“Do you think she knows about the new compensators, Sir?”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’s figured out that we’ve improved our performance, whatever her ONI reports might be telling her,” Tourville said. “She’s certainly smart enough to realize that we must have made overcoming their acceleration advantage a very high priority. Unfortunately, for all their improvements, our compensators still aren’t anywhere near as efficient as theirs are… and she’s smart enough she’s probably figured that out, too. So if she thinks she has the range advantage, she’ll expect to be able to prevent us from closing with her.”

“So you think she’s basically hoping to bluff us into breaking off,” DeLaney said.

“I suppose you might put it that way,” Tourville conceded. “I wouldn’t express it quite that strongly, myself. I think she intends to continue to give us the opportunity to decide this was a bad idea, break off, and go home right up to the last minute. It’s not a ‘bluff,’ Molly, because I don’t think she actually expects us to break off for a moment. But knowing Harrington, she figures that it’s her responsibility to give us the option, and she’s determined to do it. Which,” he added almost regretfully, “probably also means that she’ll hold her fire until the range drops to what she believes is just outside the maximum at which we could engage her effectively.”

· · • · ·

“The range is down to three light-minutes, Your Grace,” Mercedes Brigham said in the tone of voice of someone politely reminding someone else of something she might have forgotten.

“So I see,” Honor replied with a slight smile, despite the tension coiling inside her. At fifty-four million kilometers, they were well inside her own maximum powered-attack missile range.

“Still no response to our challenges, either, Ma’am,” Brigham pointed out, and Honor nodded.

“How good is your targeting information now, Andrea?” she asked.

“It’s still not anything I’d call satisfactory, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski responded promptly in a slightly sour tone. “Whatever else they may have managed, they’ve improved their ECM significantly. It’s still not as good as ours is—or, for that matter, quite as good as what we’ve seen out of the Andies over the last few months. But it’s a lot better than it was during Operation Buttercup. I’d estimate that we should expect at least a fifty or sixty percent degradation in accuracy at this range. Possibly a little bit more.”

“And even without worrying about ECM, accuracy against a target under power isn’t anything to write home about at this range,” Brigham observed.

“No, but theirs is probably worse,” Honor said, and Brigham nodded in unhappy agreement.

Honor knew that Mercedes still thought that her own insistence that they operate on the assumption that the Republic’s new SD(P)s’ missiles could match the full range of their own MDMs was unduly pessimistic. On the other hand, Honor would far rather find out that she had, in fact, been overly pessimistic than suddenly find herself under fire at a range which she had assumed would give her ships immunity from attack.