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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
"They're altering course, Ma'am. It's not just an evasion maneuver; their base vector's coming fifteen degrees to starboard."
"I see." Admiral Chin's smile was a hungry wolf's. Those "SDs" had to be drones; if they'd been real ships of the wall, the battlecruisers would never have stopped ru
She knew what they were up to. They'd suck her well clear of the base, then scatter. They'd lose the advantage of their massed point defense when they did, but the range would be opening again by then. Only her dreadnoughts would have the weight of fire to get through their individual defenses, and she could only fire at a few of them.
She was tempted to ignore them, but the base wasn't going anywhere, and she might just get lucky. The Manties had lost a quarter of their battlecruisers and one heavy cruiser, and other ships were hurting. If they were willing to let her chase them, she was willing to accept the invitation in hopes of killing a few more of them before they scattered.
"They're taking the bait, Ma'am."
"I see it, Eve." Honor rubbed the tip of her nose and wondered if she were really pleased. The dreadnoughts' fire had eased as their swing back onto a pursuit vector restricted them once more to their chase armament, but their fire control was adapting to the task group's EW. Their targeting remained less effective than Sarnow's, but their warheads were far more powerful and, despite their losses, they still had the edge in launchers. Especially, a grim mental voice told her, now that Defiant and Achilles were gone.
Nike twisted around, leading her squadron through yet another evasion maneuver, and Honor bit her lip as fresh salvos of missiles tore down on Agamemnon and Cassandra. The damaged heavy cruiser Circe cut across Cassandra's stem as the screen conformed to the battle-cruisers' movements, and six of the birds targeted on Captain Quintan's ship lost lock. They picked up the cruiser, instead, and their sudden swerve to pursue her took them clear of the counter missiles racing to meet them. Circe's laser clusters stopped two of them; the other four got through... and shattered the cruiser like a toy.
"Formation Reno, Com—get those cruisers in tighter!"
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Formation Reno." George Monet's flat voice sounded incongruously calm as he acknowledged and passed the order, and only then did Honor glance at her flag bridge com screen. She'd given the order without thinking about Sarnow, intent only on bringing the escorts in closer to the battlecruisers for mutual support. But Sarnow only nodded in agreement, then turned his head as Cartwright spoke.
"The Peep SDs are starting to move, Sir," the ops officer said. "They're heading for the base."
"Admiral Rollins is moving in, Ma'am," Commander Klim a
Admiral Chin merely nodded. It was about time he figured out what those "SDs" were and got his ass in gear, she thought sourly. Not that it would have changed what had already happened to her, but a little psychological support might have been nice.
Of course, it probably meant the Manties would scatter sooner. There'd be no point in their taking any more lumps once they realized Rollins was moving on the base behind her own ships.
HMS Agamemnon never even saw the missile coming. It rolled up from astern, slicing through a narrow sensor gap where a previous hit had blinded her radar, and detonated just off her port quarter.
For a moment the damage seemed minor; then her entire after half exploded. The mangled stub of her forward hull lurched to the side, and then it, too, blew up, and her consorts raced away from the fading clouds of gas and heat which had once been a battlecruiser and her crew.
Mark Sarnow's face was bleak and hard. The Peeps' steadily growing accuracy already exceeded his projections, and the task group was still fifteen minutes short of its pla
His people had performed superbly—but eight thousand of them had died doing it, and the Peep SDs were coming. There was no point throwing away more lives to protect a base he couldn't save anyway.
He looked at his com screen and saw the same, bitter thought in Honor Harrington's brown eyes. She knew the scatter order was coming, and he opened his mouth to give it.
"Sir! Admiral Sarnow!"
His head snapped around in surprise, for the voice was Lieutenant Commander Samuel Webster's. He'd almost forgotten Webster's presence, but the com officer was pointing at his display—the one tied into the FTL sensor net.
Commander Francis DeSoto bared his teeth as the third Manty battlecruiser died. He didn't need Admiral Chin's orders to look for a replacement target, and he searched his display hungrily. Another Homer. That was what he wanted—but then he stiffened as an icon suddenly changed. Agamemnon's destruction and a shift in the Manticoran formation had opened a hole in the maze of mutually interfering impeller signatures, and New Boston's computers got their first clear look at HMS Nike.
The updated plot blinked at DeSoto again, and his eyes glittered. That ship was five percent larger than a Homer, and that made her one of the new Reliant-class ships.
"It is Admiral Danislav, Sir!" Joseph Cartwright's confirmation of Webster's report was jubilant, and Sarnow fought his own elation. The enormous hyper footprint was well beyond Nike's onboard sensor range, but there was no question of who it was. The ten dreadnoughts at the formation's core burned sharp and clear, and Danislav must already be querying the sensor net.
The admiral made himself sit still and silent, watching the plot Webster was feeding from the sensor platforms' FTL transmissions. Danislavs ships held their arrival vector for ten seconds, then twenty, coasting without acceleration at the bare 8,000 KPS of their translation into normal space, and then the plot blinked. Danislav's heading changed, his ships went to an acceleration of four hundred and thirty gravities, and a new vector curled out across the display.
Numbers flashed with CIC's analysis. Twenty-six minutes. That was how much longer the Peeps had to keep chasing Sarnow to reach the point of no return. Just twenty-six minutes and they couldn't possibly escape Danislav's oncoming dreadnoughts.
He turned back to his com to give Captain Harrington the news.
Twenty-four missiles sped toward the task group. Five of them lost lock over a million kilometers out as jammers blinded their sensors. Another three locked onto decoys. Two of them couldn't see their primary target and shifted to the secondary, arcing away to strike at the heavy cruiser Warrior, and countermissiles smashed six more of them to bits.
Eight of them broke through the outer defense zone and bore in, weaving and bobbing while their own ECM parried and thrust with the systems trying to kill them. They were outclassed... but they were also closing at fifty-five thousand KPS. Laser clusters killed one of them, then two more. A fourth. The surviving quartet made their final course correction, two more of them blew apart, and then the last pair of missiles detonated.
HMS Nike heaved and twisted as x-ray daggers sank deep into her armored flank. Laser Seven and Graser Five exploded into wreckage. Radar Five went with them, along with Communications Two, Missile Thirteen and Fourteen, Damage Control Three, Boat Bay Two, and ninety-three men and women.