Just and the Treasury would probably appreciate it if we could talk them into surrendering, Citizen Admiral," the SS general said wryly. "I doubt that they will, though. And if they don't, you can go ahead and blast holes in their defenses to your heart's content, and the Treasury will just have to live with its unhappiness over replacing the destroyed equipment."