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She was going to die. She knew it, but if she could cripple the enemy too badly to catch Artemis even if they detected her, the sacrifice would be worth it. She accepted that, as well... but behind her calm face her heart bled at condemning so many others to die with her. People like Nimitz and Samantha. Like Rafe Cardones, Ginger Lewis, and James MacGuiness, who had flatly refused to evacuate the ship. Aubrey Wanderman, Carol Wolcott, Horace Harkness, Lewis Hallowell... All those people, people she'd come to know and treasure as individuals, many as friends, were going to die right beside her. She could no more save them than she could save herself, and guilt pressed down upon her. Those others would die because she'd ordered them to, because it was her duty to take them all to death with her and it was their duty to follow her. But unlike them, she would die knowing it was her orders which had killed them.
Yet there was no other way. She'd gotten another eight hundred people off Wayfarer, reducing the death toll to just over a thousand. One thousand men and women, and two treecats, who would die to save four thousand others. By any measure, that had to be a worthwhile bargain, but, oh, how it hurt.
She hid her pain behind serene eyes, feeling her bridge officers about her, knowing how they would focus on her, take their lead and their inspiration and their determination from her, when it began, and pride in them and grief for them warred in her soul.
Margaret Fuchien, Harold Sukowski, and Stacey Hauptman stood and watched Annabelle Ward's plot with haunted eyes. The battlecruiser had burned past them twelve minutes ago, never even noticing the liner or its protecting LACs. And why should it have? They were only seven inert pieces of alloy, radiating no energy and lost in h-space's immensity as Wayfarer deliberately sucked their enemy after her.
"Seventy-five minutes," Ward murmured.
"Will they still be in sensor range, Captain Harry?" Stacey asked softly.
"We should still have their impellers, but it won't be very clear." Sukowski closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. "In a way, I'm just as glad. I don't want to see it. It's going to..." He met Stacey’s gaze squarely. "It's going to be ugly, Stace. Her ship's already badly damaged, and if the bastards just stand off and pound her..." He shook his head again.
"Will she surrender?" Fuchien asked out of the silence, and Sukowski looked at her. "When they open fire on her, will she surrender?"
"No," Sukowski said simply.
"Why not?" Stacey demanded, her voice suddenly sharp. "Why not? She's already saved us, why won't she surrender and save her own people?"
"Because she's still protecting us," Sukowski told her as gently as he could. "When they get close enough to engage her, they'll also be close enough to spot the drone. They'll know we aren't there, but they'll also know within an hour or two when we must have shut down our drive, and our vector when we did. That means they'll have a good idea of where we could be if they come back and look for us. The odds are against their finding us, but Lady Harrington intends to make certain they don't. She'll hammer them as long as she has a weapon left, Stace, to cripple their sensors and slow them down." He saw the tears in Stacey's eyes and put his arm about her as he had about Chris Hurlman. "It's her job, Stace," he said softly. "Her duty. And that woman knows about duty. I spent enough time aboard her ship to know that."
"I envy you that, Harry," Margaret Fuchien said softly.
"Missile range in twenty-one minutes," Jennifer Hughes announced. "Assuming constant accelerations, we'll enter energy range thirteen-point-five minutes after that."
Honor nodded once more and keyed her com.
"DCC, Lewis," the woman on her screen said, and Honor smiled crookedly.
"I don't want to joggle Commander Tschu's elbow, but I'd like to confirm his latest estimate on the cargo doors."
"Current estimate is..." Ginger glanced at the chrono and did some mental math "...thirty-nine minutes, Ma'am."
"Thank you," Honor said quietly, and killed the circuit. So there it was. The pods would come back on-line just as the Peeps closed to energy range anyway. But there was nothing Honor could do about that. All she could do was continue to run as long as possible, drawing the Peeps after her, buying Artemis time, and she prepared to play the game out to its final, hopeless throw.
"We'll go with Alpha-One," she said. "Rafe, tell all hands, seal helmets in ten minutes."
A curiously shrunken Klaus Hauptman stepped onto Artemis' bridge. The people clustered around the plot looked up at him, and his face clenched as he saw Sukowski's arm around Stacey. He should have been the one to comfort his daughter. But he'd forfeited that right, he thought drearily, when he proved himself so much less than she'd always thought he was in her eyes.
And in his own.
He crossed to the plot, making his gaze meet theirs. It was almost an act of penance, an ordeal deliberately inflicted upon himself and embraced. Fuchien and Sukowski nodded to him, their expressions neutral, but neither spoke, and Stacey never even looked at him.
"How soon?" he asked, and his normally powerful, confident voice was frayed and rough.
"Sixteen minutes to missile range, Sir," Annabelle Ward replied.
"All right, Steve," Abraham Jurgens told his flagship captain. "I don't want to get in close until we're sure their teeth have been pulled."
"Aye, Citizen Commodore." Citizen Captain Stephen Holtz looked at his repeater plot and frowned. The Q-ship was putting out some damned effective decoys. Her EW was starting to play games with his sensors, too, and hypers natural sensor degradation made her efforts even more effective than usual, but he was five thousand kilometers inside the powered missile envelope.
Under normal conditions, he would have turned to open his broadside, but these weren't normal conditions. He had his own EW systems fully on-line, and the same conditions which hurt his fire control had to be hurting the Q-ship's, as well. Under the circumstances, it actually made sense to keep the vulnerable throat of his wedge towards the enemy, for it gave the Manty a weaker, fuzzier target than his sidewalls and the full length of his wedge would have.
Of course, it also restricted him only to the three tubes of his bow chasers, but that was all right. He wanted to sting the bastard, goad him. If he could get the Q-ship to fire off any pods it might have at extreme range, his point defense would be far more effective... and the Manty's target would be far harder to hit.
"Missile separation!" Jennifer Hughes announced. "I have two, no, three inbound. Time of flight one-seven-zero seconds. Stand by point defense."
"Standing by," Lieutenant Jansen replied.
"Spread Decoys Four and Five a little wider, Carol," Hughes said. "Lets see if we can pull these birds off high."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Wolcott made an adjustment on her panel, and Honor reached up to check Nimitz. Like her, the 'cat had his helmet sealed, and he'd secured the safety straps mounted on her chair to the snap rings on his suit. It wasn't as good as a shock frame, but no one made treecat-sized shock frames.
"Impact in niner-zero seconds," Jansen announced, and pressed the key that sent his countermissiles out to meet the incoming fire.
"They've killed the birds, Skipper," Holtz's tac officer reported as the third missile tore apart. None of them had even gotten as deep as the Q-ship's inner boundary laser defenses, Holtz noted in disgust. Well, it wasn't all that surprising, and at least their damned pod-launched missiles hadn't come back to kill his ship.
"Any sign at all of missile pods?"
"None, Citizen Captain. No return fire at all." Holtz knew Citizen Commander Pacelot was irritated with him for asking the obvious whenever she called him "Citizen Captain" instead of "Skipper." He grimaced, but he couldn't really blame her. He considered a moment longer, then nodded.
"All right. Let's go to sequenced fire, Helen."
"Aye, Skipper," she said, much more cheerfully, and punched the new commands into her console.
Honor's eyes narrowed as the Peeps' firing patterns changed. The battlecruiser was using her three bow-mounted tubes to fire the equivalent of a double broadside. It doubled the interval between incoming salvos and gave point defense longer to track, but it also increased the threat sources and allowed the battlecruiser to seed her fire with jammers and other penetration aids. Honor understood the logic behind that; what she didn't understand was why the Peeps were restricting themselves solely to their chasers. They had twenty tubes in each broadside and far higher acceleration. They could slalom back and forth across Wayfarer's wake, hammering her with salvos from each broadside in turn, and send in six times as many missiles in each wave.
She frowned, then dropped her suit com into Cardones' private channel.
"Why do you think he's sticking to his chasers?" she asked, and Cardones rubbed the top of his helmet.
"He's probing," he said. "This reduces the target he's offering to us, and he's trying to get a feel for what we can shoot back at him with."
"Which is nothing at all," Honor observed quietly, and Cardones gave her a lopsided grin.
"Hey, you can't have everything, Skipper."
"True," she said with an affectionate smile. "But I think it might be a little more than that." Cardones raised his eyebrows, and she shrugged. "More than just probing. He had us on gravitics when we killed his consort, but he was too far out to see how we did it. He's probably deduced we had to have used missile pods, and he may be trying to goad us into firing off any we have left at extreme range."
"Makes sense," Cardones agreed after a moment, even as Lieutenant Jansen’s point defense dealt with the last missile of the most recent salvo. "Of course, he's going to be figuring out pretty soon that we don't have any pods, or we would be shooting back."
Missiles continued to bore in on Wayfarer, racing up from astern in groups of six. Carolyn Wolcott’s decoys and jammers played merry hell with their onboard seekers once they went into final acquisition, and Jansen’s countermissiles and laser clusters picked them off with methodical precision. But the laws of chance are inexorable. Sooner or later, one of those missiles was bound to ignore the decoys, burn through the jammers, and evade the active defenses.
Honor’s earbug buzzed, and she looked down to see Ginger Lewis' face on her small com screen.
"Message from Commander Tschu, Ma'am! He did it! He's got power to the port door and its opening! It's opening, Ma'am!"
