"Heavy damage aft. Fourteen dead in Missile Two-Five. No contact at all with Two-Four or Two-Six. Sir, we've lost a beta node; our acceleration is dropping."
Lieutenant Commander Jamal was white-faced, his voice flat with a strained, unnatural calm, and Coglin stared at him in disbelief. Half their after launchers gone to a single hit? Harrington wasn't a wizard—she was a goddamned demon!
The two ships raced onward, ripping at one another with thermonuclear fire, shedding debris, streaming atmosphere like trails of blood. The big freighter began to twist and writhe in ever more violent evasion as her tiny, battered foe clung stubbornly to her heels. Sirius was reduced to three-missile salvos, and Fearless was overhauling more and more quickly.
Lieutenant Montoya made himself stand back, shutting his ears to the groans and sobs about him while his sick berth attendants cut Lieutenant Webster out of his suit. He couldn't look at the mass of wounded. The hatch was locked open, and burned and broken bodies spilled out of his cramped sickbay's bunks. They were lying in the passages now, covering the decks, and more and more of them were unprotected even by the transparent tents of emergency environmental slips. His mind shuddered away from the thought of what would happen if sickbay lost pressure now, and he stepped closer to the table as Webster's suit was stripped away. One of his assistants ran a sterilizer/depilator over the lieutenant's chest while the other looked up from her monitors to meet Montoya's eyes.
"Not good, Sir. We've got at least two ribs in his left lung. It's completely collapsed, and it looks like we may have splinter damage to his heart, too."
Montoya nodded grimly and reached for a scalpel.
"All right—heave!"
Sally MacBride bent her own back to the struggle, and the seventy-ton missile floated across the passage. The overhead tractor rails were out, and the passage was open to space. Her vac-suited people grunted and strained, manhandling the ten-meter-long projectile, leaning their weight desperately against it to point it down the shaft to Missile Two's magazine. The counter-grav collars reduced its weight to zero, but they couldn't do anything about momentum and inertia.
MacBride's own feet scrabbled against the deck as she leaned back against the drag wire, hauling the nose around by pure, brute force while Horace Harkness threw himself against it from the other side, and the long, lethal shape began to pivot toward her.
Another savage concussion shook the ship, smashing the boat bay to wreckage, and the missile twisted like a malevolent beast. It broke away from its handlers, swinging like a huge, enraged tusk, and MacBride hurled herself desperately to one side.
She almost got clear. Almost. Seventy tons of mass slammed into her, crushing her right thigh and pelvis against the bulkhead like a sledgehammer on an anvil, and she shrieked her agony into her com as the missile rolled and ground against her.
Then Harkness was there. He stood on the missile, shoulders braced against the bulkhead, heels jammed hard into a recessed service panel, and his explosive grunt of strain could be heard even through MacBride's screams. Veins stood out like cables on his temples as his back straightened with a lunging, convulsive snap, forcing the floating missile off her, and the bosun fell to the deck in a broken, moaning heap.
Her work party rushed forward, bending over her, and Harkness punched and slapped them away.
"Get back on those frigging drag lines!" the petty officer snarled. "We need this bird moved!"
The ratings staggered back, clutched numbly at wires, and heaved, and Harkness himself crouched over the bosun. Her face was white, her cheekbones standing out like knobs of ivory, but her eyes were open and her teeth were locked in a rictus of agony against her screams. He pressed her med panel, flooding her system with painkillers, and she shuddered in relief while blood ran down her chin where her teeth had bitten through her lip. He patted her shoulder awkwardly.
"Corpsman to Missile Two!" he grated, and blinked away furious tears even as he hurled himself back into the battle with the missile.
Dominica Santos skidded to a halt just inside the forward reactor compartment, and her eyes widened. The damage that had cut Damage Central's links to Fusion One was appallingly evident. A jagged, meter-wide rent had been slashed through the primary control systems from a hit on the far side of the hull, ripping the compartment's inboard bulkhead like a saw-toothed knife. Only one of her power gang was still alive, and she was trapped. The woman's hands thrust weakly at the buckled frame member pinning her to the deck, and her helmeted head rolled towards Santos.
"How bad are you hurt, Earnhardt?" Santos was already reaching for the backup computers as she spoke.
