The Shadow of Saganami

Chapter Fifty-Eight

"They know we're here," Janko Horster muttered.

"What?"

Horster glanced up, irritated by the interruption. But it was the senior tech rep, not one of his officers. The civilian obviously didn't realize he wasn't supposed to interrupt a flag officer's thought processes with questions at a time like this, and Horster decided to answer him.

"They know we're here," he repeated, and gestured at the plot. "Or at least they're afraid someone' s out here."

The range was still too great for his passive sensors to provide detailed information, but some things were brutally clear. Four of the Manties' ten impeller signatures had disappeared. Three had vanished with abrupt finality during the vicious missile exchange. Those three, he felt grimly confident, had been hard kills by Eroica Station. The fourth had gone off the display about four minutes after the others. Its strength had dropped precipitously before that, obviously because of battle damage. So either it had finally failed completely because of that damage, or else it had been shut down, which would almost certainly indicate a ship in the process of being abandoned. Whichever it was, the damned Manties had lost forty percent of their strength, and most, if not all, of their surviving units had to have been hurt.

"They've increased their deceleration to four hundred gravities," he told the civilian. "That's an increase of fifty gees over what they were holding it down to on the way in-probably because of their frigging pods-but it's a hell of a lot less than they ought to be capable of. So obviously they have impeller damage. But they've also got a ship out there somewhere that survived the shooting only to have its signature go off the display just a couple of minutes ago. So either its impeller damage was even worse than theirs, and its nodes just packed it in, or they're abandoning her. But they wouldn't be doing that this quickly unless they were afraid someone was in position to engage them."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I can't be positive , but they'd have taken longer to reverse course if they weren't. No captain's going to abandon his ship that quickly, not without surveying her damage and being certain he can't save her. And no commodore would leave her behind unless he figured he was going to have a fight on his hands and couldn't afford to be handicapped looking after cripples."

The civilian nodded slowly, and Horster smiled. It was an ugly expression, one that mingled fury over what had happened to his navy with vengeful satisfaction.

"They're dead meat," he said flatly. The civilian stopped nodding and looked at him with undisguised anxiety, and the commodore barked a laugh. "They don't have any of those damned pods left," he said, "and they never had anything bigger than a heavy cruiser to begin with, according to Admiral Hegedusic's tac analysis. At least a hundred of our missiles got into attack range before they detonated, too. They've been hammered-hammered hard- and they're going to be up against modern battlecruisers . Battlecruisers that can shoot back this time."

The civilian still looked dubious, and Horster could almost hear the thoughts running through the other man's brain. Yes, he had modern battlecruisers to kill them with, but Horster's crews had been aboard their ships for less than three weeks. Their people were still learning how to use their systems, how to master the capabilities, but it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Their engineering and astrogation departments had been forced to wait until they could actually get aboard the new ships, but the tactical crews had managed to spend over two months in the simulators Levakonic had brought with him. That might not be the same as hands-on training, but it was one hell of a lot better than nothing.

And they were battlecruisers, with all the armor and sheer toughness that implied.

"They're definitely battlecruisers, Sir," Helen said.

She was focused on her displays, trying not to think about how many people had just been killed and wounded aboard the Squadron's ships. Aboard Hexapuma . She knew Aikawa was still alive, but where was Paulo? Was he even-

She pushed the thought aside again. She had no time for it. Other people were depending on her.

"The arrays are close enough to see them now despite their EW," she continued. "They're definitely running with wedges at maintenance levels, but we're getting enough signature off them to be confident of their tonnage range."

"Can we tell if they're more Indefatigables ?"

"No, Sir. We're not getting much besides the impeller signatures and some neutrino leakage."

"Skipper," Lieutenant Bagwell said from the electronic warfare station, "until they go active with their sensor suites, we're not going to get any more off of them. From the quality of their stealth technology, though, they've got to be Solly designs."

"Another thing, Sir," Abigail said. "Whoever these people are, they were obviously already on a ballistic course for Eroica Station when we turned up, or we'd have picked up their drives. I suppose it's possible they had their impellers up and their stealth system simply hid it from us, but I don't think so. I think they'd already cut their drives. Which suggests some sort of fleet maneuver."

"And?" Terekhov prompted in an encouraging tone when she paused, although he was fairly certain he knew where she was headed.

