"Last boat, Skipper," Cardones announced. The exec was hoa.r.s.e from pa.s.sing orders, and Honor looked up with a nod from her conference with Jennifer Hughes. She spared time for one anguished glance at the back of her command chair, wishing desperately that she'd sent Nimitz across, as well. But he would no more leave her than Samantha would leave Harold Tschu-or than Honor would leave him. She might have had him forcibly removed, but she couldn't do it. She simply couldn't, and at least he was better off than Samantha. He had his skinsuit; Tschu hadn't been able to afford one, and he'd had to settle for a standard life support module. But that much Honor had been able to improve upon. She still had the deluxe module she'd bought Nimitz before Paul designed his suit-the one with the built in anti-radiation armor and the extended life support-and she'd insisted that Tschu take Samantha to her quarters and put her inside its greater protection.

Not, she thought grimly, that it would make that much difference in the end.

"How soon can we break away?" she asked.

"Any time, Skip." Cardones' smile was as grim as she felt. "That boat's not scheduled to come back. We're down to two pinnaces . . . and, of course, our life pods."

"Of course," Honor agreed with a ghost of true humor, then punched back into Damage Control Central.

"DCC, Senior Chief Lewis."

"Lewis? What are you doing down there?" Honor demanded in surprise.

"Commander Tschu has every warm body he can spare down in Cargo One, Ma'am, including Lieutenant Silvetti. I'm minding the store for them," Ginger said, deliberately misunderstanding her question, and Honor's lips quirked in a small, sad smile.

"All right, Senior Chief. Tell me how they're coming."

"The starboard motors are definitely frozen, Ma'am," Lewis said crisply. "They're completely shot; they'll need total replacement. Two of the port motors are still operable, and the third may be, but the entire control run's blown away between Frame Seven-Niner-Two and the stern plate. They're rigging new cable now, but they've got to clear wreckage to get it in, and two pods have come adrift from Number Four Rail. They'll have to get them tied down before they can even get at that portion of the problem."

"Time estimate?"

"Chief Engineer estimates a minimum of ninety minutes, Ma'am."

"Understood. Tell him to keep on it."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am."

Honor cut the circuit and looked at Jennifer Hughes.

"Time to enemy intercept?"

"Missile range in two hours, five minutes."

"But she still has us only on gravitics?"

"At this range and under these conditions, that's all she can possibly have us on, Ma'am," Hughes said confidently.

"Very well." Honor turned to Cardones, who'd taken over Communications after Cousins' departure. "Rafe, get me Captain Fuchien on the main screen."

"Yes, Ma'am."

The two-meter com screen on the command deck's forward bulkhead lit. Fuchien's face was grim, her eyes haunted, but she nodded courteously.

"It's time, Captain," Honor told her in a voice whose calm surprised even her. Perhaps it surprised especially her. "Move your ship ahead of us. I want you in our impeller shadow when your drive goes down."

"Yes, Milady," Fuchien said quietly, and Honor looked over her shoulder. "Deploy the EW drone, Jenny."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am."

Artemis slid in front of Wayfarer once more, riding directly ahead of her, and Honor turned to Senior Chief c.o.xswain O'Halley.

"This is going to have to be smartly done, Chief," she told him quietly, and her helmsman nodded his understanding. Artemis was so close the safety perimeter of her impeller wedge cleared Wayfarer's by barely sixty kilometers. She had to be, if she was going to hide her own impellers from the Peep battlecruiser behind the Q-ship's, but Wayfarer was still accelerating at over a hundred gravities. The tiniest helm error on her part when Artemis' wedge went down and Honor executed her breakaway maneuver could bring her own wedge into direct contact with the liner's hull, which would tear the other ship apart instantly.

"Understood, Ma'am," O'Halley said far more calmly than he could possibly feel, and Honor raised her eyes to the main plot, watching as Artemis settled exactly into the agreed upon position, then drew a deep breath and looked at Fuchien.

"Good luck, Captain," she said.

"G.o.d bless, Milady," Fuchien said softly, and the two captains, each with eyes filled by the pain of what duty required of them, nodded to one another.

"Very well," Honor Harrington said crisply, turning back to her own bridge. "Execute!"

CHAPTER FORTY.

Citizen Commodore Abraham Jurgens glared at the two light beads in his flag bridge plot. He'd known Marie Stellingetti and John Edwards well, known how good they'd been, and Achmed had had Kerebin on gravitics when the battlecruiser vanished. As far as Jurgens had been able to tell, she'd done everything right . . . yet she'd been destroyed, and he had no idea what the h.e.l.l had happened. Nothing weaker than a starship's impeller signature would have been detectable at that range, and all he knew was that Kerebin had suddenly gone to evasive maneuvering, then vanished.