"I'm not hurt at all, damn it!" Earnhardt snapped. She sounded far more angry than afraid. "I just can't get out from under this thing!"
"Well, sit tight, and I'll do what I can in a minute," Santos said absently, her gloved fingers already feeding commands into the computers. "I've got other things on my mind right now."
"Fucking A," Earnhardt agreed hoarsely, and Santos managed a strained grin.
It vanished an instant later as scarlet damage codes flashed before her. Her face tightened. Whatever had ripped through the primary systems must have sent a power surge through the backups. Half her command files were scrambled or completely wiped.
Someone stepped up beside her, and she turned her head. It was Manning. Her assistant stared at her display and pursed his lips in silent dismay.
"Jesus, Commander! What do we do now?"
Santos grunted a smothered curse and slapped another switch. Nothing happened, and she darted a frightened glance at the reactor itself. She knew it had to be her imagination, but she almost believed she could feel the containment field pulsing.
"We've lost most of the bottle software—I don't know how it's holding together now," she said rapidly, already ripping off access panels. "And we've lost all the hydrogen feed files. The bastard's running away on us."
Manning nodded silently, jerking off other panels at her side.
"If the plasma hits overload levels with an unstable bottle—" Santos broke off and flung herself on her belly, peering into the guts of the console, and grunted.
"We've got maybe five minutes before this thing blows, and I don't dare screw around with the mag governors."
"Cut the feed?" Manning said tautly.
"All we can do, but I'm going to have to cross-wire the damned thing by hand. I lost my cutter when we took this hit. Get me another, and hunt up four—no, five—alpha-seven jump harnesses. Fast!"
"Yes, Ma'am." Manning leapt away, and Santos turned her head without rising. Her eyes rested for just a moment on a big, red switch on the bulkhead beside her, and then she jerked them away.
"Bridge, Missile Two." The voice on the intercom was harsh with exhaustion. "We've got two laser heads shifted. They're numbers five and six on your feed queue. I'm working on shifting number three now."
"Missile Two, this is the Captain. Where's the bosun?" Honor asked quickly.
"On her way to sickbay, Skipper. This is Harkness. I guess I'm in charge now."
"Understood. Get that third missile shifted as quickly as possible, PO."
"We're on it, Ma'am."
Even as Honor spoke, Cardones's hands flashed across his console, reprioritizing his loading schedule. Fifteen seconds later, a fresh laser warhead went scorching out of his single remaining tube.
Sirius's bridge was a tiny pocket of hell. Smoke billowed, circuit boards popped and sizzled and spat actinic fury, and Johan Coglin retched as the smoke from burning insulation filled his lungs. He heard Jamal's agonized, hacking coughs as he fought to retain tactical control, and someone was screaming in pain.
"We've lost—lost—" Jamal broke off in another tortured spasm of coughing, then slammed his helmet. Coglin followed his example, rasping for breath as his suit scrubbers attacked the sinus-tearing smoke, and Jamal's voice came over his com.
"We've lost another beta node, Sir. And—" Coglin peered through the smoke, w
atching the tactical officer work on his console. Then Jamal cursed. "Point defense is hurt bad, Captain. I've lost four laser clusters and half my phased radar array."
Coglin swore viciously. With two beta nodes gone, his maximum acceleration was going to be reduced by over nine percent—he'd be lucky to pull three hundred and eighty gees. He still had his alpha nodes, which meant he still had Warshawski capability, but how long was that going to last? Especially with half his last-ditch laser clusters gone?
"Missile fire control?" he demanded harshly.
"Still functional. And my ECM suite's still up—for what it's worth," Jamal added bitterly.
"Range?"
"Coming up on one-point-five million kilometers, Sir."
Coglin nodded to himself, his eyes bitter. With the open front of Fearless's wedge toward him and no sidewalls to interdict, effective laser range was right on a million kilometers, but he'd lost one of his own spinal lasers, and the back of his wedge was as open as the front of the cruiser's. If Fearless got into energy range. . . .
Energy range, hell! His point defense was down to less than half efficiency! If Harrington realized it, turned and hit him with a multiple-missile salvo—
He bit off another curse. This couldn't be happening to him! It wasn't possible for a single, over-aged, under-sized light cruiser to do this to him!