"Well, Sir, I suppose it's possible an SLN commander might want to exercise his crews, but it doesn't seem likely he'd have pulled out all the stops that way against typical Verge sensor technology. I think it's more likely these are more of the same-additional ships being turned over to the Monicans, but already through the refit process and working up new crews."

"That's speculative, Skipper," Bagwell said, "but I think it's good speculation."

"So do I." Terekhov smiled approvingly at his youthful tactical officer. And at her even more youthful assistant. Then his expression sobered.

If Abigail was right and those ships were still in the process of working up, there were likely to be weaknesses in their performance, chinks in their armor. But they were still battlecruisers. The three of them outmassed all six of his surviving ships by better than two-to-one, and they were undamaged.

He looked at the plot. Eleven minutes had elapsed from the moment the third battlecruiser was detected. Only eleven minutes, in which hundreds of his people had been killed and the Monicans' casualties had probably run well into the thousands. He was decelerating away from the oncoming battlecruisers at the highest rate the Squadron as a whole could sustain, but nothing he did was going to prevent those ships from engaging him.

The only advantage he still had was the reach of Hexapuma's internal launchers, and the geometry of the looming engagement did much to neutralize even that. The range was down to 30.9 million kilometers, and with the battlecruisers' overtake advantage of 38,985 KPS, Hexapuma's maximum powered envelope at launch was increased to almost thirty-seven million kilometers. Assuming the battlecruisers' shipboard missile performance approximated ONI's estimates, their range would be under fifteen million kilometers, despite their overtake, but at present velocities and accelerations, they would enter that range of him within another 6.3 minutes and enter energy range eleven minutes after that. Warlock would also have a slight range advantage over the Monican battlecruisers, but it wasn't great enough to change the tactical equation significantly. Her tubes were simply too small; she couldn't handle even the Mark 14 missiles the Saganami-B s had been designed to fire, much less a Saganami-C's Mark 16s, so her advantage would be little more than three million kilometers-barely seventy-five seconds at the Monicans' rate of closure.

The range was still very long, especially against current Solarian ECM and missile defenses… and he didn't have all that many missles with which to penetrate them. Each of his Mark 16 missiles came in at over ninety-four tons, and Hexapuma's total designed loadout of attack missiles was 1,200. Fortunately, they'd squeezed in an extra hundred and twenty birds… but Abigail had expended most of them in Fire Plan Omega, and fifteen more had been in the feed queues of the five destroyed launchers. Without the redundant manpower Hexapuma didn't have, there was no way to manually reclaim those missiles, so his ship was down to an effective total of only 1,155. The cycle time on his launchers at maximum-rate fire was one round every eighteen seconds, twice the time an older ship, like Warlock , would have required. Partly because the missiles were simply larger, but even more because of the need to light up the Mark 16's onboard reactor before launch. Still, in theory, each launcher could fire fifty-four times before anyone else on either side was in range to do the same… except for the fact that he had only thirty-three rounds per tube.

Yet he had very little time to think about it. Flight time was going to be over three and a half minutes.

"Guns," he said to his youthful acting tactical officer, "your target is the lead bogey. I want double broadsides at twenty-five-second intervals. You can have four tubes in each salvo for Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Five salvos on Bogey One, then shift to Bogey Two."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

"Ms. Zilwicki, lock the Alpha-Seven array directly to Lieutenant Bagwell." He turned his chair to face the EWO. "These people's defenses are going to be good-very good. We need to hammer them, and to do that we need data on their EW capabilities-fast. The rest of the Squadron will have over ten minutes to engage after they enter their effective powered envelope, but for them to use that time, we need to feed them everything we can pry loose about these people's defensive systems, and our missile range advantage is the only crowbar we have. We need to make them show us their best, people."

"Understood, Sir," Bagwell said.

"Very well, Ms. Hearns-open fire!"

"Missile launch!"

"Wedge up!" Horster snapped instantly, and the division's impeller wedges sprang to full power. It didn't happen instantly, even from a maintenance power level, but there was plenty of time to get them up before the attacking missiles could arrive.

The commodore crossed quickly to the master plot, looking for the incoming fire, and his eyes narrowed as he found it.

The arrow-shaped icons of thirty-five missiles streaked towards his trio of ships, accelerating steadily at 46,000 gravities. Twenty-five seconds later, a second salvo followed. Then a third. A fourth.

