'Four-zero-zero thous—'
Even as Cardones spoke, Honor whipped Fearless up on her side.
'Shit!'
Coglin slammed a fist into his chair arm as the limping cruiser spun suddenly. Damn it, didn't Harrington know when it was over?! She was done. All she could do was stretch out the agony, but she didn't seem to know it, and her turn presented her impenetrable belly stress band even as he fired, as if she'd read his mind. He'd more than half expected it, but that didn't make him any happier to see it.
Sirius's side flashed with the fury of a Fleet battlecruiser, and Honor had cut her maneuver just a fraction of a second too late. Fearless's belly bands came up in time to intercept the missiles, but two of the lasers got through. The sidewall bent and attenuated them, but not enough, and the cruiser lurched as they ripped deep into her hull and smashed her single, unfired missile tube and two of her energy torpedoes.
Yet she survived ... and so did her grav lance.
'All right, goddamn it,' Coglin snarled. 'Take us in, Jamal!'
'Aye, aye, Sir.'
Honor watched the chronometer tick down, and her mind was cold and clear, accepting no possibility of failure. The sensors she had left couldn't track Sirius clearly through her belly stress band, and her current vector gave the Q-ship four options: retreat and break off the engagement, roll up on her own side relative to Fearless and shoot 'down' through the starboard sidewall as she overflew the cruiser, cross her bow, or cross her stern. She might do any of them, but Honor was betting her ship—and her life —that Coglin would cross her bows. It was the classic maneuver, the one any naval officer instinctively sought—and he knew her forward armament had been destroyed.
But if he was going to do that, then he ought to be coming into position ... just ... about ... now!
She slammed the helm over, wrenching her ship still further round to port and rolling to swing the broadside she'd denied Sirius back towards her with blinding speed.
Lieutenant Commander Jamal blinked. It was only for an instant, only the briefest hesitation. There was no logical reason for Fearless to suddenly swing back, and for no more than a heartbeat, he couldn't quite believe she had.
And in that heartbeat, Rafael Cardones targeted his grav lance and fired.
Sirius staggered. Captain Coglin jerked upright in his chair, his eyes wide, face shocked in disbelief as his sidewall went down, and then Fearless's four surviving energy torpedo launchers went to rapid, continuous fire.
The armed merchant raider Sirius disappeared forever in a devastating boil of light and fury.
Captain Honor Harrington, Royal Manticoran Navy, stood once more in a spacedock gallery aboard HMSS Hephaestus. Her hands were clasped behind her, and Nimitz sat very tall and straight on her shoulder. One hand-paw rested lightly atop her beret—the plain, back beret of the RMN undress uniform—and his green eyes were dark mirrors of her emotions as she stared through the thick, armored plastic.
HMS Fearless floated beyond the window, her hull broken and shattered, like a toy stepped on by some careless child. The gaping hole where Dominica Santos had died faced the window, stretched back along the cruiser's flank in a long, ink-black wound of broken bulkheads and melted frames. Other wounds marred that once sleek and immaculate hull. Small, some of them looked, hiding the reality of the ruin within them, and Honor felt her eyes sting as she recalled once more the people who had died under her command.
She blinked angrily, drew a deep breath, and straightened her spine, and her mind went back—back to the numbed moment when she and her surviving crew had realized they'd won while the terrible fury of Sirius's destruction lingered in the visual display like a curse. Judging by the Q-ship's performance and the weaponry she'd revealed, Sirius must have had a crew of at least fifteen hundred, and there had been no survivors. Even now, Honor could close her eyes and resummon that cauldron of light and energy in every hideous detail and feel the same sick revulsion at the work of her own hands and mind ... and the vaulting exultation and triumph.
But triumph at such cost. She bit her lip again, feeling the pain. One hundred and seven of her crew, more than a third of those aboard at the start of that terrible pursuit and slaughter, had died. Another fifty-eight were wounded, though the medics and base hospital teams would probably return most of them to duty in the next few months.
The cost in blood and pain had been terrible enough, but that had been fifty-nine percent of her total crew, even before detachments, including Dominica Santos and two of her three commissioned assistant engineers. She'd had barely a hundred and twenty uninjured people left for her repair parties, and Fearless had been a shambles. Her forward impeller nodes had failed completely within seconds of Sirius's destruction, and this time there had been no way to repair them. Worse, her after impeller ring had gone for over forty-five minutes, as well—three-quarters of an hour in which she had coasted another ninety-four million kilometers outward while damage reports flooded in to her airless bridge.
For a time, Honor had believed her crew would follow Sirius's into death. Most of Fearless's life support was down, three-quarters of her computer support was inoperable, the grav lance had shorted out three of her after beta nodes, the inertial compensator was off line, and seventy percent of her normal engineering and damage control personnel were casualties. Crewmen, many of them wounded, had been trapped in airless compartments all over the ship. Her own quarters had taken a direct hit that left them without pressure for over six hours. Only Nimitz's shielded life-support module had saved him, and her sailplane plaque was heat-warped and twisted, one corner blown completely away. It had been that close for Nimitz, and she reached up to touch the treecat yet again, reassuring herself of his survival.
But Alistair McKeon and Ilona Rierson, Dominica Santos's sole surviving lieutenant, had labored like Trojans amid the wreckage, and Petty Officer Harkness and his missile-loading party had been in Missile One's magazine when Missile Two was wiped away. They'd survived, and Harkness had needed no orders to begin working his way aft to meet McKeon and Rierson. Between them, they'd not only gotten the compensator back up but even managed to get two of the damaged after nodes back on line, giving her a deceleration capability of over two and a half KPS?.
Honor's wounded ship had taken four more hours just to decelerate to rest relative to Basilisk, but her people had used the time well. McKeon and Rierson had continued their repair activities, bringing more and more of the internal control systems back on line, and Lieutenant Montoya (and thank God she'd gotten rid of Suchon!) and his medical parties had labored beyond collapse, dragging the wounded out and laboring over their broken bodies in sickbay. Too many of Montoya's patients had slipped away from him, far more than he would ever find it easy to live with, but it was thanks to him that people like Samuel Webster and Sally MacBride had lived.
And then there had been the long voyage home. The long, slow voyage that had seemed to crawl, for Fearless's communications had been out. There was no way to tell Dame Estelle or the Admiralty what had happened, who had won, or the price her people had paid. Not until
