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 limit."
The images on the displays canted around as the Forerunner swung a hundred eighty degrees over. Vaccares double-checked the numbers and nodded to himself. The hyper limit was only about an hour away, he was still outside Fearless's missile envelope, and he was faster than she was.
They were going to make it home. Not covered with glory, as Commodore Dominick had planned, or loaded with treasure and the key to Manticore's conquest, as Charles had promised. No, they would be returning to Haven like a dog with its tail between its legs. But at least they would be returning.
And then, even as he came to that conclusion, the forward display flashed a sudden warning. "Hyper footprint!" the tac officer called. "Directly ahead of us."
"Identify," Vaccares ordered. Another Manty? Had the convoy had a second escort lurking out at the edge of the system?
But it wasn't a Manty.
It was far worse.
"Unidentified raider, this is His Imperial Majesty's battlecruiser Neue Bayern," a harsh, German-accented voice announced coldly. "You have no means of escape. Surrender, or be destroyed."
Frantically, Vaccares looked at the tac display. But Neue Bayern was right. Between the battlecruiser in front of him and the Fearless behind him, there was no vector he could take that wouldn't force him into engagement with one or both of the larger ships for at least ten minutes.
He could fight, of course. He and his crew could die for the glory of Haven, or at least to save it from the consequences of getting caught with a seized Andermani ship.
But too many people had already died in this fiasco. Most of them were Manties, but they were dead just the same.
He could see no reason to voluntarily add to their number.
"Strike the wedge," he ordered the helmsman quietly. "And then signal the Neue Bayern and Fearless.
"Tell them we surrender."
Admiral of the Red Sonja Hemphill looked up from the report and steadied her gaze onto the face of the young man standing stiffly at parade rest in front of her desk. "And what, Lieutenant," she said frostily, "am I supposed to do with you?"
Lieutenant Cardones's cheek might have twitched, but there was no other reaction Hemphill could see. "Ma'am?" he asked evenly.
"You disobeyed a direct order from a superior," Hemphill said, tapping a fingertip on the memo pad in front of her. "Captain Sandler's report makes it clear she told you not to raise the Dorado's wedge. Yet you did so anyway. Are you aware that that's a court-martial offense?"
"Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said. "And I make no excuse."
Hemphill felt her face settle into a familiar set of lines. "Aside from the fact that it saved every man and woman aboard the Fearless?" she suggested.
This time there was definitely a twitch. "Yes, Ma'am," Cardones said. "And the crews of the merchantmen, too."
"And do you intend to make a habit of placing individual lives over the value of official Naval or governmental policy?" Hemphill continued. "More to the point for a line officer, do you intend to place the value of these lives over the lawful execution of your orders?"
The young man's face had settled into lines of its own. "No, Ma'am," he said.
"That's good, Lieutenant," Hemphill said, letting her voice chill a few degrees. "Because if you were—if I even thought you were—you would be out of the service so fast it would take you three weeks just to catch up with your butt. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Good," Hemphill said softly. "Then allow me make myself even clearer. You acted out of loyalty to Captain Harrington and the Fearless. I appreciate that. But loyalty must always be balanced with the larger perspective. Here we had a chance—a small one, admittedly, but still a chance—to feed Haven a line of disinformation that could have tied up its time and resources for years to come."