"The target is Typhoon ," CIC announced as the first counter-missiles went out to meet them, and Horster nodded. Typhoon was his lead ship. He'd expected her to draw the enemy's fire, assuming they weren't stupid enough to divide it among all of his units.

The Manties had begun firing much sooner than he'd anticipated. For just an instant, he wondered if that meant they were planning on sending them in ballistic. But that would have been a stupid waste of precious ammunition, and they were firing their birds with low-power drive settings. That suggested that they must have the reach to engage under power even at this range, -presumably with plenty of time on their clocks for terminal attack maneuvers. Still, there were less than forty in each salvo. They had to be coming from a single ship, so perhaps the Manties actually had at least one battlecruiser of their own out there. Either way, there weren't enough birds to saturate his division's defenses, so-

His eyes narrowed still further as the lead salvo abruptly vanished from the plot. One instant it was there; the next all thirty-plus missiles just disappeared. Five seconds later, they reappeared, but not as the steady, blood-red light codes they'd been before. Now they strobed rapidly, almost flickering, and he jabbed an angry glance at the tech rep.

"I don't know!" the civilian said, correctly interpreting the look. "It must be some sort of jamming platform. That-" he stabbed an index finger at the flickering icons "-indicates we can see them, but we don't have hard locks. And look-look there! Goddamn it!"

Horster didn't swear out loud, but his teeth ground together as his division's entire initial salvo of counter-missiles lost lock and went stumbling off into ineffectuality.

Terekhov bared his teeth at the tactical plot. Despite the range, the FTL reports from Helen's recon drones gave him a real-time, close-range picture of what was happening. He hadn't given Abigail specific instructions on how to employ the EW platforms seeded into her attack salvos, but he recognized what she'd done. She'd used all of the available slots in the initial double broadside for Dazzlers but locked them down until they detected the launch of the enemy's first counter-missiles. When the powerful jammers did come on-line, the Monican CMs had already established lock and been cut loose from the launching ships' control links. But the counter-missiles' onboard seekers weren't up to the challenge of that sudden, massive pulse of jamming right in their faces.

The attack salvo jinked and wove, threading through, past, and around the suddenly dazed and clumsy interceptors which were supposed to have stopped it, then drove past the second wave of CMs, which had already locked onto Abigail's next attack wave. Four of the first wave's birds abruptly wavered, losing lock, veering away as the Monicans' own EW lured them astray. Then a fifth followed them. But thirty held lock, and their closing velocity was so great the defenders had no time to vector yet another wave of counter-missiles onto them.

Then Bogey One's forward laser clusters opened fire.

This time Janko Horster did swear.

Typhoon's shipboard sensors were less affected by the Manties' infernal jammers than the counter-missiles' seekers had been, but it was painfully obvious they hadn't been un affected. They fired late, and their solutions were poor. An Indefatigable -class battlecruiser's point defense clusters should have been more than equal to a salvo that size, but she stopped only fourteen of them. The other sixteen got through.

Fortunately, three of the leakers must have been EW platforms. But thirteen laser heads detonated in sequence, so rapidly it looked like one, continuous eruption, directly ahead of Typhoon . The bomb-pumped lasers stabbed straight down the throat of her wedge, unobstructed by any sidewall.

Typhoon's forward hammerhead was massively armored against just such an attack, but not even her armor could shrug off that staccato thunder of stabbing X-ray lasers. It stopped a dozen of them, but another half-dozen blasted straight through it. They knocked out two of her chase missile tubes, one of her chase energy mounts, two counter-missile tubes and a laser cluster. And, far worse, one shattered her forward radar array. It blinded her, put out the eye of her forward missile defenses, and a second wave of attacking missiles was only twenty-five seconds behind.

Lieutenant Julio Tyler staggered as Typhoon shuddered. The engineering officer was in charge of Power One, the battlecruiser's forward fusion plant, and he went pale as damage alarms screamed. Power One was far enough aft and heavily enough armored to make it highly unlikely any cruiser-sized laser head could reach it. But from the sound of the alarms, these laser heads were ripping much deeper than they should have.

Tyler swallowed hard and looked around the brightly lit, spacious compartment. He'd been transferred into Typhoon's company three days after the rest of her crew to replace a man who'd managed to fall down an emergency ladder and break his hip, and he knew the rest of the battlecruiser's engineering department wasn't overly impressed with him. He was used to that jealous reaction to his rapid promotion. Relatively few officers made it to senior lieutenant's rank before their twenty-first birthday, but Tyler had always tried to do his job. To actually deserve the fast-track promotions his last name earned.

