"Translation in one minute," DuChene announced, and Honor felt a shared, unstated tension grow about her. No hardened spacer ever admitted it, but no one really enjoyed the speed at which warships routinely made transit from hyper. Prince Adrian wasn't contemplating a true crash translation, but she'd translate on a steep enough gradient to make every stomach aboard queasy, and her crew knew it.
"Translating... now!" DuChene said crisply, and Honor grimaced and gripped her hands more tightly together behind her as the bottom dropped out of her midsection.
"Hmmm... ."
Citizen Commander Luchner, executive officer of PNS Katana, looked up at the soft, interested sound from his tactical section. Citizen Lieutenant Allworth was hardly in the same league as Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville’s new tac witch, yet, but he was learning from her example. For that matter, so was Luchner. Katana had been part of the citizen rear admiral's task group for almost a year, and that task group had done well, by the Peoples Navy's standards, during that period. But Foraker, now... She'd brought something new, an almost innocently arrogant confidence, to the task group, and it seemed to be contagious.
Luchner hoped so, anyway, as he watched the citizen lieutenant make very slow and careful adjustments at his panel. Allworth’s eyes were rapt, focused on his readouts with unusual intensity, yet that wasn't particularly noteworthy. The tac officer managed to find something to interest him on any given watch. But he seemed to be taking longer than usual to decide that he'd picked up some natural phenomenon, and Luchner walked over to stand beside him.
"What?" he asked quietly.
"Not sure, Citizen Exec." Allworth might be emulating Citizen Commander Foraker's professional competence, but he had no intention of imitating her occasional, dangerous lapses into counterrevolutionary forms of address. Not until my reputation is as good as hers, anyway! he thought absently. "It could be nothing... but then again, it could just be a hyper footprint."
"Where?" Luchner asked more sharply.
"About here, Citizen Exec," Allworth said, and a tiny icon appeared on his plot. It was a good nineteen light-minutes away along the periphery of the G0 primary's twenty-two-light-minute hyper limit, and Luchner frowned. That was too distant for Katana's onboard sensors to have detected, but Allworth continued speaking before he could object. "We've got it on our number eleven RD," he explained.
"And what, pray tell, is one of our recon drones doing over there?" Luchner asked.
"Citizen Captain Turner asked us to take that side of Nuada's zone, Citizen Exec," Allworth replied respectfully. "Her main gravitic array was already down, and now her secondary array's developed some sort of glitch. Her engineers have shut down most of her normal passive sensors while they try to sort things out, and she's relying solely on RDs until they can figure out what the problems are. But trying to cover her entire zone with drones would overload her telemetry section. Until she gets her sensor glitches straightened out, she can't cover more than two-thirds of her assigned area, so I told Citizen Captain Turner we'd take the rest for him."
Luchner frowned so darkly that Allworth had to fight an urge to quail. Not that the citizen exec doubted the explanation. Katana and Nuada had worked together to nab a pair of Manty destroyers and a single fast, independently routed freighter since the task group had taken Adler, and Turner's ship had lost two-thirds of her primary sensor suite during the pursuit of the second destroyer. Such equipment failures were less uncommon in the People's Navy than they ought to have been, especially when undertrained maintenance staffs were handed new systems to look after when they still hadn't fully mastered the old ones. Turners engineers had promised then to fix whatever had gone wrong, but now it appeared Nuada had been even unluckier and lost her secondaries, as well. Luchner had no doubt that Turners engineers would solve their problems, eventually, but he also knew it was going to take them longer than it should have.
Their shortcomings weren't really their fault, of course. Every line officer knew that rushing replacements, especially replacements drawn from the Dolists' ill-educated ranks, through the training schools in half of what prewar standards had established as the minimum time meant the newbies had to pick up their real training on the job.
Unfortunately, the political establishment didn't want to hear about that. Given the Navy's heavy losses in combat, the people's commissioners assigned to supervise the Admiralty's manpower programs had no choice but to find recruits anywhere they could and then push them through training as rapidly as possible. But they had their own heads to worry about, and admitting they were sending out insufficiently trained personnel might bring StateSec sniffing around them. Which meant that trying to defend Nuada's lack of progress to higher authority would probably be pointless. It probably also meant that Turner had asked Allworth, very indirectly and discreetly, of course, not to mention the breakdown to anyone else. And the reason Nuada had asked for help rather than trying to rely solely on her own recon drones to make up the difference was equally easy to understand. The Mars-class cruisers had given up almost a third of the telemetry capacity of the older Swords in part exchange for their superior electronic warfare capabilities, and Nuada simply couldn't operate sufficient drones to cover her entire zone of responsibility without the backup of her shipboard systems.
Luchner understood that, and he had no objection to helping to cover a colleagues ass. After all, it might be his posterior next time. No, his frown arose from another consideration, and he raised one eyebrow as he glowered down at the citizen lieutenant.
"I see. And did you, perhaps, inform myself or Citizen Captain Zachary that Katana was assuming this additional responsibility?"
"Uh... no, Citizen Exec." Allworth blushed. "I guess I forgot."
"You 'forgot,' Luchner repeated, and Allworth's blush darkened. "It failed to occur to you that we might like to know about it? Or, for that matter, that the Citizen Captain and I are legally responsible for your actions?"
"Yes, Citizen Exec," Allworth admitted miserably. He obviously wanted to lower his eyes to his display to avoid his superiors stern expression, but he made himself meet Luchner’s gaze. The citizen commander regarded him coldly for several more seconds, but beneath his baleful exterior, Luchner was pleased by the youngster's refusal to flinch, and, after a moment, he reached out and rested a hand on Allworth's shoulder.
"Citizen Commander Foraker is an outstanding tac officer," he said, and allowed himself a small smile. "You could do a lot worse for a model. But do try to stay in touch with the rest of the universe better than she does, Citizen Lieutenant. Do you read me?"
"Yes, Citizen Exec!"
"Good." Luchner gave the younger man's shoulder a squeeze. "Now tell me about this possible contact."
"It translated into n-space just outside the hyper limit eight minutes ago, Citizen Exec... assuming it is a contact. It's hard to be sure that far from the drone."
The citizen lieutenant paused, and Luchner nodded his comprehension. The PN's drones weren't as good as the Manties', with a maximum passive detection range of no more than twelve to fourteen light-minutes, depending on the strength of a target's emissions, and a maximum telemetry range of ten light-minutes. Because of that, they were normally deployed at ranges of no more than seven or eight light-minutes, which limited their mother ships' sensor reach to twenty light-minutes or so, but got the data on FTL sources (like the gravitic energy of an impeller wedge or a hyper translation) to the combat information center quickly. In this case, Allworth had deployed the drone at the very limit of the telemetry links to take up the slack for Nuada, but even so, the possible contact was near the edge of the drones envelope.