Echoes Of Honor

He glanced at Citizen Commissioner Leopold.

"With your permission, Sir, I believe we should reverse course immediately and come back at the terminus."

"Can we still defeat the fortresses?" Leopold asked, not even glancing at Huff—which, Darlington reflected, boded ill for the citizen commander when Leopold turned in his report.

"I believe so, Sir. We'll take heavier losses than the ops plan originally contemplated, but we should be able to secure control of the terminus. Whether we can carry through and maintain control until Citizen Admiral Giscard rejoins us is another matter, however. The terminus picket has almost as many dreadnoughts as we do. They can be here well before Citizen Admiral Giscard if they reverse course promptly, and if they do that and we've taken heavy damage from the forts, then I doubt we could stand them off and pick off anything making transit from the Manties' Home Fleet. On the other hand, we're well outside the hyper limit here. If we see a force we can't fight coming at us, we can retreat into hyper immediately. That," he added quietly, "was the reason Citizen Admiral Giscard was willing to contemplate this maneuver in the first place, Sir. Because we can always run away if the odds turn to crap on us."

"I see." Leopold considered for several seconds, then nodded. "Very well, Citizen Admiral. Make it so."

"Citizen Commander," Darlington said, turning to Huff, "we'll go with the least-time course. We should have time to decelerate and come back again—" he managed, somehow, not to stress the adverb " —if their terminus picket wants a fight, and I want to cross their forts' missile zone as quickly as possible."

"Aye, Citizen Admiral," Huff said, and began passing maneuvering orders to the rest of the task group.

Reynaud smothered a groan as the fresh Peep force began to decelerate. He knew exactly what they'd intended to do, and exactly how it had gone wrong, but the fact that it had didn't make him feel much better. He could run the numbers just as well as they could, and his fingers flew as he punched them into his plot. But then he felt his spine slowly stiffen as the new vectors blinked in the plot before him.

The Peeps could be here in roughly eighty-five minutes — into missile range, even with the jamming, in about eighty-four—and unlike the Peeps, Reynaud knew that the operational forts' supply of missile pods was dangerously low. The two of them together probably couldn't put more than a hundred and fifty into space. But Eighth Fleet's first destroyer would arrive in eleven minutes... and its first super-dreadnought would be here in twenty-six. And assuming White Haven could actually pull it off without turning his capital ships into billiard balls (or expanding plasma), another SD would arrive every one hundred and thirteen seconds after that. So he could have...

The Astro Control vice admiral's fingers flashed, and a most unpleasant smile appeared on his face.

Vice Admiral Markham felt his heart spasm as the FTL net reported the arrival of still more enemies. He realized as quickly as Reynaud what the original Peep intent had been, and the bitterness and despair he fought to keep out of his expression deepened at the fresh proof of how utterly the RMN had underestimated the "defensive minded" People's Navy.

But he also knew, thanks to the FTL com relays between the terminus and Medusa, that Eighth Fleet was on its way, and he bared his teeth in a death's head grin as he, too, worked the numbers on its arrival time. It didn't change what was going to happen to his own task group, of course. Nothing short of a direct act of God could have changed that. But it did change what was going to happen to the Peep bastards who thought they were going to kill the terminus forts and then wait to ambush Home Fleet if it tried to respond.

"Missile range in thirty-nine minutes, Sir," his ops officer said quietly, and he nodded.

"I wonder how Citizen Admiral Giscard is making out," Citizen Commissioner Leopold said quietly, and Darlington turned his head to meet his eyes. The people's commissioner had spoken softly enough no one else could have heard, and the citizen admiral replied equally quietly.

"Probably just fine, so far, Sir," he said. "I doubt he's made contact with their main force yet."

"I wish we could know what was happening to him," Leopold said, and Darlington shrugged.

"If we had the FTL relays the Manties have, we could, Sir. Without them, we can only guess. But it doesn't really matter. Nothing that happens that far in-system can have any immediate effect on us, and even if the Medusa picket turned out to be a hell of a lot heavier than we thought and it killed every one of the Citizen Admiral's ships and then came after us, we'd have plenty of warning to hyper out before it got here."

He glanced back up, and his mouth twitched as he saw the stricken look on Leopold's face.

"I didn't mean that I think anything of the sort is going to happen, Citizen Commissioner," he said with a barely suppressed chuckle. "I only meant to present a worst-possible-case scenario."

"Oh." Leopold swallowed, then smiled wanly. "I see. But in future, Citizen Admiral, please tell me ahead of time that that's what you're doing."

"I'll remember, Sir," Darlington promised.

The air-conditioned chill of Basilisk ACS' control room was a thing of the past. Vice Admiral Reynaud felt the sweat dripping down his face as his controllers hovered over their consoles, and even though he saw it with his own eyes, he could scarcely believe what was happening.

Thirty-nine destroyers hovered just beyond the terminus threshold. They'd come through in a steady stream, as rapidly and remorselessly as an old, prespace freight train, and Reynaud had felt like some small, terrified animal frozen on the rails as the train's headlamp thundered down upon him. But he'd handed each warship off to its own controller, cycling through the available list with feverish speed, and somehow—he still wasn't sure how—they'd managed to avoid outright collisions.

But not all damage. HMS Glorioso had been just a fraction of a second too slow reconfiguring from sails to wedge, and HMS Vixen had run right up her backside. Fortunately, perhaps, the second destroyer had gotten her wedge up quickly, for it had come on-line one bare instant before Glorioso's had, but without building to full power. Which meant that only Glorioso's after nodes had blown. The resultant explosion had vaporized two-thirds of her after impeller room, and Reynaud had no desire at all to think about how many people it must have killed when it went, but it hadn't destroyed her hull or her compensator, and the fail-safes had blown in time to save her forward impellers. Momentum, coupled with instantaneous and brilliant evasive action on Vixen's part, had been just sufficient to carry her clear of an outright collision, and two of her sisters had speared her with tractors and dragged her bodily out of the way of Vixen's next astern. But for all that, it had been impossibly close. A thousandth of a second's difference in when either wedge came on-line, a dozen meters difference in their relative locations, a single split-second of distraction on the part of Vixen's watch officer or helmsman, and not only would they have collided, but the next ship in line would have plowed straight into their molten wreckage in the begi

But they'd avoided it, and now the first superdreadnoughts were coming through. The huge ships were much slower on the helm, but they were almost as quick to reconfigure from sails to wedge, and their longer transit windows gave them precious additional seconds to maneuver. They were actually easier to handle than the destroyers had been, and Reynaud leaned back in his chair and mopped the skim of sweat from his forehead.