The translation from n-space to hyper was speed criticalat anything above .3 C, dimensional shear would tear a ship apartbut the reverse wasn't true. Which didn't make high-speed downward translations pleasant. The energy bleed as the convoy crossed each hyper wall would slow them to a crawl long before they reached the alpha bands, and shear wasn't a factor as far as hardware was concerned, but the effect on humans was something else again. Naval crews were trained for crash translations, yet there was a limit to what training could do to offset the physical distress and violent nausea, and there was no point in putting anyoneespecially her merchant crewsthrough that.
"Ready to begin translation in forty-one seconds, Ma'am," Lieutenant Commander DuMorne reported from Astrogation.
"Very well, Mr. DuMorne. The con is yours."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. I have the con. Helm, prepare for initial translation on my mark."
"Ready for translation, aye," Chief Killian replied, and the helmsman's hand hovered over the manual override, just in case the astrogator's computers dropped the ball, while Honor leaned back to watch.
"Mark!" DuMorne said crisply, and the normally inaudible hum of Fearless's hyper generator became a basso growl.
Honor swallowed against a sudden ripple of nausea as the visual display altered abruptly. The endlessly shifting patterns of hyper space were no longer slow; they flickered, jumping about like poorly executed animation, and her readouts flashed steadily downward as the entire convoy plummeted "down" the hyper space gradient.
Fearless hit the gamma wall, and her Warshawski sails bled transit energy like an azure forest fire. Her velocity dropped almost instantly from .3 C to a mere nine percent of light-speed, and Honor's stomach heaved as her inner ear rebelled against a speed loss the rest of her senses couldn't even detect. DuMorne's calculations had allowed for the energy bleed, and their translation gradient steepened even further as their velocity fell. They hit the beta wall four minutes later, and Honor winced againless violently this timeas their velocity bled down to less than two percent of light-speed. The visual display was a fierce chaos of heaving light as the convoy fell straight "down" across a "distance" which had no physical existence, and then they hit the alpha bands and flashed across them to the n-space wall like a comet.
Her readouts stopped blinking. The visual display was suddenly still, filled once more with the unwinking pinpricks of normal-space stars, the sense of nausea faded almost as quickly as it had come, and HMS Fearless's velocity had dropped in less than ten minutes from ninety thousand kilometers per second to a bare hundred and forty.
Honor drew a deep breath and suppressed the automatic urge to shake her head in relief. One or two people around the bridge were doing just that, but the old hands were as purposely blas about it as she herself. It was silly, of course, but there were appearances to maintain.
Her lips twitched at the familiar thought, and she glanced at her astrogation repeater. Stephen had done his usual bang-up job, and Fearless and her charges floated twenty-four light-minutes from Yeltsin's Star, just outside the F6's hyper limit. Even the best hyper log was subject to some error, and the nature of hyper space precluded any observations to correct, but the voyage had been relatively short and DuMorne had shaved his safety margin with an expert touch.
She pressed a com stud on her chair arm while he took normal-space fixes to refine their position, and the voice of her chief engineer answered.
"Engineering, Commander Higgins."
"Reconfigure to impeller drive, please, Mr. Higgins."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Reconfiguring now," Higgins acknowledged, and Fearless folded her Warshawski sails into her impeller wedge.
There was no internal sign of the change, but Honor's engineering readouts and visual display told the tale. Unlike Warshawski sails, which were invisible in normal space except for the brief moment in which they radiated the energy bleed of a translation, the stressed gravity bands of an impeller drive were almost painfully obvious. Now they sprang into existence above and below Fearless, angled towards one another in a wedge open both ahead and astern, and stars red-shifted as a gravity differential of a hundred thousand MPS grabbed at their photons. The cruiser floated within her wedge, like a surfer poised in the curl of a wave which hadn't yet begun to move, and Honor watched her communications officer.
Lieutenant Metzinger pressed the fingers of her right hand gently against her earbug, then looked up.
"All ships report reconfigured to impeller, Ma'am."
"Thank you, Joyce." Honor's eyes moved to the blue-green light code of the planet Grayson, ten and a half light-minutes further in-system, and then to DuMorne. "May I assume, Mr. DuMorne, that, with your usual efficiency, you now have a course worked out for Grayson?"
"You may, Ma'am." DuMorne returned her smile. "Course is one-one-five by" he double-checked his position and tapped a minute correction into his computers "zero-zero-four-point-zero-niner. Acceleration is two-zero-zero gravities with turnover in approximately two-point-seven hours."
"Lay it in, Chief Killian."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Coming to one-one-five, zero-zero-four-point-zero-niner."
"Thank you. Com, pass our course to all ships, please."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Metzinger dumped figures from DuMorne's computers to the rest of the convoy. "Course acknowledged and validated by all units," she reported a moment later. "Convoy ready to proceed."
"Very good. Are we ready, Helm?"
"Yes, Ma'am. Standing by for two-zero-zero gravities."
"Then let's be on our way, Chief."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Underway."
There was no discernible sense of movement as Fearless gathered speed at just under two kilometers per second per second, for her inertial compensator allowed her to cheat Newton shamelessly.
Two hundred gravities was a leisurely lope for Fearless, less than half of what she could have turned out even at the eighty percent "max" power settings the Manticoran Navy normally used, but it was the highest safe acceleration for Honor's freighters. Merchantmen were far larger yet had much weaker impeller drives than warships, with proportionately less powerful compensators.
She looked back at Metzinger.
"Hail Grayson Traffic Control, please, Joyce."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Transmitting now."
"Thank you." Honor leaned back in her command chair, propped her elbows on its arms, and steepled her fingers under her pointed chin. It would take her hail over ten minutes to reach Grayson, and as she watched the distant, gleaming marble swell with infinitesimal speed in the visual display, she wondered how much of a problem her gender would actually be.
High Admiral Bernard Yanakov looked up from his reader as his aide rapped gently on the frame of the open door.
"Yes, Jason?"
"Tracking just picked up a hyper footprint right on the limit, Sir. We don't have impeller confirmation yet, but I thought you'd want to know."
"You thought correctly." Yanakov switched off the reader and rose, twitched his blue tunic straight, and picked up his peaked cap. Lieutenant Andrews moved out of his way, then fell in beside and slightly behind him as he strode briskly towards Command Central.