The Short Victorious War

'Orders, Sir?!' the exec half-shouted, and Captain Lord Pavel Young clenched his jaw in silence. He couldn't go back into that horror. He couldn't!

'No response from Warlock, Ma'am.' Nike shook to yet another hit, and Monet's voice quivered with sympathetic vibration, but his stunned surprise at the heavy cruiser's silence came through clearly.

Honor's head whipped up, and Monet flinched back from her expression.

'Give me a direct link to Captain Young!'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.' Monet jabbed keys, and the blank screen at Honor's knee filled with Pavel Young's face. Sweat streaked his cheeks and ran into his beard, and his eyes were a hunted animal's.

'Get back into formation, Captain!' Young only stared at her, his mouth working soundlessly. 'Get back into formation, damn you!'

The screen went dead as Young killed the circuit. For one stunned second, she couldn't believe it, and in that second a fresh salvo of laser heads slammed at Nike's defenses. Her ship heaved and shuddered, frantic damage control reports crackled all around her, and she wrenched her eyes from the com screen to George Monet.

'General signal to all heavy cruisers. Return to formation at once. Repeat, return to formation at once!'

Puzzlement furrowed Admiral Chin's forehead as she watched the Manties' antics. Her fire must have taken out their flagship's communications, she decided. That was the only explanation for their sudden, ragged confusion. Their heavy cruisers dispersed before her eyes, taking themselves out of the antimissile net, and her missiles thundered down on the battlecruisers' weakened defenses. One of them staggered, belching air and debris, but she hauled back onto course and continued to run. Another salvo scorched in, ripping at them, maiming and tearing, and Chin smiled, sensing the kills to come—then snarled as four of the fleeing cruisers suddenly reversed course.

Only one of them continued its flight, and her fire control ignored it to concentrate on the ones who stood to fight.

Honor Harrington spared one last, hating glance for the single data code that continued to streak away from her formation. Cassandra had been savagely mauled when Young broke away. Her entire port sidewall was down, leaving her naked and vulnerable, but the other cruisers slotted back into the net, and Honor snapped fresh orders. Intolerant and Invincible dropped back between Cassandra and her enemies, shielding her with their own interposed sidewalls while her crew worked frantically at repairs.

They had nine minutes to get that sidewall back up.

Admiral Yuri Rollins jerked around in his command chair to stare at Captain Holcombe. The chief of staff was white, and Rollins felt the blood drain from his own face as Holcombe's report registered.

He vaulted from his chair and half-ran to the master plot, staring into it in disbelief as the Argus sensors updated the imagery. It had taken over fifteen minutes for the sensor platforms to relay the data to him, and the Manticoran dreadnoughts were already up to twelve thousand KPS.

A blood-red line extended itself from the newly arrived ships, racing out towards Chin's battered squadron, and the admiral's blood turned to ice as CIC's projection flashed before him. Chin would be trapped, unable to evade the threat, in less than ten minutes... and it would take any warning from him thirteen minutes to reach her.

'Reverse course—maximum military power!' he snapped, and turned away as startled responses came back to him. He walked heavily back to his chair and lowered himself into it.

Those fresh ships of the wall weren't enough to stop him—but they could maul him badly before he destroyed them. Nor could he be certain no more were coming... and their sudden arrival, coupled with the ambushes through which the Manty battlecruisers had led Chin, argued that they weren't.

It had been a trap after all, he thought dully. He didn't know how they'd managed it. Perhaps they'd had a relay ship waiting out beyond the hyper limit, ready to summon reinforcements at the opportune moment. He didn't know, and it didn't matter. He had to break back out across the hyper limit before anyone else turned up—and his course reversal was the only warning he could give Chin. Her gravitics would pick it up... and she might even figure out why he'd done it in time.

'Admiral Rollins has gone to maximum decel, Ma'am.' Commander Klim sounded puzzled, and Admiral Chin frowned in surprise. She craned her neck to see the master plot, and her own puzzlement grew.

A light blinked in Honor's display at last as the dispassionate computers confirmed it: her pursuers could no longer escape the retribution of Danislav's reinforced squadron, whatever they did.

She tried to feel exultant, but Mark Sarnow and his people had paid too high a price for that.

'Status on Cassandra's sidewall?'

'Still down, Skipper. She's lost five beta nodes, as well; her max accel's down to four-point-six KPS squared.'

Honor inhaled deeply. With the pounding the Peeps had taken, their accel was low enough Cassandra could still draw away from them, but she'd never live to get out of range. Not without her sidewall.

'Bring her up on our starboard side. Tuck her in as tight as you can and reduce our accel to match hers.

'Instruct her to maintain station on us—then order the rest of the task group to scatter.'

Admiral Chin's frown deepened as the Manty task group unraveled. There was no mistake about it this time; each ship spun away from its fellows, scattering far and wide in what was clearly a carefully planned maneuver.

All but two of them. One pair of battlecruisers clung together, so tight her sensors could hardly distinguish one from the other, and she nodded. The closer one was the Reliant-class ship, and she was obviously covering a damaged consort, which made the two of them her logical target. But even as she thought that she continued to stare at the decelerating impeller sources of Rollins' superdreadnoughts.

Now why would they be doing that, unless—

The battered Havenite dreadnoughts slowed abruptly, and Honor bared her teeth. They'd figured it out at last. She didn't know how, but they knew . . , only they didn't know it was already too late.

The dreadnoughts completed their turn, decelerating as hard as they could, and she pictured the scene on their flagship's bridge. Their CO couldn't know what bearing the threat was coming from. Until her own sensors picked up Danislav's ships she could only decelerate back the way she'd come, and every second of deceleration increased Nike's relative velocity by nine KPS. Which made it time to make the Peeps' targeting problems a little worse.

'Execute Shell Game,' she said.

Eve Chandler punched commands into her panel, and eight EW drones erupted away from the two battlecruisers. They scattered in four different directions, each pair tucked in tight, mimicking the signatures of their mother ships, and Nike and Cassandra altered course sharply to charge off on yet a fifth vector.

The sudden multiplication of targets did exactly what Honor had intended. Unable to be certain which were the real ships, the Peep commander chose not to waste her ammunition on might-have-beens... especially when she must have figured out she was going to need every missile she had very shortly.

All fire ceased, and the brutally wounded flagship of TG-H001 and her crippled consort raced for safety.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO