Gavin Bledsoe swore softly as the nearest LAC altered course. The vector projection showed the warship's new heading bringing him within a mere forty thousand klicks of the ore carrier, yet that wasn't what had drawn Bledsoe's curse. He and his crew had accepted from the beginning that the screen would figure out where the missiles had come from after the fact, and they'd never had any hope of outrunning the apostate's retribution. But a course change this soon meant the LAC must have detected the launch, and the shipkillers' low acceleration would give the screen far too long to engage them.
Yet there was nothing he could do about it, and he closed his eyes, apologizing to God for his profanity before he offered a silent prayer of dedication... and for victory.
Honor's warning hit the screen and the yachts' crews like a thunderbolt. Had it come from anyone else, many of the officers involved would have discounted the absurd alarm. Even knowing who'd sounded it, disbelief held them all for precious seconds. But then trained reactions shook off the paralysis, and tac officers aboard the screening LACs swung their own sensors to the indicated bearing, searching frantically while point defense systems sprang from standby to ready status.
But they couldn't see the targets! There was nothing there... except...
"Well, Alf?" Lieutenant Hines snapped, and the tac officer shrugged.
"Skip, I can't find the bastards!" Willis said desperately. "I— Wait!" He stabbed a key, then swore savagely. "I thought I had it for a second, Skip, but it's too damned faint a signal—nothing but a frigging ghost! I can't get anything solid enough for a lock!"
"Shit!" Hines glared at his plot, then looked at the helmsman. "Close the son-of-a-bitch who launched them, Allen," he grated through barred teeth.
Honor swung Candless' nose, bringing her bow sensors to bear on the ghosts without any interfering wedge, and her strong-boned face was carved from stone as her plot refused to hold them. She'd never seen anything like it. Never imagined anything like it. Not in what was obviously an attack bird of some sort. The bogies were coming in very slowly, at little more than the acceleration to be expected from a long-endurance recon drone, and they obviously incorporated heavy stealth capabilities to conceal their low-powered wedges. Her sensors probably had a better look at them than any of the LACs in the screen, for she was only a few hundred klicks off the flank of Grayson One's impeller wedge, and the incoming birds were obviously targeted on one or both of the yachts. But even looking straight at them, with her bow sensors against the deepest, most easily detected portion of their wedges, she still couldn't get a solid lock. Not the kind point defense needed.
She punched more keys, routing her sensor readouts direct to the screen command ship, and her brain raced.
They had to be some sort of specially configured drone. Nothing else was that slow and long ranged. But where had it come from? The Alliance didn't have anything like it, and neither did the Peeps, so who had built it? And what was it doing here?
She shook her head impatiently, brushing off the extraneous questions. What mattered was what they were and how to stop them, not where they'd come from.
Low as their acceleration rates were compared to missiles, they were still much too high for any manned vessel to keep away from. Worse, they were coming in silent, with no active targeting emissions. That meant they were homers and, presumably, that they'd been homing from the moment of launch, but how could they be doing that? They'd been launched from outside the screen, and their tracks had taken them within less than five hundred klicks of one of Intrepid's sister ships, so why hadn't their seeking systems locked onto the LAC instead of the yachts? A LAC didn't look a lot like Grayson One or Queen Adrienne, but at that close a range, its impeller signature ought to have utterly blotted out the yachts' signatures. At the very least the things should have lost lock temporarily and been forced to reacquire it, but that obviously hadn't happened.
And the fact that they were coming in silent made stopping them exponentially more difficult. They were already far stealthier than any missile ought to be, and their lack of active sensors deprived the missile defense officers of any active emissions to track. They could see the missiles only in glimpses, no more than brief flashes before those damnably efficient ECM systems blanked them out again, and that wasn't enough. Not against a target as hard to kill as a missile or drone protected by its own wedge.
Countermissiles streaked out, but that only complicated the problem. The fantastically over-powered countermissiles were even less effective than their mother ships'. Worse, their wedges and emissions could be picked up... and blotted out even the feeble ghost returns Honor had managed to detect.
She started to bark an order, but the screen commander had already seen what she had, and his own order beat her to it. The countermissiles vanished from her plot as the LACs which had launched them sent the self-detonation commands, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she managed to find the missiles again.
They were closer, and her mouth dried as the time to attack range counter spun downward on her HUD. Some of the LACs were firing their own point defense clusters, though the range was long for those weapons, and even their grasers at their best-guess positions on the missiles, but they had virtually no chance of hitting them. Grayson One and Queen Adrienne were also responding, turning away from the threat and rolling ship in an effort to interpose their wedges. Neither yacht carried any armament, but both were equipped with comprehensive EW fits, and their electronic defenses sprang to life. Yet there was little for those defenses to defend against, for the silently pursuing killers radiated no active targeting systems to be jammed, and they seemed utterly oblivious to the efforts to confuse them with decoys.
Major Francis Ney's head jerked up as Duchess Harrington's warning crackled from his earbug, and he punched a quick code into his personal com, dropping his earbug into the bridge circuits. It took him a few moments to realize what was happening. When he did, his face went pale, but he was already wheeling to throw open the stateroom hatch even as he snapped orders to his staff and the startled ministers.
Cromarty and Hodges seemed confused, but Prestwick and Earl Gold Peak were much quicker on the uptake. Fear flickered in their eyes, but they refused to panic, and the Chancellor and Foreign Secretary grabbed their colleagues and began hustling them down the passageway beyond the hatch. Ney grabbed Calvin Henke, the earl's son, by the collar and dragged him through the hatch behind them. Henke fought him for a moment, trying to break away and get the rest of the staffers out of the stateroom, but Ney was much stronger—and nastier—than Lord Henke. A three-fingered jab to the solar plexus did the job quite nicely, and he scooped the suddenly paralyzed nobleman up in a fireman's carry as he jogged down the passageway behind the ministers.
The life pod hatches sprang open as the ministers turned the final bend, and two of Ney's assistants were waiting. They threw their charges into the pods, slammed the hatches, and armed the eject sequence, and then they simply stood there, staring at Ney while their chests heaved with exertion.
He stared back, and his brain whirred. Part of him wanted to launch the pods now, but if those were laser heads and the people who'd launched them had anticipated such a move, the slow pods would be sitting ducks, despite their armor. Better to leave them where they were. A laser head would shred the unarmored yacht like tissue, but the small, well-armored life pods would have an excellent chance of surviving. Ney and his people, none of whom were in skinsuits, would not, but it was the best chance the men they were sworn to protect had. But if it was an old-fashioned contact nuke...