Honor nodded acknowledgment of Lieutenant Webster’s report without raising her eyes from her display. She’d expected the signal from the moment Admiral D’Orville’s Aggressors settled on their final approach vector, and Seven-Niner was, in a very real sense, her personal creation. Admiral Hemphill’s ops officer probably wouldn’t see it that way, but Captain Grimaldi, Hemphill’s chief of staff, had realized what Honor was up to and supported her hints and deferential suggestions with surprising subtlety. He’d even given her a grin of approval after the final captains’ briefing, which had led Honor into a fundamental re-evaluation of him, despite his position in Horrible Hemphill’s camp. Not that it took a mental giant to realize that no conventional approach would let a light cruiser, whatever its armament, survive to reach attack range of a hostile battle fleet.

There were only so many options for a commander faced by a normal-space action inside the hyper limit of a star. It was relatively simple to hide even a capital ship (at longer ranges, anyway) by simply shutting down her impellers and dropping off the enemy’s passive scanners, but the impeller drive wasn’t magic. Even at the five hundred-plus gravities a destroyer or light cruiser could manage, it took time to generate respectable vector changes, so hiding by cutting power was of strictly limited utility. After all, it did no good to hide if the enemy went charging away from you at fifty or sixty percent of light-speed, and you couldn’t hide if you accelerated in pursuit.

All of which meant an admiral simply couldn’t conceal her maneuvers from an opponent without risking loss of contact. And since hiding was normally pointless, that left only two real options: meet the enemy in a head-on, brute power clash, or try misdirection by showing him something that wasn’t quite what he thought it was. Given Admiral Hemphill’s material-oriented prejudices, it had taken all of Honor’s persuasiveness to build any misdirection at all into the battle plan, for Lady Sonja believed in massing overwhelming firepower and simply smashing away until something gave, which at least had the virtue of simplicity.

Without Grimaldi’s support, it was unlikely a lowly commander, even one specially selected to command Hemphill’s secret weapon, could have convinced the admiral, but that was fine with Honor. Admiral D’Orville knew Hemphill as well as anyone else, and the last thing he’d expect from her was sneakiness. If the Defenders could mislead him into misinterpreting what he saw, so much the better; if they couldn’t, they lost very little of importance. Only Fearless.

And so Honor watched the rest of the Defender task force moving towards her. In another sixteen minutes, the entire force would overrun her and keep right on going, leaving her single light cruiser alone and lonely almost in the Aggressors’ path.

Admiral of the Green Sebastian D’Orville frowned over his own plot aboard the superdreadnought HMS King Roger, then glanced at the visual display. Visuals were useless for coordinating battles at deep-space ranges, but they were certainly spectacular. D’Orville’s ships were charging ahead at almost a hundred and seventy thousand kilometers per second—just under .57 c—and the starfield in the forward screens was noticeably blue-shifted. But King Roger raced along between the inclined “roof” and “floor” of her impeller wedge, and the effect of a meter-deep band in which local gravity went from zero to over ninety-seven thousand MPS² grabbed photons like a lake of glue and bent the strongest energy weapon like flimsy wire. Stars seen through a stress band like that red-shifted radically and displaced their images by a considerable margin in direct vision displays, though knowing exactly how powerful the gravity field was made it fairly simple for the computers to compensate and put them back where they belonged.