Honor’s heart leapt. They could only launch two pods at a time, even if the port door functioned perfectly, but that might be enough. With the enemy still coming up astern, running directly into their fire when he hadn't seen even a single shot coming back at him, they might...
That was when a missile finally slithered past the countermissiles and slipped like a dagger through the desperate lattice of the last-ditch laser clusters. The single missile shrieked in to twenty-four thousand kilometers before it detonated, directly astern of Wayfarer, and sent five centimeter-wide X-ray lasers ripping straight up the wide open after aspect of her impeller wedge.
Wayfarer's megaton bulk bucked as energy seared through her unarmored plating with contemptuous ease. Beta Node Eight of her after impeller ring took a direct hit, and Nodes Five, Six, Seven, and Nine blew in a frenzy of energy which took Alpha Five with them. Generators exploded in Impeller Two, killing nineteen men and women and sending mad surges of power crashing across the compartment like caged lightning bolts. Point Defense Nineteen, Twenty, and Twenty-Two were blasted away, along with Radar Six, Missile Sixteen, and all the men and women who'd manned those stations.
But none of those were the cruelest thing that missile did.
A single laser slashed through Cargo One's port door. It blew the motors which had just begun to whine, blasted two complete missile pods into deadly, man-killing splinters, and smashed the control runs Honor’s engineers had fought so desperately to repair. And along the way, it killed seventy-one people, including Lieutenant Joseph Silvetti, Lieutenant Adele Klontz... and Lieutenant Commander Harold Tschu.
Honor felt Tschu's death. Felt it crash in on Samantha like a thunderbolt, felt it blast through her to her mate and from Nimitz into Honor herself. Rafael Cardones' head whipped around as his suit com carried him her animal sound of pain even over the wail of alarms, and he went white as he saw the loss and agony, the terrible, wrenching desolation, in her eyes. He didn't know what had happened; he only knew the woman upon whom every individual in Wayfarer relied had just taken a blow as shattering as her ship's, and he started to his feet in terror for her.
But Honor clenched her teeth and fought the agony down. She had to. Every strand of her being cried out to yield to it, to keen her grief as Samantha and Nimitz did, to reach out to her beloved friends in their moment of terrible loss. But she was a starship captain. She was a Queen's officer, and the bone-deep responsibility of thirty-two years in uniform and twenty years of command had her by the throat. She could not afford to be human, and so she was not, and her voice was inhumanly calm even as agony burned in her eyes.
"Bring her bow up, Chief O'Halley. Straight up, stand her on her toes!"
"Aye, Ma'am!" Senior Chief Coxswain O'Halley snapped, and Wayfarer drove straight upwards, rearing like a wounded horse to snatch her stern away from the enemy.
"We got a piece of her, Skipper!" Pacelot exulted. "Drive power just dropped significantly, and look at her run!"
"I see it, Helen." Holtz punched a query into his own plot, checking the spectrography, and gnawed the inside of his lower lip. They'd obviously gotten a good, solid hit on the Q-ship, but the atmosphere loss was low. He didn't know Cargo One had been depressurized; all he knew was that despite the Manty's antics, she was spilling far too little air.
His brain raced as he tried to guess why that was. The Manty's new course had robbed Achmed of a good missile target, but it also stole her forward acceleration from her. She was building delta vee perpendicular to Achmed's base course, but she was starting from scratch, which would let Holtz close on her rapidly if he chose to. But...
He thought a moment longer, then looked at the com screen tied to Jurgens' flag bridge.
"We're getting very little atmospheric loss from her, Citizen Commodore, and she hasn't fired a single shot at us, much less flushed any pods. I think..." He drew a deep breath, then committed himself. "I think she's not firing because she can't. I can't conceive of any captain who could shoot back not doing it. She may not be trailing more air because Kerebin already got a much bigger piece of her than we thought and depressurized a lot of her spaces."
Jurgens grunted, and his eyes narrowed. Holtz could be right. His theory fit the observed data, at any rate. And if he was right, they might be able to forget this long-range pussyfooting and get down to it. But if she was that badly hurt, then why...?
"Skipper!" It was Helen Pacelot, her voice sharpened by discovery and chagrin. "That isn't Target One in front of her!"
"What?" Holtz whipped back around to her, and she shook her head savagely.
"I just got a good read on it. It's a drone, a goddamned drone!"
Jurgens heard Pacelot's report, and his eyes met People's Commissioner Aston's in sudden understanding. Oh, those bastards, he thought. Those poor, gutsy, damned bastards!
"It's a decoy," he whispered. "They deliberately sucked us away from the liner because they knew they couldn't stop us... and because we were the only ship with a chance to catch it!"
"Agreed," Aston said flatly. "But what do we do about it?"
Jurgens rubbed his chin, brain racing, then shrugged.
"I only see one option, Sir," he said flatly. "From their maneuvers and Tactical's observations, we can only assume Kerebin hurt them far worse than we'd estimated. That makes sense; if they can't fight us, all they could do was run to draw us off the liner. But every minute we spend chasing them is another minute we're not decelerating to go after Target One."
He punched rapid commands into his own display, projecting the Q-ship's track, and Achmed's, across it. Another command produced a shaded cone that crossed Achmed's track port to starboard almost ten light-minutes back and stretched far out to its left, as well.
"The liner's got to be in that area. Our chance of finding it is slight if they're careful, but the sooner we start looking, the better the odds. Only we've got to finish the Q-ship, too; if she gets away, the covert side of the operation is blown just as wide as if we let the liner get away."
"Agreed," Aston said again.
"I think we have to assume the Manty is hurt worse than we believed. We have to go in, close with her, finish her off, and then come back after the liner."
Aston gazed at the citizen commodore's plot for perhaps ten seconds, then nodded.
"Go get her, Citizen Commodore," he said.
Ginger Lewis' soul cringed as the tidal wave of damage reports spilled across DCC's displays. Half-hysterical shouts from the remnants of the Cargo One work party had already told her what had happened to three-quarters of Engineerings officers. Only Lieutenant Hansen, in Fusion One, and two ensigns were left. That dropped total responsibility for DCC squarely onto Ginger's shoulders, and she swallowed hard.
"All right, people," she said flatly to her shocked personnel. "Wilson, get on the link to Impeller Two. I need casualties and damage. Do what you can to assist through your telemetry." Wilson nodded curtly, and she turned to another petty officer. "Durkey, you're on SAR. Tie into sickbay and try to steer their rescue and medical parties around the worst wreckage. Hammond, you've got Radar Six. It looks like it's the array, but it may just be the data feed. Find out which it is, soonest. If it's the array, see if you can reconfigure Radar Four to cover some of the gap. Eisley, check Mag Four. I'm reading pressure loss in the compartment; that hit on Missile One-Six may have damaged the feed queue to Missile One-Four, too. If it has, reroute through..."
She went on snapping commands, reacting with the trained instinct for which Harold Tschu had picked her for this post, and her orders came with an unerring precision which would have filled the dead chief engineer with pride.
"He's coming in, Skipper!" Jennifer Hughes cried in astonishment. "He's gone back to max accel, and he's boring in like a bandit!"
Honor shook herself, still shuddering with the echoes of Tschu's death, and looked at the plot. Jennifer was right. The Peep couldn't know he'd just gutted Wayfarers most potent weapon system, yet he'd obviously decided she was badly hurt, and he was coming in to finish her off. But from his profile, he was coming in to kill her with energy weapons.
It didn't make sense. He'd hammered her for almost forty minutes without drawing a single missile in reply. He had to know he could hang on her stern and keep on battering without any realistic risk to his own command, so why...?
The drone! He'd IDed the drone, and he wanted to finish Wayfarer before Artemis slipped totally away from him. It was the only thing which made sense, and it would have made sense to Honor in his place. But just as she would have been wrong, he was wrong.
"All right," she said, and her soprano voice was a cold wind, smothering the sparks of panic that single devastating hit had ignited. "He's coming in, and we're going to get hurt, but he doesn't begin to guess what kind of energy armament we've got. Jenny, it looks like we're going to have a chance for Fire Plan Hawkwing after all."
"Aye, Skipper," Jennifer Hughes said, and her own fear had vanished in a hungry snarl of anticipation. She knew Wayfarer wasn't going to "get hurt"; the Q-ship would never survive a pointblank energy engagement with a Sultan-class battlecruiser. The Peep had sixteen energy mounts, eighteen, counting the flank chasers, and twenty missile tubes in each broadside, while Wayfarer had only eight grasers and nine tubes left in her stronger broadside. But the converted freighter mounted super-dreadnought weapons, and the Peep didn't know it.
"He's coming in to cross our stern if we maintain heading," Honor went on, speaking now as much to Cardones and Senior Chief O'Halley as to Hughes. "Rafe, tie the helm into your station; I want you on backup if we lose primary control. We will maintain heading until he's committed, then I want a hard skew-turn to starboard. As hard as you can make it, Chief. I want our starboard broadside on him as he passes below us, and then I want to cut down across his stern and stick it right up his kilt. Clear?"
Cardones and O'Halley nodded, and Honor looked back at Hughes.
"Lock it in, Jenny," she said quietly. "We only get one pass."
