David Weber - Path of the Fury

His frown deepened. Harpy was well inside his perimeter destroyers, little more than ninety minutes from Procyon at her present deceleration, and she hadn't said a word. She was still 17.6 light-minutes out, so transmission lag would be a pain, but why hadn't Alexsov sent even a greeting? He had to know how Howell must have worried, and …

"Com, hail Captain Alexsov and ask him where he's been."

The message fled towards Megarea at the speed of light, and she raced to meet it. Eight hundred seconds after it was born, Megarea's receptors scooped it out of space, and Alicia swore.

"I wanted to be closer than this, damn it!" Her own displays glowed behind her eyes, and thirteen light-minutes lay between her and Procyon. She was already in the dreadnought's SLAM range … but Megarea mounted no SLAMs. She had to close another sixty-five million kilometers, fifteen more minutes at this deceleration, before her missiles could range upon her enemy- and seventy-two million before she could "break and run" on the vector to Monkoto's rendezvous.

"Can we steal enough delay, Megarea?" she demanded.

"I don't think so," the AI replied unhappily. "No reply will be the same as answering, unless this Howell's a lot dumber than we think, and battle-cruiser three's in position to cut us off short of course change."

"Better to answer, Little One. We are more like to gain time by tangling him in confusion, however briefly, than by silence."

A corner of Alicia's mind glanced at the clock. Eighty seconds since the signal came in, and Megarea was right; if she delayed much longer, her very delay would become a response… .

Something hot and primitive boiled in the recesses of her mind, something red that smoked with the hot, sweet incense of blood, and her lips thinned over her teeth.

"Oh, the hell with it! Talk to the man, Megarea."

"Transmitting," the AI said simply.

James Howell's fingers drummed on the arm of his command chair, and he frowned in growing, formless uneasiness. That had to be Harpy, but Gregor was taking his own sweet time about replying.

He glanced at the chronometer and bared his teeth at his own thoughts. Barely twenty-seven minutes had passed since he sent his own signal; a reply could scarcely have arrived this soon even if Gregor had responded instantly. He knew that, but …

He bit the thought off and made himself wait. Twenty-eight minutes. The range was down to eleven light-minutes. Twenty-nine. Thirty.

"Sir," his com officer looked up with a puzzled expression, "we have a response, but it's not from Captain Alexsov."

"What?!" Howell rounded fiercely on the unfortunate officer.

"They say they have battle damage, sir," that worthy said defensively. "We don't have visual, and their signal is very weak. I think- Here, let me route it to your station."

Howell leaned back, glaring at Harpy's blue star. Battle damage? How? From whom? What the hell was go-

His thought died as a faint voice sounded in his ear bug.

… nal is very faint. Say again your transmission. Repeat, this is Medusa. Your signal is very weak. Say again your trans-"

Medusa?! Howell jerked upright in his chair with an oath.

"Battle stations!"

His shocked bridge crew stared at him for an instant, and then alarms began to howl throughout Procyon's eight million-tonne hull.

Howell snapped his chair around to face Commander. Rendlemann across his own battle board. The ops officer's eyes were almost focused, despite his concentration on his cyber synth link, and questions burned in their depths.

"It's not Gregor," Howell snapped.

"But-how, sir?"

"I don't know how!" Yet even as he spoke, Howell's mind raced. "Something must have given Gregor away to a regular Fleet unit." He slammed a fist against his console. "They took him out and reset their transponder to bluff their way in, but they can't have taken Harpy intact. If they had, they'd know the Medusa transponder codes were bogus."

"But if they didn't take her intact, how did they know to come here?"

"How the hell do I know? Unless-" Howell closed his eyes, thinking furiously, then spat another curse. "They must've picked him up leaving Wyvern, before he worm-holed out of the system. Damn the luck! They got a read on his vector and extrapolated his destination.

"Extrapolated well enough to hit us dead center?"

"How the hell many other stars are there within twenty light-years?" Howell snarled. "But they can't've known what they were heading into. If they knew, they wouldn't have sent a single tin can to check it out." He glared at the blue dot again, yet a grudging respect had crept into his angry eyes. "Those gutsy bastards are decelerating straight toward us, and they're already inside sensor range. They can't see us on gravitics with our drives down, so they're hanging on as long as they can to get a full count for their SLAM drones, and if they do-"

He cut himself off and bent over his board. That destroyer was still outside its own range, and no destroyer could stand up to the SLAM salvos of a dreadnought. He glanced at his plot, at the two escorting battle-cruisers tying into Procyon's tactical net as his ships rushed to battle stations. A third battle-cruiser was far closer to the intruder, already wheeling to close her jaws upon her prey.

"Here they come, Alley!" Megarea warned, and Alicia watched the battle-cruiser rounding upon her. The initial surprise must have been total, but the battle-cruiser's weapons were ready at last. Megarea's sensors read her as HMS Cannae, and Alicia felt a sensual, almost erotic shiver as her/their targeting systems reached out and locked. Unlike Procyon, Cannae was barely three light-minutes from Megarea … yet she, too, thought she faced only a destroyer, for the alpha synth's ECM still hid both her identity and the shoals of sublight missiles deployed about her on tractors. Their maximum velocity was halved without the initial boost of internal launchers, but pre-spotting them more than tripled the salvos Megarea could throw.

Alicia felt them through her headset, felt them like her own teeth and claws, and hunger fuzzed her vision like some sick delirium. A part of her stood aghast, stunned by her own blood-thirst. This was wrong, it whispered, no part of Monkoto's plan, but it was only a tiny whisper. She hung on the crumbling brink of a berserker's madness … and embraced its ferocity.

"Take her!" she snapped.

The gravitic plot showed it first. Its FTL capability could see only the gravity wells of starships, SLAMs, and SLAM drones, but unlike Procyon's light-speed sensors, it gave a virtual real-time readout at such short range. Howell was watching it narrowly, waiting for the blue stars of Cannae's first SLAMs, when the battle-cruiser's Fasset drive disappeared.

Megarea's missiles erupted into Cannae's face, and the battle-cruiser's AI had too little time to react to the impossible density of that salvo. It did its best, but its best wasn't good enough.

Battle screen failed, Cannae vanished in a boil of light and plasma, and Alicia DeVries' eyes were emerald chunks of Hell. The orgiastic release of violence exploded within her, brighter and hotter than Cannae's pyre. It took her like a shark, snatching her under in a vortex of hate, and her madness reached out like pestilence. It flooded through her link to Megarea, engulfing the AI as it had engulfed her, and Tisiphone stiffened in horror.

This wasn't Alicia! The fine-meshed precision and deadly self-discipline had vanished into a heaving chaos of raw bloodlust. There was no reason in her, only the need to rend and destroy … and the Fury realized almost instantly from whence it sprang. She'd set a wall about Alicia's loss and hate to make that distilled rage her weapon, but this mortal was stronger than even the Fury had guessed. She would not be denied what was hers of right, and somehow she had breached that wall. Alicia DeVries forgot Simon Monkoto's plan. Forgot the need to survive. She saw only the fleet that had murdered her world and family, and her madness locked Megarea close as they charged to meet its flagship.