Fuchien forced her shoulders to straighten and drew a deep breath. Ward's EW drones hadn't fooled the pursuing Peep. They'd be into missile range in another eighteen minutes, and with an unreliable hyper generator, there was no way Artemis could translate down quickly enough to drop off the Peep's sensors.
She looked back at Ward's plot, and her brow furrowed. The Andermani was closing on her ship quickly, coming in at an angle that would match vectors in just under fifteen minutes. She wouldn't be able to pace the liner long, even with damaged beta nodes, Artemis could out accelerate any bulk carrier ever built, but at the moment their courses merged, they'd be moving at almost the same velocity. She had to admire the ship handling of whoever had pulled that off, but for the life of her, she still couldn't see any reason to do it in the first place.
'Anything from the Peeps yet?' she asked Com.
'No. Ma'am.'
The reply sounded as tense as Fuchien felt, and she smiled raggedly and made herself take a turn around the command-deck. There really wasn't any choice, was there? When the Peep got into missile range, all she could do was heave-to and surrender. Anything else would be madness.
'Skipper!' It was her com officer. 'We're being hailed by the Andy!'
'Well, they've made rendezvous,' Edwards observed. 'Now what?'
'I don't know. Did she respond to our warn-off at all?'
'No, Skipper,' Com replied. 'Not a word.'
'What the hell is she playing at?' Stellingetti fumed. She shoved herself angrily back in her command chair and glared at her plot. Whatever the Andermani vessels ultimate intentions, she'd just screwed Kerebin's attack options all to hell. She was too close to the Manty. Edwards' missiles were as likely to home in on her as on the Manty at this range, and the Manty skipper knew it. He'd cut his own accel to match the Andy's, riding just ahead of her to use her for a shield, and Stellingetti gritted her teeth.
'The Andies won't like our raiding commerce this close to the Empire, Skipper,' Edwards pointed out quietly. 'You don't suppose this joker's trying to warn us off, do you?'
'He's in for a hell of a surprise if he is,' Stellingetti grated.
The battlecruiser continued to race closer, eating up the distance between herself and the other two ships. Far astern of her, the cruiser Durandel launched her own pinnaces to assist Kerebin's SAR efforts. They'd already picked up over eighty members of Hawkwing's crew, an amazingly high number which spoke volumes for the determination of the searching pinnaces, yet the cruiser's rescue operations had effectively taken her out of the hunt. The battlecruiser Achmed, however, had come rumbling past Durandel over forty minutes ago, with her velocity building steadily, and she still had an excellent chance to overtake Kerebin and Artemis.
Other ships of the People's Navy were also closing in, and one of them had already locked onto the Manticoran freighter Voyager and begun closing rapidly while another peeled off to pursue RMMS Palimpsest. The entire situation was wildly confused, but the Peep warships were clearly in control of it, and the distance between Kerebin and Artemis sped downward.
'Coming up on eight hundred thousand klicks,' Edwards announced, and Stellingetti grunted. Another light-second and a half, and she could bring the Manty under fire with her energy weapons. The Andy's interference wouldn't save the liner from that, and when the Manty captain realized he couldn't possibly get away, he'd have no choice but to...
'Missile trace!' Edwards screamed, and Marie Stellingetti half-rose from her command chair in disbelief. It wasn't possible! That titanic salvo couldn't be from the Manty, or she would never have abandoned the destroyer! They had to be from the Andy, but how...?
'Hard skew port!' she shouted. 'Return fire on the Andy!'
Kerebin snapped around to her left, rolling frantically to interpose her wedge against the incoming holocaust, but there was no escape, not from that many missiles. She got a single broadside of her own into space before her writhing evasion maneuvers threw her tubes off target, but no one aboard had time to see what, if anything, her fire accomplished. The missiles roaring down on her would arrive a full twenty seconds before her own did. They streaked in, spreading out to englobe the battlecruiser, and there was nothing she could do to escape. ECM fought to confuse them, countermissiles roared out, laser clusters trained onto the incoming laser heads and fired with desperate intensity, and almost a hundred missiles lost track or vanished in the fireballs of successful intercepts. But five hundred others kept coming, and as they reached attack position and detonated, their X-ray lasers engulfed Kerebin like a dragon's breath.
They didn't all reach attack position at once. They came in in sequence, and it took almost nine seconds for all of them to detonate, but the trailers were simply wasted effort. Five seconds after the first laser head detonated, PNS Kerebin and every man and woman aboard her had become an expanding ball of plasma.
Honor Harrington made herself sit motionless as the damage reports washed over her. A part of her was horrified at what she'd just done, but a Sultan—class battle-cruiser was simply too dangerous to fool around with. She'd had to take it out with her first salvo, even knowing that so much overkill virtually guaranteed there would be no survivors from her target, and so she'd just blown over two thousand people to plasma without giving them any chance at all.
But the Peep hadn't gone without striking back. Her single broadside had sent twenty missiles slashing towards Wayfarer and Artemis, and the liner's proximity had forced Honor to make her own ship an even easier target. If any of those missiles had gone after Artemis and gotten through, they could easily have destroyed her, and with her the very civilians Honor was fighting to protect. And so she'd turned Wayfarer directly across the liner's stern, deliberately sucking Kerebin's dying vengeance in upon her. Her missile defense crews had done well, but she'd never had a proper warship's point defense, and eight laser heads had gotten through.
'We've got ninety-two confirmed dead so far, Skipper,' Rafe Cardones said harshly. 'Sickbay reports over sixty additional casualties, and they're still bringing them in.'
'Material damage?'
'We've lost Grasers One, Three, and Five out of the port broadside,' Tschu replied from Damage Control Central. 'Missiles One and Seven are gone, as well, and Five and Nine are available only in local control. LAC One's launch bays are totaled, but at least they were empty. Gravitic Two is gone, I've lost three sidewall generators, also from the port sidewall, and Impeller Two's lost a beta node.'
'Skipper, I'm reporting negative function from Cargo One,' Jennifer Hughes added urgently, and Honor felt her belly knot.
'Harry?'
'I'm checking now. We don't show a rail malfunction, but...' The engineer broke off and mouthed a silent curse. 'Correction. We do show a malfunction, it's just not with the launch system.' He studied his monitors, then shook his head. 'The rails are still up, Skipper; it's the cargo doors. That hit in the after impeller ring must've sent a surge through their power train. The port door's cycled halfway shut, and the starboard door's almost as far in.'