"She's maintaining profile," Pacelot said, and Holtz nodded. It was another sign of the Q-ship’s desperate straits; if she'd had anything left in either broadside, she would have rolled to present that broadside to the bow of Achmed's wedge as Holtz came in on her. No doubt her captain was hoping to continue up and over in a loop, holding the roof of his wedge towards Achmed as the battlecruiser passed below him, and he might even manage to pull it off. It was unlikely, given the mass differential, but even if the Q-ship managed to evade the first pass, the sort of twisting, dodging dogfight which would follow could only favor the more maneuverable battlecruiser. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, Achmed would find the single opening she needed to reduce a merchant hull to scrap.
"We'll go in as planned, Helen," he said grimly, and his eyes burned with the need to avenge Kerebin.
"Here they come," Honor said in a soft, almost soothing voice. She watched the range speed downward, watched the battlecruiser begin the roll to bring her own starboard broadside to bear. Then she looked up at Chief O'Halley and Rafe Cardones, and she knew the final maneuver of her career was going to be perfect... even if there would be no one left to remember it.
On either side.
"All right," she crooned. "Steady... Steeeady... Now!"
Achmed came roaring in just as Kendrick O'Halley hauled back on his joystick and slammed it to the right. Wayfarer heaved like a maddened beast, as if the ship herself was fighting to escape her destruction. But she answered the helm, heeling over, rolling, pointing her starboard side at her foe even as Achmed's weapons came to bear upon her.
For a frozen sliver of eternity, both ships had clear shots at the other, and in that instant, the firing plans locked into two different computers activated.
No human sense could have coped with what happened next; no human brain could have sorted it out. The range was barely twelve thousand kilometers, and missiles and lasers and grasers sleeted destruction across that tiny chasm of vacuum like enraged demons.
Achmed staggered as the first massive graser blew effortlessly through her sidewall. Her flanks carried over a meter of armor, the toughest alloy of ceramic and composites man had yet learned to forge, and the graser tore through it with contemptuous ease. Huge splinters blew out of the dreadful wound, and her relative motion turned what should have been a single puncture into a huge, gaping slash. It opened her side like a gutting knife opening a shark, and air and wreckage and human beings erupted in a howling cyclone.
But that was only one of eight such grasers. Every one of them scored direct hits, and no one on the battlecruiser had dreamed a converted merchantman could mount such weapons. Her communication circuits were a cacophony of screams, of agony, of shock, of terror, as Wayfarer's fury rent her like a toy, and then the Q-ships missiles came blasting in, stabbing her again and again with bomb-pumped lasers to complete the grasers' dreadful work. Weapon bays blew apart, power surges ran mad, control runs sizzled and popped and exploded. Her forward impeller room blew up as a graser stabbed straight into its generators, and the blast tore a hundred meters of armored hull into shredded wreckage. All three fusion plants went into automatic shutdown, and blast doors slammed throughout the ship. But in all too many instances, there was nothing for those blast doors to seal air into, for Wayfarer's grasers had blown clear through her hull and out the other side, and she spun away, a dying, helpless hulk. Yet she did not die alone.
Wayfarer had fired a fraction of a second before Achmed, but only a faction of a second, and unlike Achmed, she had no armor, no tightly compartmentalized spaces. She was a merchant ship, a thin skin around a vast, cargo-carrying void, and no refit could change that. The weapons which survived to tear into her hull were far lighter than the ones which had disemboweled Achmed, but they were hideously effective against so vulnerable a target.
Her entire starboard side was shattered from Frame Thirty-One aft to Frame Six-Fifty. The empty LAC bays blew open like so many glasses shattering under an enraged heel. Magazines Two and Four were torn apart, along with every tube except Missile Two. Six of her eight graser mounts exploded in ruin, taking virtually their entire crews with them. A laser slashed deep into the heart of her hull, destroying Fusion One and stabbing through the brig, where Randy Steilman and his fellows would never come to trial, and another blew straight into the command deck itself. Shock and concussion whipsawed the bridge madly, bulkheads and hull members tore like tissue, and a raging hurricane plucked Jennifer Hughes from her bridge chair despite her shock frame and whipped her into space. No one would ever find her body, but it scarcely mattered, for the tidal bore of atmosphere slammed her against the edge of the hull breach and shattered her helmet instantly. John Kanehama screamed over his com as a flying alloy spear impaled him; Senior Chief O'Halley was cut in half by a splinter as long as he was tall; and Aubrey Wanderman retched into his helmet as the same splinter slashed through his own control party and tore Carolyn Wolcott and Lieutenant Jansen apart.
That pocket of hell was repeated again and again, throughout Wayfarers vast hull. Bits and pieces of the ship exploded into the people Achmed's fire had missed, as if the dying ship were wreaking vengeance on the crew who had brought her to this, and HMS Wayfarer went tumbling away, her drive dead, her hyper generator destroyed, and with eight hundred dead and dying people in her shattered compartments.
Chapter FORTY-ONE
Yet there was no other way. She'd gotten another eight hundred people off Wayfarer, reducing the death toll to just over a thousand. One thousand men and women, and two treecats, who would die to save four thousand others. By any measure, that had to be a worthwhile bargain, but, oh, how it hurt.
She hid her pain behind serene eyes, feeling her bridge officers about her, knowing how they would focus on her, take their lead and their inspiration and their determination from her, when it began, and pride in them and grief for them warred in her soul.
Margaret Fuchien, Harold Sukowski, and Stacey Hauptman stood and watched Annabelle Ward's plot with haunted eyes. The battlecruiser had burned past them twelve minutes ago, never even noticing the liner or its protecting LACs. And why should it have? They were only seven inert pieces of alloy, radiating no energy and lost in h-space's immensity as Wayfarer deliberately sucked their enemy after her.
"Seventy-five minutes," Ward murmured.
"Will they still be in sensor range, Captain Harry?" Stacey asked softly.
"We should still have their impellers, but it won't be very clear." Sukowski closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. "In a way, I'm just as glad. I don't want to see it. It's going to..." He met Stacey’s gaze squarely. "It's going to be ugly, Stace. Her ship's already badly damaged, and if the bastards just stand off and pound her..." He shook his head again.
"Will she surrender?" Fuchien asked out of the silence, and Sukowski looked at her. "When they open fire on her, will she surrender?"
"No," Sukowski said simply.
"Why not?" Stacey demanded, her voice suddenly sharp. "Why not? She's already saved us, why won't she surrender and save her own people?"
"Because she's still protecting us," Sukowski told her as gently as he could. "When they get close enough to engage her, they'll also be close enough to spot the drone. They'll know we aren't there, but they'll also know within an hour or two when we must have shut down our drive, and our vector when we did. That means they'll have a good idea of where we could be if they come back and look for us. The odds are against their finding us, but Lady Harrington intends to make certain they don't. She'll hammer them as long as she has a weapon left, Stace, to cripple their sensors and slow them down." He saw the tears in Stacey's eyes and put his arm about her as he had about Chris Hurlman. "It's her job, Stace," he said softly. "Her duty. And that woman knows about duty. I spent enough time aboard her ship to know that."
"I envy you that, Harry," Margaret Fuchien said softly.
"Missile range in twenty-one minutes," Jennifer Hughes announced. "Assuming constant accelerations, we'll enter energy range thirteen-point-five minutes after that."
Honor nodded once more and keyed her com.
"DCC, Lewis," the woman on her screen said, and Honor smiled crookedly.
"I don't want to joggle Commander Tschu's elbow, but I'd like to confirm his latest estimate on the cargo doors."
"Current estimate is..." Ginger glanced at the chrono and did some mental math "...thirty-nine minutes, Ma'am."
"Thank you," Honor said quietly, and killed the circuit. So there it was. The pods would come back on-line just as the Peeps closed to energy range anyway. But there was nothing Honor could do about that. All she could do was continue to run as long as possible, drawing the Peeps after her, buying Artemis time, and she prepared to play the game out to its final, hopeless throw.
"We'll go with Alpha-One," she said. "Rafe, tell all hands, seal helmets in ten minutes."
A curiously shrunken Klaus Hauptman stepped onto Artemis' bridge. The people clustered around the plot looked up at him, and his face clenched as he saw Sukowski's arm around Stacey. He should have been the one to comfort his daughter. But he'd forfeited that right, he thought drearily, when he proved himself so much less than she'd always thought he was in her eyes.
And in his own.
He crossed to the plot, making his gaze meet theirs. It was almost an act of penance, an ordeal deliberately inflicted upon himself and embraced. Fuchien and Sukowski nodded to him, their expressions neutral, but neither spoke, and Stacey never even looked at him.
"How soon?" he asked, and his normally powerful, confident voice was frayed and rough.
"Sixteen minutes to missile range, Sir," Annabelle Ward replied.
"All right, Steve," Abraham Jurgens told his flagship captain. "I don't want to get in close until we're sure their teeth have been pulled."
"Aye, Citizen Commodore." Citizen Captain Stephen Holtz looked at his repeater plot and frowned. The Q-ship was putting out some damned effective decoys. Her EW was starting to play games with his sensors, too, and hypers natural sensor degradation made her efforts even more effective than usual, but he was five thousand kilometers inside the powered missile envelope.
