David Weber - On Basilisk Station

She stiffened in her chair, eyes wide. Dear God, perhaps it did make sense!

"Mr. McKeon." The exec looked up, and Honor beckoned him over to her chair.

"Yes, Ma'am?"

"That debris from Sirius . Could it have been hull plating?"

" Hull plating?" McKeon blinked in surprise. "Well, yes, I suppose it could have been, Skipper. But why?"

"We know that ship has a military grade drive and compensator," Honor said very softly. "Suppose it has something else military grade aboard? Something that was hidden behind false plating?"

McKeon stared at her, and then his face slowly paled.

"A Q-ship?" he half-whispered.

"ONI says they've got some heavily armed fleet colliers," Honor said in that same, soft voice. "She might be one of them, but we know they used disguised merchant raiders when they went after Trevor's Star and Sheldon." Her eyes held his levelly. "And if that is a Q-ship, she could be armed more heavily than we were before they modified our armament."

"And she's a lot bigger than we are," McKeon agreed grimly. "That could mean she's got one hell of a lot more magazine space than we do."

"Exactly." Honor drew a deep breath, her thoughts racing like honed shards of ice. "Warn Rafe, then punch up our data base and see what if anything we have on file about the Q-ships we know Haven's used in the past."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"And warn Dominica, too." Honor smiled a cold, bitter smile. "Our damage control officer may have her hands full shortly."

"I'm afraid we don't have much on their merchant raiders, Skipper." The air-conditioned bridge was cool, but Alistair McKeon scrubbed irritably at a drop of sweat on his forehead as he downloaded what he did have to Honor's secondary tactical display.

"We don't have anything at all to indicate they've modified Astra- class ships like Sirius , so there's no telling what they did to her, but some of the refugees from Trevor's Star gave ONI pretty good stats on a Q-ship built on a Trumball- class hull. She was over a million and a half tons smaller than Sirius , but it's all we've got."

Honor nodded, studying the readout and trying not to show her dismay. Smaller than Sirius or not, the Trumball- class Q-ship had been more powerfully armed than most modern heavy cruisers, and she scrolled through the data till she found the notes on its chase armament. Three missile tubes and a pair of spinal mount lasers fore and aft. If Sirius 's chasers had simply been scaled up proportionally, her fire would be twice as heavy as anything with which Fearless could reply.

She leaned back in her chair and felt her bridge crew's tension. This was no Fleet maneuver, and even if it had been, there was no brilliant ploy to let them ambush Sirius . A stern chase sliced away the options, and Fearless's sole, tiny advantage was that she was a smaller target. Even that was offset by the fact that the open front of her impeller wedge was twice the size of the after edge of Sirius's wedge, and despite her lower acceleration, the "freighter's" greater mass gave her wedge more powerful stress bands and, probably, sidewalls, as well.

She bit her lip while her mind raced, searching for an answer, but her thoughts slithered like a groundcar on ice. Once her overtake velocity was high enough, she could try turning from side to side. At anything above two or three million kilometers, she couldn't turn far enough to completely interpose her sidewalls—not without giving up too much of her acceleration advantage, if she meant to stop the other ship short of the hyper limit—but at least she might deny Sirius straight down-the-throat shots by zig-zagging across her wake. It wasn't much, but it was absolutely all she could do, and her mouth tried to twist bitterly. All those clever maneuvers at ATC, all that sneaky forethought she'd put into ambushing Admiral D'Orville's flagship, and all she could think of to do now was writhe like a worm in hot ashes to avoid destruction.

She glanced back at McKeon, trying to get behind his eyes and read his thoughts. He was a tac officer by training, too; what did he think she should do? Had it occurred to him that all she had to do was break off the pursuit? Fearless was the pursuer, not the pursued. If Honor let Coglin go, Sirius would simply vanish into hyper space, and Fearless would survive.

But it wasn't an option. She might well be wrong about Sirius's mission. She was preparing to throw away her ship and her crew's lives in pursuit of a foe at least five times as powerful as they were when it was entirely possible that foe posed no threat to the Kingdom at all. Yet she couldn't know that, and she did know that if Haven was prepared to risk open war to secure Basilisk, Coglin's freighter might bring overwhelming firepower into the system before Home Fleet could respond.

Which meant she had no choice at all.

She checked the chronometer again. Sixty-three minutes into the pursuit. She'd come thirty-six and a half million kilometers, and the range was down to seven-point-six million kilometers. Another thirteen-plus minutes until her missiles could reach Sirius before burnout. She looked down at the Havenite's light dot and wondered what he was thinking.

"What's the range, Jamal?"

"Two-five-point-three-five light-seconds, Captain."

"Time to hyper limit?"

"Ninety-four-point-six minutes."

"Their overtake speed?"

"Four-five-eight KPS, Sir."

"Missile flight time?"

"Approximately one-eight-nine seconds, Sir."

Coglin nodded and rubbed his lower lip. His missiles would still burn out nine seconds before they reached Fearless , and part of him wanted to wait. To conceal the fact that Sirius was armed until Fearless was close enough that his birds' drives would last all the way to their target. The chance of a hit would be marginally greater if they retained their power to maneuver and follow Fearless's evasion, but only marginally at such a range. And, truth to tell, it probably wouldn't really make a good goddamn's difference. Under power or ballistic, the flight time would be long enough to give the cruiser's point defense plenty of time to engage them.

Then again, he thought sourly, it was possible Harrington already suspected Sirius was armed. She certainly seemed to have figured everything else out! If she did suspect, holding his fire to try to surprise her would be pointless, yet even if she did suspect the truth, it was unlikely she realized quite how heavily armed the big Q-ship actually was. Coglin had come to possess a lively respect for the Manticoran officer's sheer guts as he watched her actions in Basilisk, but this was entirely too much like a mouse chasing a cat.

He considered his options carefully. The smartest thing to have done, he acknowledged grudgingly, would have been to obey Harrington's order to heave to. If he'd stopped, let the cruiser come into energy range, and then blown his panels, he could have wiped her out before she even realized what was happening. But he hadn't, and that mistake left him with a much less attractive range of choices.

Fearless was out-gunned by a factor of ten, whether Harrington knew it or not, but RMN cruisers were tougher than the numbers might suggest. If he turned on her, she would not only have the higher base velocity as they closed, but her higher acceleration and lower mass would make her far more maneuverable than Sirius in close combat. The way she'd taken out the courier boat's drive told him Harrington was no shiphandler to take lightly, and if his sidewalls were tougher than hers, her main impeller bands were just as impenetrable as his own. If he got drawn into a close-range dogfight against a more agile opponent, she might just get lucky and score a hit or two in the right place before she died. If she crippled his Warshawski sails, for example, it wouldn't even matter whether or not he could get into hyper. He'd get home eventually, no doubt, but he could never reach the rendezvous in time to stop the task force. Not under impeller drive alone, and especially not when he'd have to detour around the Tellerman rather than using it.