"Skipper, I'm showing another bogey!" Ward announced, and Fuchien shook herself.
"Another Peep?" she asked harshly.
"I don't think..." Ward broke off, then shook her head. "It's not a warship at all, Skipper. It's a merchantman."
"A merchantman? Where?" Ward highlighted the bogey on her plot, and Fuchien's eyes widened. It was a merchantman, closing from starboard, and it was headed straight for Artemis. Closing velocity was already over thirty thousand KPS, and the bogey was accelerating at a full two hundred gravities. But that was crazy! Even civilian sensors had to be able to pick up the detonation of laser heads at this range, and any sane merchant skipper should be running the other way as fast as her ship would go.
"Com, warn her off!" Fuchien ordered. There was no point at all in adding another ship to the Peeps' bag. The unknown freighter was still light-minutes away, and Fuchien turned to her own ship's survival rather than wait out the com delay. She punched for Cheney again "Sid, what's your best estimate for repairs?"
"Repairs?" Cheney laughed bitterly. "Forget it. We don't begin to have the spares for this kind of damage. It'd take a fully equipped repair ship a week just to run them up."
"All right. You say it's just the upper-stage governors?"
"I think that's all," Cheney corrected. "That and the power runs. But we're still tearing things apart down here, and working in skinnies..." Fuchien could almost see his shrug.
"I need to know soonest, Sid. If we can't go up, we'll have to go down, and I need to know if the generator'll stand a crash translation."
"A crash translation?" Cheney sounded doubtful. "Skip, I can't guarantee she'll hold together through that even if I don't see anything else wrong. We took an awful spike through the control systems, and if they're not a hundred percent when you try that, we're all dead."
"We may all be dead if I don't try it," Fuchien said grimly. "Just get me the best info you can as quick as you can."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Oh, Jesus." Annabelle Ward's whisper was a prayer, and Fuchien looked up just in time to see HMS Hawkwing vanish from the display with sickening suddenness. She stared at the empty spot for a long, terrible moment, then licked her lips.
"Would we see life pod transponders at this range, Anna?" she asked very quietly.
"No, Ma'am," the tac officer replied, equally quietly. "But I doubt there are any. She went off the display too fast, and I read an awful sharp energy bloom. I think it was her fusion bottle, Skipper."
"God have mercy on them," Margaret Fuchien whispered. And now it's our turn, a small, still voice said in her brain. "All right, Anna. Do your best with point defense if they get close enough to fire on us, but for God's sake, don't shoot back at them!"
"Skipper, I can't stop a battlecruiser from blowing us apart eventually. We might last a while against just her chaser tubes, but we'll never stand more than a half-dozen full broadsides."
"I know. But their accel isn't that much higher than ours. They'll need the better part of an hour just to catch up, Hawkwing bought us that much, and as soon as Sid tells me it's safe, I'm going for a crash translation down to the beta bands. I'll risk a couple of chaser salvos first if it takes him that long to tell me go or no-go on the maneuver."
"All right, Skipper. I'll do what I can." Ward punched commands into her console, deploying missile decoys, and then kicked three EW drones over the side. The drones were each programmed to duplicate Artemis' current, wounded impeller signature, and she sent them racing off on widely divergent courses. Their power wouldn't last long, and they were unlikely to fool the Peeps even that long, but the delay while the enemy sorted out which were which might buy Engineering a few more precious minutes.
"Skipper, that merchie's still coming on," she reported. She picked up a faint transmission and put her computers on-line to enhance it, then shook her head. "It's an Andy, Ma'am."
"What is this, a wormhole junction?" Stellingetti growled, glaring at her repeater plot. Its reduced size made things appear closer together than they actually were, and she glared at the new bogey closing on her fleeing prey. The plot was further confused by the Manty's EW drones, but Kerebin had been close enough to see them launch and CIC had managed to keep track of them as they came on-line. Knowing which were false targets allowed her to ignore them to concentrate on the real one, and the battlecruiser plunged after it. Battle damage had reduced her own acceleration by five percent, but she was smaller than her prey, and she could still pull a higher accel than the Manty could.
"Who's that coming up behind us?"
"I think that's Durandel in front, Skipper," Edwards replied. "The bearing's about right, and their accel is cranked too high for a battlecruiser. That's probably Achmed astern of her."
"Is Durandel in com range?"
"Barely, under these conditions," Stellingetti's com officer said.
"Order her to slow down and recover our search and rescue pinnaces."
"Aye, Citizen Captain."
Stellingetti didn't expect her pinnaces to recover very many Manties, but at least some life pods had blasted clear before the destroyer blew up. Those people were no longer enemies; they were only a handful of human beings lost in the middle of unthinkable immensity. If they weren't picked up right now, they never would be, and Marie Stellingetti refused to abandon anyone to that sort of death.
"Who the hell is this newcomer, John?"
"From her impeller strength, she's another merchie," Edwards replied, "and I'm picking up an Andermani transponder."
"An Andy?" Stellingetti shook her head. "Wonderful. Just wonderful! Why would an Andy be maneuvering to match vectors with a Manticoran with a battlecruiser on its ass?"
"I don't know, Skip." The tactical officer punched a query into his system and shook his head. "It's a horse race. Whoever's driving that ship is good, and she's running some heavy-duty risks with a civilian drive. Target One's outaccelerating her, but she's got the angle on his track. It looks like she'll match vectors with him about the time we come into extreme missile range."
"Damn!" The citizen captain gnawed on a thumbnail and, for the first time, wished Commissioner Reidel were aboard. It wasn't like Stellingetti to evade responsibility, but if the Committee of Public Safety was going to saddle her with its damned spy, the son-of-a-bitch could at least make himself useful by telling her how to clean this mess up! Her orders required her to "use any means necessary" to prevent any Manticoran-flag vessel from escaping with word of the task force's presence, but when Citizen Admiral Giscard and Peoples Commissioner Pritchart wrote that order, they'd never contemplated having a passenger liner on their hands. Stellingetti's conscience would never forgive her if she killed several thousand civilians, yet her orders left no option. If the liner wouldn't stop, she had to destroy it, and her soul shriveled at the thought. No doubt Public Information would claim the ship had been armed, which it was, and that its armament and refusal to stop had made it a legitimate target. Public Information was good at blaming victims for their fate. But Stellingetti would still have to look into her mirror every day.
And what was the damned Andermani up to? Her orders also required her to steer clear of Andies, and even to assist them against other raiders. But if that freighter insisted on poking its nose into this, it would be sitting right there, witness to the entire incident if she blew away the pirate. And what did she do then? Did she kill the Andy, too, just to finish off any witnesses who might dispute Public Information's version of what had happened out here?