Honor Among Enemies

"The Andies won't like our raiding commerce this close to the Empire, Skipper," Edwards pointed out quietly. "You don't suppose this joker's trying to warn us off, do you?"

"He's in for a hell of a surprise if he is," Stellingetti grated.

The battlecruiser continued to race closer, eating up the distance between herself and the other two ships. Far astern of her, the cruiser Durandel launched her own pi

Other ships of the People's Navy were also closing in, and one of them had already locked onto the Manticoran freighter Voyager and begun closing rapidly while another peeled off to pursue RMMS Palimpsest. The entire situation was wildly confused, but the Peep warships were clearly in control of it, and the distance between Kerebin and Artemis sped downward.

"Coming up on eight hundred thousand klicks," Edwards a

"Missile trace!" Edwards screamed, and Marie Stellingetti half-rose from her command chair in disbelief. It wasn't possible! That titanic salvo couldn't be from the Manty, or she would never have abandoned the destroyer! They had to be from the Andy, but how...?

"Hard skew port!" she shouted. "Return fire on the Andy!"

Kerebin snapped around to her left, rolling frantically to interpose her wedge against the incoming holocaust, but there was no escape, not from that many missiles. She got a single broadside of her own into space before her writhing evasion maneuvers threw her tubes off target, but no one aboard had time to see what, if anything, her fire accomplished. The missiles roaring down on her would arrive a full twenty seconds before her own did. They streaked in, spreading out to englobe the battlecruiser, and there was nothing she could do to escape. ECM fought to confuse them, countermissiles roared out, laser clusters trained onto the incoming laser heads and fired with desperate intensity, and almost a hundred missiles lost track or vanished in the fireballs of successful intercepts. But five hundred others kept coming, and as they reached attack position and detonated, their X-ray lasers engulfed Kerebin like a dragon's breath.

They didn't all reach attack position at once. They came in in sequence, and it took almost nine seconds for all of them to detonate, but the trailers were simply wasted effort. Five seconds after the first laser head detonated, PNS Kerebin and every man and woman aboard her had become an expanding ball of plasma.

Chapter THIRTY-NINE

Honor Harrington made herself sit motionless as the damage reports washed over her. A part of her was horrified at what she'd just done, but a Sultan—class battle-cruiser was simply too dangerous to fool around with. She'd had to take it out with her first salvo, even knowing that so much overkill virtually guaranteed there would be no survivors from her target, and so she'd just blown over two thousand people to plasma without giving them any chance at all.

But the Peep hadn't gone without striking back. Her single broadside had sent twenty missiles slashing towards Wayfarer and Artemis, and the liner's proximity had forced Honor to make her own ship an even easier target. If any of those missiles had gone after Artemis and gotten through, they could easily have destroyed her, and with her the very civilians Honor was fighting to protect. And so she'd turned Wayfarer directly across the liner's stern, deliberately sucking Kerebin's dying vengeance in upon her. Her missile defense crews had done well, but she'd never had a proper warship's point defense, and eight laser heads had gotten through.

"We've got ninety-two confirmed dead so far, Skipper," Rafe Cardones said harshly. "Sickbay reports over sixty additional casualties, and they're still bringing them in."

"Material damage?"

"We've lost Grasers One, Three, and Five out of the port broadside," Tschu replied from Damage Control Central. "Missiles One and Seven are gone, as well, and Five and Nine are available only in local control. LAC One's launch bays are totaled, but at least they were empty. Gravitic Two is gone, I've lost three sidewall generators, also from the port sidewall, and Impeller Two's lost a beta node."

"Skipper, I'm reporting negative function from Cargo One," Je

"Harry?"

"I'm checking now. We don't show a rail malfunction, but..." The engineer broke off and mouthed a silent curse. "Correction. We do show a malfunction, it's just not with the launch system." He studied his monitors, then shook his head. "The rails are still up, Skipper; it's the cargo doors. That hit in the after impeller ring must've sent a surge through their power train. The port door's cycled halfway shut, and the starboard door's almost as far in."

"Can we reopen them?"

"Not soon," Tschu said grimly. He tapped a command into his console, then tried a second and grimaced. "Looks like they only stopped where they did because their motors burned out. It could be just the control systems on the port door, I can't be certain from the remotes, but the starboard door's definitely burned. If it is the controls for the port one, we might be able to rig new runs and get it back open. That would give you two clear launch rails, but that hit ripped hell out of the hull, and I don't have any surviving visuals in the area to tell me how much wreckage is in the way. Repairs are going to take at least an hour, assuming they're possible at all." He met her eyes squarely from her small com screen. "Sorry, Skipper. That's the best I can do."

"Understood." Honor's mind raced. Her ship was pathetically slow compared to the Peep warship still charging towards her, the brutal damage to her port broadside reduced her close-range firepower by a quarter, and the jammed cargo doors amputated her ability to deploy pods. Even if Tschu had time to get the port door open again, she'd lost two-thirds of her long-range punch. Her chance to survive against a regular warship which got inside her missile envelope was virtually nil, and as the first Peep battlecruiser had just demonstrated, even a ship she managed to kill with missiles could still take Wayfarer with it.

She still had her second LAC squadron, that was why she'd exposed her port side, rather than the starboard launch bays, and she could use them here in the Selker. With them to support her, she'd be willing to take on a heavy cruiser even without her missile pods, but they wouldn't be enough against a battlecruiser. Even if she managed to destroy something that size, it would smash Wayfarer up so badly any of the other Peep warships could take her with ease.

"I've got Captain Fuchien, Skipper," Fred Cousins reported, and Honor shook herself. She held up one hand at Cousins long enough to look Je

"We can probably stay away from them for another three hours," Hughes replied. "I don't know what happened to that heavy cruiser, she slowed down and dropped clear off the plot twenty-six minutes ago, but that second Sultan's coming up fast. Its a cinch she's got us on passive, and her sustained velocity advantage will run us down eventually."