Yet this time, he was painfully aware of his shortcomings. In the last two weeks he'd begun finding his way around, well enough, at least, that he was pretty sure his ratings and petty officers were no longer laughing behind his back. And he had to admit the Technodyne technicians were right; Typhoon's power rooms really were laid out better, with controls that were easier to use. They just weren't the controls Tyler had spent three and a half T-years learning like the back of his own hand aboard the cruiser Star Fury .

As he listened to the alarms howl, he hoped the damage control parties had learned their equipment better than he'd learned his.

"Many hits on Bogey One!" Helen Zilwicki announced, half-hunched over her displays. Her eyes were narrowed as she studied the data coming in from her remote arrays. "I think we just took out her forward radar, Sir!"

"Excellent!" Terekhov acknowledged, but he knew that had been the most effective single salvo they were going to get in, and now that they knew for certain he'd seen them, the Monicans were no longer trying to hide. Their wedges were up, and they were accelerating directly towards the Squadron at five hundred gravities. That was going to reduce his missile engagement time, he thought grimly, but it was hardly unexpected. And at least if they were going to chase him, it meant exposing the throats of their wedges to his fire.

And Indefatigable -class battlecruisers didn't mount bow walls.

He watched the plot as Abigail's second double broadside roared into the Monicans' outer defense zone. He saw the instant that its Dazzlers came on-line and the counter-missiles which had been speeding to meet them veered aside. But this time there was time for a follow-on wave of CMs to be vectored onto them. Seventeen of them were intercepted and blotted away, and then the laser clusters began to fire. Another twelve were picked off, but six got through, and Bogey One staggered as more stilettos drilled through her armor.

Typhoon shuddered as a second wave of X-ray daggers bored through her armor. She should have stopped more of them-all of them-with her lavish anti-missile defenses, but she couldn't see them. Her point defense lasers had become dependent upon relayed tracking reports from Cyclone and Hurricane , and that simply wasn't adequate against targets coming in so fast. -Especially not targets as elusive as Manticoran Mark 16 missiles. Fresh -damage reports inundated her bridge, and her acceleration faltered as four of her beta nodes blew.

Power surges cascaded through her systems, starting in Impeller One and Laser Three. Automatic circuit breakers stopped most of them, but three of the breakers themselves had been knocked out. Rampant energy surged past them, and a broadside graser's superconductor ring blew, shattering internal bulkheads and adding its own massive power to the surge.

The surge that came roaring down the graser's main feed trunk and straight into Power One.

The untamed torrent of energy thundered into the compartment, and an already nervous petty officer leapt back as his control panel blew up. He fell to the decksole on the seat of his pants as electrical fires danced through the control runs, and an alarm began to scream.

Aivars Terekhov sat in his command chair, projecting an aura of granite determination. It was all he could do. He'd given his orders; now it was up to others to execute them, and he watched Guthrie Bagwell as the EWO concentrated on the data streaming back from the remote sensor array sitting almost on top of Bogey One. It seemed incredible that the Monicans didn't know Alpha-Seven was there, but surely if they had known they'd have destroyed it already!

Bagwell was leaning forward, as if he intended to climb bodily inside his console, and his hands hovered above his keypads. Every few seconds they darted down, stabbing keys, sending another packet of information, another observation on the enemy's ECM, to Abigail Hearns' tactical computers and on to the rest of the Squadron.

Terekhov glanced at the time display. Five minutes into the engagement. Abigail's third salvo was rumbling down on Bogey One, and in a little over seventy seconds everyone on both sides would be in range.

There'd been time-barely-for Abigail's control links to update the third salvo in light of Bagwell's observation of the ECM which had greeted the first salvo, and Terekhov's eyes gleamed. The Monicans' counter-missiles had picked off twenty of the incoming missiles, but only two of the fifteen survivors succumbed to the enemy's EW. Five of the remaining thirteen fell to Bogey One's laser clusters, but three EW birds and five laser heads reached attack range.

They detonated.

"Captain, this is Tyler, in Power One!" the young voice in Captain Schroeder's earbug was raw with terror. "We're losing containment on Fusion One!"

"Shut it down!"

