"My God, she got another one!" a voice gasped, and his arms tightened about his child.
"What about that one?" someone asked.
"No, he's still there. It's just his sail, but that should—Oh, God!"
The voices cut off with knifelike suddenness, and his heart twisted within him. He knew what that silence meant, and he raised his head slowly. Most of the officers looked away, but not Carnarvon's skipper. Tears ran down the woman's face, yet she met his gaze without flinching.
"She's gone," she said softly. "They all are. But she killed three of them first, and at least one survivor's lost a sail. I... don't think they'll continue the pursuit with just one ship, even if she's undamaged. Not with a cripple to tow clear."
Zilwicki nodded, and wondered vaguely how the universe could hold so much pain. His shoulders began to shake as his own tears came at last, and his daughter threw her arms around his neck and clung tightly.
"W-what's happening, Daddy?" she whispered. "Are... are the Peeps gonna hurt Mommy? Are they gonna get us?"
"Shssssh, Helen," he got out through his tears. He pressed his cheek into her hair, smelling the fresh, little-girl smell of her, and closed his eyes once more as he rocked her gently.
"The Peeps won't get us, baby," he whispered. "We're safe now." He drew a ragged breath. "Mommy made it safe."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Nike altered course for home, and Mike Henke hid a grin as she glanced across the bridge at her captain. Honor seldom displayed satisfaction with her own efforts, especially on the bridge. Satisfaction with the performance of her officers and crew, yes; yet her own competence was something to be taken for granted. But today she leaned back against her command chair's contoured cushions, legs crossed, and a small smile played about her lips while Nimitz preened shamelessly on the chair's back.
Henke chuckled and looked over to Tactical to bestow a wink of triumph on Eve Chandler. The diminutive redhead grinned back and raised her clasped hands over her head, and Henke heard someone else snort with laughter behind her.
Well, they had every excuse to be insufferably pleased with themselves—and their captain, Henke reflected. The squadron had worked hard in the week since Vice Admiral Parks' departure. Its steadily developing snap and precision had actually brought smiles of approval from Admiral Sarnow, and Nike's escape from the repair slip couldn't have come at a better time.
Henke wasn't the only one of Honor's officers who'd heard about Captain Doumet's concern that the flagship's enforced inactivity might have made her rusty enough to embarrass his own Agamemnon, but she'd been better placed than most to do something about it. Honor had been too submerged in squadron affairs to take on Nike's day-to-day training efforts. Besides, that sort of ongoing activity was really the exec's responsibility, and all the long, grueling simulator hours Henke had inflicted on Nike's crew had paid off handsomely in yesterday's maneuvers. Nike hadn't embarrassed Agamemnon. In point of fact, Doumet's ship had had all she could handle just to stay in shouting distance of her division mate, and Henke looked forward to her next meeting with Agamemnon's exec.
Nike had turned in the best gunnery performance of the exercise, as well, outshooting Captain Daumier's Invincible by a clear eight percent, much to the disgust of Daumier's crew, but that hadn't been the best part. No, Henke thought with a lazy smile, the best part had come when Admiral Sarnow divided his small task group in half for war games.
Commodore Banton had commanded the squadrons second and third divisions and their screen while Sarnow commanded the first and fourth, but that was only for the record. In fact, Sarnow had informed Honor five minutes into the exercise that both he and Captain Rubenstein, Division 54s senior officer, had just become casualties and that she was in command.
That was all the warning she'd gotten, but it was obvious she'd been thinking ahead, for her own orders had come without any hesitation at all. She'd used the FTL sensor platforms to locate Bantons ships, split her own force into two two-ship divisions, accelerated to intercept velocity, then killed her drives and gone to the electronic and gravitic equivalent of "silent running." But she hadn't stopped there, for she'd known Banton's Achilles had the same ability to spot and track her. And since Honor knew the commodore had plotted her base course before she closed down her emissions, she'd launched electronic warfare drones, programmed to mimic her battlecruisers' drives, on a course designed with malice aforethought to draw Banton into a position of her choice.
The commodore had taken the bait—partly, perhaps, because she didn't expect anyone to use up EW drones (at eight million dollars a pop) in an exercise—and altered course to intercept them. By the time she realized what was really going on, Honor had brought both her own divisions slashing in on purely ballistic courses, wedges and sidewall down to the very last instant and still operating separately in blatant disregard of conventional tactical wisdom. She'd hit Banton's surprised formation from widely divergent bearings, and her unorthodox approach had used Banton's more traditional formation against her, pounding her lead ships with fire from two directions, confusing her point defense, and using her own lead division to block the return fire of her rearmost ships for almost two full minutes. And, just to make it even better, she'd had Commander Chandler reprogram their screens antimissile decoys so that the heavy cruisers suddenly looked like battlecruisers.
The decoys had come on-line at the worst possible moment for Banton's tac officer. With no running plot on Honor's "invisible" ships until their drives suddenly came back up, he'd had to sort out who was who before he engaged, and the decoys had confused him just long enough for Nike,Agamemnon,Onslaught, and Invincible to "MI" Banton's flagship and "cripple" her division mate Cassandra with no damage of their own. Defiant and Intolerant had done their best after that—indeed, Captain Trinh's stellar performance had gone far to redeem his earlier problems—but they'd never had a chance. The final score had shown the complete destruction of Banton's force, moderate damage to Agamemnon and Invincible, and a mere two laser hits on Nike.Onslaught had escaped completely unscathed and even recovered all but two of the EW drones Honor had used. The drones would require overhaul before they could be reused, but their recovery had saved the Navy something like forty-eight million dollars, and Henke suspected Rubenstein's crew was going to do even more gloating than her own people.
Admiral Sarnow hadn't said a word, but his grin when he ambled onto Nike's bridge for the closing phase of the "battle" had been eloquent. Besides, Commodore Banton was a fair-minded woman. She knew she and her people had been had, and she'd commed her personal congratulations to Honor even before the computers finished calculating the final damage estimates.
A most satisfactory two days, taken all together, Henke decided. A whole week had passed without incident since Admiral Parks disappeared over the hyper limit, which had produced a deep sense of relief but hadn't lessened the squadron's determination to disprove any reservations Parks might entertain about their admiral and his flag captain... and the last couple of days' successes looked like an excellent first step.