On Basilisk Station

Honor paled as Manning's frantic message registered. Fearless could move and fight on a single reactor. She only had two for the security of redundancy, and that was also why they were at opposite ends of the hull, but if that mag bottle went down—

'Understood, Manning. Go. I'll get somebody down there to replace you.'

Manning didn't waste time replying, and she raised her head to scan her bridge, trying to think who she could send. There was only one choice, she realized with a sudden, icy calm.

'Mr. McKeon!'

'Yes, Skipper?' He made it a question, but she saw in his eyes that he already knew.

'You're the only one I've got with the experience for it. Slave your ECM panel to my remotes and get down there.'

He wanted to argue, to protest. She read it in his face, but he didn't.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.' He unlocked his shock frame and dashed for the lift, and Honor ran a quick check of the ECM. She was down to her last two decoys, but the programs McKeon had set up seemed to be working well. She started to key in a modification, then stopped as Cardones spoke without looking away from his console.

'Skipper, we're down to twelve birds for Missile Two, and I'm out of laser heads.'

'What about Missile One's magazine?'

'Twenty-three rounds left, including eleven laser heads, but the transfer tube's been breached.'

'Engage with standard nukes,' she told him, and plugged her suit com into the damage control net.

'Bosun, this is the Captain. Where are you?'

'Just finishing a bulkhead patch at frame forty, Ma'am,' MacBride replied instantly.

'Take a work party and get forward. I need you to shift missiles from Missile One to Missile Two and the transfer tube is down. Move the laser heads first.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am. I'm on it,' MacBride said flatly.

'Thank you, Bosun,' Honor said, and MacBride's eyebrows rose. She hadn't even protested the impossibility of the assignment, for she was beyond protest. She was a professional, and she knew survival was no longer a realistic option. Yet the Captain's voice had been almost absently courteous despite the the stress she had to be feeling.

The bosun drew a deep breath and glared at the people around her. 'You heard the Old Lady!' she barked. 'Harkness, Lowell—get me a dozen Mark Nine counter-grav collars. Yountz, I need drag lines. Find me a spool of number two wire and a cutter. Jeffries, you and Mathison get forward and check the tractor grab in Passage Nineteen. I want to know if—'

She went on spitting orders, goading her subordinates into action, and far behind her on Fearless's bridge, Honor Harrington returned her attention to her ECM just as a fresh salvo of missiles came streaking in.

Johan Coglin peered at his display in disbelief. He'd pounded Fearless for almost thirty minutes, hit her at least half a dozen times, and she was still after him. Not only after him, but already making up the velocity advantage she'd lost while her forward impellers were down! Goddamn it, why couldn't Harrington just leave him the hell alone? All he wanted was to get out of here and tell the task force not to come!

Another missile exploded just short of the ship, and he winced as the huge fireball blossomed astern. They must be out of laser heads. That had been a standard megaton-range warhead, and that could be very, very bad news. The standard nukes weren't stand-off weapons; they had to get in much closer to inflict damage, which gave the laser clusters more time to kill them, but a near-miss from one of those monsters could wreak untold havoc.

Sweat beaded his forehead, and he wiped at it irritably. His ship was far more powerful than Harrington's. He'd reduced her cruiser to a wreck—she had to be some kind of wizard just to hold it together, much less go on shooting at him! He longed to turn on her, finish her off, and get the hell away to safety, but all the old arguments against a close-range action remained.

Or did they?

He cocked his head, eyes narrowed as he rubbed his chin in speculation. She was still on his tail, yes, but she was firing only single missiles at a time, even if she was firing at shorter intervals, and the fact that she was using standard nukes was a clear sign her forward magazines were running low. Which didn't make any sense at all. A Courageous—class ship had a seven-tube broadside, for God's sake, and her overtake velocity was over eleven hundred KPS. Why wasn't she veering to bring those tubes to bear? She could zig-zag back and forth across his stern pouring in broadsides as she crossed, and hit him with more missiles than he was firing at her, damn it!

Unless ... Unless he'd hurt her even worse than he knew? Maybe that was why she was still charging straight up his wake. Could his hits have gone in further aft than he'd thought? Been spread over a wider area and wrecked her broadside armament or fire control? It was a possibility. Perhaps even a probability, given the way her forward fire had dropped. If she hadn't lost most of her broadside firepower, then she damned well ought to be using it instead of lunging doggedly forward through his missiles like a punch-drunk fighter while he pounded her!

And if that was true, then he might—

Sirius heaved like a shipwrecked galleon.

'Yes!' Rafael Cardones screamed, and Honor felt her own heart leap as the savage boil of light erupted just off the Q-ship's starboard quarter.

'Heavy damage aft. Fourteen dead in Missile Two-Five. No contact at all with Two-Four or Two-Six. Sir, we've lost a beta node; our acceleration is dropping.'

Lieutenant Commander Jamal was white-faced, his voice flat with a strained, unnatural calm, and Coglin stared at him in disbelief. Half their after launchers gone to a single hit? Harrington wasn't a wizard—she was a goddamned demon!

The two ships raced onward, ripping at one another with thermonuclear fire, shedding debris, streaming atmosphere like trails of blood. The big freighter began to twist and writhe in ever more violent evasion as her tiny, battered foe clung stubbornly to her heels. Sirius was reduced to three-missile salvos, and Fearless was overhauling more and more quickly.

Lieutenant Montoya made himself stand back, shutting his ears to the groans and sobs about him while his sick berth attendants cut Lieutenant Webster out of his suit. He couldn't look at the mass of wounded. The hatch was locked open, and burned and broken bodies spilled out of his cramped sickbay's bunks. They were lying in the passages now, covering the decks, and more and more of them were unprotected even by the transparent tents of emergency environmental slips. His mind shuddered away from the thought of what would happen if sickbay lost pressure now, and he stepped closer to the table as Webster's suit was stripped away. One of his assistants ran a sterilizer/depilator over the lieutenant's chest while the other looked up from her monitors to meet Montoya's eyes.

'Not good, Sir. We've got at least two ribs in his left lung. It's completely collapsed, and it looks like we may have splinter damage to his heart, too.'

Montoya nodded grimly and reached for a scalpel.

'All right—heave!'

Sally MacBride bent her own back to the struggle, and the seventy-ton missile floated across the passage. The overhead tractor rails were out, and the passage was open to space. Her vac-suited people grunted and strained, manhandling the ten-meter-long projectile, leaning their weight desperately against it to point it down the shaft to Missile Two's magazine. The counter-grav collars reduced its weight to zero, but they couldn't do anything about momentum and inertia.