David Weber - On Basilisk Station

And that brought Honor right back to Sirius , for the ship in front of her obviously had a military-grade drive and compensator. Her sheer mass meant her compensator field was larger and thus less efficient than Fearless 's, but no freighter should have been able to pull her acceleration. Even a superdreadnought, the only warship class which approached her mass, could only manage about four hundred and twenty gees, and Sirius was burning along at four hundred and ten. That left Fearless an advantage of barely a hundred and ten gees, little more than a kilometer per second squared—and Sirius had a head start of just under fifteen minutes.

It would have been worse if Fearless hadn't been at standby or Dominica Santos hadn't cut corners and chopped almost a full minute off the time it took to put her drive fully on line. As it was, Honor could still overhaul before Sirius reached the hyper limit, but not with as much margin as she might have wished. Sirius would hit the hyper limit in just under a hundred and seventy-three minutes from the time she left orbit. Honor had been in pursuit now for almost ten minutes. By cutting the safety margin on her own compensator to zero, she could match velocities with the freighter in another forty-six minutes, but it would take her over an hour just to reach effective missile range. Completely overtaking the freighter would require just over another hundred and seven minutes, leaving her less than twenty minutes before Sirius reached the hyper limit. And even if she did overtake completely, forcing the freighter to heave-to would be far from easy. Worse, momentum alone would carry Sirius beyond the hyper limit, even if she braked at max in response to Honor's demand, unless she began her deceleration within the next hour and a half, and Honor had no way of knowing just how far beyond the hyper limit a Havenite battle squadron might be lurking. No normal space sensor could see across the hyper wall. The entire Havenite Navy might lie less than a light-second beyond the limit, and no one in Basilisk would know a thing about it, so it was entirely possible Sirius needed only to break into hyper at all to accomplish her mission.

Which meant that, somehow, Honor had to stop her within the next ninety-seven minutes. If she didn't, then the only way to prevent her from translating into hyper would be to destroy her.

Captain Johan Coglin sat on his bridge. He'd run out of curses ten minutes before; now he simply sat and glared at his display while anger flowed through his mind like slow lava.

Operation Odysseus had seemed like a reasonable plan when he was first briefed for it. A few too many ruffles and flourishes, perhaps, but reasonable. There'd been no special reason why they had to use his ship for it, yet no one had listened when he suggested they use a genuine freighter. They'd wanted Sirius's higher acceleration levels and hyper speed "just in case," and he'd been far too junior to argue the point. And, he supposed, if things had gone as planned, it wouldn't really have mattered in the long run. Only the idiots who'd orchestrated the operation should have realized it would never work from the moment Fearless replaced Warlock on Basilisk Station. They should have scrubbed it weeks ago, and he'd told Canning that.

From the beginning, Odysseus had relied on deception, diversion, and the half-assed way the Royal Manticoran Navy policed Basilisk. Now it was all blowing up in their faces. What should have been a neat, clean sucker punch had turned into a fiasco which might yet become outright disaster, in large part because his ship had been used, and Coglin knew NavInt, the General Staff, and the War Cabinet were all going to fight like hell to pin it on someone else.

There was no doubt in his mind that Fearless's captain had grasped the essentials of Odysseus, and even in his anger, his own professionalism had to admire Harrington's instant, iron-nerved response. Blowing the consulate courier boat's drive that way had been incredibly risky but brilliant, reducing the players to Sirius and Fearless instead of leaving her two potential targets to pursue, and his sensors had detected the separation of three pinnaces from Fearless . That had to be the cruiser's entire Marine detachment, and the speed with which Harrington had dispatched them was clear proof Canning and Westerfeldt had grossly underestimated the contingency planning that must have gone on between her and the NPA. Given the numbers of rifles Westerfeldt had handed the Shaman, that planning might not have helped that much if the Stilties had surprised the enclaves, but a full company of Marines with Navy air support would slaughter the natives in an open field engagement.

Which meant that Coglin's part of Odysseus was probably already pointless. With no massacre in the enclaves, Haven could hardly claim that their naval forces had responded only to save off-worlder lives.

Coglin ground his teeth together. That asshole idiot Canning was as stupid as he was blind. He'd jumped the gun by ordering Sirius out of orbit before the Stilties actually hit the enclaves. If he'd waited just twenty minutes—just twenty minutes! —they'd have known about the Marines and could still have aborted the entire spaceborne portion of the operation. But Canning had panicked, and Coglin hadn't known enough about the situation dirt-side to argue, even if he'd had the authority to refuse the consul's orders.

So here he was, running from Fearless , his very flight confirming Harrington's every suspicion, while every hope for Odysseus went down the crapper behind him.

Yet he had no choice now. Canning had alerted the task force for an execution date only six days away. If the courier boat had still been hyper-capable, she could have been sent to quietly stand the task force down, but the courier couldn't be sent now. Which meant that unless Coglin reached the rendezvous with Sirius , the entire force might well move in anyway. That had to be prevented, and even if it hadn't, he couldn't possibly permit Harrington to board Sirius , for that was the one thing which would absolutely prove that Haven had been behind the Stilty uprising. There was no way to hide what his ship truly was from a naval boarding party.

He queried NavInt's files for the readout on Fearless's armament. She was one of the last of the old Courageous- class ships, almost eighty T-years old and small for her rate, by modern standards. But that didn't mean she was senile. The surviving units of her class had been thoroughly overhauled over the years, and they packed a nasty weight of metal for their age and size. They were light on defense, virtually unarmored and with relatively weak radiation shielding (for warships), but they mounted a pair of grasers, two thirty-centimeter lasers, and seven missile tubes in each broadside. They lacked the magazine capacity for a sustained missile engagement, but they could throw surprisingly heavy salvos for their size while their ammo lasted—more than enough to reduce any freighter to glowing vapor. Or it should have been, anyway.

He looked away from the readout and returned his eyes to the maneuvering display. Fearless's light dot swept after him, still losing ground but accelerating steadily, and he glared at it and clenched his fists. Damn Canning—and damn Harrington, as well! Yet even as he cursed her persistence, he felt a certain sorrow deep inside for his pursuer. That was a remarkable officer back there, one sharp and quick enough to reduce Haven's carefully laid plans to humiliating wreckage in less than two Manticoran months.