George Snyder's eyes burned as he watched the plot.
Seven battlecruisers and nine gunboats charged straight down the throats of their pursuers, and as he watched, Concorde and the surviving Dunkerques launched their first strategic bombardment missiles. Matching Bug missiles sped outward in answer to the Allied SBMs, and there were three times as many of them. ECM and point defense defeated the first few salvos, but there were more behind them. And more. And still more.
Delaware took the first hit. The Dunkerque-class ship staggered as an antimatter warhead scored a direct hit on her shields, but she shook the blow off and continued to charge, and her short-ranged consorts-the Cormorants and their command ship, Vestal-followed on her heels, still far out of the range of their own weapons as they surged straight into the Bugs' fire. Eleanor Ivashkin's frailer gunboats rode the battlecruisers' flanks, sheltering behind them, hiding in their sensor shadow, but the Bugs were ignoring them . . . just as Andrew Prescott had planned. Battlecruisers were a far greater threat than gunboats, and Bug missiles sleeted in upon them as the range spun downwards.
He heard someone breathing harshly beside him and looked up to see Soo's face streaked with tears as she watched the same icons. He wanted to reach out to her, to say something, but there was nothing he could say, and he returned his eyes to the plot.
The Enemy missile ships began to take hits. Shields flared and died, armor vaporized, atmosphere trailed behind them like tangled skeins of blood, but they charged onward, ignoring their damage, and the Fleet lunged to meet them.
Australia was the first to die.
Snyder knew no one would ever know how many hits she'd taken, but she was still driving forward, still riding the thunder of her remaining launchers, when her magazines let go and she vanished in the horrific glare of matter meeting antimatter.
A Bug Antelope blew up a moment later, but then it was Vestal's turn, and Corby and Condor were suddenly without a datanet. But only for a moment. There were openings in Concorde's now, and they slotted into them, swelling the flagship's defensive fire once more, as they and their sisters charged to their dooms.
"Gunslingers," the Survey Command crews called them, and so had Snyder, with the tolerant contempt of specialists for men and women whose only duty was to fight and die. And die they did. Shields blazed and flared like forest fires, and the plot seemed to waver before Snyder's burning eyes, but they never slowed, never hesitated. Never turned aside.
Delaware blew up, then Condor. Code Omega transmissions sang their death songs, but they were all in range now, and more Bug ships died or staggered out of formation, drives faltering. A handful of hoarded Bug kamikazes streaked in, launched at the last moment to hurl themselves upon the bleeding gunslingers. Point defense and Ivashkin's gunboats killed most of them, but TFNS Corby and Musashi were blasted apart, and then there was only Concorde.
Melanie Soo wept openly as the savagely wounded flagship charged single-handed into the tempest of missile fire which had killed all of her consorts. Half a dozen Bug starships had been destroyed or crippled, as well, but eight remained, pouring their fire into her broken, staggering hull, and still she came on, with nine human-crewed gunboats trailing in her wake. Nine gunboats the Bug gunners had completely ignored to concentrate upon the battlecruisers because they knew Allied gunboats didn't suicide.
But this time they were wrong. Lieutenant Ivashkin's gunboats went suddenly to full power, screaming past Concorde, hurling themselves bodily upon their targets. Eight of them broke through the last-second defensive fire of their targets, smashing squarely into their foes and taking the Bug battlecruisers with them in dreadful, antimatter pyres.
And as the other, fleeing units of Survey Flotilla 62 watched, TFNS Concorde followed them. Half her engine rooms were already gone, only two of her launchers remained in action. God alone knew how anyone could live or fight aboard that broken, dying ship, but somehow they did, and George Snyder closed his eyes in anguish as the flagship's icon met the last undamaged Antelope head-on and her exploding magazines wiped them both from the universe.
CHAPTER TEN: The Vengeance of Clan Prescott
"Attention on deck!"
The officers who filled TFNS Irena Riva y Silva's flag briefing room rose as Raymond Prescott-now Fleet Admiral Prescott, commanding Seventh Fleet-entered. The humans among them may have risen even faster than the others.
Not that the Gorm and Ophiuchi were tardy, by any means. And the Orions were even less so. They'd been vehement in their rejection of the idea that anyone else might command the fleet that would avenge his brother. They understood.
Indeed, they understood better than Prescott's own species . . . which was why the humans, including his own staffers who'd known him for years, came to attention like cadets in the presence of something that was changed, and cold, and more than a little frightening.
It wasn't that Prescott was outwardly different-at least not much. His hair was uniformly iron-gray now, and close inspection of his face revealed lines and creases that were more deeply graven, as though his features had settled under the weight of a grief he'd never vented aloud. He and Andrew had been very close, for all the age difference between them-twenty years was exceptional spacing, even for parents who'd both had access to the antigerone treatments-and many had expected the news from what was now being called the Prescott Chain to break him.
It hadn't.
A standard year and a half had passed since he and Zhaarnak had launched their abortive "April Fool" attack on Home Hive Three in 2365. After that, they'd settled into a routine of cautious probing, varied by occasional Bug gunboat raids. Zephrain was no different from Justin in that regard, and just as Fifth Fleet in Justin, Sixth Fleet's massive fighter patrols in Zephrain had burned any intruding gunboat instantly out of the continuum. Prescott and Zhaarnak had replied to the raids with SBMHAWK bombardments of the orbital fortresses on the Bugs' end of the warp connection, aware even as they did so that some of their firepower was almost certainly being wasted on electronic mirages. They would have been aware of that even if Vice Admiral Terence Mukerji, for whom Prescott had been forced to create a staff position ("governmental liaison," which at least sounded better than "commissar") hadn't repeatedly pointed it out from behind the shelter of his unassailable political protection.
Then, after more than a year of stalemate, had come the news that had electrified the Grand Alliance: a second El Dorado had been found! No one even claimed to have been present when Raymond Prescott received that news-or the other, personal, news which had accompanied it. Zhaarnak had arranged matters so that he would read that portion of the report in private. After he'd emerged from that enforced seclusion, the respect, admiration, and, yes, love that his human subordinates had always felt for him had been joined by something else: fear.
Not that his customary affable courtesy and sensitive consideration were gone. Not at all. But behind them was something new. Or maybe something was missing. It was hard to tell which . . . and that may have been the most frightening thing all.
The new monitors were finally coming into service, and SF 62's tidings had caused a radical rethinking of their deployment. Instead of being sent to Zephrain, or to Murakuma's fleet, they would form the core of a new offensive formation, to be designated Seventh Fleet. Rather than battering their way through long-established and well-prepared Bug defenses at known points of contact, they would carry the war to the Bugs through the doorway Andrew Prescott had died to open. And Kthaara'zarthan had surprised some humans by refusing to even consider the notion that one of his own race might command that Fleet.