Not, she thought grimly, that it would make that much difference in the end.
"How soon can we break away?" she asked.
"Any time, Skip." Cardones' smile was as grim as she felt. "That boats not scheduled to come back. We're down to two pinnaces... and, of course, our life pods."
"Of course," Honor agreed with a ghost of true humor, then punched back into Damage Control Central.
"DCC, Senior Chief Lewis."
"Lewis? What are you doing down there?" Honor demanded in surprise.
"Commander Tschu has every warm body he can spare down in Cargo One, Ma'am, including Lieutenant Silvetti. I'm minding the store for them," Ginger said, deliberately misunderstanding her question, and Honor's lips quirked in a small, sad smile.
"All right, Senior Chief. Tell me how they're coming."
"The starboard motors are definitely frozen, Ma'am," Lewis said crisply. "They're completely shot; they'll need total replacement. Two of the port motors are still operable, and the third may be, but the entire control run's blown away between Frame Seven-Niner-Two and the stern plate. They're rigging new cable now, but they've got to clear wreckage to get it in, and two pods have come adrift from Number Four Rail. They'll have to get them tied down before they can even get at that portion of the problem."
"Time estimate?"
"Chief Engineer estimates a minimum of ninety minutes, Ma'am."
"Understood. Tell him to keep on it."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am."
Honor cut the circuit and looked at Jennifer Hughes.
"Time to enemy intercept?"
"Missile range in two hours five minutes."
"But she still has us only on gravitics?"
"At this range and under these conditions, that's all she can possibly have us on, Ma'am," Hughes said confidently.
"Very well." Honor turned to Cardones, who'd taken over Communications after Cousins' departure. "Rafe, get me Captain Fuchien on the main screen."
"Yes, Ma'am."
The two-meter com screen on the command deck's forward bulkhead lit. Fuchien's face was grim, her eyes haunted, but she nodded courteously.
"It's time, Captain," Honor told her in a voice whose calm surprised even her. Perhaps it surprised especially her. "Move your ship ahead of us. I want you in our impeller shadow when your drive goes down."
"Yes, Milady," Fuchien said quietly, and Honor looked over her shoulder. "Deploy the EW drone, Jenny."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am."
Artemis slid in front of Wayfarer once more, riding directly ahead of her, and Honor turned to Senior Chief Coxswain O'Halley.
"This is going to have to be smartly done, Chief," she told him quietly, and her helmsman nodded his understanding. Artemis was so close the safety perimeter of her impeller wedge cleared Wayfarer's by barely sixty kilometers. She had to be, if she was going to hide her own impellers from the Peep battlecruiser behind the Q-ship's, but Wayfarer was still accelerating at over a hundred gravities. The tiniest helm error on her part when Artemis' wedge went down and Honor executed her breakaway maneuver could bring her own wedge into direct contact with the liners hull, which would tear the other ship apart instantly.
"Understood, Ma'am," O'Halley said far more calmly than he could possibly feel, and Honor raised her eyes to the main plot, watching as Artemis settled exactly into the agreed upon position, then drew a deep breath and looked at Fuchien. "Good luck, Captain," she said.
"God bless, Milady," Fuchien said softly, and the two captains, each with eyes filled by the pain of what duty required of them, nodded to one another.
"Very well," Honor Harrington said crisply, turning back to her own bridge. "Execute!"
Chapter FORTY
Citizen Commodore Abraham Jurgens glared at the two light beads in his flag bridge plot. He'd known Marie Stellingetti and John Edwards well, known how good they'd been, and Achmed had had Kerebin on gravitics when the battlecruiser vanished. As far as Jurgens had been able to tell, she'd done everything right... yet she'd been destroyed, and he had no idea what the hell had happened. Nothing weaker than a starship’s impeller signature would have been detectable at that range, and all he knew was that Kerebin had suddenly gone to evasive maneuvering, then vanished.
It wasn't supposed to be like this! he thought savagely. Like many of the PN's officers, he hated the Royal Manticoran Navy for what it had done to them. He wasn't like that idiot Waters, who saw butchering even merchant spacers as his holy duty in the Republic’s cause, but he would shed no tears over them, either, and he'd seen the value of raiding Manty merchant shipping. He'd also expected it to be a relatively safe operation, yet half his battlecruiser division had just been wiped from the face of the universe, and he didn't even know how it had been done!
But you do know, don't you? he told himself. Or, at least, you know who must have done it. That extra "merchantman" has to be a Manty Q-ship. God only knows what it's doing here, and he's also the only one who knows what the hell it could be armed with to punch Kerebin out that way, but you know that's what it is.
He'd picked up enough information from Durandel as he passed to know Stellingetti’s "Target One" hadn't done the job; if it had that kind of firepower, it would have used it before Kerebin snuffed its destroyer consort. No, it had to have been the second ship, and that ship had a civilian-grade compensator, or it would have been running a hell of a lot faster than it was. So it had to be one of the Manties' "merchant cruisers," which meant it was far more fragile than his flagship. But it obviously carried something extraordinary in the way of armament, and the range had been eight hundred thousand kilometers when Kerebin died, well beyond energy range. More of their damned missile pods? he wondered. It could be, but how could a merchie put enough of them on tow? Even their SD’s are limited to ten or so, and that shouldn't have been enough to just wipe Kerebin out that way. But even if that was what they did to her, they never slowed down enough to deploy more of them, so they can't do it to me.
That was not his estimate alone. Citizen Captain Holtz, Achmed's CO, and his own ops officer shared it. Yet Jurgens had no intention of walking into anything. He would approach carefully, with every missile defense system on-line. He would treat this ship as cautiously as if it were another battlecruiser, even a battleship, until he knew for certain that it couldn't do to him whatever it had done to Kerebin. But once he was certain...
"Target One shouldn't have slowed down," Peoples Commissioner Aston said quietly.
Jurgens turned his head to look at the chubby man in the uniform with no rank insignia. By and large, the task force had been fortunate in its people's commissioners. Eloise Pritchart had been allowed a remarkably free hand in their selection, and aside from one or two fools who'd been forced on her by their own sponsors, like Frank Reidel, the sole survivor from Kerebin's entire company, most of them were surprisingly competent and unusually human. Kenneth Aston was both of those things, and Jurgens nodded.