On Basilisk Station

firepower advantage, he felt a shiver of anxiety. But if the range was low enough to let her fire full-power shots, the same was true for him, he told himself firmly.

'Jesus!'

Coglin's head jerked up as Jamal spat out the incredulous curse. A damage alarm screamed, the bridge twitched, and he whipped around to his display in panic, then relaxed convulsively. The laser warhead had savaged Sirius's flank, ripping number four cargo hold open to space like a huge talon, but number four was empty, and Sirius had suffered no casualties. Her capabilities were unimpaired, and he swiveled his cold eyes to the tactical officer.

'Well, Jamal?' he snapped.

'They suckered me, Sir,' Jamal admitted. Sweat beaded his forehead, but his fingers were already racing across his panel. 'They fired a pair of laser warheads and staggered their launch.' He pressed the commit key, locking his new firing orders into the point defense computers, and twisted around to return his captain's look. 'The interval was less than half a second, but the lead missile mounted some kind of ECM emitter, Captain. I'm not sure what it was, but it covered the gap between their launch times. The computers thought they were coming in simultaneously, and our fire solution missed the separation, so we nailed the lead bird, but the second one got through. It won't happen again, Sir.'

'It better not,' Coglin growled. 'It's a hell of a long walk home.' He glared at his display and bared his teeth. So Commander Harrington wanted to show him a few surprises, did she? Well, he had one for her, as well.

'Go to rapid fire on all after tubes,' he said coldly.

'A hit, Ma'am!' Cardones crowed. The gush of escaping air was clear to his sensors, like blood on a wounded animal's flank, and a soft sound of approval rippled across the bridge.

Honor didn't share it. She was watching her other sensors, and there was no change in Sirius's energy profile. She understood Cardones's jubilation perfectly—a similar hit on Fearless would have inflicted serious damage—but he'd forgotten how big Sirius was. She could suck up far more destruction than Fearless could, and—

The tactical display blinked, and Honor inhaled sharply. Sirius was no longer firing salvos of two missiles each; she was firing six at a time.

The two ships charged onward, and Fearless writhed from side to side under her opponent's steady pounding. Honor felt sweat trickle down her temple and wiped it irritably away, hoping no one had noticed it. She was losing a tiny fraction of her effective acceleration advantage, yet she had no choice; the shallow S-turns she'd added to Killian's wild, erratic rolls weren't much, but she'd lost another decoy. She had only one spare left, now, and the hail of missiles sleeting at her from Sirius was inconceivable. A regular capital ship might have fired more in a single salvo but no warship—not even a superdreadnought— boasted the magazine capacity to keep up such density for so long! She herself was able to fire little more than one salvo a minute; for every missile she sent after Sirius, the Q-ship sent twelve back into her teeth.

Sweat plastered Cardones's hair to his scalp, and McKeon's face was etched with strain as the two of them battled against that incredible weight of fire and tried to strike back. They were outclassed. She knew it, and every one of her officers knew it as well, but she no longer even thought of breaking off. She had to stop that ship, and somehow—

Fearless lurched. The entire ship bucked like a terrified thing, alarms howled, and Killian's head jerked up.

'Forward impellers down!' he barked.

Dominica Santos's face went white in Central Damage Control as the focused blast of X rays slashed into Fearless's bows. Alarms shrieked at her, screaming like damned souls until Lieutenant Manning stabbed the button that killed them.

'Forward hold open to space. Mooring Tractor One's gone. Heavy casualties in Fusion One,' Manning snapped. 'Oh, Jesus! We've lost Alpha Two, Ma'am!'

'Shit!' Santos pounded on her keyboard, querying the central computers, and swore again as a scarlet- daubed schematic of the forward impeller nodes flashed before her. She studied the damage for just a moment, dark eyes bitter, then hit her intercom key.

'Bridge. Captain,' a cool soprano, barely frayed about the edges, said in her ear.

'Skipper, this is Santos. The whole forward drive segment's gone into automatic shutdown. We've lost Number Two Alpha node, and it looks like Beta Three went with it.'

'Can you restore them?' There was urgency in the captain's voice, and Santos closed her eyes in furious thought.

'No way, Ma'am,' she said through gritted teeth. Her eyes popped back open, and she traced the blinking schematic with a fingertip while her mind raced. Then she nodded to herself. 'The main ring's broken at Alpha Two and Beta Three. I think we've got some more damage at Beta Four, but the rest of the ring looks okay,' she said. 'I can probably route around the wrecked nodes, then run up Beta Two and Four—assuming Four's still with us—to compensate in the impeller wedge, but it's going to take time.'

'How long?'

'Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, Ma'am. At best.'

'Very well, Dominica. Get on it as quickly as you can.'

'I'm on it, Skipper!' Santos unlocked her shock frame and jerked up out of her chair. 'Allen, I'm going forward. You're damage control officer till I get back.'

'But what about Fusion One?' Manning demanded. 'It's open to space and we've lost two-thirds of the forward power watch!'

'Oh, shit!' Santos bent over his panel, studying the readouts, and her face tightened. Not only were most of her people dead, but there was already an imbalance in the fusion bottle temperature. She stabbed keys and grunted in relief as the data readouts changed.

'The bottle's holding steady,' she said quickly. 'Cut the reactor out of the circuit to be safe—Fusion Two can handle the load—and keep an eye on that temperature. If it starts climbing any faster than it is, let me know.'

'Yes, Ma'am.' Manning bent back over his console, and Santos headed for the hatch at a run.

'Direct hit, Sir!' Lieutenant Commander Jamal announced, and Coglin nodded in sharp approval. At last! And about damned time, too; they'd been firing at Fearless for over seventeen minutes.

'Her acceleration's falling, Sir.' Jamal's voice was sharp with excitement, and he grinned hugely. 'We must have taken out her forward impellers!'

'Good, Jamal. Very good! Now do it again,' Coglin growled.

'Aye, aye, Sir!'

Honor bit her lip so hard she tasted blood, but somehow she kept the sickness from her face. Fearless had just dropped to half power, which was bad enough, but the loss of the alpha node could be disaster. Despite the loss in acceleration, she was continuing to close the range on Sirius, if more slowly, for her velocity was almost fifteen hundred KPS higher than the Q-ship's. But Sirius was now out-accelerating her by almost 1.5 KPS?. Unless Santos could restore the forward nodes, the range would begin to open again in less than seventeen minutes.

Yet that was the least of Honor's worries. She stared into the visual display, watching it sparkle and flash as Fearless's over-strained point defense beat aside the missiles coming in at shorter and shorter intervals, and fought her despair.

Without the alpha node, Fearless couldn't reconfigure her forward impellers for Warshawski sail. If Sirius broke through into hyper space and reached the Tellerman, she