David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"I don't know for sure, Sir. It can't be much over a hundred gravs. We've lost the entire after ring, and the forward ring's badly damaged."

"That's what I was afraid of." Terekhov drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. "You're going to have to abandon, Lieutenant."

"No!" Gainsworthy protested instantly. "We can save her! We can get her home!"

"No, you can't, Lieutenant," Terekhov said, gently but implacably. "Even if she could be repaired, which is doubtful, she can't stay with the rest of the Squadron. Those bogeys will run right over her. So get your people off and set the scuttling charges, Lieutenant Gainsworthy. That's an order."

"But, Sir, we-!" A tear carved a white streak down one dirty cheek, and Terekhov shook his head.

"I'm sorry, son," he said, cutting the lieutenant off quietly. "I know it hurts to lose her-I've done it. But however much you love her, she's only a ship, Lieutenant." A lie , his brain shouted. You know that's a lie! "She's only alloy and electronics. It's her people that matter. Now get them off."

The final sentence came slowly, measured, and Gainsworthy nodded.

"Yes, Sir."

"Good, Lieutenant. God bless."

Terekhov cut the circuit and turned back to the ships he might still be able to save.

"They know we're here," Janko Horster muttered.

"What?"

Horster glanced up, irritated by the interruption. But it was the senior tech rep, not one of his officers. The civilian obviously didn't realize he wasn't supposed to interrupt a flag officer's thought processes with questions at a time like this, and Horster decided to answer him.

"They know we're here," he repeated, and gestured at the plot. "Or at least they're afraid someone' s out here."

The range was still too great for his passive sensors to provide detailed information, but some things were brutally clear. Four of the Manties' ten impeller signatures had disappeared. Three had vanished with abrupt finality during the vicious missile exchange. Those three, he felt grimly confident, had been hard kills by Eroica Station. The fourth had gone off the display about four minutes after the others. Its strength had dropped precipitously before that, obviously because of battle damage. So either it had finally failed completely because of that damage, or else it had been shut down, which would almost certainly indicate a ship in the process of being abandoned. Whichever it was, the damned Manties had lost forty percent of their strength, and most, if not all, of their surviving units had to have been hurt.

"They've increased their deceleration to four hundred gravities," he told the civilian. "That's an increase of fifty gees over what they were holding it down to on the way in-probably because of their frigging pods-but it's a hell of a lot less than they ought to be capable of. So obviously they have impeller damage. But they've also got a ship out there somewhere that survived the shooting only to have its signature go off the display just a couple of minutes ago. So either its impeller damage was even worse than theirs, and its nodes just packed it in, or they're abandoning her. But they wouldn't be doing that this quickly unless they were afraid someone was in position to engage them."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I can't be positive , but they'd have taken longer to reverse course if they weren't. No captain's going to abandon his ship that quickly, not without surveying her damage and being certain he can't save her. And no commodore would leave her behind unless he figured he was going to have a fight on his hands and couldn't afford to be handicapped looking after cripples."

The civilian nodded slowly, and Horster smiled. It was an ugly expression, one that mingled fury over what had happened to his navy with vengeful satisfaction.

"They're dead meat," he said flatly. The civilian stopped nodding and looked at him with undisguised anxiety, and the commodore barked a laugh. "They don't have any of those damned pods left," he said, "and they never had anything bigger than a heavy cruiser to begin with, according to Admiral Hegedusic's tac analysis. At least a hundred of our missiles got into attack range before they detonated, too. They've been hammered-hammered hard- and they're going to be up against modern battlecruisers . Battlecruisers that can shoot back this time."

The civilian still looked dubious, and Horster could almost hear the thoughts running through the other man's brain. Yes, he had modern battlecruisers to kill them with, but Horster's crews had been aboard their ships for less than three weeks. Their people were still learning how to use their systems, how to master the capabilities, but it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Their engineering and astrogation departments had been forced to wait until they could actually get aboard the new ships, but the tactical crews had managed to spend over two months in the simulators Levakonic had brought with him. That might not be the same as hands-on training, but it was one hell of a lot better than nothing.

And they were battlecruisers, with all the armor and sheer toughness that implied.

"They're definitely battlecruisers, Sir," Helen said.

She was focused on her displays, trying not to think about how many people had just been killed and wounded aboard the Squadron's ships. Aboard Hexapuma . She knew Aikawa was still alive, but where was Paulo? Was he even-

She pushed the thought aside again. She had no time for it. Other people were depending on her.

"The arrays are close enough to see them now despite their EW," she continued. "They're definitely running with wedges at maintenance levels, but we're getting enough signature off them to be confident of their tonnage range."

"Can we tell if they're more Indefatigables ?"

"No, Sir. We're not getting much besides the impeller signatures and some neutrino leakage."

"Skipper," Lieutenant Bagwell said from the electronic warfare station, "until they go active with their sensor suites, we're not going to get any more off of them. From the quality of their stealth technology, though, they've got to be Solly designs."

"Another thing, Sir," Abigail said. "Whoever these people are, they were obviously already on a ballistic course for Eroica Station when we turned up, or we'd have picked up their drives. I suppose it's possible they had their impellers up and their stealth system simply hid it from us, but I don't think so. I think they'd already cut their drives. Which suggests some sort of fleet maneuver."

"And?" Terekhov prompted in an encouraging tone when she paused, although he was fairly certain he knew where she was headed.

"Well, Sir, I suppose it's possible an SLN commander might want to exercise his crews, but it doesn't seem likely he'd have pulled out all the stops that way against typical Verge sensor technology. I think it's more likely these are more of the same-additional ships being turned over to the Monicans, but already through the refit process and working up new crews."

"That's speculative, Skipper," Bagwell said, "but I think it's good speculation."

"So do I." Terekhov smiled approvingly at his youthful tactical officer. And at her even more youthful assistant. Then his expression sobered.

If Abigail was right and those ships were still in the process of working up, there were likely to be weaknesses in their performance, chinks in their armor. But they were still battlecruisers. The three of them outmassed all six of his surviving ships by better than two-to-one, and they were undamaged.

He looked at the plot. Eleven minutes had elapsed from the moment the third battlecruiser was detected. Only eleven minutes, in which hundreds of his people had been killed and the Monicans' casualties had probably run well into the thousands. He was decelerating away from the oncoming battlecruisers at the highest rate the Squadron as a whole could sustain, but nothing he did was going to prevent those ships from engaging him.