Under normal conditions, he would have turned to open his broadside, but these weren't normal conditions. He had his own EW systems fully on-line, and the same conditions which hurt his fire control had to be hurting the Q-ship's, as well. Under the circumstances, it actually made sense to keep the vulnerable throat of his wedge towards the enemy, for it gave the Manty a weaker, fuzzier target than his sidewalls and the full length of his wedge would have.
Of course, it also restricted him only to the three tubes of his bow chasers, but that was all right. He wanted to sting the bastard, goad him. If he could get the Q-ship to fire off any pods it might have at extreme range, his point defense would be far more effective... and the Manty's target would be far harder to hit.
"Missile separation!" Jennifer Hughes announced. "I have two, no, three inbound. Time of flight one-seven-zero seconds. Stand by point defense."
"Standing by," Lieutenant Jansen replied.
"Spread Decoys Four and Five a little wider, Carol," Hughes said. "Lets see if we can pull these birds off high."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Wolcott made an adjustment on her panel, and Honor reached up to check Nimitz. Like her, the 'cat had his helmet sealed, and he'd secured the safety straps mounted on her chair to the snap rings on his suit. It wasn't as good as a shock frame, but no one made treecat-sized shock frames.
"Impact in niner-zero seconds," Jansen announced, and pressed the key that sent his countermissiles out to meet the incoming fire.
"They've killed the birds, Skipper," Holtz's tac officer reported as the third missile tore apart. None of them had even gotten as deep as the Q-ship's inner boundary laser defenses, Holtz noted in disgust. Well, it wasn't all that surprising, and at least their damned pod-launched missiles hadn't come back to kill his ship.
"Any sign at all of missile pods?"
"None, Citizen Captain. No return fire at all." Holtz knew Citizen Commander Pacelot was irritated with him for asking the obvious whenever she called him "Citizen Captain" instead of "Skipper." He grimaced, but he couldn't really blame her. He considered a moment longer, then nodded.
"All right. Let's go to sequenced fire, Helen."
"Aye, Skipper," she said, much more cheerfully, and punched the new commands into her console.
Honor's eyes narrowed as the Peeps' firing patterns changed. The battlecruiser was using her three bow-mounted tubes to fire the equivalent of a double broadside. It doubled the interval between incoming salvos and gave point defense longer to track, but it also increased the threat sources and allowed the battlecruiser to seed her fire with jammers and other penetration aids. Honor understood the logic behind that; what she didn't understand was why the Peeps were restricting themselves solely to their chasers. They had twenty tubes in each broadside and far higher acceleration. They could slalom back and forth across Wayfarer's wake, hammering her with salvos from each broadside in turn, and send in six times as many missiles in each wave.
She frowned, then dropped her suit com into Cardones' private channel.
"Why do you think he's sticking to his chasers?" she asked, and Cardones rubbed the top of his helmet.
"He's probing," he said. "This reduces the target he's offering to us, and he's trying to get a feel for what we can shoot back at him with."
"Which is nothing at all," Honor observed quietly, and Cardones gave her a lopsided grin.
"Hey, you can't have everything, Skipper."
"True," she said with an affectionate smile. "But I think it might be a little more than that." Cardones raised his eyebrows, and she shrugged. "More than just probing. He had us on gravitics when we killed his consort, but he was too far out to see how we did it. He's probably deduced we had to have used missile pods, and he may be trying to goad us into firing off any we have left at extreme range."
"Makes sense," Cardones agreed after a moment, even as Lieutenant Jansen’s point defense dealt with the last missile of the most recent salvo. "Of course, he's going to be figuring out pretty soon that we don't have any pods, or we would be shooting back."
Missiles continued to bore in on Wayfarer, racing up from astern in groups of six. Carolyn Wolcott’s decoys and jammers played merry hell with their onboard seekers once they went into final acquisition, and Jansen’s countermissiles and laser clusters picked them off with methodical precision. But the laws of chance are inexorable. Sooner or later, one of those missiles was bound to ignore the decoys, burn through the jammers, and evade the active defenses.
Honor’s earbug buzzed, and she looked down to see Ginger Lewis' face on her small com screen.
"Message from Commander Tschu, Ma'am! He did it! He's got power to the port door and its opening! It's opening, Ma'am!"
Honor’s heart leapt. They could only launch two pods at a time, even if the port door functioned perfectly, but that might be enough. With the enemy still coming up astern, running directly into their fire when he hadn't seen even a single shot coming back at him, they might...
That was when a missile finally slithered past the countermissiles and slipped like a dagger through the desperate lattice of the last-ditch laser clusters. The single missile shrieked in to twenty-four thousand kilometers before it detonated, directly astern of Wayfarer, and sent five centimeter-wide X-ray lasers ripping straight up the wide open after aspect of her impeller wedge.
Wayfarer's megaton bulk bucked as energy seared through her unarmored plating with contemptuous ease. Beta Node Eight of her after impeller ring took a direct hit, and Nodes Five, Six, Seven, and Nine blew in a frenzy of energy which took Alpha Five with them. Generators exploded in Impeller Two, killing nineteen men and women and sending mad surges of power crashing across the compartment like caged lightning bolts. Point Defense Nineteen, Twenty, and Twenty-Two were blasted away, along with Radar Six, Missile Sixteen, and all the men and women who'd manned those stations.
But none of those were the cruelest thing that missile did.
A single laser slashed through Cargo One's port door. It blew the motors which had just begun to whine, blasted two complete missile pods into deadly, man-killing splinters, and smashed the control runs Honor’s engineers had fought so desperately to repair. And along the way, it killed seventy-one people, including Lieutenant Joseph Silvetti, Lieutenant Adele Klontz... and Lieutenant Commander Harold Tschu.
Honor felt Tschu's death. Felt it crash in on Samantha like a thunderbolt, felt it blast through her to her mate and from Nimitz into Honor herself. Rafael Cardones' head whipped around as his suit com carried him her animal sound of pain even over the wail of alarms, and he went white as he saw the loss and agony, the terrible, wrenching desolation, in her eyes. He didn't know what had happened; he only knew the woman upon whom every individual in Wayfarer relied had just taken a blow as shattering as her ship's, and he started to his feet in terror for her.
But Honor clenched her teeth and fought the agony down. She had to. Every strand of her being cried out to yield to it, to keen her grief as Samantha and Nimitz did, to reach out to her beloved friends in their moment of terrible loss. But she was a starship captain. She was a Queen's officer, and the bone-deep responsibility of thirty-two years in uniform and twenty years of command had her by the throat. She could not afford to be human, and so she was not, and her voice was inhumanly calm even as agony burned in her eyes.
"Bring her bow up, Chief O'Halley. Straight up, stand her on her toes!"
"Aye, Ma'am!" Senior Chief Coxswain O'Halley snapped, and Wayfarer drove straight upwards, rearing like a wounded horse to snatch her stern away from the enemy.
"We got a piece of her, Skipper!" Pacelot exulted. "Drive power just dropped significantly, and look at her run!"
"I see it, Helen." Holtz punched a query into his own plot, checking the spectrography, and gnawed the inside of his lower lip. They'd obviously gotten a good, solid hit on the Q-ship, but the atmosphere loss was low. He didn't know Cargo One had been depressurized; all he knew was that despite the Manty's antics, she was spilling far too little air.
His brain raced as he tried to guess why that was. The Manty's new course had robbed Achmed of a good missile target, but it also stole her forward acceleration from her. She was building delta vee perpendicular to Achmed's base course, but she was starting from scratch, which would let Holtz close on her rapidly if he chose to. But...
He thought a moment longer, then looked at the com screen tied to Jurgens' flag bridge.
"We're getting very little atmospheric loss from her, Citizen Commodore, and she hasn't fired a single shot at us, much less flushed any pods. I think..." He drew a deep breath, then committed himself. "I think she's not firing because she can't. I can't conceive of any captain who could shoot back not doing it. She may not be trailing more air because Kerebin already got a much bigger piece of her than we thought and depressurized a lot of her spaces."
Jurgens grunted, and his eyes narrowed. Holtz could be right. His theory fit the observed data, at any rate. And if he was right, they might be able to forget this long-range pussyfooting and get down to it. But if she was that badly hurt, then why...?
"Skipper!" It was Helen Pacelot, her voice sharpened by discovery and chagrin. "That isn't Target One in front of her!"
"What?" Holtz whipped back around to her, and she shook her head savagely.
"I just got a good read on it. It's a drone, a goddamned drone!"
Jurgens heard Pacelot's report, and his eyes met People's Commissioner Aston's in sudden understanding. Oh, those bastards, he thought. Those poor, gutsy, damned bastards!
"It's a decoy," he whispered. "They deliberately sucked us away from the liner because they knew they couldn't stop us... and because we were the only ship with a chance to catch it!"
"Agreed," Aston said flatly. "But what do we do about it?"
Jurgens rubbed his chin, brain racing, then shrugged.
"I only see one option, Sir," he said flatly. "From their maneuvers and Tactical's observations, we can only assume Kerebin hurt them far worse than we'd estimated. That makes sense; if they can't fight us, all they could do was run to draw us off the liner. But every minute we spend chasing them is another minute we're not decelerating to go after Target One."
He punched rapid commands into his own display, projecting the Q-ship's track, and Achmed's, across it. Another command produced a shaded cone that crossed Achmed's track port to starboard almost ten light-minutes back and stretched far out to its left, as well.
