“Exactly.” Honor drew a deep breath, her thoughts racing like honed shards of ice. “Warn Rafe, then punch up our data base and see what if anything we have on file about the Q-ships we know Haven’s used in the past.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“And warn Dominica, too.” Honor smiled a cold, bitter smile. “Our damage control officer may have her hands full shortly.”

Chapter Thirty

“I’M afraid we don’t have much on their merchant raiders, Skipper.” The air-conditioned bridge was cool, but Alistair McKeon scrubbed irritably at a drop of sweat on his forehead as he downloaded what he did have to Honor’s secondary tactical display.

“We don’t have anything at all to indicate they’ve modified Astra-class ships like Sirius, so there’s no telling what they did to her, but some of the refugees from Trevor’s Star gave ONI pretty good stats on a Q-ship built on a Trumball-class hull. She was over a million and a half tons smaller than Sirius, but it’s all we’ve got.”

Honor nodded, studying the readout and trying not to show her dismay. Smaller than Sirius or not, the Trumball-class Q-ship had been more powerfully armed than most modern heavy cruisers, and she scrolled through the data till she found the notes on its chase armament. Three missile tubes and a pair of spinal mount lasers fore and aft. If Sirius’s chasers had simply been scaled up proportionally, her fire would be twice as heavy as anything with which Fearless could reply.

She leaned back in her chair and felt her bridge crew’s tension. This was no Fleet maneuver, and even if it had been, there was no brilliant ploy to let them ambush Sirius. A stern chase sliced away the options, and Fearless’s sole, tiny advantage was that she was a smaller target. Even that was offset by the fact that the open front of her impeller wedge was twice the size of the after edge of Sirius’s wedge, and despite her lower acceleration, the “freighter’s” greater mass gave her wedge more powerful stress bands and, probably, sidewalls, as well.

She bit her lip while her mind raced, searching for an answer, but her thoughts slithered like a groundcar on ice. Once her overtake velocity was high enough, she could try turning from side to side. At anything above two or three million kilometers, she couldn’t turn far enough to completely interpose her sidewalls—not without giving up too much of her acceleration advantage, if she meant to stop the other ship short of the hyper limit—but at least she might deny Sirius straight down-the-throat shots by zig-zagging across her wake. It wasn’t much, but it was absolutely all she could do, and her mouth tried to twist bitterly. All those clever maneuvers at ATC, all that sneaky forethought she’d put into ambushing Admiral D’Orville’s flagship, and all she could think of to do now was writhe like a worm in hot ashes to avoid destruction.

She glanced back at McKeon, trying to get behind his eyes and read his thoughts. He was a tac officer by training, too; what did he think she should do? Had it occurred to him that all she had to do was break off the pursuit? Fearless was the pursuer, not the pursued. If Honor let Coglin go, Sirius would simply vanish into hyper-space, and Fearless would survive.