It wasn't supposed to be like this! he thought savagely. Like many of the PN's officers, he hated the Royal Manticoran Navy for what it had done to them. He wasn't like that idiot Waters, who saw butchering even merchant s.p.a.cers as his holy duty in the Republic's cause, but he would shed no tears over them, either, and he'd seen the value of raiding Manty merchant shipping. He'd also expected it to be a relatively safe operation, yet half his battlecruiser division had just been wiped from the face of the universe, and he didn't even know how it had been done!

But you do know, don't you? he told himself. Or, at least, you know who must have done it. That extra "merchantman" has to be a Manty Q-ship. G.o.d only knows what it's doing here-and He's also the only one who knows what the h.e.l.l it could be armed with to punch Kerebin out that way-but you know that's what it is.

He'd picked up enough information from Durandel as he pa.s.sed to know Stellingetti's "Target One" hadn't done the job; if it had that kind of firepower, it would have used it before Kerebin snuffed its destroyer consort. No, it had to have been the second ship, and that ship had a civilian-grade compensator, or it would have been running a h.e.l.l of a lot faster than it was. So it had to be one of the Manties' "merchant cruisers," which meant it was far more fragile than his flagship. But it obviously carried something extraordinary in the way of armament, and the range had been eight hundred thousand kilometers when Kerebin died, well beyond energy range.

More of their d.a.m.ned missile pods? he wondered. It could be, but how could a merchie put enough of them on tow? Even their SDs are limited to ten or so, and that shouldn't have been enough to just wipe Kerebin out that way. But even if that was what they did to her, they never slowed down enough to deploy more of them, so they can't do it to me.

That was not his estimate, alone. Citizen Captain Holtz, Achmed's CO, and his own ops officer shared it. Yet Jurgens had no intention of walking into anything. He would approach carefully, with every missile defense system on-line. He would treat this ship as cautiously as if it were another battlecruiser-even a battleship-until he knew for certain that it couldn't do to him whatever it had done to Kerebin. But once he was certain- "Target One shouldn't have slowed down," People's Commissioner Aston said quietly.

Jurgens turned his head to look at the chubby man in the uniform with no rank insignia. By and large, the task force had been fortunate in its people's commissioners. Eloise Pritchart had been allowed a remarkably free hand in their selection, and aside from one or two fools who'd been forced on her by their own sponsors-like Frank Reidel, the sole survivor from Kerebin's entire company-most of them were surprisingly competent and unusually human. Kenneth Aston was both of those things, and Jurgens nodded.

"You're right. The Q-ship's got a civilian compensator, so she's pulling close to her max accel, and she's probably only got civilian-grade particle shielding, too. But Target One-" He shook his head. "She has to be a liner to produce the kind of accel we've already seen out of her, and they should have let her run for it. She's probably got the legs to get away, especially if the Q-ship can slow us down, and we're the only ship close enough to have either of them on sensors now. If they'd split up, we'd never have caught her."

"Unless they couldn't split up for some reason," Aston suggested.

"Unless they couldn't," Jurgens acknowledged. "I suppose it's possible Kerebin got a piece of her drive, but her acceleration was much higher before the Q-ship joined up. No," he shook his head. "Whoever's in command of the Q-ship has screwed up. He's trying to keep her close enough to 'protect' her."

"I agree." Aston nodded, but he also rubbed his double chin thoughtfully. "At the same time, he did destroy Citizen Captain Stellingetti's ship with remarkable speed, and if he has military-grade sensors, he may know we're the only ship which still has them on its plot. Could he be expecting to do the same thing to us?"

"He may," Jurgens said grimly. "If he took us out, then both of them could break contact, and we'd never find them again in all this garbage." He waved a hand at the flickering energy flux of hyper-s.p.a.ce on the flag bridge's view screens. "We've even lost Durandel now, and the rest of the pickets who were close enough to respond are off chasing freighters. But if he thinks he's going to take my flagship without losing his a.s.s in the process, he's sadly mistaken!"

"He's found another few gees of acceleration somewhere, Skipper," Jennifer Hughes said. "Revised time to missile range is now one hour, seventeen minutes."

Honor simply nodded acknowledgment. She'd done all she could. Tschu was laboring frantically in Cargo One, but the damage was worse than he'd initially thought, and he'd already lost six of his people: two crushed to death and four "merely" injured by one of the dismounted pods before it could be tied down. His original time estimate had been revised upward twice, and badly as she wanted to com him to urge him on, she knew it would have achieved nothing except to distract and delay him further. He'd tell her the moment he had anything to report.

Other damage control people had managed to put Missile Seven back into the central fire control net, and Ginger Lewis was doing an outstanding job in Damage Control Central. DCC was no job for any petty officer, however experienced she was, but Tschu needed every man and woman he could get for other jobs, and Lewis' voice was confident whenever she buzzed the bridge with another report. Harry was certainly right about her ability, Honor thought with a slight smile, and glanced at her repeater plot once more.

They were on their second EW drone now, and they'd need number three shortly. The drone's transponders required a fearsome amount of power to simulate the drive strength of an Atlas-cla.s.s liner, and no drone could keep it up forever. But that was one reason Honor was holding the drones in so tight. It was also why she had Carolyn Wolcott maneuvering them in and out of Wayfarer's grav shadow at random intervals. It must look like sloppy station keeping to the Peeps, but it also let Honor bring "Artemis" squarely back in front of her for each drone changeover. It probably wasn't necessary-by now, the Peeps must have it firmly fixed in their brains that they were chasing two ships-but there was no point being clumsy.

Especially now. Artemis had cut her drive, but she was still plunging ahead at the .39 c velocity she'd attained first, and her side vector was almost directly towards Wayfarer at well over thirty thousand KPS. The Peeps had pa.s.sed her position less than ten minutes previously, and if they realized what had happened and decelerated for a search pattern, they might just find her after all. The odds were against it, but it was possible, and Honor would not permit that to happen. Not when she'd already decided to sacrifice her own ship to save Captain Fuchien's.

She made herself face that, accept that she'd deliberately sentenced her own crew to death knowing they couldn't defeat their enemy. The Peep CO astern of her had to know she'd killed his consort with missiles. He wouldn't want to get in any closer than he had to, so he'd turn to open his broadside at maximum range and fire his own birds in to see how she responded. And when she didn't return a matching fire, he'd stay right there and pound Wayfarer to death without ever closing into the reach of her energy weapons.

She was going to die. She knew it, but if she could cripple the enemy too badly to catch Artemis even if they detected her, the sacrifice would be worth it. She accepted that, as well . . . but behind her calm face her heart bled at condemning so many others to die with her. People like Nimitz and Samantha. Like Rafe Cardones, Ginger Lewis, and James MacGuiness, who had flatly refused to evacuate the ship. Aubrey Wanderman, Carol Wolcott, Horace Harkness, Lewis Hallowell . . . All those people-people she'd come to know and treasure as individuals, many as friends-were going to die right beside her. She could no more save them than she could save herself, and guilt pressed down upon her. Those others would die because she'd ordered them to, because it was her duty to take them all to death with her and it was their duty to follow her. But unlike them, she would die knowing it was her orders which had killed them.

Yet there was no other way. She'd gotten another eight hundred people off Wayfarer, reducing the death toll to just over a thousand. One thousand men and women-and two treecats-who would die to save four thousand others. By any measure, that had to be a worthwhile bargain, but, oh, how it hurt.

She hid her pain behind serene eyes, feeling her bridge officers about her, knowing how they would focus on her-take their lead and their inspiration and their determination from her-when it began, and pride in them and grief for them warred in her soul.

Margaret Fuchien, Harold Sukowski, and Stacey Hauptman stood and watched Annabelle Ward's plot with haunted eyes. The battlecruiser had burned past them twelve minutes ago, never even noticing the liner or its protecting LACs. And why should it have? They were only seven inert pieces of alloy, radiating no energy and lost in h-s.p.a.ce's immensity as Wayfarer deliberately sucked their enemy after her.

"Seventy-five minutes," Ward murmured.

"Will they still be in sensor range, Captain Harry?" Stacey asked softly.

"We should still have their impellers, but it won't be very clear." Sukowski closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. "In a way, I'm just as glad. I don't want to see it. It's going to-" He met Stacey's gaze squarely. "It's going to be ugly, Stace. Her ship's already badly damaged, and if the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds just stand off and pound her-" He shook his head again.

"Will she surrender?" Fuchien asked out of the silence, and Sukowski looked at her. "When they open fire on her, will she surrender?"

"No," Sukowski said simply.

"Why not?" Stacey demanded, her voice suddenly sharp. "Why not? She's already saved us-why won't she surrender and save her own people?"

"Because she's still protecting us," Sukowski told her as gently as he could. "When they get close enough to engage her, they'll also be close enough to spot the drone. They'll know we aren't there, but they'll also know within an hour or two when we must have shut down our drive-and our vector when we did. That means they'll have a good idea of where we could be if they come back and look for us. The odds are against their finding us, but Lady Harrington intends to make certain they don't. She'll hammer them as long as she has a weapon left, Stace, to cripple their sensors and slow them down." He saw the tears in Stacey's eyes and put his arm about her as he had about Chris Hurlman. "It's her job, Stace," he said softly. "Her duty. And that woman knows about duty. I spent enough time aboard her ship to know that."

