Engineering reported that the ablated shields could be reset when they’d rerouted some damaged cable. Fifteen to twenty minutes . . . if they had fifteen minutes. Heris forbore to hurry them; it would take as long as it took. She checked again with sickbay: most of the casualties were dead, as expected, but there were eighteen listed as serious, and another five as moderate, out of duty for at least twenty-four hours.
Three to two now. If her two ships had been undamaged, if they had had plenty of weapons left—but Paradox, though undamaged, had run out of missiles, and its LOS beams were discharged. In another five or six hours—hours they didn’t have—it could support her with beam weapons. Now, though—an undamaged cruiser a third again the size of hers stalked her. Encumbered as it was with a crippled assault carrier it must shelter, how would it choose to fight? The other assault carrier still had more firepower than Vigilance, but it was far less maneuverable.
“There’s something jumping in,” Koutsoudas reported. “Something big—lots—DAMN!”
Heris said nothing. She couldn’t help whatever it was, and snapping at ’Steban wouldn’t get her the data any faster.
“And skip-jumping. They know exactly what they’re coming into.” Which meant the Benignity, probably. She had small hope that her own message, sent on the station’s equipment, had gotten through.
“It’s Despite,” Koutsoudas said. He didn’t sound as if he believed it. Heris certainly didn’t. Hearne changed her mind? Hearne led the Benignity fleet in herself? With Hearne, it could be either. Koutsoudas leaned over his screen as if that would help. “The distant ones—it’ll be hours before I can get an ID, unless they skip their way into closer range.”
“And here’s the other cruiser,” said another scan tech. “Paganini, their admiral’s flagship.”
“Well,” said Heris, “I suppose it’s time to face that music.” A moment of blank silence, then a groan from half the bridge crew; she grinned at them.
“That patrol craft has quit attacking,” the captain pointed out. Admiral Straosi grunted. That patrol craft had almost hulled an assault carrier by itself, and that should not have been possible. If only the damn things weren’t so maneuverable.
“What about the others?”
“There’s a big cargo vessel moving very slowly in from the gas giant—it could even be an ore-hauler with no communications capacity, possibly unmanned. It’s no threat. The cruiser’s damaged; Dylan and Augustus have it bracketed and it won’t last long—”
“Sir—” A scan tech, his face paper white. “It’s Dylan—it’s gone!”
“Nonsense.”
“It is—and that damnable Serrano is still there.”
Straosi’s blood seemed to take fire. The bitch had ruined his attack, and his career. The Benignity would have not only his neck, but his family’s fortune. “Enough!” he roared. “First we kill that patrol—we show her! Then her. All ships—” The assault carriers could keep her busy while he blew the patrol ship, and then—then all three of them would blast that stupid, stubborn woman right out of this world.
Jig Esmay Suiza had survived the battle for control of Despite, and after Major Dovir finally died, she ranked all the others—the small band of ensigns and junior lieutenants who had been the nucleus of the loyalists. Now she faced the grizzled, balding senior NCO, Master Chief Vesec, who had just called her “Captain” and asked for orders.
She managed not to say, “Me?” and instead said, “Dovir’s dead, then?”
“Yes, Captain Suiza.” There had been a time when she dreamed of hearing that . . . of coming aboard her first command, of being congratulated. Now she stared back, her mind foggy with fatigue. Vesec stood in front of her, a stocky man her father’s age, with her father’s air of impatience with youthful indecision. She was captain. She had to know what to do. She wanted to burst into tears. She didn’t.
“Position?” she heard herself ask, in a voice steadier than it had been five minutes before.
“Three minutes from FTL exit through jump point Balrog.” That didn’t give her much time.
“Balrog has a Fleet relay,” she said.
“Yes, sir. Also there’s usually a manned station.” A wave of relief washed over her. Help. Someone senior who would tell her what to do.
“We’ll drop a packet,” she said.
“If the captain permits—” he said.
“Yes?”
“It might be wise to take precautions. Sometimes when the Benignity attacks, they’ve mined nearby jump points.”
She hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t known about that. “And what would Captain—what’s a good way of being careful?” Graceless, but the sense got across. He rewarded her with a careful smile.
“Low relative vee insertion. Shields hot as we come out. Wait for scans to recover.”
“Very well,” she said. “Then make it so.”
“Yes, sir.” A ghost of a twinkle as he turned away. She saw covert glances from others on the bridge. Peli, only six months junior, who had proved more than once he was better at things than she was. He stared at her, then his lips moved. She read them easily. Oh—yes. The captain’s formal announcement of command. She moved over to the command position and picked up the command wand Dovir had given her after he was shot. She couldn’t sit—the command chair still stank of blood and guts—and she had to lean down to insert it in the slot.
“Attention all posts.” They had had to memorize this, back in the Academy, and she remembered saying it to the mirror, to her roomies, to the shower wall. “This is Lieutenant Junior Grade Esmay Suiza, assuming command of the patrol craft Despite, upon the deaths of all officers senior in the chain of command.” She had never commanded anything bigger than a training shuttle, and now—she wouldn’t think of it. The computer requested her serial number; she gave it automatically. Then it was over, and she was formally and finally in command. Her vision wavered.
Peli came closer. “Captain,” he said formally. The challenge she usually saw in his eyes was missing. “Captain, we’re not going back, are we?”
“Back?” She hadn’t thought that far; it had been Dovir’s decision to run for help, to call in Fleet. Now it was hers; she shook her head. “We’re coming out of jump to make our report, Peli. What we do next depends on what we find.”
Jump exit brought a ripple of light to the blanked scan screens. Gradually, the ripples steadied, and became points of light, icons tagged with ID numbers, colored lines defining traffic lanes in the Balrog system. Debris sparkled in a ragged shell around the jump point.
“Debris,” Master Chief Vesec confirmed her guess. “One thing about it, whoever got blown took most of the mines with him.” Esmay felt cold. That could have been their ship, coming out of jump with high vee, fleeing trouble.
“The Fleet picket?” she asked. None of the icons showed a Fleet ID; she could see that for herself. All were far away, days or weeks of travel at normal insystem velocities, and all were civilian.
“We’ll hope not,” Vesec said.
“Launch that packet,” Esmay said, as steadily as she could. “Estimate time to a Fleet node with live pickup.”
“Three or four days, sir.” Add to that the response time, and it meant that those two ships back at Xavier would be sparkling debris in someone else’s scan by the time help arrived. The juniors had discussed that, in the hours before someone appeared to offer them a place in the mutiny.