"I think he's in trouble, Guns," Honor said, staring at the readouts from her ECM suite's passive sensors. "I think you just took out most of his missile tracking capability."
"I hope so, Skipper," Cardones said hoarsely, "because I'm down to just three more birds, and—"
"Got it!" Santos shouted as she bridged the last circuit and started to slide out from under the console. Now all she had to do was cut the fuel feed and—
Fearless twisted and leapt. The savage motion picked the engineer up and smashed her down. The side of her helmet crashed against the deck, and she grunted in shock, stunned for just an instant.
It was an instant she didn't have. She blinked back into focus, and her mouth went desert dry. She couldn't hear the alarm in Fusion One's vacuum, but she could see the numbers flashing blood-red on the panel. The mag bottle was going, counting down with lightning speed, and there was no longer time to kill the plasma flow.
She rolled across the deck, trying not to think, knowing what she had to do, and drove her hand toward the scarlet bulkhead switch.
"Jesus Christ, we got her!" Jamal screamed. "We nailed the bitch!"
* * *
The emergency jettisoning charges hurled the entire side of Fusion One out into space a microsecond before the ejection charges blew the reactor after it. There had to be a delay, be it ever so tiny, lest a faltering mag bottle be smashed against an intact bulkhead and liberate its plasma inside the ship. But small as that delay was, it was almost too long.
Dominica Santos, Allen Manning, and Angela Earnhardt died instantly. The dying containment field failed completely just as the reactor housing blew through the opening, and the terrible fury of a star's heart erupted back into the compartment as well as out. Fusion One vanished, along with seven hundred square meters of Fearless's outer hull, Missile Two, Laser Three, Point Defense One, Rad Shield One, all of her forward fire control sensors, and her forward port sidewall generators, and forty-two of Fearless's surviving crewmen died with them. A streamer of pure energy gushed out of the dreadful wound, and the light cruiser heaved bodily up to starboard in maddened response.
Honor clung to her command chair, and her ship's agony whiplashed through her own flesh. Her ECM panel went down. The main tactical display locked as the forward sensors died. Chief Killian's shock frame broke, and the coxswain flew forward over his console. He thudded into a bulkhead and slid limply down it, and every damage sensor in the ship seemed to blaze in scarlet fury before her eyes.
She slammed the release on her own shock frame and lunged towards the helm.
"Look at that, Sir!" Jamal exulted.
"I see it." Coglin fought his own exultation, but it was hard. Fearless staggered sideways and her fire died suddenly. He didn't know exactly what Jamal had hit, but whatever it was had gutted the cruiser at last.
Yet she wasn't dead. Her wedge was weakened and fluttering, but it was still up, and even as he watched someone was bringing her back under command. He stared at the crippled cruiser, and something hot and primitive boiled deep within him. He could run now. But Fearless was still alive. Not only alive, but battered into a bloody, broken wreck. If he left her behind, the Royal Manticoran Navy would have far more than instrument data to prove Sirius had been armed.
He sensed the danger of his own emotions and tried to fight his way through them. What had happened out here was an act of war—there were no two ways to look at that—and Haven had fired the first shot. But no one knew that except Sirius and Fearless, and Fearless was helpless behind him.
And dead men, he thought, told no tales.
He told himself he had to consider all the options, had to evaluate and decide coldly and calmly, and he knew it was a lie. He'd suffered too much at that ship's hands to think calmly.
"Bring us about, Mr. Jamal," he said harshly.
" . . . nothing left at all in the port broadside," Alistair McKeon's hoarse voice reported from Central Damage Control, "and the port sidewall's down clear back to Frame Two Hundred. We've lost an energy torpedo and Number Two Laser out of the starboard broadside, but at least the starboard sidewall is still up."
"And the drive?" Honor demanded.
"Still up, but not for long, Ma'am. The entire port impeller ring's unbalanced forward. I don't think I can hold it another fifteen minutes."
Honor stared around her bridge, seeing the exhaustion, tasting the fear. Her ship was dying about her, and it was her fault. She'd brought them all to this by refusing to break off, by not being smarter and quicker.
