The soaring finale of Salute to Spring swept to its climax and faded away, and Honor inhaled deeply. She straightened and looked at Cardones.
"Time to intercept, Guns?" she asked calmly.
"Eighteen minutes, Skippermissile range in six-point-five."
"Very well." She laid her forearms very precisely along her command chair's arms. "Stand by point defense."
"Captain Edwards!"
"Yes, My Lord?" Reliant's captain's voice was hushed, as he, too, watched tragedy unfold before him.
"Bring the division ninety degrees to starboard. I want broadside fire on Saladin right now."
"But" Edwards began in shock, and Alexander cut him off harshly.
"Do it, Captain!"
"At once, My Lord!"
Byron Hunter looked sidelong at his admiral and cleared his throat.
"Sir, the range is over a hundred million klicks. There's no way we can score at"
"I know the range, Byron," Alexander never turned away from his own display, "but it's all we've got. Maybe Harrington will pick them up on radarif she still has radaras they close. Or maybe Saladin's suffered sensor damage of her own. If she isn't trying to break off because she doesn't know we're here, either, maybe she will if we let her know we are. Hell, maybe we'll actually score on her if she holds her course!"
He looked up at last, and his chief of staff saw the despair in his eyes.
"It's all we've got," he repeated very, very softly as Battlecruiser Division 17 turned to open its broadsides and went to rapid fire.
The first missiles spewed out from Thunder of God, and Fearless's crippled sensors couldn't see them above a half million kilometers. That gave Rafe Cardones and Carolyn Wolcott barely seven seconds to engage them, far too brief a window to use counter missiles.
Their damaged jammers and decoys fought to blind and beguile the incoming fire, and they'd learned even more about Thunder's offensive fire control than Lieutenant Ash had learned about theirs. Three-quarters of the first broadside lost lock and veered away, and computer-commanded laser clusters quivered like questing hounds, pitting their minimal prediction time against the surviving laser heads' acquisition time.
Rods of coherent light picked off targets with desperate speed, but Fearless couldn't possibly stop them all, and she didn't. Most of those which got through wasted their fury against her impenetrable belly band, but a few raced across "above" and "below" her to attack her sidewalls. Damage alarms wailed again, men and women died, weapons were wiped away, but the cruiser shook off the damage and kept closing, and there was only silence on her bridge. Honor Harrington sat immovable in her command chair, shoulders squared, like an eye of calm at the heart of that silence, and watched her plot.
Seven more minutes to intercept.
Matthew Simonds snarled as Fearless kept coming through the whirlwind of his fire. Seventy-two missiles per minute slashed out at the cruiser, his magazine levels fell like a sand castle melting in the rain, but she hadn't fired a single shot back at him, and her unflinching approach sent a chill of fear through the heart of his exhaustion-fogged rage. He was hitting herhe knew he was hitting her!but she came on like some nerveless juggernaut only death itself could stop.
He stared at the light bead in his display, watching atmosphere spill from it like blood, and tried to understand. She was an infidel, a woman. What kept her coming for him this way?
"Intercept in five minutes, Skipper."
"Understood."
Honor's cool soprano was unshadowed by her own fear. They'd already endured Saladin's fire for six minutes and taken nine more hits, two serious, and the battlecruiser's fire would only grow more accurate as they closed.
A massive salvo hurtled through space, eighty-four missiles spawned by four battlecruisers from a base closing velocity of thirty thousand KPS. Another came behind it, and another, but the range was impossibly long.
Their drives had burned out three minutes and twelve-point-three million kilometers after launch, at a terminal velocity of almost a hundred and six thousand KPS. Now they tore onward, riding a purely ballistic course, invisible on Hamish Alexander's plot, and his stomach was a lump of iron. Thirteen minutes since launch. Even at their velocity, they would take another four minutes to enter attack range, and the chance of their scoring a hit raced downward with every second of flight time.
Fearless rocked as a pair of lasers slashed into her port side.
"Missile Six and Laser Eight gone, Captain," Commander Brentworth reported. "Dr. Montoya reports Compartment Two-Forty open to space."
"Acknowledged." Honor closed her eye in pain, for Two-Forty had been converted into an emergency ward when the casualties spilled out of sickbay. She prayed the wounded's emergency environmental slips had saved some of them, but deep inside she knew most of those people had just died.
Her ship bucked again, and fresh tidings of death and injury washed over her, but the time display on her plot ticked steadily downward. Only four more minutes. Fearless only had to last another four minutes.
"Intercept in three-point-five minutes," Lieutenant Ash said hoarsely, and Simonds nodded and slid down in his chair, bracing himself for the holocaust about to begin.
"Missiles entering attack range ... now!" Captain Hunter rasped.
A proximity alarm flashed on Lieutenant Ash's panel, a warning buzzer wailed, and a shoal of crimson dots appeared on his radar display.
The lieutenant gaped at them. They were coming in at incredible speed, and they couldn't be there. They couldn't be there!
But they were. They'd come over a hundred million kilometers while Thunder of God moved to meet them, and their very lack of drive power had helped them evade all of Thunder's remaining passive sensors. Ash's radar had a maximum range against such small targets of just over a half million kilometers, and that was less than five seconds at their velocity.
"Missiles at three-five-two!" he cried, and Simonds' head jerked towards his secondary plot.
Only five of them were close enough to attack Thunder, and they no longer had any power to adjust their trajectoriesbut Thunder had held her undeviating course for over two hours. They raced across her bow and rolled on attitude thrusters, bringing their laser clusters to bear down the unprotected throat of her wedge, and all five of them detonated as one.
Thunder of God bucked like a mad thing as half a dozen lasers ripped into her port beam, and Matthew Simonds went white with horror as he saw the second incoming broadside racing down upon him.
"Hard a starboard!" he shouted.
The coxswain threw the helm hard over, wrenching Thunder's vulnerable bow away from the new menace, and Simonds felt a rush of relief.
Then he realized what he'd done.
"Belay that helm order!" he screamed.
"He's turning!" Rafe Cardones shouted, and Honor jerked upright in her chair. It couldn't be! There was no