"Sir, I'm trying , but-"

Janko Horster's face went white as Typhoon blew up.

That shouldn't have happened , a small, stunned corner of his brain insisted. Not to a battlecruiser !

" Allah! " the Technodyne rep whispered. His face glistened with sweat now, and his hands shook. "How-?"

"No telling," Horster said harshly. "A freak hit. Somebody in a fusion room who punched the wrong button. Maybe God just got pissed at us! But it's not going to help them much in another sixty seconds!"

Terekhov stared at his own plot in disbelief. Eight hundred and fifty thousand tons of starship had just disappeared. Just like that.

"Good work, Guns!" he heard his own voice saying even as he tried to come to grips with the reality.

Abigail didn't look up from her console. He didn't know if she'd even heard him. She was oblivious to all distractions, wrapped in a fugue state Terekhov knew from personal experience. Every gram of attention was focused on her displays, her keypads, and the ruby icons of her targets. Anything directly pertaining to their destruction registered instantly, cleanly; everything else was extraneous and supremely unimportant.

Her next two salvos-sixty-two precious laser heads and eight EW platforms-went streaking into nothingness. Their target no longer existed, and there was no time to divert them to Bogey Two; they would continue to the end of their powered run, then detonate harmlessly. But that gave her computers an additional fifty seconds to update the first of Bogey Two's salvos. And she'd taken a different approach with its penetration aides.

It was Hurricane's turn.

Unlike Typhoon , there was nothing at all wrong with Hurricane's forward sensors. But the salvo of missiles tearing down upon her seemed totally oblivious to her ECM. They ignored her decoys, brushed aside her jamming. It was ridiculous. No one could respond that quickly to a target's electronic warfare systems!

But somehow the Manties were doing it.

Hurricane's counter-missiles roared out. The Manties' jamming didn't seem quite so intense this time-either that, or Hurricane's tactical officers were getting a better feel for it. Horster smiled as he watched the CMs tear out to meet the Manticoran missiles.

And then, suddenly, there weren't thirty-five incoming birds; there were more than seventy of them.

"Damn them! Damn them!" the tech rep muttered. "They can't do this shit!"

"What are you talking about?" Horster snarled as the intercepting counter-missiles went berserk trying to maintain lock on their designated targets in the midst of so many abruptly replicated threats.

"They can't have the power to confuse our sensors this way!" the civilian said. "They're inside our shipboard sensor envelope. They aren't dealing with remote arrays, or even smaller shipboard suites-these are battlecruisers , damn it! We should be burning through that clutter like it wasn't even there!"

"You said they had superdense fusion bottles in their missiles, why not here?" Horster demanded harshly.

"But even if they have the power, the emitters would have to be…" The Solarian's voice trailed off, and his eyes narrowed as intense speculation overcame-momentarily, at least-even his fear.

Horster glared at him, but there was more than a little envy in the glare. A part of the commodore wished something could distract him from the debacle which had engulfed his Navy. No matter what happened to the Manties in front of him, they'd accomplished their mission. When the smoke cleared, there would be no Monican System Navy.

But at least he could make sure they never got to celebrate their triumph.

The bridge lift door opened, and Midshipman Paulo d'Arezzo came through it at a run.

Terekhov saw him; Helen was so tightly focused on the input from her sensor arrays and the looming missile engagement with the oncoming battlecruisers that she never even noticed.

"Sorry, Sir!" Paulo said, as he skidded to a temporary halt beside the captain's command chair. "That explosion knocked me on my ass for a minute or two. I'm afraid it wrecked my EW station, too. So I came up here to see if I could lend Lieutenant Bagwell a hand."

There was blood on the young man's right temple, Terekhov noted, and the entire right side of his face was already beginning to bruise. But he was on his feet, and he was here, and the captain smiled tightly at him and pointed at Bagwell.

"Just don't jostle his elbow, Paulo," he said, and the midshipman bared his teeth in a half-manic grin and dashed across to Bagwell.

The miraculously increased Manticoran missile salvo slammed into Hurricane .

Horster wasn't certain how many of the real attack missiles Hurricane and Cyclone had managed to kill. Some of them, at least. But an entire cluster of them got through, and it was Hurricane's turn to twitch in agony as the X-ray needles stabbed into her. They seemed to be all over her, ripping at her like demons, yet unlike Typhoon, she shook the hits off without any apparent effect, and Horster grinned like a punch-drunk fighter. That was what it meant to be a battlecruiser fighting heavy cruisers!

