In Enemy Hands

"Go active," he said.

Singer glanced up over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow. Commodore Yeargin had specifically instructed her orbiting units to maintain a passive sensor watch only. Active sensors were too short ranged to do much good, anyway, and their only practical function would have been to turn the emitting ships into brilliant electronic beacons for anyone who'd managed to make it past the limited number of platforms her understrength "task group" had been able to deploy. But her orders had included a proviso authorizing officers of the watch to make targeted, short-duration active sweeps if they felt they were required, and Dillinger nodded to Singer to get on with it.

"Aye, aye, Sir," the ops officer said, and reached for his console once more.

"Radar pulse!"

Sha

"Strength?" Tourville snapped.

"Well above detection values," Foraker replied, never taking her eyes from her display as she worked her passive sensors. "They've got us... but I've got them, too!" She looked up at last and bared her teeth at her commanding officer. "I make it right on two-point-four million klicks, Sir, and I've got a good fix on whoever just pulsed us!"

"Set it up!" Tourville looked at Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser. "Pass the word," he told the com officer. "We launch in thirty seconds!"

"My God!"

Holden Singer snapped upright in his chair, eyes wide. It took eight seconds for his radar pulse to reach Count Tilly and her consorts, and another eight seconds for it to return. During that time, the Peeps' approach speed had cut the range by over a million kilometers... and brought them well into missile range. It took the lieutenant another two seconds to realize what he was seeing and shout a warning, and it took Commander Dillinger another second and a half to order the General Quarters alarm sounded. In all, twenty seconds elapsed between the time Tourville passed his order to fire and the moment the atonal, two-toned howl of the alarm actually began to sound.

HMS Enchanters crew had barely begun to race to their battle stations when four battlecruisers, eight heavy cruisers, and six light cruisers, with a combined total of fifty-six missile pods on tow behind them, opened fire. Peep missiles were less efficient than those of the RMN, but in compensation, Peep warships mounted more tubes... and so did their missile pods.

By the time Singers assistant tac officer flung herself into the chair beside his, over nine hundred missiles were in space and streaking for his ship.

"Yessss!"

Citizen Captain Bogdanovich’s exultant, sibilant whisper said it all as Tourville and his staff watched their massive salvo stream towards the enemy. Even as the missiles went out, Tourville's engineers were bringing up his ships' impellers and sidewalls, for there was no longer any reason to hide. Unlike the Manties, Tourville's officers had known their drives and defensive systems would be needed, and they'd been at standby for over fifteen hours, but even with hot impeller nodes, they would need at least another thirteen minutes to bring their wedges up.

Yet that still put them far ahead of the Manties, for the Manties hadn't known this was coming. Their missile-defense fire control started to come on-line, blossoming on Sha

Commodore Frances Yeargin hurled herself onto her flag bridge almost before the lift doors opened. She hadn't waited to don her skinsuit; she came charging out of the lift in shirt sleeves, without even her tunic... just in time to see the first laser heads detonate in the depths of her visual display.

Lester Tourville stared into the master plot, unable even now to truly believe what it showed. A Manty task group had been caught totally unprepared, and that wasn't supposed to happen. But it had, and Sha

It wasn't a perfect distribution, a corner of his brain noted. One or two of those ships were going to get off with no more than a dozen or so birds, while others were going to be attacked by scores of them, but it didn't really matter. Sha

For all intents and purposes, surprise was total. Commodore Yeargin's crews were still scrambling frantically to their stations when the first wave came in. Of her six heavy cruisers, two never got their point defense on-line at all. Three more managed, somehow, to bring their laser clusters up under computer control, but only Enchanter got off a single salvo of counter-missiles. Not that it made much difference. One hundred and six incoming missiles were picked off before they reached attack range; the other eight hundred and sixty-two raced in to twenty-thousand kilometers and detonated in rippling succession.

Nuclear explosions pocked space, each one generating a thicket of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers. It wasn't even a massacre, for there was nothing, absolutely nothing, between those lasers and their targets. It took less than four seconds for all eight hundred-plus warheads to attack. Sixteen seconds later, Sha

Commander Jessica Dorcett sat frozen in her command chair, staring with numb incomprehension at the impossible tactical imagery. Hers was the senior ship of the destroyer division assigned to cover the main processing platform of the Adler System's asteroid extraction industry. The platform's Peep-built technology wasn't much by Manticoran standards, but it was still an important facility, and it was presently over fifty light-minutes from Samovar, well away from the course the enemy must have followed on his way in-system. Which meant that Dorcett's three ships had survived... and that she was now the system's senior officer. It was up to her to decide what had to be done, but what in God's name could she do?

The task group was gone. Only her own division remained, and it would be less than useless against the force decelerating towards the fresh wreckage orbiting Samovar. She had just witnessed the most crushing, one-sided defeat in the history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.