"Sirius is turning, Skipper." Rafael Cardones sat awkwardly hunched to one side, favoring obviously broken ribs, but he was still watching what was left of his sensor readouts. "She's coming back at us!"
Honor's eyes whipped down to the helmsman's maneuvering display in front of her. It wasn't as detailed as a proper tactical display, but it was still live, and she saw the angry red dot of the Q-ship swinging to decelerate savagely towards her. Coglin was coming back to make certain.
"Skipper, if you bring us hard to port, I can get off a few shots from our starboard missile tube," Cardones said urgently, but Honor shook her head.
"No."
"But, Skipper—!"
"We're not going to do a thing, Rafe," she said flatly. Cardones whipped around to stare at her in disbelief, and she smiled at him, her eyes like brown flint. "Not a thing except let her close . . . and bring up the grav lance," she said very, very softly.
* * *
Johan Coglin listened to the thunder of his pulse as his ship braked with all her power. Fearless limped slowly and painfully to port, turning her starboard side toward him, but her acceleration was a crawl. Even with Sirius's node damage, it would take her less than five minutes to reach pointblank range.
Jamal sat stiff and silent at Tactical, poised over his missile defense panel. A small sigh of relief had escaped him as Sirius's turn brought his undamaged forward sensors to bear, but he obviously dreaded what Fearless's broadside might do to him.
Only it wasn't doing a thing, and Coglin felt a bubble of vengeful laughter tearing at the back of his throat. He'd been right! The cruiser's armament must have been gutted—no captain would pass up the opportunity to fire his full broadside down the throat of a wide open impeller wedge!
He completed his turn, swinging the vulnerable front of his wedge away from Fearless, closing at an oblique angle and presenting his port broadside to her. The range fell with flashing speed, and his smile was ugly.
"Range five hundred thousand," Cardones said tautly. "Closing at three-three-nine-two KPS."
Honor nodded and eased the helm another degree to port.
Her crippled ship turned like a dying shark, and Sirius plunged towards her.
"Four-eight-five thousand." Cardones's voice was harsh. "Four-seven-five. Four-six-zero. Four-four-five. Rate of closure now four-zero-two-one KPS. Time to energy range one-one-point-nine seconds. Time to grav lance eight-two-point-six-five seconds."
"Stand by grav lance." Honor's voice was quiet, and her mind raced. Would he come all the way in? Or would he stand off? He had less than a minute and a half to make his mind up, and if no fire came at him. . . .
She sat very still at the helm, gloved right hand poised lightly on the stick, and watched the range fall.
"Give her a broadside at four hundred thousand," Coglin said softly. "Let's see how she likes that."
"Four-zero-zero thous—"
Even as Cardones spoke, Honor whipped Fearless up on her side.
* * *
"Shit!"
Coglin slammed a fist into his chair arm as the limping cruiser spun suddenly. Damn it, didn't Harrington know when it was over?! She was done. All she could do was stretch out the agony, but she didn't seem to know it, and her turn presented her impenetrable belly stress band even as he fired, as if she'd read his mind. He'd more than half expected it, but that didn't make him any happier to see it.
Sirius's side flashed with the fury of a Fleet battlecruiser, and Honor had cut her maneuver just a fraction of a second too late. Fearless's belly bands came up in time to intercept the missiles, but two of the lasers got through. The sidewall bent and attenuated them, but not enough, and the cruiser lurched as they ripped deep into her hull and smashed her single, unfired missile tube and two of her energy torpedoes.
Yet she survived . . . and so did her grav lance.
"All right, goddamn it," Coglin snarled. "Take us in, Jamal!"
"Aye, aye, Sir."
Honor watched the chronometer tick down, and her mind was cold and clear, accepting no possibility of failure. The sensors she had left couldn't track Sirius clearly through her belly stress band, and her current vector gave the Q-ship four options: retreat and break off the engagement, roll up on her own side relative to Fearless and shoot "down" through the starboard sidewall as she overflew the cruiser, cross her bow, or cross her stern. She might do any of them, but Honor was betting her ship—and her life—that Coglin would cross her bows. It was the classic maneuver, the one any naval officer instinctively sought—and he knew her forward armament had been destroyed.