And that brought Honor right back to Sirius, for the ship in front of her obviously had a military-grade drive and compensator. Her sheer mass meant her compensator field was larger and thus less efficient than Fearless’s, but no freighter should have been able to pull her acceleration. Even a superdreadnought, the only warship class which approached her mass, could only manage about four hundred and twenty gees, and Sirius was burning along at four hundred and ten. That left Fearless an advantage of barely a hundred and ten gees, little more than a kilometer per second squared—and Sirius had a head start of just under fifteen minutes.

It would have been worse if Fearless hadn’t been at standby or Dominica Santos hadn’t cut corners and chopped almost a full minute off the time it took to put her drive fully on line. As it was, Honor could still overhaul before Sirius reached the hyper limit, but not with as much margin as she might have wished. Sirius would hit the hyper limit in just under a hundred and seventy-three minutes from the time she left orbit. Honor had been in pursuit now for almost ten minutes. By cutting the safety margin on her own compensator to zero, she could match velocities with the freighter in another forty-six minutes, but it would take her over an hour just to reach effective missile range. Completely overtaking the freighter would require just over another hundred and seven minutes, leaving her less than twenty minutes before Sirius reached the hyper limit. And even if she did overtake completely, forcing the freighter to heave-to would be far from easy. Worse, momentum alone would carry Sirius beyond the hyper limit, even if she braked at max in response to Honor’s demand, unless she began her deceleration within the next hour and a half, and Honor had no way of knowing just how far beyond the hyper limit a Havenite battle squadron might be lurking. No normal-space sensor could see across the hyper wall. The entire Havenite Navy might lie less than a light-second beyond the limit, and no one in Basilisk would know a thing about it, so it was entirely possible Sirius needed only to break into hyper at all to accomplish her mission.

Which meant that, somehow, Honor had to stop her within the next ninety-seven minutes. If she didn’t, then the only way to prevent her from translating into hyper would be to destroy her.

Captain Johan Coglin sat on his bridge. He’d run out of curses ten minutes before; now he simply sat and glared at his display while anger flowed through his mind like slow lava.

Operation Odysseus had seemed like a reasonable plan when he was first briefed for it. A few too many ruffles and flourishes, perhaps, but reasonable. There’d been no special reason why they had to use his ship for it, yet no one had listened when he suggested they use a genuine freighter. They’d wanted Sirius’s higher acceleration levels and hyper speed “just in case,” and he’d been far too junior to argue the point. And, he supposed, if things had gone as planned, it wouldn’t really have mattered in the long run. Only the idiots who’d orchestrated the operation should have realized it would never work from the moment Fearless replaced Warlock on Basilisk Station. They should have scrubbed it weeks ago, and he’d told Canning that.