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Monkoto and his allies had known what it would be like the instant they realized Howell wasn't going to run for it. They could have broken off, but they hadn't come to break off. The two fleets interpenetrated and merged, racing side-by-side while the hammering match raged.
Procyon's massive beam and energy torpedo batteries opened fire, and a dozen destroyers and cruisers died in the first salvo. Verdun poured her own fire into the maelstrom, but two of O'Kane's battle-cruisers locked their batteries on her, and her fire slackened as more and more of her power was shunted frantically into her battle screen. She writhed, cored in their fire, and Procyon blew one of her attackers to vaporized wreckage.
Not in time. Verdun's screens failed, a tight-focused salvo of particle beams ripped through them, and she vomited flame across the stars.
Procyon rounded vengefully upon her killer, but Audacious and the battleship Assassin were on her like mastiffs. They were far smaller, slower, less heavily armed, but their cyber synths were intact, and thunder wracked the vacuum as the leviathans spread their arms in lethal embrace. Two more battle-cruisers raced to join them, then a third, and all six rained javelins of flame upon the dreadnought.
Eight million to
He glared at the red switch on his console. He could engage the shield and laugh at Monkoto's attack ... but there was no point. He couldn't accelerate with the shield up; only drift, knowing that when he finally lowered it, the enemy would be waiting. He raised fiery eyes to Commander Rahman.
"Get the battleships!" he snarled.
-=0=-***-=0=
Alicia's nails drew blood from her palms as the battleship Assassin blew apart. She remembered Esther Tarbaneau's gentle brown eyes, and her lips writhed back from her teeth as the red holocaust broke free within her.
The hell with Treadwell! The hell with everything! The mercenaries were fighting her fight, dying her death. She felt Megarea and Tisiphone battling to turn her madness, and she didn't care.
"Now, goddamn it!" she snarled. "Everything we've got now!" and Megarea wept as she obeyed. The drive thundered and shrieked in agony, and the alpha synth began to close on the cyclone of dying starships.
-=0=-***-=0=
Simon Monkoto's teeth met through his lip as Assassin vanished. First Arlen, now Tadeoshi and Esther—but he had the bastards. He had them! His flagship's AI noted a fluctuation in Procyon's defenses, a wavering the dreadnought would have sensed and corrected had her own AI survived. But it hadn't, and Audacious flashed orders over the net. One battleship and four battle- cruisers threw every beam and energy torpedo they had at the chink in Procyon's armor, and her Fasset drive exploded.
-=0=-***-=0=
Alicia's banshee howl echoed from the bulkheads as the dreadnought's drive died, and her eyes were mad. The mercenaries peeled away from Procyon, for they no longer needed to endure her close- range fire. They'd broken her wings, destroyed her ability to dodge. Once their own ships got far enough from her to avoid friendly SLAM fire, she was dead, But Alicia didn't think about the mercenaries' SLAMs, didn't care about the short-range weapons still waiting to destroy her. All she saw was the lamed hulk of her enemy, waiting for her to kill it.
-=0=-***-=0=
HMS Tsushima decelerated towards the savage engagement, and her captain's brain whirled as she digested the preposterous sensor readings. Fleet units locked in mortal combat with mercenaries?! Insane! Yet it was happening, and Brigadier Keita's briefing echoed in her ears. If the mercenaries were here to engage pirates, then those Fleet units must be pirates, for no engagement this close and brutal could be a mistake. Both sides had to know exactly who they were fighting ... didn't they?
Tsushima was the lead ship of the task force, already approaching SLAM range of the fighting, but Captain Wu held her fire. Even if she'd been certain what was going on, only a lunatic would fire SLAMs into that tight-packed boil of ships, for she would be as likely to kill friends as enemies. But what was that one ship doing so far behind the melee? It was moving at preposterous speed, overhauling the others, but something about its drive signature ...
"Captain! That's an alpha synth!" her plotting officer said suddenly, and Wu's face went white. There were no Fleet alpha synths in this sector; the only two previously assigned to it had been ordered out so that there could be no confusion.
Wu swallowed a bitter curse and looked at her plot. She'd heard the gossip, knew how close Keita and that Cadre major, Gateau, were to Alicia DeVries, but Keita's flagship was ten light- minutes astern of her. DeVries would vanish into the maelstrom in half the time it would take to pass the buck to him, and when she did, Tsushima could no longer fire her SLAMs in pursuit.
She didn't want to do this. No Fleet officer did. She knew each of them had prayed that he or she wouldn't be the one it fell to. But she was here, and the order still stood.
-=0=-***-=0=
"SLAMs, Alley! SLAMs!"
Megarea's shriek of warning—small and faint, almost lost in her hunger—touched some last fragment of reason. Alicia saw the SLAMs racing after her, and that sliver of sanity roused, intellect fighting instinct run mad.
Tisiphone hurled herself into the tiny flaw in the hurricane, and Alicia jerked back in her command chair, gasping as the Fury smashed through to her. The terrible roaring eased, and understanding filled her.
"Break off, Megarea." She choked the words out, thoughts as clumsy as her thick tongue. She clung to her guttering sanity by her fingernails, feeling the blood-sick chaos reaching for her yet again.
"Evasion course. Wormhole out," she gasped, fighting for every word, and reached for the only escape from her madness. "Tisiphone, put me out!" she screamed, and slithered from her chair as the Fury clubbed her unconscious.