At All Costs

Chapter Sixty-Eight

"Ma'am, you're in command now," Captain Goodrick said.

"What?" Alice Truman looked at him in disbelief.

"The flagship's gone," Goodrick said harshly. "That puts you in command."

"What about Vice Admiral Emiliani?" Truman demanded.

"Valkyrie took a hit on flag bridge. Emiliani is dead. You're next most senior."

Truman stood for perhaps two heartbeats, then she shook herself.

"Very well," she said. "Franklin," she looked at Lieutenant Bradshaw. "General signal, all units. Inform them that command has passed to Chimera."

"Yes, Ma'am." Bradshaw seemed almost calm, anesthetized, perhaps, by the intensity of the carnage. "Any orders?" he asked.

"No." Truman shook her head. "Not at this time."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Bradshaw bent over his communications console, and Truman looked at the time/date display. Nine minutes. Only nine minutes since the Peeps had opened fire, and almost half of Third Fleet had already been destroyed.

She thought about Bradshaw's question. Orders. There were no orders for a situation like this one. Admiral Kuzak had already given the only ones anyone could. Now it was a matter of duty, not orders. A matter of Third Fleet's duty to fight to the death in defense of its home, and it would.

It's not my fleet, she thought, watching Third Fleet's bleeding ships, punching out missiles even as they died, and her eye unerringly finding the icon of Intransigent, tagged with the jagged crimson code of critical damage. Not my fleet... but by God if I've got to die, I couldn't have found a better one to die with.

"That's two more of them, Ma'am," Commander Spiropoulo said, and Chin nodded.

Third Fleet was finished, she thought, her grim satisfaction tinged with more than a little horror as she contemplated the losses both navies had suffered this blood-soaked day. Thirty of the Manty SDs had been destroyed or hulked. Over half the survivors had critical damage, and whoever had been equipped with that new weapons system was among the dead or disabled.

Fifth Fleet would lose the range on Kuzak's battered remnants in another twenty-five seconds. The last salvo she could bring down on the fleeing Manties would land in another fifteen, but she found it hard to regret it. There'd already been enough blood, enough destruction, to satisfy anyone, she thought grimly.

She looked at the tally on one of her secondary displays. Second Fleet was down to only seventy-five ships-only fifty-six effectives, really-out of the two hundred and forty wallers and ninety escorts Lester Tourville had taken into the resonance zone. She herself had lost "only" eleven superdreadnoughts, and most of the crew had gotten out of three of them. But the back of the Star Kingdom's home system's defenses had been broken. She still had plenty of missile pods left aboard her remaining eighty-five wallers, and Second Fleet, despite its own brutal losses, had enough combat power to finish off Third Fleet's remnants. And then-

"Hyper footprint!" Spiropoulo said suddenly. "Multiple hyper footprints at seven-two-point-niner-three million kilometers!"

Honor Alexander-Harrington's eyes were brown ice as Theophile Kgari, in a virtuoso display of astrogation, dropped the massed superdreadnoughts of Eighth Fleet exactly where she'd told him to in a single jump right out of the center of the resonance zone.

She didn't look at the pathetic remnants of Third Fleet's icons. Didn't even glance at the other icons, representing Lester Tourville's task force. She had attention only for Genevieve Chin's superdreadnoughts, and her voice was a frozen soprano sword.

"Engage the enemy, Andrea," Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington said.

Genevieve Chin's heart began beating once again, and her instant instinct to break off eased a bit as the range registered. At almost seventy-three million kilometers, the new arrivals were well outside even MDMs' powered range. Besides, there were only thirty-eight of them-less than half her own strength, even if all of them were wallers and not carriers.

"Turn us around, Andria

Eighth Fleet spent three minutes rolling pods. In that time, it deployed 7,776.

Then it fired.

"What the-?" Andria

"Ma'am," she said, turning to Admiral Chin, "the Manties have just fired."

"They've what?" Genevieve Chin looked up from a discussion with NicodŠme Sabourin.

"They've fired, Ma'am," Spiropoulo repeated. "It doesn't make any sense. They're still at least seven million kilometers out of range!"

"That doesn't make any sense," Chin agreed, walking across to stare at the preposterous missile icons in the master display.

"Maybe they're trying to panic us, Admiral," Sabourin suggested. She looked at him, eyebrows rising in disbelief, and he shrugged. "I know it sounds silly, Ma'am, but I don't have any better suggestion. I mean, we've just hammered two entire Manty fleets into so much scrap metal, and these people are outnumbered by at least three-to-one. Maybe they figure this is the only way to distract us from finishing off the system."

"I suppose it's possible," Chin said slowly, watching the icons come. "But it doesn't seem like a Manty sort of thing to do. On the other hand, I don't see what else they could expect to accomplish."

Honor watched her own plot, sitting very still in her command chair. Nimitz sat upright in her lap, leaning back against her chest. She wrapped her right arm about him, holding him, and felt his cold, focused determination-an echo of her own-as his grass green eyes followed the same icons, watched the missiles speeding outward.

Apollo had done several things. It provided real-time control of her missiles at any range. By using the Apollo birds to control the other missiles from their pods, it effectively multiplied the number of MDMs each ship could control by a factor of eight. And it provided her tactical officers with unprecedented control over their missiles' fight profiles.

Eighth Fleet was the only formation in space fully equipped with the new system, and Honor and her captains had spent long, thoughtful hours exploring Apollo's ramifications. Now she was prepared to use them.

"They can't be serious," Spiropoulo said in exasperation as every single impeller signature disappeared from her plot simultaneously. She glared at the plot with an affronted sense of professionalism, then punched a radical course change into the fleet tactical net.

Fifth Fleet obeyed the order immediately, rolling through a skew turn which would take it over thirty thousand kilometers from its predicted position by the time the Manticoran missiles reached it.

"What is it, Andria

"Ma'am, you aren't going to believe this," Spiropoulo said, "but they're sending their birds in ballistic."

"What?" Chin looked back down at her com. "Excuse me for a moment, please," she told the flag officers on its compartmentalized display. "I think I need to see this for myself."

She climbed out of her command chair and walked over to stand beside Spiropoulo, her eyes seeking out the missile icons. She found them, but they were rapidly strobing flickers, not the steady light of the hard position fixes active impeller drives would have provided.