"Missile range in twenty seconds, Commodore!"

"Bring the division to starboard. Clear our port broadsides."

"Yes, Sir."

The two surviving battlecruisers swung to starboard, bringing their port broadsides to bear, and Horster kicked himself mentally. He should have done this sooner. He'd been too fixated on pursuing the enemy, accelerating straight after them. He should have let them go ahead and reduce the closure rate in order to bring his broadside sensors and additional point defense to bear. But he'd been confident in the strength of his armor and the effectiveness of his EW… until Typhoon blew up, at least.

They'd just begun their turn when the second Manty heavy cruiser opened fire, followed seconds later by every surviving Manticoran ship.

Hexapuma and Aegis were the only ships in Terekhov's riven Squadron with the off-bore capacity to fire both broadsides at a single target. The light cruiser had twenty tubes. Warlock had sixteen in her less damaged broadside. Janissary had eight, Aria had six, and the severely mauled Audacious had three. Altogether, it came to eighty-eight launchers. The minimum cycle time for Warlock, Janissary, and Aegis was eight seconds per launcher; for the older Aria and Audacious , it was fourteen seconds. But penetrating the battlecruisers' defensive envelope required massed fire, so the controlling factor was the slowest cycle time of the squadron.

Hexapuma had expended four hundred and sixty-five Mark 16s and sixty of her hundred and thirty EW platforms. She had six hundred and thirty attack missiles left-only eighteen double broadsides, but her consorts had full magazines, and the last thing Aivars Terekhov wanted was to let two undamaged battlecruisers into energy range of his mangled ships. The rest of the Squadron had eleven minutes of concentrated missile fire to do something about that, which was the real reason he'd expended so many missiles while only Hexapuma had the range to engage, but Hexapuma had only another five minutes of fire.

Guthrie Bagwell's analysis of the enemy's electronic warfare capabilities had gone out to the entire Squadron, and if they lacked Hexapuma's reach, even the older destroyers could come close to matching her penetration aids over the range they did have.

If they couldn't stop, or at least severely damage, those oncoming leviathans before the two forces interpenetrated, there would be no tomorrow, and so as the range dropped to 11.4 million kilometers, they went to rapid fire at Hexapuma's maximum rate.

Janko Horster realized he'd made another mistake, one far worse than failing to open his broadsides earlier. Each of his battlecruisers had twenty-nine tubes in her broadside. With Typhoon gone, that gave him fifty-eight-two-thirds as many as the Manties had-with a minimum cycle time of thirty-five seconds. Worse, his tactical crews had no information at all on the Manties' electronic warfare capabilities, while it was quickly and dismally apparent the Manticoran CO had learned a great deal about his EW during the approach.

His people were doing their best, but seven weeks of combined simulator and hands-on training wasn't enough. It wasn't second nature to them, wasn't instinctive. The slight hesitation in their responses, the friction in the decision loops, might not have been apparent against another Verge navy. But he didn't face another Verge navy. He faced the Royal Manticoran Navy, and that was a mistake few survived.

In the next two hundred and sixteen seconds, Aivars Terekhov's cruisers and destroyers fired nine hundred and ninety attack missiles and one hundred and twenty Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Seven hundred and thirteen missiles and seventy-nine of the electronic warfare birds were in space before the first salvo landed. In the same time period, Cyclone and Hurricane fired three hundred and thirty-six missiles… and no dedicated EW platforms at all.

It was a holocaust.

The Manticoran missiles went through the Monicans' electronic defenses like white-hot awls. Counter-missiles managed to kill dozens of them, point defense laser clusters killed dozens more, but for every missile that was stopped, five got through. The battlecruisers' tracking capacity was simply overwhelmed by the Dragon's Teeth's false images of incoming warheads. Their sensors were hashed by blinding bursts of static. They were a third-class navy up against what might well be the premier combat fleet of the explored galaxy, and they were outclassed in every quality but courage.

Janko Horster saw it coming. Realized even Technodyne's "experts" had underestimated the enormous technological edge the Manticoran Navy held over their own hardware. Realized, even more gallingly, how outclassed his crews-and he-were by the crews aboard those Manticoran warships. His ships were battlecruisers, armed and armored on a scale none of his opponents could match. But what use armor when hundreds upon hundreds of laser warheads ripped and tore and gouged? What use massive energy batteries that were shattered and broken, reduced to ruined battle steel and dead and dying crewmen before ever they got into range of an enemy?

