Well, I told them it worked for Cortez, she thought wryly. Of course, most of them don’t have any idea who Cortez was…

As far as her subordinates’ other concerns went, a half-hour at five gravities would be punishing but endurable—most humans didn’t begin graying out until they hit six or seven g, and heavy-worlders like Honor had even more tolerance than that. And it would take a ship over three million kilometers down-range and impart a velocity of almost thirty-one hundred KPS. That wasn’t terribly impressive compared to what an impeller drive could have done in the same length of time, but it offered one huge advantage.

With no impeller signature, a ship might as well be invisible at any sort of extended range.

On the scale to which God built star systems, active sensors had a limited range at the best of times. Officially, most navies normally monitored a million-kilometer bubble with their search radar. In fact, most sensor techs—even in the RMN—didn’t bother with active sensors at all at ranges much above a half-million kilometers. There was no real point, since getting a useful return off anything much smaller than a superdreadnought was exceedingly difficult at greater ranges. Worse, virtually all warships incorporated stealth materials into their basic hull matrices. That made them far smaller radar targets than, say, some big, fat merchantman when their drives were down… and when their drives were up, there was no reason to look for them on active, anyway, since passive sensors—and especially gravitic sensors—had enormously greater range and resolution. Of course, they couldn’t pick up anything that wasn’t emitting, but that was seldom a problem. After all, any ship coming in under power would have to have its wedge up, wouldn’t it?

Stealth systems could do quite a bit to make an impeller signature harder to spot, but they were even more effective against other sensors, and so, again, gravitics became the most logical first line of defense. They might not be perfect, but they were the best system available, and captains and sensor techs alike had a pronounced tendency to rely solely upon them.

But Honor’s ships didn’t have impeller signatures. She had waited two and a half hours, watching the Peeps and plotting their vector carefully before she committed to the thruster burn. The acceleration period had been as bad as she had anticipated, but now her ships were slicing through space at a steady thirty-one hundred KPS, and she smiled again—this time with a predator’s snarl—as she watched their projected vector reach out across her plot. Assuming her initial estimate of the Peeps’ intentions had been accurate (and their flight profile so far suggested that it had been), she would cut across their base course some three minutes before they slowed to zero relative to Hell. She would be somewhere between six hundred and nine hundred thousand kilometers from them at the moment their courses intersected… and their bows would be towards her.

The two transports—and that was the only thing those two big, slow ships could be—had dropped back to ride a million and a half kilometers behind the main task group, ready to hand but safely screened against any unpleasant surprises. A single warship—probably a heavy cruiser, and most likely one of the older Sword-class ships, from her impeller signature—had been detached as a close escort for them, but Honor wasn’t worried about that. If her maneuver worked, she should be in a position to send enough firepower after them to swat the escort without much difficulty, and all three of those ships were much too far inside the hyper limit for the transports to possibly escape before her cruisers ran them down.