It didn't matter. What mattered was that the only way to avoid fighting both enemy forces was to take Monkoto head on ... and that was suicide.
But perhaps not for everyone. If any of his people could break through the mercenaries, they might turn true pirate, or perhaps take service with a Rogue World far enough from Franconia not to realize what they'd been. It wasn't much, but it was all he could offer them—that and a chance to kill some of the bastards who'd ambushed them.
-=0=-***-=0=
"Come to poppa, you bastards," Simon Monkoto whispered. He'd hoped for still more SLAM salvos, but then he'd expected the renegades to accelerate back up to wormhole out. They hadn't, and now they were hidden behind the drives pointed straight at him. The battle to come had just turned even uglier, but his own ships matched the "pirates'" maneuver. Thanks to the battleships, their maximum deceleration was less than the enemy's, but it would be enough to insure a long and deadly embrace.
-=0=-***-=0=
"Up their asses, Megarea!" Alicia snarled.
"Are you sure, Alley? I'm not in good enough offensive shape to add much to Simon's firepower."
Megarea's worried voice tore at the corona of violence building in Alicia's mind. She clenched her teeth, sweating, trying to make herself think, and a part of her screamed in warning. The web about her madness sang with stress, and it was crumbling. She felt Tisiphone between her and it, felt the Fury pouring herself into the fraying web. She writhed in her chair, fighting to keep her jaws locked on the order to engage. She could break off. She could curl away from Howell and leave him to Monkoto's unwounded ships, and she knew she had to. She and her companions were the only ones who knew the truth about Treadwell. They couldn't let themselves die yet. She knew it; yet she couldn't let go. She held her course, and the most she could do was strangle the order for Megarea to redline her deceleration.
-=0=-***-=0=
The edge of James Howell's squadron "overtook" Monkoto's. Screening destroyers and light cruisers suddenly found themselves broadside-to-broadside at ranges as low as fifty thousand kilometers, and energy torpedoes and beams ripped back and forth. Point defense was irrelevant; misses were almost impossible, and battle screens were blazing halos wrapped about fragile battle steel. Two renegade destroyers and a light cruiser vanished in star-bright fury, but Commodore Falconi's heavy cruiser flagship went with them, and the death toll was only starting.
Monkoto and his allies had known what it would be like the instant they realized Howell wasn't going to run for it. They could have broken off, but they hadn't come to break off. The two fleets interpenetrated and merged, racing side-by-side while the hammering match raged.
Procyon's massive beam and energy torpedo batteries opened fire, and a dozen destroyers and cruisers died in the first salvo. Verdun poured her own fire into the maelstrom, but two of O'Kane's battle-cruisers locked their batteries on her, and her fire slackened as more and more of her power was shunted frantically into her battle screen. She writhed, cored in their fire, and Procyon blew one of her attackers to vaporized wreckage.
Not in time. Verdun's screens failed, a tight-focused salvo of particle beams ripped through them, and she vomited flame across the stars.
Procyon rounded vengefully upon her killer, but Audacious and the battleship Assassin were on her like mastiffs. They were far smaller, slower, less heavily armed, but their cyber synths were intact, and thunder wracked the vacuum as the leviathans spread their arms in lethal embrace. Two more battle-cruisers raced to join them, then a third, and all six rained javelins of flame upon the dreadnought.
Eight million tonnes of starship heaved as something got through a local screen failure, and Monkoto's wolves set their fangs in the flanks of the crippled saber-tooth. Howell ripped his attention away from them long enough to check the main plot and swallowed a groan. Procyon was attracting more and more of the mercenaries' attention, but there were more than enough destroyers and cruisers to pair off in duels with his own units. Ships flashed and vanished like dying sparks, damage signals snarled in his synth link, and Tracking had finally identified the newcomers: Fleet battle-cruisers, already gaining on Procyon with their higher rate of deceleration.
He glared at the red switch on his console. He could engage the shield and laugh at Monkoto's attack ... but there was no point. He couldn't accelerate with the shield up; only drift, knowing that when he finally lowered it, the enemy would be waiting. He raised fiery eyes to Commander Rahman.
"Get the battleships!" he snarled.
-=0=-***-=0=
Alicia's nails drew blood from her palms as the battleship Assassin blew apart. She remembered Esther Tarbaneau's gentle brown eyes, and her lips writhed back from her teeth as the red holocaust broke free within her.
The hell with Treadwell! The hell with everything! The mercenaries were fighting her fight, dying her death. She felt Megarea and Tisiphone battling to turn her madness, and she didn't care.
"Now, goddamn it!" she snarled. "Everything we've got now!" and Megarea wept as she obeyed. The drive thundered and shrieked in agony, and the alpha synth began to close on the cyclone of dying starships.
-=0=-***-=0=
Simon Monkoto's teeth met through his lip as Assassin vanished. First Arlen, now Tadeoshi and Esther—but he had the bastards. He had them! His flagship's AI noted a fluctuation in Procyon's defenses, a wavering the dreadnought would have sensed and corrected had her own AI survived. But it hadn't, and Audacious flashed orders over the net. One battleship and four battle- cruisers threw every beam and energy torpedo they had at the chink in Procyon's armor, and her Fasset drive exploded.
-=0=-***-=0=
Alicia's banshee howl echoed from the bulkheads as the dreadnought's drive died, and her eyes were mad. The mercenaries peeled away from Procyon, for they no longer needed to endure her close- range fire. They'd broken her wings, destroyed her ability to dodge. Once their own ships got far enough from her to avoid friendly SLAM fire, she was dead, But Alicia didn't think about the mercenaries' SLAMs, didn't care about the short-range weapons still waiting to destroy her. All she saw was the lamed hulk of her enemy, waiting for her to kill it.
-=0=-***-=0=
HMS Tsushima decelerated towards the savage engagement, and her captain's brain whirled as she digested the preposterous sensor readings. Fleet units locked in mortal combat with mercenaries?! Insane! Yet it was happening, and Brigadier Keita's briefing echoed in her ears. If the mercenaries were here to engage pirates, then those Fleet units must be pirates, for no engagement this close and brutal could be a mistake. Both sides had to know exactly who they were fighting ... didn't they?
Tsushima was the lead ship of the task force, already approaching SLAM range of the fighting, but Captain Wu held her fire. Even if she'd been certain what was going on, only a lunatic would fire SLAMs into that tight-packed boil of ships, for she would be as likely to kill friends as enemies. But what was that one ship doing so far behind the melee? It was moving at preposterous speed, overhauling the others, but something about its drive signature ...
"Captain! That's an alpha synth!" her plotting officer said suddenly, and Wu's face went white. There were no Fleet alpha synths in this sector; the only two previously assigned to it had been ordered out so that there could be no confusion.
Wu swallowed a bitter curse and looked at her plot. She'd heard the gossip, knew how close Keita and that Cadre major, Gateau, were to Alicia DeVries, but Keita's flagship was ten light- minutes astern of her. DeVries would vanish into the maelstrom in half the time it would take to pass the buck to him, and when she did, Tsushima could no longer fire her SLAMs in pursuit.