David Weber - At All Costs

Her eyes opened wide in horror.

"General signal all units!" she shouted, spinning towards her com section. "Hyper out immediately! Repeat, hyper out-"

But it had taken Genevieve Chin two minutes too long to realize what was happening.

"Drives going active... now, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, and the missiles thirteen million kilometers short of Fifth Fleet suddenly brought their final drive stages on-line. Their icons burned abruptly bright and strong once again as they lit off their impellers... and hurled themselves at their targets under full shipboard control.

They blazed in across the remaining distance, tracking with clean, lethal precision, and their ballistic flight had dropped them off of the Republic's sensors. Chin's ships knew approximately where they were, but not exactly, and their supporting EW platforms and penetration aids came up with their impellers. They hurtled in across the Republican SD(P)s' defensive envelope at over half the speed of light, and the sudden eruption of jamming, of Dragons Teeth spilling false targets, hammered those defenses mercilessly.

The fact that the missile defense crews aboard those ships had known, without question, that the attacking missiles would be clumsy, half-blind, only made a disastrous situation even worse.

Eighth Fleet had deployed almost eight thousand pods. Those pods launched 69,984 missiles. Of that total, 7,776 were Apollo birds. Another 8,000 were electronic warfare platforms. Which meant that 54,208 carried laser heads-laser heads which homed on Genevieve Chin's ships with murderously accurate targeting.

Second Fleet's missile defenses did their best.

Their best was not good enough.

Honor sat hugging Nimitz and watched the real-time tactical download from one of the Apollos. It felt unnatural, as if she were right there, on top of the Havenite fleet, not over seventy million kilometers away. She watched the enemy counter-missiles fire late and wide. She watched the attack missiles' accompanying EW platforms beating down the defenses. She watched the missiles themselves sliding through those defenses like assassins' daggers.

Fifth Fleet stopped almost thirty percent of them, which was a truly miraculous total, under the circumstances. But over thirty-seven thousand got through.

It was, she decided coldly, a case of overkill.

Lester Tourville stared at his plot in horror as the impeller signatures of sixty-eight Republican ships of the wall abruptly vanished. Seventeen continued to burn on the display for another handful of seconds. Then they, too, vanished in what he devoutly hoped was a frantic hyper translation.

There was total silence on Guerriere's flag bridge.

He never knew exactly how long he simply sat there, his mind a great, singing emptiness around a core of ice. It couldn't have been the eternity that it seemed to be, but eventually he forced his shoulders to straighten.

"Well," he said in a voice he couldn't quite recognize, "it would appear our time estimate on the deployment of their new system was slightly in error."

He turned his command chair to face Frazier Adamson.

"Cease fire, Commander."

Adamson blinked twice, then shook himself.

"Yes, Sir," he said hoarsely, and Second Fleet ceased firing at Third Fleet's tattered remnants as Adamson transmitted the order.

"Dear Lord," Dame Alice Truman murmured feelingly. "Talk about last-second reprieves."

"Did what I think happened really just happen, Ma'am?"

Wraith Goodrick's voice sounded shaky, and Truman didn't blame him a bit. Only seven of Theodosia Kuzak's superdreadnoughts were still in action, and all of them were brutally damaged. Another three had technically survived, but Truman doubted any of the ten would be worth repairing. All four of Kuzak's CLACs had been killed, and of Truman's own eight, three had been destroyed, one was a drifting cripple without impellers, and the other four-including Chimera-were severely damaged. For all intents and purposes, Third Fleet had been as totally destroyed Home Fleet.

But the merciless hail of missiles had at least stopped pounding its remnants.

And, Truman thought with grim survivor's humor, I don't blame whoever gave that order a bit, either.

"Missile trace!" Frazier Adamson barked suddenly, and Lester Tourville's belly muscles clenched.

What was left of Third Fleet had stopped firing when he did. Were they insane enough to resume the action? If they did, he'd have no choice but to-

"Sir, they're coming in from outside the zone!" Adamson said.

"What?" Molly DeLaney demanded incredulously. "That's ridiculous! They're a hundred fifty million klicks away!"

"Well, they're coming in on us now anyway," Tourville said sharply as Guerriere's missile defense batteries began to fire once more.

They didn't do much good. He watched sickly as the missiles which had suddenly brought up their impellers, appearing literally out of nowhere, hurtled down on his battered and broken command. They drove straight in, swerving, dancing, and his sick feeling of helplessness frayed around the edges as he realized there were less than sixty of them. Whatever they were, they weren't a serious attack on his surviving ships, so what-?

His jaw tightened as the missiles made their final approach. But they didn't detonate. Instead, they hurtled directly through his formation, straight through the teeth of his blazing laser clusters.

His point defense crews managed to nail two-thirds of them. The other twenty pirouetted, swerved to one side, then detonated in a perfectly synchronized, deadly accurate attack... on absolutely nothing.

Lester Tourville exhaled the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. He sensed the confusion of his flag bridge crew, and this time, he had no answer at all for them. Then-

"Sir," Lieutenant Eisenberg said in a very small voice, "I have a com request for you."

He turned his command chair to look at her, and she swallowed.

"It's... from Duchess Harrington, Sir."

The silence on Guerriere's flag bridge was complete. Then Tourville cleared his throat.

"Throw it on my display, Ace," he said.

"Yes, Sir. Coming up now."

An instant later, a face appeared on Tourville's display. He'd seen that face before, when its owner surrendered to him. And again, when she had been clubbed down by the pulse rifle butts of State Security goons. Now she looked at him, her eyes like two more missile tubes.

"We meet again, Admiral Tourville," she said, and her soprano voice was cold.

"Admiral Harrington," he replied. "This is a surprise. I thought you were about eight light-minutes away."

"I am. I'm speaking to you over what we call a 'Hermes buoy.' It's an FTL relay with standard sub-light communication capability. We can load it into a cell in one of our new missile pods." The expression she produced was technically a smile, but it was one that belonged on something out of deep, dark oceanic depths.

"It accompanied my missile launch so I could speak directly to you," she continued in that same, icy-cold voice. "I'm sure you observed my birds' terminal performance. I'm also sure you understand I have the capability to blow every single one of your remaining ships out of space from my present position. I hope you aren't going to make it necessary for me to do so."

Tourville looked at her, and knew that last statement wasn't really accurate. Knew a part of her-the part behind those frozen eyes, that icy voice-hoped he would make it necessary. But too many people had already died for him to kill still more out of sheer stupidity.

"No, Your Grace," he said quietly. "I won't make it necessary."