The Service of the Sword

target's electronic warfare capability was enormously better than anything he'd ever seen out of any non- Manticoran unit. It came up faster, and it was far more effective.

The missiles' target faded into a fuzzy ball of jamming, and fiendishly effective decoys came to life on their tethering tractors. Blumenthal's systems didn't quite lose lock completely, but that lock became much looser and more tentative, and at least a quarter of Gauntlet's missiles veered off to target the decoys as the combination of limited telemetry links and the decoys' efficiency came into play. The fact that Gauntlet was bows-on to her target even after course change let her engage with both broadsides and her bow chasers alike, but she had links for little more than a quarter of that many birds without sharing them, and it showed.

Yet however good their EW might be, it was evident that they couldn't match Ghost Rider's capabilities. Both Number One and Number Two returned Gauntlet's fire almost instantly, but they fired only eight missiles between them. Clearly, those birds came solely from their chase tubes, which suggested that their broadside tubes couldn't match Manticore's off-bore capability.

But that was the only really good news, and Oversteegen watched as his own counter missiles and point defense engaged the incoming fire.

Just as the opposing cruisers' electronic warfare capability was far better than any Peep's would have been, so was their missiles' ECM. Point defense's firing solutions were much poorer than usual, and two of the incoming birds evaded no fewer than three counter missiles each. Blumenthal's last-ditch laser clusters managed to nail both of them before they reached laser head attack range, but Manticoran missile defenses shouldn't have let anything get that close from such a small salvo.

'Two hits on Number One!' one of Blumenthal's ratings announced just as the lasers stopped the second of the near-misses. Which, Oversteegen told himself sourly, wasn't anything to write home about coming out of a sixty-missile launch.

Still, it was better than the other side had done.

Fortune Hunter bucked, and alarms shrilled, as two X-ray lasers slammed into her bow. They came in from almost dead ahead, with no sidewall to interdict, and armor shattered under their ferocious power. Point Defense Four blew apart, and the same hit drove deep, severely damaging Gravitic One and breaching Magazine Two. The second hit came in at a broader angle, with no carry back into the hull, but it also came in directly on top of Missile Four. Seventeen men and women died under those two hits, and six more were wounded, and Tyler felt a deep, panicky stab of near-superstitious dread.

But then the Manty's change of course registered, and his eyes narrowed. He still didn't have any idea how the other cruiser had managed to target him with what had to be both broadsides simultaneously, but it was obvious that the enemy ship was running for the hyper limit. In the Manty's position, Tyler would have been attempting to avoid action from the very beginning against such numerical odds, but that wasn't the way Manties normally handled pirates. Now, though . . .

'The bastards are running,' he muttered, and looked up from his plot. 'They're running!' he repeated.

'Maybe so, but they're also hammering us a lot harder than we're hammering them!' his executive officer shot back.

'Hell, yes, they are,' Tyler agreed with a snort. 'And if we'd fired fifteen times as many missiles at them, we'd probably have hit them more often, too! Look at how close two of our birds did get before they stopped them!'

'Well, yeah . . .'

The exec had been with Tyler for almost four T-years, and he had a tendency to try to second-guess his CO. And he was also a fellow Silesian, with the same near phobic respect for the Royal Manticoran Navy. But his panic seemed to ease slightly as he considered the pirate captain's point.

'Damned right, 'well'!' Tyler shot back now, and looked past the other man at his helmsman. 'Bring us hard to starboard! Put us as close to parallel with them as you can!'

'They're changing heading to open their broadsides, Sir,' Blumenthal reported as Gauntlet's third double broadside blasted from her tubes.

'Not surprisin',' Oversteegen replied in a calm, cool voice. 'Only thing they can do, really. But they're not goin' t' be able t' put themselves on a headin' t' follow us across the wall. Stay with Number One, Guns.'

Jerome Tyler had already reached the same conclusion as Michael Oversteegen. Whatever he did, Fortune Hunter and Samson Lamar's Predator were going to slide in-system past Gauntlet. But they'd have time for at least eight or nine more broadsides first, and his lips skinned back from his teeth in an ugly smile. No Silesian raider had ever willingly engaged a Manticoran cruiser, but many of them had dreamed of the freak set of circumstances which might have let them do so successfully. The fact that the Manty had to be destroyed was the only thing which had inspired him to engage in the first place, but now that it had been forced upon him, he scented victory, and he wanted it. Badly.

'Pour it on, Tactical!' he snapped. 'Communications, raise Morder! Get her current position—now!'

Joel Blumenthal focused on his plot more intensely than he'd ever done anything before in his life. His eyes flicked across the display, noting shifting vectors, the enemy's fire patterns, and CIC's analysis of the other side's EW and decoys, and he grunted in partial satisfaction.

Number One and Number Two were firing full broadsides, now, and their turn had taken the vulnerable open front aspects of their wedges away from Gauntlet. Worse, the penetration aids and ECM of their attacking missiles were even harder to compensate for as the threat numbers multiplied. But his Ghost Rider recon platforms were real-timing close-range observations of the other ships' EW to him, which gave CIC's computers a much better look at them than the other side had at his own electronic defenses. And good as the pirates' EW might be, it wasn't as good as Blumenthal had originally believed. Or possibly it was; it could be lack of skill on its operators' part.

Whatever the cause, the enemy's EW was slow. However effective their decoys might be, they were much slower to adapt their emissions than Manticoran decoys would have been. Perhaps even more importantly, their mother ships' onboard EW was slow to adapt to the active sensors aboard Blumenthal's remote recon platforms.

Those platforms' FTL grav-pulse transmitters fed his targeting computers with real-time data, and their radar and lidar was getting far better hits off of their targets than they should have done against jammers that capable. He wondered if the pirates even realized how close the platforms were. Or how quickly their targeting info could make its way back to Gauntlet. There was no way to tell, and it didn't really matter, he thought, as he updated his current missile salvo's attack profiles.

'Yes!'

Tyler pounded jubilantly on the arm of his command chair, and a hungry sound of triumph rippled around Fortune Hunter's bridge as two of their laser heads broke through the Manty's defenses. The enemy cruiser's sidewall intercepted them, bending and blunting them, and it was unlikely they'd inflicted heavy damage, but it was a start, and more broadsides were already in space.

'I've got Morder,' Tyler's com officer announced. 'I'm feeding her current position directly to Tactical.'

Tyler waved one hand in acknowledgment. Then he looked down at his repeater plot as Maurersberger's cruiser appeared upon it, and his eyes flamed. Morder was closing in on the Manty from almost directly astern, and Maurersberger was nearly in range already. The Manty's superior acceleration wasn't enough to overcome the velocity advantage Morder had built up before the enemy ship altered course.