But that was precisely what looked like making this work, she thought, and the reports were both less serious and less numerous than she’d feared when she ordered her ships to do something no warship captain had done in over six centuries.

The reports ended, and she smiled wickedly as Nimitz added his own complaints. He’d been remarkably patient about waiting until the official reports were all in, but he hadn’t enjoyed the last half-hour a bit. Treecat g tolerances were considerably higher than those of most humans, just as Honor’s was, but that didn’t mean Nimitz had enjoyed spending thirty-five minutes weighing three-point-seven times his Sphinxian weight. The fact that it had been much worse than that for Honor’s human crewmen, and especially the ones who had spent long enough on Hell to fully acclimate to its .94 g gravity, hadn’t made him any happier about it, either, and he let her know it in no uncertain terms.

He bleeked indignantly at her smile, and she lifted him in the crook of her arm, cradling him against her breasts while she tried to radiate a sufficiently contrite apology. He looked up at her for a second or two longer, then made a snorting sound, patted her live cheek with a gentle hand, and forgave her.

“Thanks, Stinker,” she told him softly, and let him slide back down into her lap as she turned back to her plot.

Most of her captains had thought she was out of her mind when she first proposed using reaction thrusters to generate an intercept vector. It simply wasn’t done. The maximum acceleration a ship like Farnese could attain on her auxiliary thrusters, even if she ran them up to maximum emergency power, was on the order of only about a hundred and fifty gravities, which was less than a third of what her impeller wedge could impart. Worse, those thrusters were fuel hogs, drinking up days’ worth of reactor mass in minutes. And to add insult to injury, without a wedge, there was no inertial compensator. Warships had much more powerful internal grav plates than shuttles or other small craft, but without the sump of a grav wave for their compensators to work with, the best they could do was reduce the apparent force of a hundred and fifty gravities by a factor of about thirty.

But Honor had insisted it would work, and her subordinates’ skepticism had begun to change as she walked them through the numbers. By her calculations, they could sustain a full-powered burn on their main thrusters for thirty-five minutes and still retain sufficient hydrogen in their bunkers to run the battlecruisers’ fusion plants at full power for twelve hours and the heavy cruisers’ for almost eight. Those were the minimum reserve levels she was willing to contemplate, and they represented the strongest argument against Operation Nelson. Thanks to the huge StateSec tank farm orbiting Hell, they would be able to completely refill the bunkers of every ship afterward, and twelve hours would be more than sufficient to decide any engagement they could possibly hope to win, but none of her ships would have the reactor mass to run for it if the battle fell apart on them.