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Rods of coherent light picked off targets with desperate speed, but Fearless couldn't possibly stop them all, and she didn't. Most of those which got through wasted their fury against her impenetrable belly band, but a few raced across "above" and "below" her to attack her sidewalls. Damage alarms wailed again, men and women died, weapons were wiped away, but the cruiser shook off the damage and kept closing, and there was only silence on her bridge. Honor Harrington sat immovable in her command chair, shoulders squared, like an eye of calm at the heart of that silence, and watched her plot.
Seven more minutes to intercept.
Matthew Simonds snarled as Fearless kept coming through the whirlwind of his fire. Seventy-two missiles per minute slashed out at the cruiser, his magazine levels fell like a sand castle melting in the rain, but she hadn't fired a single shot back at him, and her unflinching approach sent a chill of fear through the heart of his exhaustion-fogged rage. He was hitting her—he knew he was hitting her!—but she came on like some nerveless juggernaut only death itself could stop.
He stared at the light bead in his display, watching atmosphere spill from it like blood, and tried to understand. She was an infidel, a woman. What kept her coming for him this way?
"Intercept in five minutes, Skipper."
"Understood."
Honor's cool soprano was unshadowed by her own fear. They'd already endured Saladin's fire for six minutes and taken nine more hits, two serious, and the battlecruiser's fire would only grow more accurate as they closed.
A massive salvo hurtled through space, eighty-four missiles spawned by four battlecruisers from a base closing velocity of thirty thousand KPS. Another came behind it, and another, but the range was impossibly long.
Their drives had burned out three minutes and twelve-point-three million kilometers after launch, at a terminal velocity of almost a hundred and six thousand KPS. Now they tore onward, riding a purely ballistic course, invisible on Hamish Alexander's plot, and his stomach was a lump of iron. Thirteen minutes since launch. Even at their velocity, they would take another four minutes to enter attack range, and the chance of their scoring a hit raced downward with every second of flight time.
Fearless rocked as a pair of lasers slashed into her port side.
"Missile Six and Laser Eight gone, Captain," Commander Brentworth reported. "Dr. Montoya reports Compartment Two-Forty open to space."
"Acknowledged." Honor closed her eye in pain, for Two-Forty had been converted into an emergency ward when the casualties spilled out of sickbay. She prayed the wounded's emergency environmental slips had saved some of them, but deep inside she knew most of those people had just died.
Her ship bucked again, and fresh tidings of death and injury washed over her, but the time display on her plot ticked steadily downward. Only four more minutes. Fearless only had to last another four minutes.
"Intercept in three-point-five minutes," Lieutenant Ash said hoarsely, and Simonds nodded and slid down in his chair, bracing himself for the holocaust about to begin.
"Missiles entering attack range ... now!" Captain Hunter rasped.
A proximity alarm flashed on Lieutenant Ash's panel, a warning buzzer wailed, and a shoal of crimson dots appeared on his radar display.
The lieutenant gaped at them. They were coming in at incredible speed, and they couldn't be there. They couldn't be there!
But they were. They'd come over a hundred million kilometers while Thunder of God moved to meet them, and their very lack of drive power had helped them evade all of Thunder's remaining passive sensors. Ash's radar had a maximum range against such small targets of just over a half million kilometers, and that was less than five seconds at their velocity.
"Missiles at three-five-two!" he cried, and Simonds' head jerked towards his secondary plot.
Only five of them were close enough to attack Thunder, and they no longer had any power to adjust their trajectories—but Thunder had held her undeviating course for over two hours. They raced across her bow and rolled on attitude thrusters, bringing their laser clusters to bear down the unprotected throat of her wedge, and all five of them detonated as one.
Thunder of God bucked like a mad thing as half a dozen lasers ripped into her port beam, and Matthew Simonds went white with horror as he saw the second incoming broadside racing down upon him.
"Hard a starboard!" he shouted.
The coxswain threw the helm hard over, wrenching Thunder's vulnerable bow away from the new menace, and Simonds felt a rush of relief.
Then he realized what he'd done.
"Belay that helm order!" he screamed.
"He's turning!" Rafe Cardones shouted, and Honor jerked upright in her chair. It couldn't be! There was no—
"Roll port! All batteries, engage!"
"Engage with forward batteries!" Simonds yelled desperately.
He had no choice. Thunder was too slow on the helm, and he'd compounded his original mistake. He should have completed the turn, gotten around as quickly as he could to interpose his wounded port sidewall while he rolled to block with the top or belly of his wedge; instead, his helmsman obeyed the orders he'd been given, checking the turn to come back to port in the same plane, and Thunder hung for a few, short seconds bow-on to Fearless.
The battlecruiser's forward armament spat fire, two powerful spinal lasers blazing frantically at the target suddenly square across her bow. The first salvo wasted itself against the belly of Fearless's wedge, but the cruiser was rolling like a snake. Thunder fired again, pointblank energy fire ripped through her sidewall, and armor was no protection at that range. Air and debris vomited into space, but then her surviving broadside came to bear.
Four lasers and three far more powerful grasers went to continuous rapid fire, and there was no sidewall to stop them.
Matthew Simonds had one flaming instant to know he'd failed his God, and then HMS Fearless blew his ship apart around him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Honor Harrington stepped into a trill of bosun's pipes, and Nimitz stiffened on her shoulder even as her good eye widened in surprise. Admiral White Haven had summoned her for a final, routine meeting before she took Fearless home, but Ambassador Langtry waited beside him in Reliant's boat bay. That was odd enough, yet no lesser personages than Admiral Wesley Matthews and Benjamin Mayhew himself stood with them, and speculation frothed through her even as her hand rose in automatic salute.
Hamish Alexander waited for Protector Mayhew and Sir Anthony Langtry to find chairs, then sat behind his desk and considered the woman before him.
Her treecat was obviously restive, but she looked calm, despite the surprise she must be feeling, and he remembered the first time he'd seen her. She'd been calm then, too, when she'd come aboard to report her damages and casualties with an indifference which had repelled him. She hadn't even seemed to care, as if people were simply part of a ship's fittings, only weapons to be expended and forgotten.
Her emotionless detachment had appalled him ... but then the report came in that Commander McKeon had somehow gotten almost a hundred of his crew away in his single surviving pi