"The liner's got to be in that area. Our chance of finding it is slight if they're careful, but the sooner we start looking, the better the odds. Only we've got to finish the Q-ship, too; if she gets away, the covert side of the operation is blown just as wide as if we let the liner get away."
"Agreed," Aston said again.
"I think we have to assume the Manty is hurt worse than we believed. We have to go in, close with her, finish her off, and then come back after the liner."
Aston gazed at the citizen commodore's plot for perhaps ten seconds, then nodded.
"Go get her, Citizen Commodore," he said.
Ginger Lewis' soul cringed as the tidal wave of damage reports spilled across DCC's displays. Half-hysterical shouts from the remnants of the Cargo One work party had already told her what had happened to three-quarters of Engineerings officers. Only Lieutenant Hansen, in Fusion One, and two ensigns were left. That dropped total responsibility for DCC squarely onto Ginger's shoulders, and she swallowed hard.
"All right, people," she said flatly to her shocked personnel. "Wilson, get on the link to Impeller Two. I need casualties and damage. Do what you can to assist through your telemetry." Wilson nodded curtly, and she turned to another petty officer. "Durkey, you're on SAR. Tie into sickbay and try to steer their rescue and medical parties around the worst wreckage. Hammond, you've got Radar Six. It looks like it's the array, but it may just be the data feed. Find out which it is, soonest. If it's the array, see if you can reconfigure Radar Four to cover some of the gap. Eisley, check Mag Four. I'm reading pressure loss in the compartment; that hit on Missile One-Six may have damaged the feed queue to Missile One-Four, too. If it has, reroute through..."
She went on snapping commands, reacting with the trained instinct for which Harold Tschu had picked her for this post, and her orders came with an unerring precision which would have filled the dead chief engineer with pride.
"He's coming in, Skipper!" Jennifer Hughes cried in astonishment. "He's gone back to max accel, and he's boring in like a bandit!"
Honor shook herself, still shuddering with the echoes of Tschu's death, and looked at the plot. Jennifer was right. The Peep couldn't know he'd just gutted Wayfarers most potent weapon system, yet he'd obviously decided she was badly hurt, and he was coming in to finish her off. But from his profile, he was coming in to kill her with energy weapons.
It didn't make sense. He'd hammered her for almost forty minutes without drawing a single missile in reply. He had to know he could hang on her stern and keep on battering without any realistic risk to his own command, so why...?
The drone! He'd IDed the drone, and he wanted to finish Wayfarer before Artemis slipped totally away from him. It was the only thing which made sense, and it would have made sense to Honor in his place. But just as she would have been wrong, he was wrong.
"All right," she said, and her soprano voice was a cold wind, smothering the sparks of panic that single devastating hit had ignited. "He's coming in, and we're going to get hurt, but he doesn't begin to guess what kind of energy armament we've got. Jenny, it looks like we're going to have a chance for Fire Plan Hawkwing after all."
"Aye, Skipper," Jennifer Hughes said, and her own fear had vanished in a hungry snarl of anticipation. She knew Wayfarer wasn't going to "get hurt"; the Q-ship would never survive a pointblank energy engagement with a Sultan-class battlecruiser. The Peep had sixteen energy mounts, eighteen, counting the flank chasers, and twenty missile tubes in each broadside, while Wayfarer had only eight grasers and nine tubes left in her stronger broadside. But the converted freighter mounted super-dreadnought weapons, and the Peep didn't know it.
"He's coming in to cross our stern if we maintain heading," Honor went on, speaking now as much to Cardones and Senior Chief O'Halley as to Hughes. "Rafe, tie the helm into your station; I want you on backup if we lose primary control. We will maintain heading until he's committed, then I want a hard skew-turn to starboard. As hard as you can make it, Chief. I want our starboard broadside on him as he passes below us, and then I want to cut down across his stern and stick it right up his kilt. Clear?"
Cardones and O'Halley nodded, and Honor looked back at Hughes.
"Lock it in, Jenny," she said quietly. "We only get one pass."
"She's maintaining profile," Pacelot said, and Holtz nodded. It was another sign of the Q-ship’s desperate straits; if she'd had anything left in either broadside, she would have rolled to present that broadside to the bow of Achmed's wedge as Holtz came in on her. No doubt her captain was hoping to continue up and over in a loop, holding the roof of his wedge towards Achmed as the battlecruiser passed below him, and he might even manage to pull it off. It was unlikely, given the mass differential, but even if the Q-ship managed to evade the first pass, the sort of twisting, dodging dogfight which would follow could only favor the more maneuverable battlecruiser. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, Achmed would find the single opening she needed to reduce a merchant hull to scrap.
"We'll go in as planned, Helen," he said grimly, and his eyes burned with the need to avenge Kerebin.
"Here they come," Honor said in a soft, almost soothing voice. She watched the range speed downward, watched the battlecruiser begin the roll to bring her own starboard broadside to bear. Then she looked up at Chief O'Halley and Rafe Cardones, and she knew the final maneuver of her career was going to be perfect... even if there would be no one left to remember it.
On either side.
"All right," she crooned. "Steady... Steeeady... Now!"
Achmed came roaring in just as Kendrick O'Halley hauled back on his joystick and slammed it to the right. Wayfarer heaved like a maddened beast, as if the ship herself was fighting to escape her destruction. But she answered the helm, heeling over, rolling, pointing her starboard side at her foe even as Achmed's weapons came to bear upon her.
For a frozen sliver of eternity, both ships had clear shots at the other, and in that instant, the firing plans locked into two different computers activated.
No human sense could have coped with what happened next; no human brain could have sorted it out. The range was barely twelve thousand kilometers, and missiles and lasers and grasers sleeted destruction across that tiny chasm of vacuum like enraged demons.
Achmed staggered as the first massive graser blew effortlessly through her sidewall. Her flanks carried over a meter of armor, the toughest alloy of ceramic and composites man had yet learned to forge, and the graser tore through it with contemptuous ease. Huge splinters blew out of the dreadful wound, and her relative motion turned what should have been a single puncture into a huge, gaping slash. It opened her side like a gutting knife opening a shark, and air and wreckage and human beings erupted in a howling cyclone.
But that was only one of eight such grasers. Every one of them scored direct hits, and no one on the battlecruiser had dreamed a converted merchantman could mount such weapons. Her communication circuits were a cacophony of screams, of agony, of shock, of terror, as Wayfarer's fury rent her like a toy, and then the Q-ships missiles came blasting in, stabbing her again and again with bomb-pumped lasers to complete the grasers' dreadful work. Weapon bays blew apart, power surges ran mad, control runs sizzled and popped and exploded. Her forward impeller room blew up as a graser stabbed straight into its generators, and the blast tore a hundred meters of armored hull into shredded wreckage. All three fusion plants went into automatic shutdown, and blast doors slammed throughout the ship. But in all too many instances, there was nothing for those blast doors to seal air into, for Wayfarer's grasers had blown clear through her hull and out the other side, and she spun away, a dying, helpless hulk. Yet she did not die alone.
Wayfarer had fired a fraction of a second before Achmed, but only a faction of a second, and unlike Achmed, she had no armor, no tightly compartmentalized spaces. She was a merchant ship, a thin skin around a vast, cargo-carrying void, and no refit could change that. The weapons which survived to tear into her hull were far lighter than the ones which had disemboweled Achmed, but they were hideously effective against so vulnerable a target.
Her entire starboard side was shattered from Frame Thirty-One aft to Frame Six-Fifty. The empty LAC bays blew open like so many glasses shattering under an enraged heel. Magazines Two and Four were torn apart, along with every tube except Missile Two. Six of her eight graser mounts exploded in ruin, taking virtually their entire crews with them. A laser slashed deep into the heart of her hull, destroying Fusion One and stabbing through the brig, where Randy Steilman and his fellows would never come to trial, and another blew straight into the command deck itself. Shock and concussion whipsawed the bridge madly, bulkheads and hull members tore like tissue, and a raging hurricane plucked Jennifer Hughes from her bridge chair despite her shock frame and whipped her into space. No one would ever find her body, but it scarcely mattered, for the tidal bore of atmosphere slammed her against the edge of the hull breach and shattered her helmet instantly. John Kanehama screamed over his com as a flying alloy spear impaled him; Senior Chief O'Halley was cut in half by a splinter as long as he was tall; and Aubrey Wanderman retched into his helmet as the same splinter slashed through his own control party and tore Carolyn Wolcott and Lieutenant Jansen apart.
That pocket of hell was repeated again and again, throughout Wayfarers vast hull. Bits and pieces of the ship exploded into the people Achmed's fire had missed, as if the dying ship were wreaking vengeance on the crew who had brought her to this, and HMS Wayfarer went tumbling away, her drive dead, her hyper generator destroyed, and with eight hundred dead and dying people in her shattered compartments.
Chapter FORTY-ONE
Honor fought her way out of her buckled shock frame and whirled. Nimitz's safety straps had snapped, and he floated limply away from her in the sudden zero-gravity. But he was alive; she knew he was, and she gasped in relief as a shaky Andrew LaFollet snagged the unconscious 'cat and dragged him close. She took him from her armsman and used one of the broken straps to lash him to the shoulder grab ring on her own suit, then turned to her ship and her crew.
