Honor’s hands tightened on her chair’s arms, but she didn’t even blink as her eighty-eight-thousand-ton command screamed down into the very heart of Medusa’s orbital traffic. She’d laid in that vector by eye, without the careful calculations and double-checking The Book required, but there was no time for that, and her mind was still in that odd overdrive. She knew it was correct, with an absolute certainty that admitted no doubt, and Fearless rode the invisible rail she’d nailed down in space as her speed mounted by almost three kilometers per second with every second that passed.

The Havenite courier boat loomed directly ahead of her on Honor’s visual display, impeller nodes beginning to glow as they started to come up, but they weren’t on line yet. Vapor spewed from the boat’s emergency maneuvering thrusters as her skipper tried frantically to avoid Fearless’s mad charge, yet those thrusters were far too weak to move the boat more than a few meters in the time they had, and the light cruiser stooped upon the eggshell courier like a vengeful falcon.

Breath hissed as her officers tensed for the inevitable, suicidal impact, but Honor’s face was carved stone as the edge of Fearless’s drive field slashed past the courier at less than two kilometers, far inside its drive safety perimeter. Vaporized alloy burst from the smaller vessel’s stern as the cruiser’s vastly more powerful impeller wedge blew her after nodes to incandescent gas; then Fearless was past, and the starscape slewed crazily in the visual display as she shot up and away from the planet in a mad skew turn and went instantly to full emergency power, accelerating at five hundred and twenty gravities.

“My God!” someone gasped as Fearless streaked past an orbiting four-million-ton freighter at a bare ten kilometers’ separation. Honor didn’t even turn her head. Her eyes were already reaching out for the scarlet light dot of the fleeing Sirius.

“Captain?” Webster sounded as shaken as anyone.

“Yes, Samuel?” Honor asked absently.

“Captain, I have an incoming message from that courier boat. They sound pretty upset, Ma’am.”

“I imagine they do.” Honor surprised herself with a grin and sensed the sudden release of her bridge crew’s tension. “Put them on my screen.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Her screen lit with the image of a very young officer in the green and gray of the People’s Navy. He wore a lieutenant’s insignia, and his face was a curious, mottled blend of furious red and terrified white.

“Captain Harrington, I protest your reckless, illegal shiphandling!” the youngster shouted. “You almost destroyed my ship! Our entire after—”

“I’m very sorry, Captain,” Honor interrupted in her most soothing tone. “I’m afraid I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“Weren’t watching wh—?!” The Havenite lieutenant strangled his exclamation and gritted his teeth. “I demand you heave to and assist my command in dealing with the damage you’ve inflicted!” he snarled instead.

“I regret that that’s impossible, Captain,” Honor said.

“Under the interstellar convention of—” the lieutenant began again, but she cut him off with a pleasant smile.