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Yet her surviving ships were around at last, presenting their full broadsides to the enemy, and their missiles raced after the Manticorans. It was a feeble response to the massive salvo which had ravaged her command, yet she watched the outgoing missile traces with hungry eyes. The Manties were ru
A fresh salvo of Manticoran missiles scorched in on Malik. There were only a few dozen of them this time, yet the battlecruiser was a sitting target. Her cruiser screen did its best to stop them, but at least ten got through, and they weren't even laser heads. Megaton-range fireballs enveloped Malik in a star-bright boil; when it cleared, another eight hundred and fifty thousand tons of warship had been wiped away, and Chin swore with silent, bitter venom.
A dreadnought and three battlecruisers—all of them Sultans—gone just like that. The enemy's targeting had been as deadly as the sheer weight of his fire, and she'd walked straight into it. She made herself accept that, then looked back at the plot, and her teeth showed as she digested the data. She didn't know how battlecruisers had pumped so many missiles at her, but they'd exposed themselves to do it. Despite their higher accelerations, she had more than enough overtake advantage to bring them into beam range, and no battlecruiser could stand up to a dreadnought's energy armament.
"Bring us back around," she grated.
"Aye, Ma'am." DeSoto sounded sick and shaken, but he was regaining his balance, and her wounded command swung back to pursue its tormentors. Then—
"Fresh contact, Admiral. Correction—multiple contacts, bearing one-seven-niner by oh-oh-eight, range one-oh-six-point-niner million klicks!"
New light codes appeared in her command chairs tactical repeater, and her jaw clenched. Superdreadnoughts. Sixteen of them—two full battle squadrons—coming at her from the "helpless" repair base at 4.3 KPS?.
"Reverse course. Maximum deceleration!"
Honor's eyes blazed as the "superdreadnoughts" headed toward the Peeps. The repair base might not be armed, but its gravitic sensors had watched the savagery of the initial exchange, and its traffic control systems had sufficed to activate the preprogrammed electronic warfare drones Sarnow had left in orbit with it. Now the drones raced outward, and the Peeps had no choice but to go to maximum power in the other direction in the faint hope of escaping the "capital ships" lunging to complete their destruction.
Admiral Chin sat motionless for long, silent seconds. A minute passed, then two. Three. Her ships' drives fought desperately to slow their headlong charge toward the Manty superdreadnoughts, but the range fell inexorably and the admiral's eyes burned with frustrated rage as the battlecruisers sped away from her. The missile exchange continued, no less ferocious despite the drop in volume as both sides turned their broadsides away from one another, but the Manties' superior missiles and—especially—defensive EW let them more than hold their own. Worse, they were ignoring everyone else to pound doggedly at Waldensville, whose damaged drive, unable to match her consorts' decel, lagged further and further astern—closer and closer to the battlecruisers—as Chin's ships fled the superdreadnoughts.
She stared down at her tactical repeater, then shoved herself out of her chair with a muffled curse and stamped across to the master plot. DeSoto and Klim exchanged unhappy looks as she abandoned the protection of her shock frame and left her helmet racked, but neither dared protest as she glared down into the holo.
"Confirm ID on those SDs!" she snapped.
"Ma'am?" Surprise startled DeSoto into the question, but the ops officer cleared his throat quickly when Chin turned her glare upon him. "Uh, CIC's confidence is high, Ma'am," he said hurriedly, glancing back down at his own display. "Emissions and impeller strength both conform to data base's threat files on Sphinx—class super-dreadnoughts across the board-"
The admiral made an ugly sound deep in her throat. She folded her hands tightly behind her, and her staff sat silent in the face of her anger as she rocked up and down on her toes. The master plot confirmed the ops officers report, but now that her instant, instinctive reaction had passed, her own tactical sense warred with the data. It didn't make sense. If battlecruisers could pump that many missiles at her—and she was begi
And if those were superdreadnoughts, why were the battlecruisers still ru
Her furious rocking motion slowed and her eyes narrowed as another thought chased itself through her mind. If those were SDs, why hadn't the Argus net detected their return to the system?
She glanced at the chrono. Seven minutes since course change. Her velocity had fallen by nineteen hundred KPS and the battlecruisers' had climbed by over two thousand. She'd already lost the chance to bring them into energy range, but if she turned back to pursue them once more, she could hold them in her powered missile range for more than an hour. Except that doing so would also doom her ships by matching them against those SDs. Unless...
A trio of Havenite missiles found a gap in the task group's hard-pressed defenses and charged down on HMS Crusader. The heavy cruiser's decoys and laser clusters did their best, but the Peeps' fire was too heavy. There were too many threat sources, and the tac net's computers released her systems to self-defense a fraction of a second too late.
The laser heads detonated at less than 13,000 kilometers, and they were capital ship missiles. Their lasers burned through her sidewall as if it didn't exist. Battle steel shattered and vaporized, and a failsafe circuit took a microsecond too long to function.
Commodore Stephen Van Slyke's flagship vanished in the eye-tearing flare of a failing fusion bottle, and Captain Lord Pavel Young suddenly inherited command of Heavy Cruiser Squadron Seventeen.
Admiral Chin barely noticed Crusader's destruction. One heavy cruiser either way hardly mattered against the scale of the engagement... or the threat sweeping towards her from the Manty base. If it was a threat.
She bit her lip. If those weren't SDs, then they were the best EW drones she'd ever seen, and instinct seemed a frail thing matched against the cold, hard reality of her sensors, but...
She inhaled deeply without turning from the display.