On Basilisk Station

Someone stepped up beside her, and she turned her head. It was Ma

"Jesus, Commander! What do we do now?"

Santos grunted a smothered curse and slapped another switch. Nothing happened, and she darted a frightened glance at the reactor itself. She knew it had to be her imagination, but she almost believed she could feel the containment field pulsing.

"We've lost most of the bottle software—I don't know how it's holding together now," she said rapidly, already ripping off access panels. "And we've lost all the hydrogen feed files. The bastard's ru

Ma

"If the plasma hits overload levels with an unstable bottle—" Santos broke off and flung herself on her belly, peering into the guts of the console, and grunted.

"We've got maybe five minutes before this thing blows, and I don't dare screw around with the mag governors."

"Cut the feed?" Ma

"All we can do, but I'm going to have to cross-wire the damned thing by hand. I lost my cutter when we took this hit. Get me another, and hunt up four—no, five—alpha-seven jump harnesses. Fast!"

"Yes, Ma'am." Ma

"Bridge, Missile Two." The voice on the intercom was harsh with exhaustion. "We've got two laser heads shifted. They're numbers five and six on your feed queue. I'm working on shifting number three now."

"Missile Two, this is the Captain. Where's the bosun?" Honor asked quickly.

"On her way to sickbay, Skipper. This is Harkness. I guess I'm in charge now."

"Understood. Get that third missile shifted as quickly as possible, PO."

"We're on it, Ma'am."

Even as Honor spoke, Cardones's hands flashed across his console, reprioritizing his loading schedule. Fifteen seconds later, a fresh laser warhead went scorching out of his single remaining tube.

Sirius's bridge was a tiny pocket of hell. Smoke billowed, circuit boards popped and sizzled and spat actinic fury, and Johan Coglin retched as the smoke from burning insulation filled his lungs. He heard Jamal's agonized, hacking coughs as he fought to retain tactical control, and someone was screaming in pain.

"We've lost—lost—" Jamal broke off in another tortured spasm of coughing, then slammed his helmet. Coglin followed his example, rasping for breath as his suit scrubbers attacked the sinus-tearing smoke, and Jamal's voice came over his com.

"We've lost another beta node, Sir. And—" Coglin peered through the smoke, watching the tactical officer work on his console. Then Jamal cursed. "Point defense is hurt bad, Captain. I've lost four laser clusters and half my phased radar array."

Coglin swore viciously. With two beta nodes gone, his maximum acceleration was going to be reduced by over nine percent—he'd be lucky to pull three hundred and eighty gees. He still had his alpha nodes, which meant he still had Warshawski capability, but how long was that going to last? Especially with half his last-ditch laser clusters gone?

"Missile fire control?" he demanded harshly.

"Still functional. And my ECM suite's still up—for what it's worth," Jamal added bitterly.

"Range?"

"Coming up on one-point-five million kilometers, Sir."

Coglin nodded to himself, his eyes bitter. With the open front of Fearless's wedge toward him and no sidewalls to interdict, effective laser range was right on a million kilometers, but he'd lost one of his own spinal lasers, and the back of his wedge was as open as the front of the cruiser's. If Fearless got into energy range. . . .

Energy range, hell! His point defense was down to less than half efficiency! If Harrington realized it, turned and hit him with a multiple-missile salvo—

He bit off another curse. This couldn't be happening to him! It wasn't possible for a single, over-aged, under-sized light cruiser to do this to him!

"I think he's in trouble, Guns," Honor said, staring at the readouts from her ECM suite's passive sensors. "I think you just took out most of his missile tracking capability."

"I hope so, Skipper," Cardones said hoarsely, "because I'm down to just three more birds, and—"

"Got it!" Santos shouted as she bridged the last circuit and started to slide out from under the console. Now all she had to do was cut the fuel feed and—

Fearless twisted and leapt. The savage motion picked the engineer up and smashed her down. The side of her helmet crashed against the deck, and she grunted in shock, stu

It was an instant she didn't have. She blinked back into focus, and her mouth went desert dry. She couldn't hear the alarm in Fusion One's vacuum, but she could see the numbers flashing blood-red on the panel. The mag bottle was going, counting down with lightning speed, and there was no longer time to kill the plasma flow.

She rolled across the deck, trying not to think, knowing what she had to do, and drove her hand toward the scarlet bulkhead switch.

"Jesus Christ, we got her!" Jamal screamed. "We nailed the bitch!"

The emergency jettisoning charges hurled the entire side of Fusion One out into space a microsecond before the ejection charges blew the reactor after it. There had to be a delay, be it ever so tiny, lest a faltering mag bottle be smashed against an intact bulkhead and liberate its plasma inside the ship. But small as that delay was, it was almost too long.

Dominica Santos, Allen Ma

Honor clung to her command chair, and her ship's agony whiplashed through her own flesh. Her ECM panel went down. The main tactical display locked as the forward sensors died. Chief Killian's shock frame broke, and the coxswain flew forward over his console. He thudded into a bulkhead and slid limply down it, and every damage sensor in the ship seemed to blaze in scarlet fury before her eyes.

She slammed the release on her own shock frame and lunged towards the helm.

"Look at that, Sir!" Jamal exulted.

"I see it." Coglin fought his own exultation, but it was hard. Fearless staggered sideways and her fire died suddenly. He didn't know exactly what Jamal had hit, but whatever it was had gutted the cruiser at last.

Yet she wasn't dead. Her wedge was weakened and fluttering, but it was still up, and even as he watched someone was bringing her back under command. He stared at the crippled cruiser, and something hot and primitive boiled deep within him. He could run now. But Fearless was still alive. Not only alive, but battered into a bloody, broken wreck. If he left her behind, the Royal Manticoran Navy would have far more than instrument data to prove Sirius had been armed.

He sensed the danger of his own emotions and tried to fight his way through them. What had happened out here was an act of war—there were no two ways to look at that—and Haven had fired the first shot. But no one knew that except Sirius and Fearless, and Fearless was helpless behind him.