David Weber - In Enemy Hands

"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the con. Helm, prepare to translate on my command."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Standing by to translate," the cruiser's helmswoman replied.

Honor walked quietly over to stand beside McKeon's command chair, careful to stay out of his way but placed to watch his repeater plot more comfortably, and he looked up to give her a small smile. Then he turned to Lieutenant Commander Metcalf.

Honor nodded to herself as he and the tac officer began a quiet discussion. Unlike her flagship, Prince Adrian had no internal FTL transmitter. The technology hadn't existed when she was built, and finding room to retrofit the impeller node modifications required to project the gravity pulses upon which the system relied would have required complete rebuilding, not just a refit. Any ship could use its standard gravitic detectors to read an FTL message (assuming it knew what to look for), and Prince Adrian 's recon drones, built to a more modern design than their mother ship and with enormously smaller impeller nodes, mounted less powerful transmitters for long-range reconnaissance missions. But the ship's onboard transmission capability was limited to light-speed, which meant that, since Alvarez was still nine light-minutes astern of Prince Adrian in hyper-space (which translated to an n-space distance of almost nine light- days ), the message Sanko had transmitted would take approximately six minutes to reach the flagship—during which Alvarez and her charges would continue to advance through hyper at sixty percent of light-speed (which translated to an apparent velocity of 2,500 c in normal-space terms). The main body of Convoy JNMTC-76 would reach the point at which Prince Adrian had translated into n-space seven minutes after that, but rather than follow McKeon immediately out of hyper, the other ships would decelerate to zero and wait another two hours before beginning their own translations. The delay was designed to give Prince Adrian time to sort out her sensor picture and move far enough in-system to be sure no nasty surprises awaited them.

That precaution was almost certainly unnecessary here, and some convoy commanders would have skimped on it, but the safety of those ships and all the people and material aboard them was Honor's responsibility. Time wasn't in such short supply that she couldn't afford to spend a couple of hours insuring against even unlikely dangers, and McKeon's quiet double-checking of his tactical section's preparations with Metcalf showed that he shared her determination to do things right.

"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 People's 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. Turner's 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 Turner's 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.