Or what was left of them.
Two-thirds of her bridge crew were dead, and others were wounded. She saw Aubrey Wanderman and Rafe Cardones bent over a Tracking yeoman, hands flashing as they slapped emergency seals onto her skinsuit, and her eyes flinched away from the mangled ruin which had once been Carolyn Wolcott and Kendrick O'Halley and Eddy Howard’s drifting corpse. Then she was throwing aside pieces of wreckage herself, dragging bodies out and searching desperately for signs of life.
She found all too few of them, and even as she fought to save someone and her heart raged at the universe, she knew the same scene was being repeated all over her ship.
DCC survived, but all the central links were down, and its computers were on backup power. Ginger Lewis dragged herself up off the deck and flung herself back into her chair, and somehow her mind still worked. The internal com net was gone, but her gloved fingers flashed over her keyboard. She called up the watch bill which identified the men and women at each duty station by name and keyed her suit com.
"Lieutenant Hansen," she said, reading the first name off her display, "this is DCC. Report status on Fusion One." There was no answer, and she inhaled sharply. "Any person in Fusion One, this is DCC. Report status!"
Still there was no answer, and she dropped to the next name. "Ensign Weir, this is DCC. Report status on Fusion Two."
An endless moment dragged out, and then a hoarse voice replied.
"DCC, this is PO Harris, Fusion Two. We..." The petty officer coughed, but his voice was stronger when he resumed. "The plants on-line. Ms. Weir's dead, and we've got four or five more casualties, but we're still on-line."
"DCC copies," Ginger said, and waved urgently at Chief Wilson. She hit a key, throwing a segment of her list onto his display, and he nodded! Ginger took one moment to paint Fusion Two as operable on her schematic, the single green compartment looked pathetically tiny on the board, and went to her next priority.
"Commander Ryder, this is DCC. Report status on sickbay and wounded."
Scotty Tremaine groaned and shook his head. He wished instantly that he hadn't, but his brain cleared slowly. He wondered for a moment what he was doing on the deck with half his Flight Ops console blasted over him, then looked up into Horace Harkness' worried face.
"You with me now, Sir?" he asked, and Scotty nodded.
"What's our situation?"
"Dunno yet, but it ain't, good." Harkness pried the last wreckage off his lieutenant's ankles and lifted him effortlessly. "No grav," he pointed out. "Means Engineering took a heavy hit, and the com links're down."
"What about us?" Scotty asked hoarsely.
"Mr. Bailes and Chief Ross are still with us; I haven't heard from anyone else," Harkness said grimly, and Scotty winced. There'd been twenty-one people left in his skeletal Flight Ops. "Both birds look intact," Harkness went on, "and we've got a clear bay. We can get 'em out, Sir... if we've got somewhere to send 'em."
"I..." Scotty broke off as another voice sounded over his suit com.
"Lieutenant Tremaine, this is Chief Wilson, DCC. Report status on Flight Ops," it said.
Angela Ryder looked up as another rescue party staggered into sickbay. She and her sole remaining assistant had just amputated Susan Hibson’s right leg and had no time to spare from their desperate, losing fight to save Sergeant Major Hallowell’s life, but Yoshiro Tatsumi was there in an instant, bending over the writhing, skinsuited woman the party carried.
It was a miracle sickbay had retained pressure. The surgeons were working on backup power only, and Ryder refused to let herself think about what happened when that power ran out. Anyone she saved would only die later. She knew that, but she was a physician. Her enemy wore no uniform, and she would fight him to the last ditch.
"Well, whatever they did to us, we must've hit them just as hard," Cardones said wearily, and Honor nodded. They'd done what they could for their wounded, and she and Rafe had tried every sensor in an effort to find the Peep battlecruiser. None of the systems they'd tried still worked, but Rafe was right. If the Peeps weren't at least as badly hurt as Wayfarer, they would already have finished her off.
Not that she needed much "finishing." Honor shook herself, then reached up as Nimitz stirred on her shoulder. The 'cat twisted, and she felt his pain and confusion. But she also felt him reaching out to her, and to Samantha. She sensed his terrible surge of relief as he realized both of them were still alive, and he clung more firmly to the grab ring as he poured that relief into her.
But for now, she had to determine the condition of her shattered command, and how...?
"Captain Harrington, this is Lewis in DCC," a voice said over her suit com. "Captain Harrington, please reply."
"Lewis?" Honor shook herself. "Captain here, DCC. Go."
"Aye, Ma'am." The relief in Ginger’s voice was as vast as Nimitz's, and she paused just a moment before she continued. "Ma'am, I've been contacting each station by suit com," she said, and her tone was flat now. "So far, less than twenty percent have responded. What we know so far is that Fusion One's gone, but Fusion Two is still on-line. Environmental is a total write-off. Main Hyper took a direct hit, and we've lost the generator. Both Warshawski sails are down, and Impeller One and Impeller Two are both badly damaged. We may be able to get a few beta nodes back in each ring, if we can find anyone for repair parties, but not the sails. Artificial gravity's also out, the Bosun's trying to get down there for a look. I won't know if we can get it back until I hear from her, but it doesn't look good. As nearly as I can tell, all sensors are out. We've got one operational graser in the port broadside, and a single tube to starboard, but no sidewall, no radiation fields, and no particle shielding. The hull's a mess. Without a survey, I'm not sure we've got enough frame integrity left to stand up to the drive even if we can get the impellers back. Sickbay still has pressure and backup power, and I've got some people trying to restore main power to it. Flight Ops is totaled, but both pinnaces are intact, and we've got a pilot for both of them, one'll need a replacement flight engineer, though."
The voice on Honor's com paused, hesitated, and then resumed quietly. "The head count from the people reporting in is under a hundred and fifty, Ma'am. I think that's pessimistic, but it's the only hard number I have now." Ginger cleared her throat. "That's my report so far, Captain. Sorry its not complete, but we're working on it."
Honor’s eyes were wide with astonishment. It was incredible. A senior chief, and one who'd been jumped from a mere second-class tech less than six months before, had somehow managed to pull together all that information entirely on her own initiative. Anguish for the death toll Ginger had reported twisted deep within her, but it only confirmed what she'd already guessed, and she couldn't let it paralyze her.
"Don't apologize, Ginger," she said, unable to see the other's flush of pleasure as she used her first name. "I can hardly believe you've already managed so much. Stay with it, and keep Commander Cardones informed in parallel with me. First priority is getting sickbay's power restored and making sure nothing happens to its atmospheric integrity."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. We're on it." Honor turned to Cardones, and the exec shook his head grimly, then leaned forward until their helmets touched.
"We've had it, Skipper," he said quietly, letting the contact of their helmets carry his voice to keep it off the com. "With no generator and no sails, we're dead, even assuming we could get enough life support back to take us anywhere."
"Agreed." Honor spoke softly, her face wrung with pain. "On the other hand, we may as well keep our people busy." He nodded, and she went on. "See what you can do to organize a repair party from up here. Try to get into the central lift trunks. They don't have power, but they're the only way we're going to be able to get people into contact with one another. Check for compartments that are still pressure-tight, then I want you and MacBride to take over on the rescue parties. I want everyone who's still alive found. It may not matter in the long run, but I won't have any of my people trapped alone and dying in some compartment somewhere."
"Yes, Ma'am." Cardones nodded again and pulled their helmets apart, and Honor switched com channels to one she hadn't yet had the courage to try.
"Mac?" she said hesitantly, and some of the anguish leached out of her face as a voice replied.
"I'm here, Ma'am. I'm afraid your quarters are a mess, but I've checked the life-support module. Samantha seems to be all right, but I can't be sure. She's curled up on the floor and won't look up when I tap the view port."
"Harry Tschu's dead, Mac," she said softly. "All we can do for now is leave her in peace, but I want you to stay with her. I want her to know someone's there."
"Understood, Ma'am," he said quietly.
"I'll get back to you," Honor promised, then changed channels once more, this time to the all-hands frequency, and her voice was strong and calm when she spoke again. "All right, people, this is the Captain," she told the shattered remnants of her crew. "We're in bad shape, but we're still here. Work your way towards Deck Zero-Zero. We'll assemble there and work back out on SAR and damage survey. Anyone wounded or trapped in a compartment, report by com to Senior Chief Lewis in DCC or to Search and Rescue. Don't worry. We'll get you out. Captain, clear."
She switched her transmitter off and looked around her command deck once more, wondering what she could do once she did get them all out.
But nothing came to her.
"That's it, Skipper." Annabelle Ward's voice was hushed. "I don't know what happened, but both impeller signatures went off the plot almost simultaneously."
"We didn't just lose the range?"
"No, Ma'am. They just... vanished."
Fuchien looked at Sukowski. It was possible one or both of the other ships had survived, but both had clearly lost their drives, and that was a bad sign.
"Skipper, we don't have anything at all on sensors," her exec pointed out in the low voice, of a man who hated what he heard himself saying, and Fuchien nodded. Lady Harrington's orders had been clear, and she and Wayfarer had bought Artemis the chance to escape. But Artemis was also the only ship which knew what had happened to Wayfarer and the Peep battlecruiser, or, at least, where it had happened.