Space itself seemed to shudder around the two ships writhing at the heart of the furnace, surrounded by a seething cauldron of nuclear flame as laser head after laser head detonated and hurled its fury at them. Armor and hull plating shattered, atmosphere gushed from gaping wounds like blood, and men died-some instantly, like the switching off of a light, and some screaming in broken agony, alone and trapped in the wreckage of their ships.

By the time Cyclone and Hurricane reached energy range of the first Manticoran ship, they were little more than hulks, wedges dead, power gone, trailing atmosphere, escape pods, and wreckage.

But they didn't die alone. Outclassed they might have been, with faulty training and poor doctrine, but there was nothing at all wrong with their courage. And however justified Aivars Terekhov's actions might have been, the fury they felt at his attack burned with a clear, white heat. Three hundred of their missiles reached Terekhov's squadron before the blowtorch of his own attack seared them, and the destroyer Janissary and the light cruiser Audacious died with them. Hexapuma , Warlock , Aegis , and Aria survived. Four ships, all that was left of Terekhov's squadron, every one of them severely damaged.

"- and Surgeon Commander Simmons abandoned Vigilant successfully with a pinnace full of wounded before she blew. They'll be aboard directly, Sir," Amal Nagchaudhuri said wearily. With Ansten FitzGerald still unconscious and Naomi Kaplan even more badly injured, and with Ginger Lewis working like a titan to deal with Hexapuma's brutal wounds, Nagchaudhuri was Terekhov's acting executive officer. He looked exhausted, out on his feet, and Terekhov sympathized, for he felt exactly the same.

"Good, Amal," he said crisply, and the com officer wondered where the Captain found his energy. No one could look that clear-eyed and alert after what they'd all been through, but somehow, the Captain managed it. "We'll have to find room for the wounded somewhere," he continued. "But thank God we can get a proper doctor in here!"

"Yes, Sir," Nagchaudhuri agreed. He pressed the page key, bringing up his next screen of notes. "We've lost six beta nodes in the forward ring, and eight betas and two alphas out of the after ring. Our best acceleration's about three hundred gravities, but Ginger's working on that. We're down to two grasers in the port broadside-none at all to starboard, although Ginger thinks she may be able to get one of them back eventually. We've got eight operable tubes to starboard, and eleven to port, but we shot ourselves dry. We're even out of counter-missiles. The after chase armament's pretty much trashed, and I don't think Ginger's going to be able to do anything about that. The forward chasers came through untouched, somehow. And we still have the bow wall. But if it comes to another fight, Skipper, we've got the firepower-maybe-of a destroyer, and we have exactly one starboard sidewall generator."

Terekhov grimaced. They were no unexpected revelations in Nagchaudhuri's report. Indeed, if anything surprised him it was that they had even one broadside energy mount left.

"And our people?" he asked quietly, and Nagchaudhuri winced.

"We're still working on the numbers, and we've still got people unaccounted for who may be alive in the wreckage. But so far, Skipper, it looks like sixty dead and twenty-eight wounded."

Terekhov's jaw clenched. Eighty-eight might not sound like very much compared to what the Monicans had lost. Or the other ships of his own squadron, for that matter. But Hexapuma's total company, including Marines, was only three hundred and fifty before her earlier casualties and detachments. Nagchaudhuri's numbers-which still weren't complete, he reminded himself-represented thirty percent of the people he'd taken into battle with him.

And Hexapuma was one of the lucky ships.

"What about the rest of the Squadron?"

" Aegis is the closest thing we've got to combat-capable, Sir, and she's down to sixty-two missiles and five grasers. Warlock doesn't have a single operable weapon left, and Aria is almost that bad. Lieutenant Rossi says-"

"Excuse me, Skipper." Terekhov looked up. It was Jefferson Kobe.

"Yes, Jeff? What is it?"

"Sir, Helen's arrays are picking up several Monican warships headed our way. It looks like half a dozen LACs, four destroyers, and a pair of light cruisers. And we've just received a message from an Admiral Bourmont. He demands that we surrender or be destroyed."

