David Weber - [Honor Harrington 07] by In Enemy Hands

Author:In Enemy Hands
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter Sixteen

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"Well I'll be damned." Citizen Captain Helen Zachary leaned back in her command chair and gave the people's commissioner seated beside her a tight smile. "It looks as if we're about to have company, Citizen Commissioner."

"So I see." Timothy Kuttner nodded, but he also frowned, and the fingers of his right hand drummed a fretful tattoo on his helmet. Like everyone else on Katana 's bridge, Kuttner wore his skinsuit, but rather than rack his helmet on his command chair in proper naval fashion, he had it in his lap. Zachary had tried to explain (tactfully) to him why that was a bad idea—the shock of a hit could easily throw an unsecured helmet clear across a compartment, with potentially fatal consequences for its owner—but Kuttner liked to play with the thing. And, Zachary admitted, she hadn't really tried all that hard to convince him not to.

He wasn't as bad as some commissioners, but he was a lot worse than others, and at the moment his expression was the one she least liked: that of a man looking hard for some suggestion he could make to prove he was on top of the situation. She'd had sufficient experience of that expression's consequences in the past, and she turned her attention quickly to Citizen Lieutenant Allworth in an effort to preempt Kuttner.

"How long until she enters the bag, Tactical?"

"Roughly another twenty-three minutes, if present headings and decelerations remain constant, Citizen Captain," Allworth said promptly, and Zachary nodded. She pondered for a moment, still carefully not meeting Kuttner's gaze while she did so, then beckoned her exec over before she finally looked back at the people's commissioner.

"With your permission, Sir," she told him briskly, "I intend to go to full power in twenty-five minutes."

"But if you wait that long, especially towing missile pods, you won't be able to match vectors with him before he breaks past us, will you?" Kuttner sounded surprised, and Zachary suppressed a sigh.

"No, Sir," she said patiently. "But there's no real reason for us to do so. Her closing velocity will be only six thousand KPS when we go to our own maximum acceleration, and at that point she'll be too close to avoid us. She'll have no choice but to accept action, and while our own velocity will never match hers, we can certainly keep her in range until she crosses the limit . . . assuming she lasts that long."

Her eyes flicked to Luchner's face, but the exec's attentive expression gave no sign of the exasperation she knew he had to share. Katana had gone to five percent power the moment it became clear the Manty's maneuvers were going to bring the enemy ship back towards her. Katana 's EW could hide that weak an impeller signature even from Manticoran sensors at anything over thirty light-seconds, and Zachary, Luchner, and Allworth had made an almost perfect estimate of the Manty's course. Unless she changed heading in the next twenty-three

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