At All Costs

"We couldn't let them punch out Sphinx, and that meant coming in after them," he said. "You did."

"I should have seen this coming," she shot back, but quietly, quietly, keeping her voice down. "After what Harrington did to them at Lovat, it was the logical response."

"Oh?" Smithson cocked his head, smiling ironically despite the hurricane of missiles rushing towards them. "And I suppose you were supposed to somehow use clairvoyance to realize they had another hundred wallers in reserve? That they were going to throw three hundred and fifty superdreadnoughts at us? Just you-not Admiral Caparelli, not ONI, not Admiral D'Orville, or Admiral Harrington. Just you. Because, obviously, this is all your fault."

"I didn't mean-" she began angrily, then stopped. She looked at him for a moment, then reached out and squeezed his shoulder.

"I guess I did deserve that. Thanks."

"Don't mention it." Smithson smiled sadly. "It's one of a chief of staff's jobs."

"All right, Alekan," Alistair McKeon told his ops officer harshly. "We're the only squadron with Apollo. Admiral Kuzak has authorized us for independent targeting to make best use of the system. That means it's going to be up to you."

"Understood, Sir." Commander Slowacki nodded hard.

"I want to concentrate on this new bunch," McKeon continued. "They haven't been hit yet, their fire control and their tactical departments are going to be in better shape. We'll take them one ship at a time."

"Understood, Admiral," Slowacki said again, and McKeon pointed at the icons of Genevieve Chin's task force.

"Good. Now go kill as many of those bastards as you can."

"Aye, aye, Sir!"

"I wish Her Grace were here, Sir," Commander Roslee Orndorff said quietly beside McKeon as Slowacki and his assistants began updating their targeting solutions.

"I don't," McKeon told Orndorff, his voice equally quiet, and shook his head. "This is one not even she could get us out of, Roslee."

"I guess not," Orndorff agreed. "And you're right. I shouldn't wish she was stuck in here with the rest of us. But-no offense, Sir-I... miss her."

"So do I." McKeon reached out and stroked the head of the treecat perched on Orndorff's shoulder. Banshee pressed back against his hand, but only for a moment. Then the 'cat pressed his cheek against the side of his person's head and crooned softly to her.

Orndorff reached up, caressing him tenderly, without ever taking her eyes from the plot.

Unlike Oliver Diamato's battlecruisers, Third Fleet couldn't dodge the pulser dart. Admiral Kuzak's command was too deep, pi

At least Third Fleet's base velocity was almost fourteen thousand kilometers per second higher than Fifth Fleet's, and almost directly away from it. Given that geometry, Chin's powered missile envelope was only fifty-one million kilometers. But the range was only 41,700,000 kilometers, and that meant Chin could keep Kuzak's ships under fire for eleven minutes before Third Fleet could run out of range.

Eleven minutes. It didn't sound like such a long time, but it was longer than Home Fleet had survived against Lester Tourville. And Home Fleet hadn't been ru

"Open fire!" Lester Tourville snapped.

"Aye, Sir!" Frazier Adamson acknowledged, and Tourville watched the icons of his missiles reaching out towards the Manties.

He'd almost left it too late, he thought. Chin's astrogation had been off by a good ten million kilometers, although it was hard to fault her for that. She'd had only a handful of minutes to adjust her position after MacArthur's arrival, thanks in no small part to how long Tourville had waited, and making that kind of delicate, short-ranged micro-translation was always infernally difficult.

Given that any error placing her alpha translation on the wrong side of the zone boundary would have resulted in the destruction of every ship under her command, it was inevitable-and proper-that she should err on the side of caution. Besides, it had never been part of the ops plan for her ships to move inside the resonance zone or hyper limit until she and Tourville were certain they'd dealt with the defenses. All the defenses.

Still, eleven minutes of concentrated fire from ninety-six SD(P)s should smash the hell out of the Manties' combat capability, even if it failed to destroy them outright. And in the meantime, he could do a little something to help Chin along.

The range for his missiles was only 32,955,000 kilometers, and unlike the range from Chin's ships, it was dropping by over a million kilometers per minute. Not to mention the fact that unlike Chin, his tactical officers had been tracking the Manties steadily, updating their firing solutions for the last thirty or forty minutes.

He checked the time display. Flight time for his missiles was just under six minutes, two minutes less than for Chin. Although she'd fired first, his missiles would reach their targets before hers.

"We are truly and royally screwed, Skipper," Chief Warrant Officer Sir Horace Harkness said quietly from HMLAC Dacoit's engineering station.

Scotty Tremain glanced at him, then looked back at the plot, and wished there were some way he could disagree.

"You have a message from Admiral Truman, Captain," Dacoit's com section AI said. "Personal to you."

"Accept, Cental," Tremain said. A moment later, Alice Truman appeared on his com display.

"Admiral," he said, watching the missile icons spreading like the tracks of pre-space wet-navy torpedoes.

"It looks like we're going to get hammered, Scotty," Truman told him bluntly. "I want you to detach your Katanas. Leave them behind to help thicken Admiral Kuzak's defenses. Then take all the rest of your birds and head for the in-system force now."

Tremain looked at her for just a moment. He knew what she had in mind. His Ferrets and Shrikes, especially the former, were preparing to help bolster Third Fleet's missile defenses, yet compared to his Katanas, their contribution would have been relatively minor. But by sending them against the survivors of the first Havenite attack force, she might compel it to divert its fire. It no longer had a screen, its attached LACS had taken severe losses, and it couldn't simply run away from him into hyper. It would have no choice but to stand and fight, and if it let him get into attack range without severe losses of his own....

"Understood, Dame Alice," he said. "We'll do our best to keep their heads down."

"Good, Scotty. Good hunting. Truman, clear."

"Crap," Molly DeLaney muttered, and Lester Tourville chuckled harshly.

"They're a little quicker off the mark with it than I expected," he said, watching the Manty LACs' arc away from Third Fleet. Missile flight times were long enough-and the Manty reaction fast enough-that their course change was already evident, even though Second Fleet's first salvo had yet to reach attack range.

"Still," he continued, "it was the logical move, once we lost the screen. Frazier."

"Yes, Admiral?" Commander Adamson replied.

"Send Smirnoff out to meet these people."

"Captain Smirnoff is dead, Sir," Adamson said. "Commander West is COLAC now."

Tourville winced internally. He hadn't known Alice Smirnoff well. Only met the woman twice, actually, and then only in passing. But somehow her death, u