In Enemy Hands

smashed, and thirty-two members of her crew died as the energy blew into her hull, but the sidewall and the antiradiation fields inside it had blunted and attenuated those lasers.

But there was no sidewall to protect against the four laser heads which exploded directly ahead of her. Their clustered fury ripped straight down the throat of her wedge, and damage alarms shrieked as transfer energy slammed into her, tearing alloy like tissue and slaughtering her people. Power levels fluctuated madly, spikes surging through the systems in the forward portion of the ship too quickly for circuit breakers to function, and massive secondary explosions followed in their wake. Honor was thrown to her knees as a giants fist shook McKeon's ship, like a terrier shaking a rat, and the bridge displays flickered, died, and then came back up.

'Damage report!' McKeon snapped, but there was no response. He stabbed at the com buttons on his chair arm, plugging directly into Damage Control Central. 'Damage report!' he repeated, but still there was no answer, and he punched another combination, this one direct to Commander Gillespie's com. 'Taylor, I need a damage report!'

'The Exec's dead, Skipper,' someone gasped over the intercom after a seeming eternity. 'DCC's gone. We're... all... dead... down...'

The voice died, and McKeon closed his eyes in anguish.

'Good hits on Bandit Ten!' Metcalf announced. 'We got at least four in on the bastards, Sir!'

'Negative function on all forward point defense!' someone else barked. 'We've lost Lidar One and Two! Grav Threes down!'

'Switch to Lidar Five!' Metcalf replied, and one of her assistants acknowledged the order, but the tide of disaster rolled on over her voice. Without Damage Control Central the reports came in piecemeal... but they came.

'Graser One is down. Heavy casualties on Graser Three and Five and in Missile Five. No contact with Missile Seven. Magazine One is out of the feed queue.'

'What about Impeller One?' McKeon demanded of the helmsman, abandoning his efforts to get through to anyone in Engineering.

'Sir, Impeller One doesn't answer,' Chief Harris replied tautly. 'Our accel's down to two hundred gravities and dropping.'

'Sidewall Generators One, Three, Five, and Seven are off-line. We're losing the port sidewall, Captain!'

'Sir, Bandit One has opened fire. Twenty-four missiles inbound. Impact in one-seven-three seconds.'

'Bandit Ten is altering course and increasing acceleration. Closing at five-point-three KPS-squared!'

Prince Adrian shuddered again, twisting about her iron bones as fresh energy smashed into her.

'Direct hit on CIC!' a voice shouted over the com. 'We're losing con...'

The voice chopped off in midsyllable. Smoke gouted from the main ventilation trunk before it slammed shut, and more damage alarms snarled.

'Bridge, this is Juno in Fusion Two!' The voice of Lieutenant Juno, Prince Adrian's junior engineering officer, came from the intercom. 'I'm setting up here for damage control, but it doesn't look good.'

'Status of Impeller One?' McKeon demanded.

'Gone, Sir,' Juno said harshly. 'We may have four or five beta nodes left, if I can get them back on-line, but that's it.'

McKeon's face clenched. With her forward alpha nodes gone, Prince Adrian had lost her Warshawski sails... and Adler lay squarely in the heart of a hyper-space gravity wave, where only sails would permit a ship to maneuver. That single, devastating salvo from Katana had doomed his ship, and McKeon knew it.

'Helm, bring us forty degrees to port!' he snarled, and his gaze locked with Metcalf’s across the bridge as Harris acknowledged. 'We're going down Ten's throat, Gerry. Hit the bastard with everything you've got!'

'Aye, aye, Sir.' Metcalf hunched over her panel, fighting the destruction of her sensors and fire control systems as much as the enemy, and the ship bucked as still more missiles smashed through her crippled defenses to blot away weapons and the people who crewed them.

Honor dragged herself to her feet, Nimitz clinging to her shoulder. She felt blood dribbling down her chin from where she'd bitten her lip in her fall, but it was a distant awareness, one that belonged to someone else, far, far away, and she swept her eyes over the glaring crimson damage lights on McKeon's displays. She opened her mouth, then staggered and clung to the command chairs back as Prince Adrian heaved in fresh agony. She almost fell again, but she stayed upright somehow and grabbed McKeon's shoulder.

'Surrender, Alistair.' She didn't raise her voice, yet its very calmness cut through the combat chatter and damage reports and the howl of alarms like a knife, and McKeon stared at her.

'But...' he began, but she shook her head and squeezed his shoulder hard.

'Surrender,' she repeated. 'That's an order.'

Still McKeon stared at her, and she understood his agonized hesitation. His shame. In the five hundred-T- year history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, only thirty-two Queen’s ships had ever surrendered to an enemy.

'I said surrender, Captain!' she said more sharply. 'We got the convoy out, but your entire forward impeller room's gone. Now surrender your ship before any more of our people die for nothing!'

'I...' McKeon closed his eyes, then shook himself and nodded. 'Helm, turn us away from the enemy and kill your accel,' he said in a voice like hammered iron. 'Commander Metcalf, jettison every FTL-equipped drone with a locked in self-destruct command, then purge the computers and instruct all hands to destroy classified equipment and material. Lieutenant Sanko, hail Bandit Ten. Inform her captain we surrender.'

Chapter Eighteen

'Who did you say?' Lester Tourville stared at the face on his com, certain he'd misunderstood, but Citizen Captain Bogdanovich nodded vigorously.

'There's no mistake, Citizen Admiral. May I play Citizen Captain Zacharys message for you?'

Tourville nodded, and the time and date header for a burst transmission message addressed to the chief of staff replaced Bogdanovich's image. The header disappeared in turn, and a slim, severe-faced woman appeared. The name patch on the left breast of her skinsuit said 'ZACHARY, HELEN G,' and her dark eyes seemed to hold an echo of the astonishment Tourville himself had just experienced. She looked out of the screen for a moment, then cleared her throat.

'Citizen Captain Bogdanovich,' she said formally, 'I have to report that PNS Katana, under my command, and PNS Nuada, Citizen Captain Wallace Turner, commanding, have engaged the Manticoran heavy cruiser Prince Adrian. After a long range exchange in which I was able to take maximum advantage of my towed missile pods, Prince Adrian was compelled to surrender. Katana suffered moderate damage, including twenty-one casualties, seven of them fatal, but Nuada sustained no damage, and my executive officers preliminary survey indicates that Prince Adrian's casualties were at least six times our own. We are examining the prize, but her crew's destruction of classified equipment seems to have been thorough, and the heavy damage we ourselves inflicted includes the destruction of her forward impeller room. My present impression is that repair will be impossible out of our available resources, and I'm afraid we'll have to destroy her rather than take her with us when we withdraw from the system.'

She paused for a moment, as if drawing a mental breath, and went on in an almost mechanical voice.

'Among the prisoners we've so far identified are Prince Adrian's commander,