"We can't leave," someone said, and Fuchien turned in shock, for it was Klaus Hauptman. Her employer faced her, his face gaunt and his eyes haunted, but there was something behind the shame in them now. He shook his head, then looked at the other officers on her bridge, and at his daughter, and went on in a quiet, almost humble tone none of them had ever heard.
"I... haven't handled this well. If I hadn't held Artemis in New Berlin for the freighters, we would've crossed the rift up in the epsilon bands, and the Peeps never would have seen us. As for the way I spoke to Lady Harrington..."
He paused and shook his head again, and his voice was a bit stronger when he resumed.
"But that's beside the point now. We know where Wayfarer went off the plot, and we know what her vector was. If there's anyone left alive aboard her, or aboard the Peep, I suppose, we're the only people who can help them."
"I can't possibly justify taking Artemis over there," Fuchien said flatly. "First, the Peep may have survived, and her damage may be repairable. We could sail right into her broadside, and I cannot risk all the people aboard this ship. Secondly, it would take hours for us to make the flight, whatever happened, and every minute we spend under power increases the chances another Peep will come along and spot us."
"I realize that, but we can't simply abandon them."
"We don't have a choice, Sir!" Fuchien's voice was harsh, and her eyes flickered with anger. Anger directed irrationally at Hauptman for making her say what she knew was true. "And, Sir, you may be this ship's owner, but I am her captain."
"Please, Captain." More than one eye widened in disbelief at the pleading in Hauptman's voice. "There has to be something we can do!"
Fuchien started to snap back, then closed her mouth and settled for a grim headshake. Hauptman's shoulders slumped, and the stricken look in his eyes hit Harold Sukowski like a hammer. He has to do something, the captain thought. He's hard, arrogant, a copper-plated son-of-a-bitch, but he understands responsibility, and Lady Harrington rubbed his nose in it. And so, Sukowski glanced at Stacey Hauptman, did making a fool of himself in front of his daughter. But Maggie's right. We can't risk the ship, however much we all wish we...
His thoughts chopped off, and he frowned. He heard Fuchien and Hauptman continuing to speak, but they sounded distant and far away as his brain worked at frantic speed.
"I'm sorry, Sir," Fuchien said at last, her voice much gentler than it had been. "I truly am. But there's nothing we can do."
"Maybe there is," Sukowski murmured, and every person on the bridge swung to stare at him. "We can't take Artemis out on SAR, no," he went on, "but there may be another way."
"I've got a visual on the Peep, Skipper," Scotty Tremaine said.
He and Harkness had taken a pinnace out for an inspection of the hull, and one look had told them there was no hope. Wayfarer was broken and buckled, her impeller rings shattered. That meant none of them would survive, and Honor had sent Tremaine and Harkness to search for the Peep. Perhaps her damages were less serious than Wayfarers. If they were, and if the survivors of both crews worked together, perhaps they could get her to a port... and at the moment, even a Peep POW camp would be heaven.
Now Honor listened over her suit com as Scotty described Achmed's damages, and her heart sank. She was in one of the enlisted mess compartments which had somehow retained pressure, with her helmet off, and aside from a few small parties MacBride still had probing wreckage where someone might be trapped alive, all of her surviving personnel were either here, in sickbay, in DCC, or down in Fusion Two.
There were few enough of them that no one felt crowded, she told herself grimly, and waited until Scotty finished his report.
"All right," she said then. "She's not going anywhere with that bow damage, and we're drifting steadily apart. See if you can contact anyone on board. It sounds like they're in even worse shape than we are. If so, offer to take them off and bring them aboard Wayfarer. Tell them," she smiled bleakly, "we can figure out later who's whose prisoner."
"Aye, Ma'am," Tremaine replied, and sent his pinnace moving closer to Achmed.
"Is that wise, Skipper?" Cardones asked too quietly for anyone else to here. "We're on canned life support, and Environmental looks bad."
"There can't be many left, Rafe," she replied, equally quietly, "and for all we know, they don't have any life support over there. We, on the other hand, may be able to get some of ours back. Our only hope is that we can and that one of their consorts has some idea where we both are and comes looking for us, but they may not have even that much hope. We have to give them the best chance we can. It's the only decent thing to do."
Cardones nodded slowly, then moved off to his own duties, and Honor looked back up and beckoned to the petty officer she'd been speaking to when Tremaine's report came in.
"All right, Haverty," she said briskly. "Once you've got that leak in Seven-Seventeen patched, I want pressure back in there. Commander Ryder needs to move people out of sickbay to relieve crowding, and that's the best place to put them. So as soon as we've got pressure, inform Senior Chief Lewis so we can organize a working party to move them. Once you're through in Seven-Seventeen, I want you and your people to do an eyeball on Main Environmental. Then..."
Or what was left of them.
Two-thirds of her bridge crew were dead, and others were wounded. She saw Aubrey Wanderman and Rafe Cardones bent over a Tracking yeoman, hands flashing as they slapped emergency seals onto her skinsuit, and her eyes flinched away from the mangled ruin which had once been Carolyn Wolcott and Kendrick O'Halley and Eddy Howard’s drifting corpse. Then she was throwing aside pieces of wreckage herself, dragging bodies out and searching desperately for signs of life.
She found all too few of them, and even as she fought to save someone and her heart raged at the universe, she knew the same scene was being repeated all over her ship.
DCC survived, but all the central links were down, and its computers were on backup power. Ginger Lewis dragged herself up off the deck and flung herself back into her chair, and somehow her mind still worked. The internal com net was gone, but her gloved fingers flashed over her keyboard. She called up the watch bill which identified the men and women at each duty station by name and keyed her suit com.
"Lieutenant Hansen," she said, reading the first name off her display, "this is DCC. Report status on Fusion One." There was no answer, and she inhaled sharply. "Any person in Fusion One, this is DCC. Report status!"
Still there was no answer, and she dropped to the next name. "Ensign Weir, this is DCC. Report status on Fusion Two."
An endless moment dragged out, and then a hoarse voice replied.
"DCC, this is PO Harris, Fusion Two. We..." The petty officer coughed, but his voice was stronger when he resumed. "The plants on-line. Ms. Weir's dead, and we've got four or five more casualties, but we're still on-line."
"DCC copies," Ginger said, and waved urgently at Chief Wilson. She hit a key, throwing a segment of her list onto his display, and he nodded! Ginger took one moment to paint Fusion Two as operable on her schematic, the single green compartment looked pathetically tiny on the board, and went to her next priority.
"Commander Ryder, this is DCC. Report status on sickbay and wounded."
Scotty Tremaine groaned and shook his head. He wished instantly that he hadn't, but his brain cleared slowly. He wondered for a moment what he was doing on the deck with half his Flight Ops console blasted over him, then looked up into Horace Harkness' worried face.
"You with me now, Sir?" he asked, and Scotty nodded.
"What's our situation?"
"Dunno yet, but it ain't, good." Harkness pried the last wreckage off his lieutenant's ankles and lifted him effortlessly. "No grav," he pointed out. "Means Engineering took a heavy hit, and the com links're down."
"What about us?" Scotty asked hoarsely.
"Mr. Bailes and Chief Ross are still with us; I haven't heard from anyone else," Harkness said grimly, and Scotty winced. There'd been twenty-one people left in his skeletal Flight Ops. "Both birds look intact," Harkness went on, "and we've got a clear bay. We can get 'em out, Sir... if we've got somewhere to send 'em."
"I..." Scotty broke off as another voice sounded over his suit com.
"Lieutenant Tremaine, this is Chief Wilson, DCC. Report status on Flight Ops," it said.
Angela Ryder looked up as another rescue party staggered into sickbay. She and her sole remaining assistant had just amputated Susan Hibson’s right leg and had no time to spare from their desperate, losing fight to save Sergeant Major Hallowell’s life, but Yoshiro Tatsumi was there in an instant, bending over the writhing, skinsuited woman the party carried.
It was a miracle sickbay had retained pressure. The surgeons were working on backup power only, and Ryder refused to let herself think about what happened when that power ran out. Anyone she saved would only die later. She knew that, but she was a physician. Her enemy wore no uniform, and she would fight him to the last ditch.
"Well, whatever they did to us, we must've hit them just as hard," Cardones said wearily, and Honor nodded. They'd done what they could for their wounded, and she and Rafe had tried every sensor in an effort to find the Peep battlecruiser. None of the systems they'd tried still worked, but Rafe was right. If the Peeps weren't at least as badly hurt as Wayfarer, they would already have finished her off.
Not that she needed much "finishing." Honor shook herself, then reached up as Nimitz stirred on her shoulder. The 'cat twisted, and she felt his pain and confusion. But she also felt him reaching out to her, and to Samantha. She sensed his terrible surge of relief as he realized both of them were still alive, and he clung more firmly to the grab ring as he poured that relief into her.
But for now, she had to determine the condition of her shattered command, and how...?
"Captain Harrington, this is Lewis in DCC," a voice said over her suit com. "Captain Harrington, please reply."
"Lewis?" Honor shook herself. "Captain here, DCC. Go."
