Alarm of War

about this, understand?”

Grant understood.

They had been through five krait attacks in two days. The Savak were the stuff of nightmares. They just kept coming at you without mercy or fear until you put them down like you would a rabid animal. So many people had died right in front of him, screaming in pain and anguish and fear and utter frustration that they could not kill the Savak butchers before they died themselves. And now his mind yearned for release, for comfort, for a few blessed moments of respite before it all started over again.

Grant understood.

He nodded and touched her face. She sighed again, then took his hand and guided it to her breast. She closed her eyes. “Okay then,” she whispered. She drew him to her. “Okay then.”

Chapter 48

On the Atlas Space Station, in Victorian Space

In the privacy of her stateroom, Queen Anne sipped coffee and stared bleakly at a hologram of the Victorian Sector. “No one will come to our aid, will they?”

Sir Henry wondered if he should give his new queen some false hope, then dismissed the idea. “No, Majesty. There is no time for them to mobilize.” He sighed. “And in any event, there is no one who will risk it this early. Cape Breton is involved somehow with the Dominion. Sybil Head and the Sultenic Empire will wait to see who is the likely victor, and then put their support behind them. The Light does not have a deep space navy. Arcadia is probably under attack by the Tilleke as we speak. And Refuge is hopefully getting ready to receive us. But their navy is small. They will not be able to fortify their wormhole entrance and send out a fleet to aid us at the same time.”

“So to save ourselves, to have any hope of fighting back, we have to abandon our home world and all our colonies,” she said bitterly. “My first official act as Victoria’s new queen!”

“If you remain behind, the Dominion will kill you,” he replied bluntly. “You are now the heart and soul of Victoria, Majesty. If you die, Victoria dies with you.”

“You always have the pretty words, don’t you?” she spat.

Sir Henry, a long-time survivor of royal mood swings, remained silent.

“I will do whatever I have to,” she said finally. Her faced clouded and her brow creased. “But sometimes I have to catch myself from just sitting in the corner and screaming that this can’t really be happening.”

Sir Henry laughed bitterly. “Your Majesty, forty eight hours ago, my biggest concern was that a rogue Victorian Admiral might pose a threat to you and your mother. Now Victoria has been defeated by the Dominion and we’re running for our lives. I’d say that begs credulity.”

Anne smiled. It was a dreadful smile, a cold, bleak smile that promised a long winter and terrible storms. “The Dominion has miscalculated, Sir Henry. I will do whatever I have to to save Victoria. And when I’m done, the Dominion will rue the day I was born.”

Chapter 49

H.M.S. Lionheart, in Victorian Space

Admiral Douthat scowled at the status board. The longer she looked at it, the worse their situation seemed. Battleships were the fleet’s heavy hitters, carrying forty missile tubes and up to twenty energy beams, a simply awesome amount of fire power. A single battleship was a significant force in any battle. Two battleships working together or with five cruisers were a force of nature, overwhelming and destructive. First Fleet had had three battleships, but two of them had been destroyed by the Dominion ambush, leaving her with only Lionheart.

But that wasn’t her biggest problem.

Most of the Home Fleet’s admirals had died at the Palace, which meant that most of her ship captains were gone. Normally a battleship would be the flagship for its battle group, but now she was going to assign that task to cruisers and assign new captains to all but one of her cruisers and a couple of destroyers. The frigate captains, too junior in rank to have been invited to the Palace, were mostly intact. So if she moved the frigate captains up to the destroyers…hmmm, but that meant moving the cruiser XOs up to captain the cruisers and some of the XOs simply weren’t up to it. If she was honest, she’d admit that despite rank, some of the frigate captains would make better cruiser captains than the current cruiser XOs. Maybe some of the XOs could be made frigate captains — She shook her head; no matter what she did, most of her ships were going to have new captains, and captains who had not worked with that ship’s crew.

But that wasn’t her biggest problem.

The tug boat captain, Murphy, had reported in that in order to keep the stresses tolerable for Atlas as they towed it to Refuge, they would have to accelerate slowly. Now instead of it being a three day flight to the Refuge wormhole, it was going to be at least five days, maybe six. Six days for the Dominion to find them and attack them, six days in which the Dominion could bring sheer numbers into play and grind them into dust.

But that wasn’t her biggest problem.

Her biggest problem was that stiff-necked, stubborn, obstinate, obdurate, mulish and goddamed willful child who was now the Queen of all Victoria refused to board the destroyer Repulse and be taken to safety in Refuge. “I think not, Admiral,” she had said.

And that was that. Now Queen Anne was on the Atlas Space Station, the single object the entire Dominion navy was intent on capturing. Or destroying.

So for the next six days, Atlas would be in harm’s way.

“Bugger me,” she snarled, and thought, not for the first time, that when this was over she would welcome the court martial that was sure to follow.

If they lived.

Chapter 50

Victorian Space

Battleship H.M.S. Lionheart

“Here is the situation in a nutshell,” Admiral Douthat told the others on the conference. “The enemy will reach Cornwall in fifteen hours, so sometime short of that they will realize that Atlas is gone. By that time we will be six hours away. The geometry looks like this.” She put a simple map up on the screen. “The good news is that since we are taking Atlas with us, we have an almost limitless supply of missiles and mines and quick access to emergency repairs.

“The bad news is that with Atlas in tow, we can’t accelerate very fast. Also, the inertia compensators on Atlas are not as robust as on our ships, so our top speed will be limited. The enemy will overtake us. They outnumber us two to one in war ships and probably more than that in throw weight.”

“Can we expect help from Second Fleet?” someone asked.

“No,” Douthat replied shortly. “Second Fleet will not be coming to help us. Nor Third Fleet.”

There was a moment of awkward silence as they digested that. Admiral Douthat plowed ahead, acutely aware that time was in short supply.

“Thanks to the attack on the Palace, we have huge gaps in our command structure. With the loss of