"I envy you that, Harry," Margaret Fuchien said softly.

"Missile range in twenty-one minutes," Jennifer Hughes announced. "a.s.suming constant accelerations, we'll enter energy range thirteen-point-five minutes after that."

Honor nodded once more and keyed her com.

"DCC, Lewis," the woman on her screen said, and Honor smiled crookedly.

"I don't want to joggle Commander Tschu's elbow, but I'd like to confirm his latest estimate on the cargo doors."

"Current estimate is-" Ginger glanced at the chrono and did some mental math "-thirty-nine minutes, Ma'am."

"Thank you," Honor said quietly, and killed the circuit. So there it was. The pods would come back on-line just as the Peeps closed to energy range anyway. But there was nothing Honor could do about that. All she could do was continue to run as long as possible, drawing the Peeps after her, buying Artemis time, and she prepared to play the game out to its final, hopeless throw.

"We'll go with Alpha-One," she said. "Rafe, tell all hands-seal helmets in ten minutes."

A curiously shrunken Klaus Hauptman stepped onto Artemis' bridge. The people cl.u.s.tered around the plot looked up at him, and his face clenched as he saw Sukowski's arm around Stacey. He should have been the one to comfort his daughter. But he'd forfeited that right, he thought drearily, when he proved himself so much less than she'd always thought he was in her eyes.

And in his own.

He crossed to the plot, making his gaze meet theirs. It was almost an act of penance, an ordeal deliberately inflicted upon himself and embraced. Fuchien and Sukowski nodded to him, their expressions neutral, but neither spoke, and Stacey never even looked at him.

"How soon?" he asked, and his normally powerful, confident voice was frayed and rough.

"Sixteen minutes to missile range, Sir," Annabelle Ward replied.

"All right, Steve," Abraham Jurgens told his flagship captain. "I don't want to get in close until we're sure their teeth have been pulled."

"Aye, Citizen Commodore." Citizen Captain Stephen Holtz looked at his repeater plot and frowned. The Q-ship was putting out some d.a.m.ned effective decoys. Her EW was starting to play games with his sensors, too, and hyper's natural sensor degradation made her efforts even more effective than usual, but he was five thousand kilometers inside the powered missile envelope.

Under normal conditions, he would have turned to open his broadside, but these weren't normal conditions. He had his own EW systems fully on-line, and the same conditions which hurt his fire control had to be hurting the Q-ship's, as well. Under the circ.u.mstances, it actually made sense to keep the vulnerable throat of his wedge towards the enemy, for it gave the Manty a weaker, fuzzier target than his sidewalls and the full length of his wedge would have.

Of course, it also restricted him only to the three tubes of his bow chasers, but that was all right. He wanted to sting the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, goad him. If he could get the Q-ship to fire off any pods it might have at extreme range, his point defense would be far more effective . . . and the Manty's target would be far harder to hit.

"Missile separation!" Jennifer Hughes announced. "I have two-no, three inbound. Time of flight one-seven-zero seconds. Stand by point defense."

"Standing by," Lieutenant Jansen replied.

"Spread Decoys Four and Five a little wider, Carol," Hughes said. "Let's see if we can pull these birds off high."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am." Wolcott made an adjustment on her panel, and Honor reached up to check Nimitz. Like her, the 'cat had his helmet sealed, and he'd secured the safety straps mounted on her chair to the snap rings on his suit. It wasn't as good as a shock frame, but no one made treecat-sized shock frames.

"Impact in niner-zero seconds," Jansen announced, and pressed the key that sent his counter-missiles out to meet the incoming fire.

"They've killed the birds, Skipper," Holtz's tac officer reported as the third missile tore apart. None of them had even gotten as deep as the Q-ship's inner boundary laser defenses, Holtz noted in disgust. Well, it wasn't all that surprising, and at least their d.a.m.ned pod-launched missiles hadn't come back to kill his ship.

"Any sign at all of missile pods?"

"None, Citizen Captain. No return fire at all." Holtz knew Citizen Commander Pacelot was irritated with him for asking the obvious whenever she called him "Citizen Captain" instead of "Skipper." He grimaced, but he couldn't really blame her. He considered a moment longer, then nodded..

"All right. Let's go to sequenced fire, Helen."

"Aye, Skipper," she said, much more cheerfully, and punched the new commands into her console.