"I envy you that, Harry," Margaret Fuchien said softly.
"Missile range in twenty-one minutes," Jennifer Hughes announced. "Assuming constant accelerations, we'll enter energy range thirteen-point-five minutes after that."
Honor nodded once more and keyed her com.
"DCC, Lewis," the woman on her screen said, and Honor smiled crookedly.
"I don't want to joggle Commander Tschu's elbow, but I'd like to confirm his latest estimate on the cargo doors."
"Current estimate is..." Ginger glanced at the chrono and did some mental math "...thirty-nine minutes, Ma'am."
"Thank you," Honor said quietly, and killed the circuit. So there it was. The pods would come back on-line just as the Peeps closed to energy range anyway. But there was nothing Honor could do about that. All she could do was continue to run as long as possible, drawing the Peeps after her, buying Artemis time, and she prepared to play the game out to its final, hopeless throw.
"We'll go with Alpha-One," she said. "Rafe, tell all hands, seal helmets in ten minutes."
A curiously shrunken Klaus Hauptman stepped onto Artemis' bridge. The people clustered around the plot looked up at him, and his face clenched as he saw Sukowski's arm around Stacey. He should have been the one to comfort his daughter. But he'd forfeited that right, he thought drearily, when he proved himself so much less than she'd always thought he was in her eyes.
And in his own.
He crossed to the plot, making his gaze meet theirs. It was almost an act of penance, an ordeal deliberately inflicted upon himself and embraced. Fuchien and Sukowski nodded to him, their expressions neutral, but neither spoke, and Stacey never even looked at him.
"How soon?" he asked, and his normally powerful, confident voice was frayed and rough.
"Sixteen minutes to missile range, Sir," Annabelle Ward replied.
"All right, Steve," Abraham Jurgens told his flagship captain. "I don't want to get in close until we're sure their teeth have been pulled."
"Aye, Citizen Commodore." Citizen Captain Stephen Holtz looked at his repeater plot and frowned. The Q-ship was putting out some damned effective decoys. Her EW was starting to play games with his sensors, too, and hypers natural sensor degradation made her efforts even more effective than usual, but he was five thousand kilometers inside the powered missile envelope.
Under normal conditions, he would have turned to open his broadside, but these weren't normal conditions. He had his own EW systems fully on-line, and the same conditions which hurt his fire control had to be hurting the Q-ship's, as well. Under the circumstances, it actually made sense to keep the vulnerable throat of his wedge towards the enemy, for it gave the Manty a weaker, fuzzier target than his sidewalls and the full length of his wedge would have.
Of course, it also restricted him only to the three tubes of his bow chasers, but that was all right. He wanted to sting the bastard, goad him. If he could get the Q-ship to fire off any pods it might have at extreme range, his point defense would be far more effective... and the Manty's target would be far harder to hit.
"Missile separation!" Jennifer Hughes announced. "I have two, no, three inbound. Time of flight one-seven-zero seconds. Stand by point defense."
"Standing by," Lieutenant Jansen replied.
"Spread Decoys Four and Five a little wider, Carol," Hughes said. "Lets see if we can pull these birds off high."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Wolcott made an adjustment on her panel, and Honor reached up to check Nimitz. Like her, the 'cat had his helmet sealed, and he'd secured the safety straps mounted on her chair to the snap rings on his suit. It wasn't as good as a shock frame, but no one made treecat-sized shock frames.
"Impact in niner-zero seconds," Jansen announced, and pressed the key that sent his countermissiles out to meet the incoming fire.
"They've killed the birds, Skipper," Holtz's tac officer reported as the third missile tore apart. None of them had even gotten as deep as the Q-ship's inner boundary laser defenses, Holtz noted in disgust. Well, it wasn't all that surprising, and at least their damned pod-launched missiles hadn't come back to kill his ship.
"Any sign at all of missile pods?"
"None, Citizen Captain. No return fire at all." Holtz knew Citizen Commander Pacelot was irritated with him for asking the obvious whenever she called him "Citizen Captain" instead of "Skipper." He grimaced, but he couldn't really blame her. He considered a moment longer, then nodded.
"All right. Let's go to sequenced fire, Helen."
"Aye, Skipper," she said, much more cheerfully, and punched the new commands into her console.
Honor's eyes narrowed as the Peeps' firing patterns changed. The battlecruiser was using her three bow-mounted tubes to fire the equivalent of a double broadside. It doubled the interval between incoming salvos and gave point defense longer to track, but it also increased the threat sources and allowed the battlecruiser to seed her fire with jammers and other penetration aids. Honor understood the logic behind that; what she didn't understand was why the Peeps were restricting themselves solely to their chasers. They had twenty tubes in each broadside and far higher acceleration. They could slalom back and forth across Wayfarer's wake, hammering her with salvos from each broadside in turn, and send in six times as many missiles in each wave.
She frowned, then dropped her suit com into Cardones' private channel.
"Why do you think he's sticking to his chasers?" she asked, and Cardones rubbed the top of his helmet.
"He's probing," he said. "This reduces the target he's offering to us, and he's trying to get a feel for what we can shoot back at him with."
"Which is nothing at all," Honor observed quietly, and Cardones gave her a lopsided grin.
"Hey, you can't have everything, Skipper."
"True," she said with an affectionate smile. "But I think it might be a little more than that." Cardones raised his eyebrows, and she shrugged. "More than just probing. He had us on gravitics when we killed his consort, but he was too far out to see how we did it. He's probably deduced we had to have used missile pods, and he may be trying to goad us into firing off any we have left at extreme range."
"Makes sense," Cardones agreed after a moment, even as Lieutenant Jansen’s point defense dealt with the last missile of the most recent salvo. "Of course, he's going to be figuring out pretty soon that we don't have any pods, or we would be shooting back."
Missiles continued to bore in on Wayfarer, racing up from astern in groups of six. Carolyn Wolcott’s decoys and jammers played merry hell with their onboard seekers once they went into final acquisition, and Jansen’s countermissiles and laser clusters picked them off with methodical precision. But the laws of chance are inexorable. Sooner or later, one of those missiles was bound to ignore the decoys, burn through the jammers, and evade the active defenses.