Terekhov looked at him, then at Nagchaudhuri. The lieutenant commander's expression was tight, his eyes dark, and Terekhov understood that, too. Obsolete though the regular Monican Navy might be, it was more than adequate to destroy his own shattered survivors.

"How long for their first unit to get here?"

"Toby says four hours for a zero/zero, Sir. Three hours, fifty minutes if they settle for a flyby firing pass."

"Very well." Terekhov strode out of the briefing room onto Hexapuma's bridge and waved for Kobe to resume his station at Communications. He felt his bridge crew's tension, felt them wanting to turn and look at him even as discipline kept them focused on their displays. These people hovered on the ragged brink of exhaustion, and they knew as well as he that they couldn't fight the Monicans.

"First, Jeff," Terekhov said calmly, "get Commander Badmachin on the FTL."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

It took less than a minute to make the connection. Hexapuma and her three battered consorts floated in space, less than nine million kilometers from Eroica Station with zero relative motion. That put the ammunition ship, still hovering at the hyper limit, 12.2 million kilometers further out.

"Yes, Captain?" Badmachin's expression was eloquent with concern.

"Captain Badmachin, I want you to join the rest of the Squadron here at your best speed."

" There , Sir?"

"Yes. You should have time to join us, drop off a couple of hundred more pods, and still return across the hyper limit before any Monican unit is in range to fire on you. Please get underway immediately."

"Yes, Sir. Immediately!" she said.

"Good. Terekhov, clear." He looked back at Kobe. "Now record for Admiral Bourmont, please."

"Yes, Sir. Standing by to record."

"Admiral Bourmont," Terekhov faced the visual pickup, his shoulders square, his expression confident, and his voice was icy. "You've called upon my Squadron to surrender. Unfortunately, I can't do that. I came here to do a job-to neutralize the battlecruisers your star nation has been assembling to attack mine. I have not yet completed that task. Two of your battlecruisers remain undamaged, because I refrained from firing upon them in light of their proximity to the civilian portions of your Eroica Station complex. Should any of your armed vessels continue to approach my own command-and we have all of them under surveillance as I speak-I will have no option but to complete my task before withdrawing into hyper before any of your warships can reach me . I regret to say it, but this will require a bombardment of the battlecruisers in question with contact nuclear warheads, and it will be impossible for me to permit the evacuation of your civilian workforce first."

He heard someone inhale sharply behind him, but his own expression never wavered.

"Should you choose to stand down your warships, and to maintain the present status quo unchanged pending the arrival of the approaching Manticoran relief force, I will be spared that unpleasant necessity. Should you choose not to stand down your warships and maintain the status quo , I will proceed with the bombardment. And under no circumstances will I permit the evacuation of your civilians. The choice is yours, Sir. You have two hours in which to make it and get your decision to me. Terekhov, clear."

He stopped and looked at Kobe. The lieutenant looked severely shaken, but he nodded.

"Good copy, Sir," he said with only the slightest tremor in his voice.

"Very well. Attach the latest tactical summary, including the positions of all of their units we currently have under observation. Then send it, please."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

"Now, Amal," Terekhov said calmly, turning back to Nagchaudhuri, "I believe you have a report to complete. We'll have time for that before Volcano arrives. If you please."

He walked back across the deathly silent bridge to the briefing room, his boot heels sounding clearly on the decksole, and Nagchaudhuri followed after only a brief hesitation. So did Van Dort. He hadn't been invited, but Terekhov wasn't surprised at all to see him after the hatch closed and he turned back to Nagchaudhuri.

"Yes, Bernardus?" he asked in that same, calm voice.

"Aivars, you are bluffing, aren't you? You wouldn't really massacre all those civilians?"

"Bernardus, we can't leave. Monica's squarely in the middle of a hyper-space grav wave. The only two ships we have left who can still generate Warshawski sails are Aegis and Volcano , and they don't begin to have the life-support to take all our survivors with them. And what do you think will happen to my people if I allow them to fall into Monican hands before the relief force gets here?"

Van Dort didn't answer the question. He didn't have to.

"But what if there isn't a relief force?" he asked instead.

"There will be," Terekhov said, with the certitude of God's own prophet. "And when it arrives, my people will be alive to see it."

"But you won't really bombard the battlecruisers?"

"On the contrary, Bernardus," Captain Aivars Alexsovitch Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy, said coldly. "If these bastards call my 'bluff,' I will blow their goddamned battlecruisers, and every civilian around them, to hell."