David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

He heard someone inhale sharply behind him, but his own expression never wavered.

"Should you choose to stand down your warships, and to maintain the present status quo unchanged pending the arrival of the approaching Manticoran relief force, I will be spared that unpleasant necessity. Should you choose not to stand down your warships and maintain the status quo , I will proceed with the bombardment. And under no circumstances will I permit the evacuation of your civilians. The choice is yours, Sir. You have two hours in which to make it and get your decision to me. Terekhov, clear."

He stopped and looked at Kobe. The lieutenant looked severely shaken, but he nodded.

"Good copy, Sir," he said with only the slightest tremor in his voice.

"Very well. Attach the latest tactical summary, including the positions of all of their units we currently have under observation. Then send it, please."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

"Now, Amal," Terekhov said calmly, turning back to Nagchaudhuri, "I believe you have a report to complete. We'll have time for that before Volcano arrives. If you please."

He walked back across the deathly silent bridge to the briefing room, his boot heels sounding clearly on the decksole, and Nagchaudhuri followed after only a brief hesitation. So did Van Dort. He hadn't been invited, but Terekhov wasn't surprised at all to see him after the hatch closed and he turned back to Nagchaudhuri.

"Yes, Bernardus?" he asked in that same, calm voice.

"Aivars, you are bluffing, aren't you? You wouldn't really massacre all those civilians?"

"Bernardus, we can't leave. Monica's squarely in the middle of a hyper-space grav wave. The only two ships we have left who can still generate Warshawski sails are Aegis and Volcano , and they don't begin to have the life-support to take all our survivors with them. And what do you think will happen to my people if I allow them to fall into Monican hands before the relief force gets here?"

Van Dort didn't answer the question. He didn't have to.

"But what if there isn't a relief force?" he asked instead.

"There will be," Terekhov said, with the certitude of God's own prophet. "And when it arrives, my people will be alive to see it."

"But you won't really bombard the battlecruisers?"

"On the contrary, Bernardus," Captain Aivars Alexsovitch Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy, said coldly. "If these bastards call my 'bluff,' I will blow their goddamned battlecruisers, and every civilian around them, to hell."

"So you're finally ready, Captain," Vice Admiral Quentin O'Malley observed.

"Yes, Sir," Aivars Terekhov replied.

"I imagine you'll be glad to get home," O'Malley said.

"Yes, Sir," Terekhov repeated. "Very glad. Ericsson and the other repair ships have done a remarkable job, but she really needs a full-scale shipyard."

O'Malley nodded. In the three T-months since Rear Admiral Khumalo's arrival in Monica, the Talbott Station support ships had patched HMS Hexapuma up enough to at least get her home. Which had been just as remarkable a job as Terekhov had implied. They hadn't had much to work with, after all.

Of Terekhov's impromptu squadron, only Aegis and Hexapuma would ever return to service. Aria and Warlock were simply too old, too obsolescent, to be worth repairing, even if they hadn't been so severely mangled in the Battle of Monica. Warlock , at least, would be returning to the Star Kingdom under Commnder George Hibachi's command and her own power in company with Hexapuma , but only because repairing her alpha nodes had cost less than the Navy would be able to reclaim from her hull when she was broken up.

Yet the name Warlock would not disappear from the Royal Manticoran Navy. As Ito Anders had once said, HMS Warlock had not been fortunate in her commanding officers or her reputation. But Anders had repaired that fault. It had cost him his life, but his ship had redeemed herself. Like every unit of Terekhov's "Squadron," her name had been added to the List of Honor. Those names would be kept in commission in perpetuity in recognition of what they and their people had accomplished at such dreadful cost.

Fifty- one percent of Terekhov's personnel had died in Monica; another twenty-six percent had been wounded. Manticore's total casualties had been far lower than those of the Monican Navy. Probably, O'Malley reflected, even proportionately, but certainly in absolute terms. Which didn't change the fact that sixty percent of his ships had been destroyed outright, that the remaining forty percent had been brutally crippled, and that less than a quarter of their personnel were fit for duty. Yet somehow, with the missile pods from Volcano as their only remaining hole card, Aivars Terekhov's surviving, broken, air-bleeding wrecks had managed to hold an entire star system captive for seven standard days. One entire T-week. All by themselves, with no assurance Augustus Khumalo was really coming. With no way of knowing when a Solarian League task force might come over the alpha wall with blood in its eye.

No, O'Malley corrected himself. They had one other card, beside the pods. They had Terekhov.

He looked at the broad-shouldered, bearded captain whose blue eyes looked steadily back from under the band of his white beret. He looked so… ordinary in so many ways. A bit taller than average, perhaps. But there were only those unflinching eyes to give the lie to his ordinary appearance. And they were enough, O'Malley decided. Enough to explain why this man was already being compared by some to Honor Harrington or Ellen D'Orville. Perhaps even to Edward Saganami himself.

O'Malley wondered what Terekhov had thought when Hercules finally arrived. Had he been relieved? Or had he anticipated that Khumalo would order his arrest? Have him charged, court-martialed? From what O'Malley had seen of Terekhov since his own arrival in Monica with the Home Fleet relief force and Dame Amandine Corvisart, he suspected that the thought of court-martial and disgrace had held no terror for this man. No officer with the moral courage to do what he'd done, to risk-and suffer-the casualties his people had taken, after having already survived the Battle of Hyacinth, would hesitate to pay the price he'd known his decision might carry. Which was not to say he would have found the destruction of his own naval career any less agonizing simply because his own sense of duty had required that sacrifice of him.

Yet whatever Terekhov might have feared, Augustus Khumalo had turned out to possess hidden depths of his own. Depths Quentin O'Malley, for one, would never have suspected. Whatever Khumalo might have thought during his long voyage from Spindle to Monica, he had never hesitated or wavered a single millimeter after his arrival. He'd backed Terekhov's actions to the hilt. When Roberto Tyler demanded that he withdraw immediately from Monican territory, Khumalo had flatly refused. Perhaps the evidence of the two remaining Indefatigable -class battlecruisers at Eroica Station helped explain that. Yet O'Malley felt oddly certain that Khumalo would have supported Terekhov's actions anyway. The man would never be a brilliant officer, perhaps, but he'd demonstrated an astonishing depth of moral courage of his own, and his undamaged superdreadnought flagship and her consorts had been more than sufficient to transform the tense stalemate in Monica into a complete Monican surrender. Especially when he endorsed Terekhov's threat to destroy the remaining battlecruisers by bombardment.

There might still be a little hell to pay over that, O'Malley reflected. Under the letter of interstellar law, Terekhov and Khumalo would have been within the legitimate rights of a belligerent had they done precisely what they threatened, but that wasn't the sort of tactic the Royal Manticoran Navy normally embraced. Especially not when the Navy had invaded another sovereign star system without benefit of the minor formality of a declaration of war. Not to mention the fact that destroying the remaining battlecruisers might very well also have destroyed all supporting evidence for Terekhov's interpretation of the Monicans intentions if Tyler had chosen to stonewall.