And that was why Honor had to throw away her best chance to avoid action.
"We can't let that happen, Alistair," she said, still quietly. "And I'm afraid I see only one way to guarantee that it doesn't."
"We make him chase us," McKeon said flatly.
"Yes." Honor reached out to the arm of his command chair and tapped a function key, throwing one of the evasion patterns she'd entered at DuChene's station onto McKeon's repeater plot. "If we alter course about thirty-five degrees to port and go to five hundred gravities for fifteen minutes, then break back for the limit in the same plane," she said, "we'll swing away from Two, Three, and Four. Two will still have a chance to overhaul us, but only if she's got some accel in reserve. But we'll be giving One a chance to cut the angle on us and bring us to action short of the limit. Not by much. I estimate we'll be in his engagement envelope for no more than twenty-five minutes. To get the shot, though, he'll have to conform to our movements... which should put the convoy's translation point outside his range on emergence."
"I see." McKeon studied the vectors on his plot, then cleared his throat. "I can't fault your logic, Ma'am," he said quietly, "and if he's the only one with a shot at us, he'd almost have to take it on the theory of a bird in the hand's being worth two in hyper. But suppose he doesn't?"
"If he doesn't, he doesn't," Honor replied, "but it's all we can do. Even if we turned immediately to engage him, we'd need over an hour just to decelerate to rest relative to Adler... and we'd be another forty-three million klicks further in-system. He'd certainly maintain his present course and acceleration until he was inside the hyper limit, and Bandit Two would have so much overtake by the time we started back out-system that he'd run right up our backside before we ever engaged Bandit One."
McKeon rubbed his chin for a moment, then decided not to ask what she intended to do if her proposed course took them into the clutches of yet another Peep, one which hadn't brought its drive up and so had no impeller signature to warn them it was waiting for them. She would have considered that just as he had, and, also as he had, come to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do about it if it happened.
"If I may, Ma'am," he said instead, "I'd suggest we also deploy an RD and program its grav transmitters to order Captain Greentree and the rest of the convoy to hyper back out immediately."
"Agreed." Honor nodded crisply and stepped back from his command chair. He smiled crookedly at her courtesy and seated himself.
"I wish you were still aboard Alvarez," he said very, very quietly, and then turned his chair to face Commander Gillespie.
"Very well, Tony," he said calmly. "Bring us to battle stations and come thirty-five degrees to port at five hundred gravities."
Chapter Sixteen
"Well I'll be damned." Citizen Captain Helen Zachary leaned back in her command chair and gave the people's commissioner seated beside her a tight smile. "It looks as if we're about to have company, Citizen Commissioner."
"So I see." Timothy Kuttner nodded, but he also frowned, and the fingers of his right hand drummed a fretful tattoo on his helmet. Like everyone else on Katana’s bridge, Kuttner wore his skinsuit, but rather than rack his helmet on his command chair in proper naval fashion, he had it in his lap. Zachary had tried to explain (tactfully) to him why that was a bad idea, the shock of a hit could easily throw an unsecured helmet clear across a compartment, with potentially fatal consequences for its owner, but Kuttner liked to play with the thing. And, Zachary admitted, she hadn't really tried all that hard to convince him not to. He wasn't as bad as some commissioners, but he was a lot worse than others, and at the moment his expression was the one she least liked: that of a man looking hard for some suggestion he could make to prove he was on top of the situation. She'd had sufficient experience of that expression’s consequences in the past, and she turned her attention quickly to Citizen lieutenant Allworth in an effort to preempt Kuttner.
"How long until she enters the bag, Tactical?"
"Roughly another twenty-three minutes, if present headings and decelerations remain constant, Citizen Captain," Allworth said promptly, and Zachary nodded. She pondered for a moment, still carefully not meeting Kuttner’s gaze while she did so, then beckoned her exec over before she finally looked back at the people’s commissioner.
"With your permission, Sir," she told him briskly, "I intend to go to full power in twenty-five minutes."
"But if you wait that long, especially towing missile pods, you won't be able to match vectors with him before he breaks past us, will you?" Kuttner sounded surprised, and Zachary suppressed a sigh.
"No, Sir," she said patiently. "But there's no real reason for us to do so. Her closing velocity will be only six thousand KPS when we go to our own maximum acceleration, and at that point she'll be too close to avoid us. She'll have no choice but to accept action, and while our own velocity will never match hers, we can certainly keep her in range until she crosses the limit... assuming she lasts that long."
Her eyes flicked to Luchner's face, but the exec's attentive expression gave no sign of the exasperation she knew he had to share. Katana had gone to five percent power the moment it became clear the Manty's maneuvers were going to bring the enemy ship back towards her. Katana's EW could hide that weak an impeller signature even from Manticoran sensors at anything over thirty light-seconds, and Zachary, Luchner, and Allworth had made an almost perfect estimate of the Manty's course. Unless she changed heading in the next twenty-three minutes, she would enter Katana’s missile envelope, headed almost directly towards the Republican cruiser... and still a good half-hour's flight inside the hyper limit.
Under other circumstances, that would have made Zachary nervous. The citizen captain was no coward, but only a fool (which she also was not) would try to deny the combat edge Manticoran ships enjoyed. But Katana had powerful support ready to hand in the form of PNS Nuada, which would enter extreme engagement range barely ten minutes after Katana opened fire. More than that, the system defenders had been given ample time to identify their target. It was one of the older Prince Consort—class cruisers, not a more modern Star Knight, which meant she and Katana would be well matched.
Or would have been, Zachary thought with a sharklike smile, if not for the half-dozen missile pods trailing astern of her own ship.
"I realize you can keep him in missile range, Citizen Captain," Kuttner's somehow petulant voice cut into the citizen captains thoughts, "but you won't be able to bring him into energy range. Are you sure that fighting such a long-range action is wise, given the, ah, disparity in our antimissile capabilities?"
Zachary bit back an injudiciously candid response, but it was hard. She thought, briefly, but with intense longing, of sudden pressure losses and helmets which bounced away from idiot commissioners who combined a sense of their own importance with just enough knowledge to make them dangerous. My, but he'd look nice with his lungs oozing out of his nose, she reflected, but she also made herself smile gravely.
"I understand your point, Citizen Commissioner," she said, "but the conditions are a bit atypical, and I'd like to keep them that way." Kuttner frowned in puzzled confusion, and Zachary reminded herself to keep things literal, and simple. "What I mean, Sir," she went on, "is that, at the moment, the enemy can have no idea we're here. If she did, she would have chosen a different heading, or at least already changed course."