David Weber - On Basilisk Station

"Move in!" he shouted, and his armored squad hurled itself forward in instant response.

O'Brian covered the distance to the central cave mouth in less than thirty seconds, diving aside to cover himself against any waiting weapons behind a shoulder of solid rock and dirt. He stabbed a quick look at his display and grunted in satisfaction. They were all closed up against their objectives. Now someone had to poke his head inside and hope to hell no one blew it off.

"Watch my ass, Turner," he growled, and thrust himself cautiously around the edge of the opening.

A narrow, rough-walled gut, more like a tunnel than a cave, opened before him. He moved down it slowly, rifle ready, sensors probing, and grunted again as he picked up additional power sources ahead of him. So. This was the base they'd been looking for . . . and somewhere up there were the bastards who'd given the Stilties their fucking guns. His lips drew up in a hungry smile at the thought, but he made himself maintain his slow, cautious pace.

The cave swung to the left and opened out, and light glowed around the bend. He sidled up to it cautiously, and his eyes narrowed as he saw a dozen coughing humans crouched behind out-thrust swells of rock and piles of off-world freight canisters and cargo-handling equipment amid the fog of dust and smoke Stimson's shot had blown back into the cave. It looked as if they'd been loading the aircar for a frantic evacuation, but there'd been a change in plans, O'Brian thought coldly. They weren't going anywhere now.

Most of them wore unpowered body armor, and he saw some fairly heavy weapons down there, as well as sidearms and half a dozen pulse rifles. On the other hand, his people were in full battle armor, and none of those bastards knew he was here above them yet, now did they?

He started to squeeze his trigger, then stopped. He was no cop, but he supposed the brass would like prisoners. And physical evidence.

"Solid shot only," he murmured over his com. "Try not to tear things up too badly if you have to shoot—they're gonna want evidence—but don't take any stupid chances."

Acknowledgments came back to him, and his own little finger squeezed, switching over to the non-explosive rounds in the secondary magazine. He drew a deep breath and eased further forward, keeping as low as he could while Turner slid up to his right. She moved as carefully and quietly as he and settled down in position to watch his back. He and the private looked at one another, and O'Brian nodded.

"Throw down your weapons!" he barked suddenly. His voice boomed and roared through the cavern, hugely amplified by his armor's external speaker, and the people before him jerked in surprise. Faces swung towards him, and two or three of them dropped their weapons, raising their hands in sheer reflex.

"No, Goddamnit!" someone screamed. Heads whipped around, and blinding light and searing heat flashed from the cave wall three meters to O'Brian's right as the man who'd screamed fired a plasma carbine desperately in his direction. The sergeant didn't even blink, but his eyes glowed with a hard, vicious light. He didn't repeat his surrender demand. His rifle muzzle angled slightly to the right, and he bared his teeth as he squeezed the trigger twice with cold deliberation.

The non-explosive darts screamed across the cavern at two thousand meters per second, and Tadeuz O'Brian was qualified Expert Marksman with the pulse rifle. Body armor slowed them, but it couldn't possibly stop them at such a short range, and they struck precisely where he'd intended—a centimeter below Colonel Bryan Westerfeldt's navel.

The sergeant stood fully upright, listening to the clatter of weapons on stone. He started down into the cave, and the cold, bitter hate at the core of him hoped the ghosts of the NPA's slaughtered patrol could hear the high, tearing screams of the gutshot bastard dying on the floor before him.

Commander Honor Harrington sat in her command chair and watched her displays as HMS Fearless tore through space under maximum emergency power. The cruiser accelerated at a steady five hundred and twenty gravities—more than five kilometers per second per second—in pursuit of the freighter Sirius ; Honor's face was still and cold, a mask against her own anxiety, while her mind churned behind her eyes.

She was almost certain she had it right . . . but only almost. And if she was wrong, if she hadn't guessed correctly after all, if—

She chopped off that train of thought and made herself lean back. The timing of Sirius's departure could mean only one thing, she told herself, and Brigham's projection of her course confirmed it. Sirius was, indeed, headed for the Tellerman wave, and the Tellerman was one of the "Roaring Deeps," the most powerful grav waves ever charted. More than that, it headed almost directly towards the People's Republic of Haven. If there truly was a Peep battle squadron out here, the Tellerman would take Sirius to meet it at two and a half or three thousand times the speed of light.

Back in the early days of hyper flight, spacers would have avoided something like the Tellerman like death itself, for death was precisely what it would have meant for any starship that encountered it.

The original hyper drive had been a mankiller, yet it had taken people a while to realize precisely why that was. Some of the dangers had been easy enough to recognize and avoid, but others had been far more difficult to identify and account for—mainly because people who encountered them never came back to describe their experience.

It had been discovered early on that translating into or out of the alpha band, the lowest of the hyper bands, at a velocity greater than thirty percent that of light was suicide, yet people had continued to kill themselves for centuries in efforts to translate at speeds higher than that. Not because they were suicidal, but because such a low velocity had severely limited the usefulness of hyper travel.

The translation into or out of any given band of hyper space was a complex energy transfer that cost the translating vessel most of its original velocity—as much as ninety-two percent of it, in the case of the alpha band. The energy loss dropped slightly with each "higher" hyper band, but its presence remained a constant, and for over five standard centuries, all hyper ships had relied on reaction drives.

There were limits to the amount of reaction mass a ship could carry, and hydrogen catcher fields didn't work in the extreme conditions of hyper space. That had effectively limited ships to the very lowest (and "slowest") hyper bands, since no one could carry enough reaction mass to recover velocity after multiple translations. It also explained why more stubborn inventors had persisted in their costly efforts to translate at higher velocities in order to maintain as much starting velocity in hyper space as possible. It had taken over two hundred years for the .3 c limitation to be fully accepted, and even today, some hyper physicists continued to search for a way around it.

Even after one had resolved the problems of safe translation speeds, however, there was the question of navigation. Hyper space wasn't like normal space. The laws of relativistic physics applied at any given point in hyper, but as a hypothetical observer looked outward, his instruments showed a rapidly increasing distortion. Maximum observation range was barely twenty light-minutes; beyond that, the gravity-warped chaos of hyper and its highly charged particles and extreme background radiation made instruments utterly unreliable. Which, of course, meant that astrogation fixes were impossible, and a ship that couldn't see where it was going seldom came home again.