Echoes Of Honor

scored direct hits, and beams that could have ripped through unprotected battle steel at three-quarters of a million kilometers smashed into her from less than two thousand. They punched straight through her hull like battering rams, shattering plating, tearing anyone and anything in their paths to splinters, and the battlecruiser's emissions signature spiked madly as the grasers shed energy into her. Her thrusters were still firing, turning her on her long axis, and the energy fire gutted her like a gaffed shark. And then, with shocking suddenness, her fusion plants let go.

Yang's visual display blanked as the dreadful, white-hot boil of fury overpowered the filters. Attila was less than six hundred kilometers from Farnese when she went, and the flagship's hull fluoresced wildly as the stripped atoms of her eviscerated sister slashed across her. Only her standard, station-keeping particle screens were up, and those were intended mainly to keep dust from accumulating on her hull. They had never been intended to deal with something like this, and threat receivers and warning signals wailed.

It was only later that Yang realized that only one of Attila's plants had actually let go. The fail-safes on the other two must have functioned as designed. If they hadn't, Attila would have taken Farnese and probably Wallenstein, as well, with her. As it was, the flagship's damage was incredibly light. Her starboard sensors, communications arrays, and point defense laser clusters were stripped away, half her weapon bay hatches were warped and jammed, up to a half meter of her armor was planed away in some places, and she lost two beta nodes out of her forward ring and three more out of her after ring, but her port side was untouched, and the sensors and com lasers on the roof and floor of her hull survived more or less unscathed. Had she dared contemplate resistance, she would actually have remained a fighting force... until the grasers which had killed Attila got around to her, at any rate.

Wallenstein was further away... and partially shielded by the heavy cruiser Hachiman. The big Mars-class cruiser took a savage beating from the explosion. She was much closer than Farnese had been, and the shock front smashed over her on the heels of the energy spike. The fact that any of her hull survived even remotely intact was an enormous testimonial to her designers and builders, but she was turned into a dead hulk, blasted and broken, and none of her people had been in skinsuits or expecting trouble of any sort. Two-thirds of them died almost instantly; of those who survived the initial blast, half took lethal radiation doses not even modern medicine could do a thing about.

But her sacrifice saved Wallenstein from Farnese's fate. She came through with only minor damage, and Kutuzov,MacArthur, and Barbarosa, Yang's other battlecruisers, were far enough out to escape without significant injury. Best of all, all of her other ships' skippers— thank God!—had the sense to do absolutely nothing to draw the defenses' ire down on them.

The rest of the convoy was outside lethal radius of the explosion, and Yang felt a bitter, ungrudging moment of admiration as she realized why 'Charon Control' had been so careful to steer the warships and transports into different orbits. The Longstops would have been turned inside out by a fraction of the damage Farnese had survived, but their positions meant they got little more than a moderate shaking from the explosion. The light cruiser Sabine was almost as fortunate; her sister ship Seahorse was not. The second light cruiser remained more or less intact, but most of her weapons and virtually all of her sensors were reduced to scrap, her after hammerhead was smashed in and twisted, and half her after impeller ring—including two alpha nodes—was destroyed outright.

It took several minutes for the explosion's interference to fade enough for Charon to punch a fresh com laser through to Farnese, and a white-faced Prestwick Thornegrave stared in horror at the face of the woman who had just killed four thousand of his personnel.

'I regret the necessity of that action,' she said flatly, 'but if any of your surviving vessels fail to comply instantly and completely with any instructions they receive, I will repeat it. And I will repeat it as many times as I must, Citizen General. Is that understood?'

Thornegrave stared at her, and his mouth worked, but no words came. Her expression hardened, and a small tic developed at the corner of her mouth as he gaped at her like a beached fish. He tried frantically, but he couldn't get a single word out, however desperate his effort, and Rachel Yang shot one look at him, then punched buttons at her own com station. Thornegrave's face vanished from the transmission to Charon, and hers replaced it.

'This is Citizen Commodore Rachel Yang,' she said flatly. 'Your instructions have been received and will be obeyed, Admiral Harrington. Our communications are badly disorganized up here at the moment, however. Please give us a little time to get our net back up so that I can pass the appropriate orders to the other units of the convoy.'

'Very well, Citizen Commodore,' Harrington replied. 'You have five minutes to instruct your vessels to stand by to be boarded. My people will come aboard in battle armor and with heavy weapons. Any resistance—any resistance at all, Citizen Commander—will be met with lethal and overwhelming force.'

'Understood,' Yang got out through gritted teeth.

'Be very sure that it is, Citizen Commodore, because most of my people have been on Hell for years, even decades. They won't hesitate for a moment to kill anyone who resists. In fact, they're probably looking forward to it.'

'Understood,' Yang repeated.

'Good.' The right side of Harrington's mouth curled to bare her teeth in what might conceivably have been described—by someone other than Rachel Yang—as a smile. 'Then there's just one more thing, Citizen Commodore. You will inform your captains that any effort to abandon ship, scuttle their vessels, or wreck their computer nets will also be considered justification for the use of lethal force. Your ships are our prizes, and they are StateSec vessels. As such, and in light of what State Security has done to the prisoners on this planet, neither they nor your personnel are protected in our eyes by the Deneb Accords. They would be wise to remember that.' She never raised her voice. It remained conversational, almost normal, but liquid helium lurked in its depths, and Rachel Yang felt something shudder deep down inside her as she nodded in silent submission.

Chapter Forty-Seven

'Preparations complete, Milady,' Captain Gonsalves said formally from the com display, and Honor nodded back gravely. For forty-seven hours, every available hand had labored frantically. Now it was time.

'Very well, Captain Gonsalves,' she said just as formally. 'You're cleared to depart.' Then her voice softened. 'Godspeed, Cynthia,' she finished quietly.

'Thank you.' Gonsalves managed a smile. 'We'll see you at Trevor's Star, Ma'am. Don't be late!'

She cut the circuit, and Honor turned to the display on her new flag deck and watched the transports accelerate ponderously out of Hades orbit towards the hyper limit with their single escort. They'd managed to cram just over two hundred and eighty-six thousand people—her people now, however they'd become that—aboard those ships. That was a little better even than Montoya had estimated, and the troop decks were packed claustrophobically full. But crowded as they were, their life support—buttressed by the scores of small craft which had been added to their systems—should suffice to see their passengers safely home.

Even now, Honor could hardly believe they'd actually managed to get this far, and she felt a fierce pride as the Longstops headed outward.

She deeply regretted the spectacular destruction of Attila and (for all intents and purposes)Hachiman and Seahorse, and not simply because of the loss of life. The explosion had cost her ships she'd needed badly, and it would have been entirely avoidable if that idiot Thornegrave had taken the opportunity she'd given him to surrender without violence. But he hadn't, and she hadn't dared give him more time. For all she'd known, he'd simply been stalling while he used untappable whisker lasers of his own to send messages to the other convoy escorts. It had been unlikely that he could have accomplished anything through active resistance, but he might have made the attempt anyway, in which case she