On Basilisk Station

question, and he nodded.

'We're jammed, Ma'am. We're too far out on the wrong vector for me to hit any of the buckets in Medusa orbit with a laser, and they're blanketing everything else.'

'Understood, Mr. Webster.' She returned her attention to the tactical display, watching the missiles race towards her, and counted down the range. There! Cardones's counter-missiles streaked away at over ninety thousand gravities, charging to meet them, and she watched the incoming weapons' drives burn out. They coasted onward, suddenly sitting targets, unable to maneuver, and the counter-missiles adjusted their own vectors with finicky precision. They carried no warheads; their small but powerful impeller wedges were their weapons, sweeping the space before them, and she watched Sirius's missiles vanish from the display.

But there were two more behind them, and another pair launched as she watched. Cardones tapped keys, bringing his point defense laser clusters on line, and she made herself look calmly and deliberately at her own tactical readouts.

Ten more minutes before she could return fire with any realistic hope of a hit, and her forward magazines held less than sixty missiles. She couldn't waste them hoping for a lucky hit as Sirius was doing, and she cursed Lady Sonja Hemphill with cold and silent venom. If Hemphill hadn't butchered her armament, she might have turned long enough to open her broadside and pump a full sevenmissile salvo back at Sirius, just to test the limits of her point defense. But she no longer had a seven-tube broadside, and even if she'd had one, she didn't have the missiles to support that kind of fire.

She looked back up as Cardones picked off two more missiles and suckered the third pair with his decoys.

Johan Coglin snorted through his nose as his light-speed sensors reported what had happened twenty-five lightseconds behind him. The speed with which Fearless's decoys and ECM had sprung into action certainly answered the question of whether or not Harrington had suspected Sirius was armed! And they were better than NavInt had projected, he noted. Fleet HQ had been unable to provide him with solid data on Manticoran system capabilities, and it seemed their estimates had been low.

He watched his display, noting the cool professionalism with which Fearless had held her counter-fire until she had perfect targets, and filed that away with all his other data on Commander Harrington's capabilities. A dangerous, dangerous woman, he told himself as two of his missiles were decoyed off course and exploded harmlessly outside Fearless's sidewalls. But not dangerous enough to make up for the difference in firepower.

'Go to rapid fire on twenty and twenty-one, Jamal,' he said.

Honor winced inwardly as the Q-ship ahead of her began to spit paired missiles at fifteen-second intervals. They came racing astern from the big freighter, and the sheer prodigality of that stream of deadly projectiles was frightening. At that rate of fire, Sirius would fire off more missiles than her own forward magazines held in barely seven minutes, and she doubted it was a panic reaction. Coglin had been too cool and deliberate throughout. He knew precisely what he was doing, and that meant he had the magazine capacity to burn through ammo this way.

'Evasion pattern Echo-Seven-One, Chief Killian,' she said.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Commencing Echo-Seven-One.'

Echo-Seven-One was just about the simplest evasion pattern Honor had practiced with Killian, little more than an erratically timed barrel roll along the same vector. It only moved them a few dozen kilometers either side of their base course each time they rolled, but there wasn't a lot else Fearless could do to evade Sirius's fire. Not unless Honor wanted to angle far enough off the base track to interpose a sidewall, and that would give away too much of her acceleration advantage over the Q-ship. Yet it wasn't quite as useless as one might have thought, for she'd included Cardones and McKeon in the same drills. Now Cardones retained control of his active defenses, but McKeon took over the passive systems and began a deliberate jingle-jangle between the flanking decoys. Fearless's rolling progress swept them in a complete circuit about the cruiser, and the exec shifted their power levels in a carefully timed pattern which gave the impression that the ship's heading was veering from side to side, as well. It wasn't, of course, but, hopefully, Sirius's tactical officer would be forced to use up missiles covering the course changes the cruiser might be making because he couldn't be certain she wasn't.

Honor certainly hoped he would. The Q-ship's missiles were still burning out before they came in, but the engagement time between salvos was too short for Cardones to wait them out. He had to launch sooner, with poorer solutions and lower counter-missile accelerations to give him more time—and range—on their impeller wedges. The laser clusters began to fire as a handful of Sirius's shots got past his counter-missiles, and she looked up at the main visual display as incandescent bursts of brilliance pitted the starfield ahead of her. Unless she missed her guess about the warheads those missiles carried, she had to stop them at least twenty thousand kilometers short of her ship, and they looked frighteningly close.

But none of them were getting closer than a hundred thousand ... yet.

'Coming up on twenty-four light-seconds' range, Captain,' Lieutenant Commander Jamal reported. 'We're getting them in closer, but those decoys of theirs are better than anything I've ever seen before.'

Coglin grunted acknowledgment without even looking up from his tactical display. Jamal was right. Oh, there was more than a bit of ass-covering in his remark, but Fearless's ECM was a hell of a lot better than NavInt had believed possible, and it was making Jamal's job a pain in the ass. It was also using up a lot of ammunition, and he hated to think about how much money each of those missiles cost. He knew damned well some braided idiot was going to climb all over him for the expense, but they cost a lot less than Sirius did.

Honor flinched as Cardones finally missed an incoming missile. It darted in to twenty-two thousand kilometers; then it vanished in a brilliant eyeblink, and she bit her lip as her worst fears were confirmed. Sirius was using laser warheads, turning each missile into a remotely targeted cluster of bomb-pumped x-ray lasers.

The rate of closure was over seventy-seven thousand KPS, which didn't allow for a lot of accuracy from the fire control that could be squeezed into a warhead, especially not fire control dazzled by McKeon's ECM, but one of the beams picked off her port decoy. McKeon deployed another without orders or comment, but there was no need for comments. Fearless carried only three more decoys; when they were gone, her ECM's effectiveness would be more than halved, and she hadn't even gotten into range of her opponent yet.

Captain Coglin's smile was thin as his first warhead got close enough to detonate. There was no sign it had inflicted any damage, but that would come in time.

'Range coming down to twenty-three-point-four light-seconds.' Cardones's harsh voice showed the strain of thirteen minutes under fire to which he could not reply, but there was exultation in it, as well.

'Very good, Guns.' Honor heard a shadow of matching hunger in her own voice. They'd lost another decoy, but they'd been incredibly lucky so far. Fearless was undamaged—and she had the range at last.

'Fire plan Tango on my command,' she said.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. Setting up fire plan Tango.' The lieutenant punched commands into his systems. 'Fire plan Tango locked.'

'Then you may engage, Guns.'

'Engaging.'

'Incoming fire!' Jamal snapped, and Coglin smothered a curse. Damn it, what did it take to hit that frigging ship?! He'd fired over ninety missiles so far; six of them had gotten through Fearless's counter-fire, but the cruiser's ECM was hellishly effective, and not one of them had scored a hit! Now Harrington was shooting back, and despite his