"Confirm ID on those SDs!" she snapped.
"Ma'am?" Surprise startled DeSoto into the question, but the ops officer cleared his throat quickly when Chin turned her glare upon him. "Uh, CIC's confidence is high, Ma'am," he said hurriedly, glancing back down at his own display. "Emissions and impeller strength both conform to data base's threat files on Sphinx—class super-dreadnoughts across the board-"
The admiral made an ugly sound deep in her throat. She folded her hands tightly behind her, and her staff sat silent in the face of her anger as she rocked up and down on her toes. The master plot confirmed the ops officers report, but now that her instant, instinctive reaction had passed, her own tactical sense warred with the data. It didn't make sense. If battlecruisers could pump that many missiles at her—and she was beginning to suspect how they'd done it—surely ships of the wall could have laid down even more fire! Two squadrons of super-dreadnoughts could have annihilated her entire force and come close to evening the odds against Rollins' total task force in a single blow, and if the Manties could get battlecruisers into range undetected, there was no reason they couldn't have done the same thing with SDs.
And if those were superdreadnoughts, why were the battlecruisers still running? They were accelerating away from her at almost five KPS?; combined with her own deceleration, that produced a cumulative vector change of 9.45 KPS. Of course, no battlecruiser wanted to get any closer to a dreadnought than it had to, but their heading also meant they could reply to her ships' after chase armament only with their stem chasers. True, their fire was hammering Waldensville with ever mounting damage, but they could have turned to open their broadsides and quadrupled the weight of their fire, and with SDs coming to their assistance, Chin couldn't possibly have risked slowing her escape efforts by turning to reply in kind.
Her furious rocking motion slowed and her eyes narrowed as another thought chased itself through her mind. If those were SDs, why hadn't the Argus net detected their return to the system?
She glanced at the chrono. Seven minutes since course change. Her velocity had fallen by nineteen hundred KPS and the battlecruisers' had climbed by over two thousand. She'd already lost the chance to bring them into energy range, but if she turned back to pursue them once more, she could hold them in her powered missile range for more than an hour. Except that doing so would also doom her ships by matching them against those SDs. Unless...
A trio of Havenite missiles found a gap in the task group's hard-pressed defenses and charged down on HMS Crusader. The heavy cruiser's decoys and laser clusters did their best, but the Peeps' fire was too heavy. There were too many threat sources, and the tac net's computers released her systems to self-defense a fraction of a second too late.
The laser heads detonated at less than 13,000 kilometers, and they were capital ship missiles. Their lasers burned through her sidewall as if it didn't exist. Battle steel shattered and vaporized, and a failsafe circuit took a microsecond too long to function.
Commodore Stephen Van Slyke's flagship vanished in the eye-tearing flare of a failing fusion bottle, and Captain Lord Pavel Young suddenly inherited command of Heavy Cruiser Squadron Seventeen.
Admiral Chin barely noticed Crusader's destruction. One heavy cruiser either way hardly mattered against the scale of the engagement... or the threat sweeping towards her from the Manty base. If it was a threat.
She bit her lip. If those weren't SDs, then they were the best EW drones she'd ever seen, and instinct seemed a frail thing matched against the cold, hard reality of her sensors, but...
She inhaled deeply without turning from the display.
"Bring us back around." Her voice was cold and hard. "Pursuit vector, maximum acceleration."
"Admiral Chin is reversing course, Sir!"
Admiral Rollins twitched as Captain Holcombes report penetrated his sick despair at the trap he'd stumbled into. He twisted in his chair, double-checking his own plot in sheer disbelief, then slumped back and watched Chin's impeller signatures complete their suicidal swing.
"Orders, Sir?" Holcombe asked tautly, and Rollins could only shrug his helplessness. He was over two hundred million kilometers astern of Chin. Any order of his would take over twelve minutes to reach her, and her vector would merge with the Manty SDs' in less than fifty. Her chance of escaping them was already minute; if she accelerated towards them for twelve more minutes, it wouldn't even exist.
"What good would it do?" he asked in a voice of quiet bitterness. "We can't call her off in time, and we couldn't get close enough to help even if she kept running straight towards us. She's on her own."
"They didn't buy it, Sir," Honor said quietly.
"Not completely, no," Sarnow agreed from her com screen. There was no surprise in his voice—not really. They'd both hoped the Peeps might break off their attack when they saw the "superdreadnoughts," yet it had never been more than a hope. "But they know they've been kissed. And they did slow down enough to keep us out of beam range."
Honor nodded silently, and her eyes moved back to her plot and the growing sidebar list of damaged ships. Commodore Prentis' Defiant had taken impeller damage, though it wasn't critical yet, and Onslaught had also been hit. All her weapons remained in action, but her gravitic sensors had been knocked out, and her communications had been damaged seriously enough for Captain Rubenstein to pass control of his division's tactical net to Invincible. The cruisers Magus and Circe had taken two hits each, as well, but Crusader was their only total loss.
A corner of her brain was appalled that she could apply the word "only" to the deaths of nine hundred men and women, but it was the appropriate one, for their casualties were minuscule beside those Sarnow had wreaked in reply. She knew it, yet another corner of her mind still railed at her admiral; for all of his brilliance and audacity he had failed to stop the enemy. They'd hurt the Peeps, but they hadn't saved the base—and Paul—after all.
She stamped a mental foot on her resentment, shamed by its total unfairness, and made herself consider the situation coldly. At least the second Peep element was holding position right on the hyper limit. The contest was still between them and the battered force on their heels, and the glittering icon of the hastily laid minefield blinked in her plot, a bare three million kilometers ahead. Not even Nike's sensors could see the mines clearly, despite knowing where they were, and the Peeps should have even poorer luck against their low-signature materials.
"Our time to minefield is two-point-niner-six minutes, Ma'am," Charlotte Oselli said, as if the astrogator had read her mind. "The Peeps should enter attack range in... seven-point-five-three minutes."
Honor nodded in acknowledgment, never looking up from her plot. Now if only the mines didn't make a mistake where the task group's IFF was concerned.
"You're right, Ma'am. They've got to be drones."
Genevieve Chin gave Commander Klim a sharp nod and turned from the master display. She stalked back to her command chair and sank into it, locking her shock frame with slow deliberation, then looked at DeSoto.
"Lay in new firing orders. They're concentrating on Waldensville ; let's give them a little of their own medicine. Pick two BCs and hit them with everything we've got."
"Aye, Ma'am!" Matching hunger sharpened DeSoto's reply, and Chin smiled a thin smile. They'd been suckered and they'd taken their lumps; now it was time to hand out a few in reply.