Nor was he alone. Every Peep skipper in the Adler System realized what Prince Adrian had done, and their sulfurous reactions to the enormity of the prize they'd been sucked away from mirrored their admiral's. Aside from Nuada herself—and, of course, the hidden Katana—every ship which had been pursuing Prince Adrian swerved away to go after the convoy. Not because they had any realistic hope of intercepting it, but simply because they couldn't see that huge, glittering opportunity and not pursue it.
Captain Thomas Greentree stood at Lieutenant Commander Terracelli's shoulder, looking down at the tac officer's larger, more detailed plot. It would take a few minutes for Alvarez's sensors to sort things out, but in the meantime—
"Sir!" Greentree's turned quickly at his com officer's sudden, uncharacteristic exclamation. He started to open his mouth, but Lieutenant Chavez went right on speaking. "We're picking up a Flash Priority transmission from Lady Harrington, Sir!"
"Flash Priority?" Greentree repeated. "What does it say?"
"I don't know yet, Sir. It's FTL and it's still coming in. I—"
Chavez broke off, his eyes going wide, and Greentree made himself clamp his mouth shut. There was no point badgering the com officer with questions he couldn't answer yet, and despite many improvements over the crude original systems, the FTL com's one real drawback remained its slow data transmission rate. It could shoot pulses across light-minutes virtually instantaneously, but the time required to generate each pulse meant a simple declarative sentence could take as much as two full minutes to transmit. Which, of course, was why code groups were used. It was almost like a revision to the ancient wet-navy days of signal flags, when a flag could stand for a single letter of the alphabet or an entire sentence from the fleet's code book, and—
"Orders from the Flag, Captain," Chavez said, and Greentree felt his jaw clench as he noted the com officer's shaken tone and jerked his head for him to continue.
"The convoy is to reenter hyper and return to Clairmont immediately," Chavez said, and now his voice was flat and utterly toneless. "You are to assume command, Sir... and inform Admiral Sorbanne at Clairmont that the enemy has taken the Adler System."
"I'm to assume command?" Greentree heard his own voice asking the question before he could stop it, and Chavez nodded.
"Yes, Sir. And return to Clairmont with the convoy. Immediately."
"But what about Lady Harrington?" Terracelli blurted. Greentree turned to glare at him, but his heart wasn't in it, for the tac officer's question burned in his own mind.
"I—" Chavez paused and looked back down at his display where more clusters of alphanumeric characters had continued forming even as he spoke. His eyes flicked over them, and then he swallowed. "Prince Adrian is drawing the Peeps into pursuing her, Captain," he said in that same flat voice. "She will proceed independently to rejoin the squadron at Clairmont. And—" his tonelessness wavered, and he looked back up to meet Greentree's eyes "—the order to hyper back out is repeated, Sir. Twice."
Greentree stepped quickly to the lieutenant's side and gazed down at the display, and his lips were a thin, tight line. Chavez was right, and the captain's lips thinned still further as one final sentence spelled itself out very slowly, letter by letter.
"These orders are nondiscretionary, Thomas," it said, and his fists clenched. He looked up, meeting Chavez's eyes, and for just an instant he hovered on the brink of ordering the com officer to delete that final sentence from the message log. But he was a naval officer. However much his instincts might scream to go to Lady Harrington's assistance, he was a naval officer, responsible not just for himself but for all the ships of the squadron and all the merchantmen under their escort, and he had his orders.
"Sir," Lieutenant Commander Terracelli said into the silence, "I'm picking up incoming impeller signatures."
"How many?"
"At least five, Sir. Two are probably battlecruisers."
"How long?"
"Minimum of thirty-one minutes to extreme missile range for the closest, Sir."
"Thank you."
Greentree turned away, walked slowly back to his command chair, and lowered himself into it. Thirty-one minutes. It was plenty of time for the convoy to make its escape. Once back across into hyper, the grav wave they'd ridden to Adler would let them accelerate at thousands of gravities, and all his merchantmen were JNMTC ships. By the time the first Peep could translate in pursuit, they'd be too far down range for the Peeps even to track them, far less fire on them. All he had to do was abandon his commodore.
But he really had no choice, did he? He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked back at Chavez.
"General signal, Com," he rasped. "The convoy will reenter hyper in two minutes. Adrian," he didn't even look at his astrogator, "plot our course back to Clairmont and pass it to Lieutenant Chavez for transmission to all units. Santander will take point."
"There they go," Luchner said bitterly, and Zachary nodded in silent agreement. She shared his bitterness—a bitterness made all the worse because they'd figured out what was coming before it actually happened—but she also felt an unwilling professional admiration for the Manty cruiser skipper who'd sucked Nuada out of position to do anything about it. Not that she intended to let that stop her from destroying her opponent.
She watched the impeller signatures of the convoy vanish and raised her voice.
"How long were they in n-space, Tactical?"
"Approximately nine minutes, Citizen Captain, but their initial translation required over three minutes."
"Thank you," Zachary said absently, and looked at Luchner. "Not bad at all for a convoy that size, was it Fred?" Luchner shook his head, and she smiled thinly. "Well, now that they've put one over on us, let's just see if we can't give Ms. Cruiser a little surprise of her own. Pass the word to Engineering. I want maximum military power in four minutes."
Chapter Seventeen
Honor managed to keep the exultation out of her expression, yet she felt as if the entire universe had just been lifted from her shoulders. An echo of her own enormous relief flowed into her from the rest of Prince Adrian's bridge crew as the convoy blinked safely back into hyperspace, and she turned her head to exchange a satisfied look with McKeon. Now all they had to do was deal with the one enemy between them and escape, and while anything could happen in a deep space engagement, Honor was more than willing to take her chances in an eleven-minute, maximum range running engagement with a Peep. The Allies' advantages in missile combat remained overwhelming, and even if that really was a battlecruiser over there, it wouldn't have the time or the firepower to—
An alarm buzzed harshly, and her head snapped around to the tactical station as a brilliant red icon glared in Metcalf's main display, thirty degrees off Prince Adrian's port bow but accelerating to cross her base course
"New unidentified contact!" Surprise sharpened the tac officer's voice. "Designate this contact Bandit Ten. She must've been holding her accel down to hide from us," Metcalf continued, but then her tone changed as initial surprise gave way to puzzlement. "Skipper, CIC calls it a Sword-class cruiser from its impeller signature and emissions fingerprint, but there's something wrong with the drive numbers."