The Honor of the Qween

'Yes, Ma'am?'

'I think I'd like a little music, Joyce.' Metzinger blinked at her, and Honor smiled. 'Punch up Hammerwell's Seventh on the intercom, please.'

'Hammerwell's Seventh?' Metzinger shook herself. 'Yes, Ma'am.'

Honor had always loved Hammerwell. He, too, had come from Sphinx, and the cold, majestic beauty of her home world was at the heart of everything he'd ever written. Now she leaned back in her chair as the swirling strains of Manticore's greatest composer's masterwork spilled from the com, and people looked at one another, first in surprise and then in pleasure, as the voices of strings and woodwinds flowed over them.

HMS Fearless sped towards her foe, and the haunting loveliness of Hammerwell's Salute to Spring went with her.

* * *

'Fearless isn't breaking off, My Lord,' Captain Hunter said, and Alexander frowned. His message must have reached Harrington over five minutes ago, but her course had never wavered.

He checked the time. At this range, it would take another five or six minutes for her reply to reach him, and he made himself sit back.

'She may be afraid Saladin will launch against the planet unless she keeps the pressure on,' he said to Hunter, but his voice sounded self-convincing even to himself.

* * *

'Intercept in seven-five minutes,' Simonds' astrogator reported, and the Sword nodded.

* * *

Hamish Alexander's frown deepened. Reliant had been in Yeltsin space for over thirty minutes, and still Harrington's course held steady. She was still boring in for her hopeless fight, and that didn't make any sense at all.

He had four battlecruisers, supported by twelve lighter ships, and there was no way Saladin could outrun them with their initial velocity advantage. With that much firepower bearing down on her enemy, there was no sane reason for Harrington to keep coming this way. The separation was still too great for Saladin to range on her, but unless she broke off in the next ten minutes, that was going to change.

'Dear God.' The hushed whisper came from Alice Truman, and Alexander looked at her. The Commander had gone bone-white, and her lips were bloodless.

'What is it, Commander?'

'She doesn't know we're here.' Truman turned to him, her face tight. 'She never got your message, My Lord. Her communications are out.'

Alexander's eyes went very still, and then he nodded. Of course. Harrington had already lost Troubadour, and her own acceleration was barely 2.5 KPS?. That spelled battle damage, and if her com section had been destroyed as well as her gravitics—

He turned to his chief of staff.

'Time to missile range, Byron?'

'Three-niner-point-six minutes, Sir.'

'Time until their vectors merge?'

'Nineteen minutes,' Hunter said flatly, and Alexander's jaw clenched in pain all the worse for his earlier elation. Twenty minutes. Less than an eyeblink by the standards of the universe, yet those twenty minutes made all the difference there was, for they hadn't been in time after all.

Grayson would be safe, but they were going to see HMS Fearless die before their eyes.

* * *

The soaring finale of Salute to Spring swept to its climax and faded away, and Honor inhaled deeply. She straightened and looked at Cardones.

'Time to intercept, Guns?' she asked calmly.

'Eighteen minutes, Skipper—missile range in six-point-five.'

'Very well.' She laid her forearms very precisely along her command chair's arms. 'Stand by point defense.'

* * *

'Captain Edwards!'

'Yes, My Lord?' Reliant's captain's voice was hushed, as he, too, watched tragedy unfold before him.

'Bring the division ninety degrees to starboard. I want broadside fire on Saladin right now.'

'But—' Edwards began in shock, and Alexander cut him off harshly.

'Do it, Captain!'

'At once, My Lord!'

Byron Hunter looked sidelong at his admiral and cleared his throat.

'Sir, the range is over a hundred million klicks. There's no way we can score at—'

'I know the range, Byron,' Alexander never turned away from his own display, 'but it's all we've got. Maybe Harrington will pick them up on radar—if she still has radar—as they close. Or maybe Saladin's suffered sensor damage of her own. If she isn't trying to break off because she doesn't know we're here, either, maybe she will if we let her know we are. Hell, maybe we'll actually score on her if she holds her course!'

He looked up at last, and his chief of staff saw the despair in his eyes.

'It's all we've got,' he repeated very, very softly as Battlecruiser Division 17 turned to open its broadsides and went to rapid fire.

* * *

The first missiles spewed out from Thunder of God, and Fearless's crippled sensors couldn't see them above a half million kilometers. That gave Rafe Cardones and Carolyn Wolcott barely seven seconds to engage them, far too brief a window to use counter missiles.

Their damaged jammers and decoys fought to blind and beguile the incoming fire, and they'd learned even more about Thunder's offensive fire control than Lieutenant Ash had learned about theirs. Three-quarters of the first broadside lost lock and veered away, and computer-commanded laser clusters quivered like questing hounds, pitting their minimal prediction time against the surviving laser heads' acquisition time.

Rods of coherent light picked off targets with desperate speed, but Fearless couldn't possibly stop them all, and she didn't. Most of those which got through wasted their fury against her impenetrable belly band, but a few raced across 'above' and 'below' her to attack her sidewalls. Damage alarms wailed again, men and women died, weapons were wiped away, but the cruiser shook off the damage and kept closing, and there was only silence on her bridge. Honor Harrington sat immovable in her command chair, shoulders squared, like an eye of calm at the heart of that silence, and watched her plot.

Seven more minutes to intercept.

* * *

Matthew Simonds snarled as Fearless kept coming through the whirlwind of his fire. Seventy-two missiles per minute slashed out at the cruiser, his magazine levels fell like a sand castle melting in the rain, but she hadn't fired a single shot back at him, and her unflinching approach sent a chill of fear through the heart of his exhaustion-fogged rage. He was hitting her—he knew he was hitting her!— but she came on like some nerveless juggernaut only death itself could stop.

He stared at the light bead in his display, watching atmosphere spill from it like blood, and tried to understand. She was an infidel, a woman. What kept her coming for him this way?

* * *

'Intercept in five minutes, Skipper.'