"Aye, Ma'am." The relief in Ginger’s voice was as vast as Nimitz's, and she paused just a moment before she continued. "Ma'am, I've been contacting each station by suit com," she said, and her tone was flat now. "So far, less than twenty percent have responded. What we know so far is that Fusion One's gone, but Fusion Two is still on-line. Environmental is a total write-off. Main Hyper took a direct hit, and we've lost the generator. Both Warshawski sails are down, and Impeller One and Impeller Two are both badly damaged. We may be able to get a few beta nodes back in each ring, if we can find anyone for repair parties, but not the sails. Artificial gravity's also out, the Bosun's trying to get down there for a look. I won't know if we can get it back until I hear from her, but it doesn't look good. As nearly as I can tell, all sensors are out. We've got one operational graser in the port broadside, and a single tube to starboard, but no sidewall, no radiation fields, and no particle shielding. The hull's a mess. Without a survey, I'm not sure we've got enough frame integrity left to stand up to the drive even if we can get the impellers back. Sickbay still has pressure and backup power, and I've got some people trying to restore main power to it. Flight Ops is totaled, but both pinnaces are intact, and we've got a pilot for both of them, one'll need a replacement flight engineer, though."
The voice on Honor's com paused, hesitated, and then resumed quietly. "The head count from the people reporting in is under a hundred and fifty, Ma'am. I think that's pessimistic, but it's the only hard number I have now." Ginger cleared her throat. "That's my report so far, Captain. Sorry its not complete, but we're working on it."
Honor’s eyes were wide with astonishment. It was incredible. A senior chief, and one who'd been jumped from a mere second-class tech less than six months before, had somehow managed to pull together all that information entirely on her own initiative. Anguish for the death toll Ginger had reported twisted deep within her, but it only confirmed what she'd already guessed, and she couldn't let it paralyze her.
"Don't apologize, Ginger," she said, unable to see the other's flush of pleasure as she used her first name. "I can hardly believe you've already managed so much. Stay with it, and keep Commander Cardones informed in parallel with me. First priority is getting sickbay's power restored and making sure nothing happens to its atmospheric integrity."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. We're on it." Honor turned to Cardones, and the exec shook his head grimly, then leaned forward until their helmets touched.
"We've had it, Skipper," he said quietly, letting the contact of their helmets carry his voice to keep it off the com. "With no generator and no sails, we're dead, even assuming we could get enough life support back to take us anywhere."
"Agreed." Honor spoke softly, her face wrung with pain. "On the other hand, we may as well keep our people busy." He nodded, and she went on. "See what you can do to organize a repair party from up here. Try to get into the central lift trunks. They don't have power, but they're the only way we're going to be able to get people into contact with one another. Check for compartments that are still pressure-tight, then I want you and MacBride to take over on the rescue parties. I want everyone who's still alive found. It may not matter in the long run, but I won't have any of my people trapped alone and dying in some compartment somewhere."
"Yes, Ma'am." Cardones nodded again and pulled their helmets apart, and Honor switched com channels to one she hadn't yet had the courage to try.
"Mac?" she said hesitantly, and some of the anguish leached out of her face as a voice replied.
"I'm here, Ma'am. I'm afraid your quarters are a mess, but I've checked the life-support module. Samantha seems to be all right, but I can't be sure. She's curled up on the floor and won't look up when I tap the view port."
"Harry Tschu's dead, Mac," she said softly. "All we can do for now is leave her in peace, but I want you to stay with her. I want her to know someone's there."
"Understood, Ma'am," he said quietly.
"I'll get back to you," Honor promised, then changed channels once more, this time to the all-hands frequency, and her voice was strong and calm when she spoke again. "All right, people, this is the Captain," she told the shattered remnants of her crew. "We're in bad shape, but we're still here. Work your way towards Deck Zero-Zero. We'll assemble there and work back out on SAR and damage survey. Anyone wounded or trapped in a compartment, report by com to Senior Chief Lewis in DCC or to Search and Rescue. Don't worry. We'll get you out. Captain, clear."
She switched her transmitter off and looked around her command deck once more, wondering what she could do once she did get them all out.
But nothing came to her.
"That's it, Skipper." Annabelle Ward's voice was hushed. "I don't know what happened, but both impeller signatures went off the plot almost simultaneously."
"We didn't just lose the range?"
"No, Ma'am. They just... vanished."
Fuchien looked at Sukowski. It was possible one or both of the other ships had survived, but both had clearly lost their drives, and that was a bad sign.
"Skipper, we don't have anything at all on sensors," her exec pointed out in the low voice, of a man who hated what he heard himself saying, and Fuchien nodded. Lady Harrington's orders had been clear, and she and Wayfarer had bought Artemis the chance to escape. But Artemis was also the only ship which knew what had happened to Wayfarer and the Peep battlecruiser, or, at least, where it had happened.
"We can't leave," someone said, and Fuchien turned in shock, for it was Klaus Hauptman. Her employer faced her, his face gaunt and his eyes haunted, but there was something behind the shame in them now. He shook his head, then looked at the other officers on her bridge, and at his daughter, and went on in a quiet, almost humble tone none of them had ever heard.
"I... haven't handled this well. If I hadn't held Artemis in New Berlin for the freighters, we would've crossed the rift up in the epsilon bands, and the Peeps never would have seen us. As for the way I spoke to Lady Harrington..."
He paused and shook his head again, and his voice was a bit stronger when he resumed.
"But that's beside the point now. We know where Wayfarer went off the plot, and we know what her vector was. If there's anyone left alive aboard her, or aboard the Peep, I suppose, we're the only people who can help them."
"I can't possibly justify taking Artemis over there," Fuchien said flatly. "First, the Peep may have survived, and her damage may be repairable. We could sail right into her broadside, and I cannot risk all the people aboard this ship. Secondly, it would take hours for us to make the flight, whatever happened, and every minute we spend under power increases the chances another Peep will come along and spot us."
"I realize that, but we can't simply abandon them."
"We don't have a choice, Sir!" Fuchien's voice was harsh, and her eyes flickered with anger. Anger directed irrationally at Hauptman for making her say what she knew was true. "And, Sir, you may be this ship's owner, but I am her captain."
"Please, Captain." More than one eye widened in disbelief at the pleading in Hauptman's voice. "There has to be something we can do!"
Fuchien started to snap back, then closed her mouth and settled for a grim headshake. Hauptman's shoulders slumped, and the stricken look in his eyes hit Harold Sukowski like a hammer. He has to do something, the captain thought. He's hard, arrogant, a copper-plated son-of-a-bitch, but he understands responsibility, and Lady Harrington rubbed his nose in it. And so, Sukowski glanced at Stacey Hauptman, did making a fool of himself in front of his daughter. But Maggie's right. We can't risk the ship, however much we all wish we...
His thoughts chopped off, and he frowned. He heard Fuchien and Hauptman continuing to speak, but they sounded distant and far away as his brain worked at frantic speed.
"I'm sorry, Sir," Fuchien said at last, her voice much gentler than it had been. "I truly am. But there's nothing we can do."
"Maybe there is," Sukowski murmured, and every person on the bridge swung to stare at him. "We can't take Artemis out on SAR, no," he went on, "but there may be another way."
"I've got a visual on the Peep, Skipper," Scotty Tremaine said.
He and Harkness had taken a pinnace out for an inspection of the hull, and one look had told them there was no hope. Wayfarer was broken and buckled, her impeller rings shattered. That meant none of them would survive, and Honor had sent Tremaine and Harkness to search for the Peep. Perhaps her damages were less serious than Wayfarers. If they were, and if the survivors of both crews worked together, perhaps they could get her to a port... and at the moment, even a Peep POW camp would be heaven.
Now Honor listened over her suit com as Scotty described Achmed's damages, and her heart sank. She was in one of the enlisted mess compartments which had somehow retained pressure, with her helmet off, and aside from a few small parties MacBride still had probing wreckage where someone might be trapped alive, all of her surviving personnel were either here, in sickbay, in DCC, or down in Fusion Two.
There were few enough of them that no one felt crowded, she told herself grimly, and waited until Scotty finished his report.
"All right," she said then. "She's not going anywhere with that bow damage, and we're drifting steadily apart. See if you can contact anyone on board. It sounds like they're in even worse shape than we are. If so, offer to take them off and bring them aboard Wayfarer. Tell them," she smiled bleakly, "we can figure out later who's whose prisoner."
"Aye, Ma'am," Tremaine replied, and sent his pinnace moving closer to Achmed.
"Is that wise, Skipper?" Cardones asked too quietly for anyone else to here. "We're on canned life support, and Environmental looks bad."
"There can't be many left, Rafe," she replied, equally quietly, "and for all we know, they don't have any life support over there. We, on the other hand, may be able to get some of ours back. Our only hope is that we can and that one of their consorts has some idea where we both are and comes looking for us, but they may not have even that much hope. We have to give them the best chance we can. It's the only decent thing to do."
Cardones nodded slowly, then moved off to his own duties, and Honor looked back up and beckoned to the petty officer she'd been speaking to when Tremaine's report came in.
"All right, Haverty," she said briskly. "Once you've got that leak in Seven-Seventeen patched, I want pressure back in there. Commander Ryder needs to move people out of sickbay to relieve crowding, and that's the best place to put them. So as soon as we've got pressure, inform Senior Chief Lewis so we can organize a working party to move them. Once you're through in Seven-Seventeen, I want you and your people to do an eyeball on Main Environmental. Then..."