The Service of the Sword

'Never mind the lifeboat,' Dominick growled. The boarding boats were in space now, driving hard toward the drifting Dorado, and there was no indication that whatever the Royalists had done to the nodes was gaining any ground. They should have plenty of time to get aboard and shut the system down before it blew.

But now, with the safety of his precious cargo assured, he was taking another look at the people who had tried to deprive him of it.

They were still fleeing, out there in their souped-up dispatch boat. Running as if their lives depended on it.

Which was, Dominick decided, as forlorn a hope as he'd ever heard of. Certainly Vanguard couldn't catch a boat that fast; but then, he hardly had to catch them to make his displeasure known. 'Lock a graser on that dispatch boat,' he ordered, shifting his eyes to the lifeboat. The merchantman's lower-ranking crewmen, most likely, left to fend for themselves when their superiors ran out in the faster boat.

Well, they would have the last laugh. They would get to see their former oppressors die.

'Graser ready, Commodore.'

'Key it to me,' Dominick ordered. This one he would do himself. A shame he couldn't use a missile, he thought regretfully. A missile would be even more satisfying, because that way the Manties would have a few seconds to see their doom bearing down on them. With a graser, unfortunately, they would be dead before they even knew about it.

But missiles cost money, and personal vengeance might as well be economical.

On his board, the fire-control command key winked on. Savoring the moment, he reached out a hand to push it.

Ten thousand kilometers away, seated behind Pampas and McLeod in the lifeboat, Cardones gave the remote-control displays one final check. The heading was keyed, the course maneuver settings locked in. All was ready.

Mentally crossing his fingers, he pressed the button.

'Commodore!'

Koln's startled cry cut across the bridge, jerking Dominick's finger away from the firing key before he could push it and jerking his eyes toward the displays.

The Dorado was moving.

Not just a reflexive twitch or jerk, either. The merchantman was swinging around, scattering away the boarding boats swarming toward it, bringing itself nose-on to the Vanguard.

And with its wedge blazing away at full power, it leaped forward.

But not at the pathetic acceleration of a normal merchantman. Not a lumbering, insignificant two hundred gees. Instead, the Dorado was burning through space at an utterly impossible two thousand gravities, fully four times Vanguard's own top rate.

The very shock of it froze Dominick in his chair for that first horrifying fraction of a second. It was insane —the crew would have had to cut the safety interlocks, disable the inertial compensator, and crank the nodes up to a level they couldn't possibly maintain for more than a minute or two before vaporizing under the stress.

Impeller nodes that shouldn't have been operating in the first place! 

'Evasive!' he snapped. 'Ninety-degree starboard yaw—full power. Port broadside: fire at will.'

The helmsman was on it in an instant, swinging the Vanguard hard over and kicking her into motion. But it was too late. The Dorado was turning right along with it, locked on and still coming.

'Shoot it!' Dominick shouted again, a note of desperation in his voice. He swung his chair around to snarl at Charles—

The snarl died in his throat. The seat beside the tac station was empty.

Charles was gone.

He swung around again, eyes darting to every corner of the bridge, knowing even as he did so that it was a pitiful way to waste his last few seconds of life. Charles had left the bridge and probably the ship, leaving nothing behind but empty promises and the acid taste of betrayal.

Belatedly, the port lasers and grasers opened fire. But with Fearless looming in the distance, all of Vanguard's fire control had been locked into the long-range sensors, and there was no time to recalibrate for short-range fire. One graser beam did manage to score a direct hit, going straight down the Dorado's throat and burning clear through its centerline, and for a brief moment Dominick dared to hope.

But there was nothing on that path of destruction but crew quarters, control systems, and cargo holds. Nothing that could disable those straining impeller nodes or otherwise halt the terrible Juggernaut bearing down on them.

And then there was no more time for firing. No more time for anything . . . except to appreciate a last bitter flicker of irony.

As he had those last few seconds to see his doom bearing down on him.

The Dorado reached the Peep battlecruiser . . . and with just under five hundred kilometers still separating them, their two impeller wedges intersected.

The nodes went first, in both ships, the sudden influx of gravitational energy shattering them into explosions of shrapnel and superheated gas that ripped through the impeller rooms, crushing decks and bulkheads and killing everyone in their path. Shock waves and electromagnetic pulses swept ahead of the shrapnel, crushing and killing and demolishing electronics as they passed. Vanguard writhed in agony; the Dorado, far weaker and more vulnerable than a warship, was already twitching her last death throes.

And then, the expanding spheres of destruction reached the fusion mag bottles.

The Dorado's fusion generator had already died, hammered into useless rubble along with everything else inside the merchantman's hull. But the Vanguard's twin plants, like the beating hearts of the still struggling ship, had somehow managed to survive.

They died now; and for a brief, eye-wrenching second there was a new star in the Walther System's night sky.

And then the star faded, and there was nothing left but a quietly expanding sphere of plasma and debris.

Aboard the recently renamed light cruiser Forerunner, Captain Vaccares stared at his displays in disbelief. One minute the Vanguard had stood alone among a group of disabled merchantmen, waiting like a lion for its prey to be driven to it.

And now, in the blink of an eye, it was gone.

And that same prey, the HMS Fearless, was hailing him.

'Andermani Light Cruiser Alant,' a woman's voice came from the bridge speaker, 'or whatever you're calling yourself now, this is Captain Harrington aboard Her Majesty's Ship Fearless. You are ordered to strike your wedge and surrender your ship.'

'Fearless has turned around again, Captain,' the helmsman announced. 'She's started accelerating toward us.'

'Turn ship,' Vaccares ordered. Between the two of them, he and Commodore Dominick could easily have taken a Manticoran heavy cruiser. But with Vanguard gone, he would have had to be insane to think of facing Fearless alone. 'Give me full acceleration toward the hyper