The Shadow of Saganami

acceleration, even without pods, was no better than four hundred gravities. She was down to thirty-five tubes, and a quarter of her broadside grasers-sixty percent of her starboard energy broadside-and one of her after chasers were gone. Thirty-seven of her people were confirmed dead, with at least another seventeen wounded... including Surgeon Commander Orban. His sick berth attendants were doing their best, but none of them were fully trained physicians.

It was her fault. She knew that was insane, yet a small, cruel voice deep down inside whispered that she'd been in charge of the missile defenses. She was the one who was supposed to stop this from happening.

She stared at the com screen still connected to the badly damaged AuxCon and saw Aikawa working frantically with two uninjured ratings as they applied first-aid to the wounded. But no matter how hard she stared, there was no sign of Paulo.

Aivars Terekhov surveyed the damage, and his jaw clenched painfully.

He'd walked straight into it, and a third of the Squadron's ships had been destroyed because he had. It was all very well to remind himself no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy. He even knew it was true. But it didn't make him feel one bit better about the dead and maimed who'd counted on him to get it right.

He drew a deep breath and turned his attention to Eroica Station and felt a stab of vengeful satisfaction. Those damned missile pods had savaged his squadron, killed his people, but their own fire had shattered the military components of the Station. The close-in drones made it obvious that at least eight of the nine battlecruisers in the military yard had been wrecked beyond any hope of repair even by a Solarian shipyard, far less Monica's facilities. The other one might be repairable, but it would take a fully equipped shipyard months, possibly T-years, to do the job. The two on the civilian side of the installation were still intact, but there wasn't much he could do about that, even using laser heads instead of conventional nukes, without killing hundreds of civilians. He didn't want to do that, and he wouldn't... if he had any choice at all. And at least Eroica Station itself had been thoroughly neutralized as a threat.

Which, unfortunately, wasn't true of the oncoming battlecruisers.

Janko Horster's face was white with mingled shock and fury. His sensors couldn't give him as clear a picture of what had happened to Eroica Station as Terekhov's could, but he didn't need details to know the Monican Navy had just been mangled. Most-probably all-of the other battlecruisers were gone, and the same was almost certainly true of the older units which had been laid up at Eroica to provide personnel for his own ships. First Division, by itself, probably had ten times the firepower of the entire Monican Navy before Levakonic had delivered the new ships, but it would be impossible to carry out the operational plan with what was left.

And that didn't include the casualties. The men he'd known and served and trained with for decades. The friends.

Yet the Manties had been hurt, too. Badly. And they must have fired every pod they had to inflict such damage on Eroica Station.

Their long-range missile advantage was gone, and the bastards who'd raped his Navy couldn't get away from him now.

'Get me Vigilant ,' Terekhov grated.

'Aye, aye, Sir,' Nagchaudhuri acknowledged, and fifteen seconds later, he found himself facing a lieutenant he'd never seen before.

'Commander Diamond?' he asked.

'Dead, Sir,' the lieutenant said hoarsely. 'We took a direct hit on the bridge. No survivors, I'm afraid.' He coughed on the thin haze of smoke swirling about him, and Terekhov realized he was connected to Damage Control Central.

'Who's in command, Lieutenant?' he asked as gently as he could.

'I guess I am, Sir. Gainsworthy, third engineer. I think I'm the senior officer left.'

Dear God, Terekhov thought. Their casualties must be almost as bad as Defiant's were.

'What's your maximum acceleration, Lieutenant Gainsworthy?'

'I don't know for sure, Sir. It can't be much over a hundred gravs. We've lost the entire after ring, and the forward ring's badly damaged.'

'That's what I was afraid of.' Terekhov drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. 'You're going to have to abandon, Lieutenant.'

'No!' Gainsworthy protested instantly. 'We can save her! We can get her home!'

'No, you can't, Lieutenant,' Terekhov said, gently but implacably. 'Even if she could be repaired, which is doubtful, she can't stay with the rest of the Squadron. Those bogeys will run right over her. So get your people off and set the scuttling charges, Lieutenant Gainsworthy. That's an order.'

'But, Sir, we-!' A tear carved a white streak down one dirty cheek, and Terekhov shook his head.

'I'm sorry, son,' he said, cutting the lieutenant off quietly. 'I know it hurts to lose her-I've done it. But however much you love her, she's only a ship, Lieutenant.' A lie , his brain shouted. You know that's a lie! 'She's only alloy and electronics. It's her people that matter. Now get them off.'

The final sentence came slowly, measured, and Gainsworthy nodded.

'Yes, Sir.'

'Good, Lieutenant. God bless.'

Terekhov cut the circuit and turned back to the ships he might still be able to save.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

'They know we're here,' Janko Horster muttered.

'What?'

Horster glanced up, irritated by the interruption. But it was the senior tech rep, not one of his officers. The civilian obviously didn't realize he wasn't supposed to interrupt a flag officer's thought processes with questions at a time like this, and Horster decided to answer him.

'They know we're here,' he repeated, and gestured at the plot. 'Or at least they're afraid someone' s out here.'

The range was still too great for his passive sensors to provide detailed information, but some things were brutally clear. Four of the Manties' ten impeller signatures had disappeared. Three had vanished with abrupt finality during the vicious missile exchange. Those three, he felt grimly confident, had been hard kills by Eroica Station. The fourth had gone off the display about four minutes after the others. Its strength had dropped precipitously before that, obviously because of battle damage. So either it had finally failed completely because of that damage, or else it had been shut down, which would almost certainly indicate a ship in the process of being abandoned. Whichever it was, the damned Manties had lost forty percent of their strength, and most, if not all, of their surviving units had to have been hurt.

'They've increased their deceleration to four hundred gravities,' he told the civilian. 'That's an increase of fifty gees over what they were holding it down to on the way in-probably because of their frigging pods-but it's a hell of a lot less than they ought to be capable of. So obviously they have impeller damage. But they've also got a ship out there somewhere that survived the shooting only to have its signature go off the display just a couple of minutes ago. So either its impeller damage was even worse than theirs, and its nodes just packed it in, or they're abandoning her. But they wouldn't be doing that this quickly unless they were afraid someone was in position to engage them.'

'How can you be so sure?'

'I can't be positive , but they'd have taken longer to reverse course if they weren't. No captain's going to abandon his ship that quickly, not without surveying her damage and being certain he can't save her. And no commodore would leave her behind unless he figured he was going to have a fight on his hands and couldn't afford to be handicapped looking after cripples.'

The civilian nodded slowly, and Horster smiled. It was an ugly expression, one that mingled fury over what had happened to his navy with vengeful satisfaction.