“Inform the Citizen Rear Admiral that Citizen Admiral Kellet is… unavailable, Citizen Lieutenant,” he said flatly. “Tell him—” He paused, thinking hard, then nodded once. “Tell him our com systems are badly damaged and we need to keep our remaining channels clear.”

“Aye, Sir,” the Citizen Lieutenant said in a tiny voice, and Hall turned back to her plot.

· · • · ·

“All right!”

Michael Gearman heard Ensign Thomas’ cry of delight as Harpy and the rest of Gold Section concentrated the fire of their grasers on one of the Peep cripples. The battlecruiser-weight weapons blasted through armor and structural members like battleaxes, and their target heaved, belching atmosphere and debris and bodies. Gearman shared Thomas’ exultation, but he remembered another battle, another ship—this one a superdreadnought—heaving as she was battered to wreckage and her people were slaughtered… or maimed. His hand went to the thigh of his regenerated leg, and even in the heart of his own battle fury, his lips murmured a silent prayer for their victims.

“We’ve drawn out of range of their superdreadnoughts, Ma’am,” Diamato reported hoarsely.

“Understood.” Hall nodded. Yes, they’d left the ships of the wall behind, but not before their fire, coupled with those incredible missiles coming in from the lone dreadnought so far astern of her—and, of course, the LACs—had killed another four battleships. That made nine gone out of thirty-three, with all of the survivors damaged. All the tin cans were gone, as well, and only two heavy cruisers remained to her, both badly damaged.

Which means I have no screen at all, she thought coldly as the LACs raced back up on her flanks like shoals of sharks. She had a count on them now, and her people had managed to destroy sixteen of them outright and drive another five off with damage. But that left seventy-five, and their acceleration was incredible. The bastards were hitting her with what was obviously a well-thought-out maneuver; charging up on TF 12.3’s flanks, taking their licks from her missiles—which were far less effective than they ought to be—until they reached their attack points, and then slashing in in coordinated runs from both sides. They were scissoring through her formation, firing as they came, and the damage they were doing was immense.

But they lost ground and velocity on her each time they crossed her base course. For some reason, they appeared to completely stop accelerating each time they turned in for a firing pass, but they were turning out over six hundred and thirty gravities of acceleration before they turned in, and they snapped right back up to it as they turned back to parallel her course once more at the end of each pass. Which meant they had more than enough maneuvering advantage to continue battering away at her remaining twenty-six ships all the way to the hyper limit.

Which meant the only way out was going to be through them.

“All right,” Jackie Harmon told her squadron and section commanders. Her voice was still relaxed, almost drawling, but her face was taut. She’d lost three more LACs, two of them on cowboy solo attacks they should never have attempted, on the last firing run. She was down to seventy-two effectives now, and she tried not to think of all the people who had died aboard the LACs she no longer had. “Admiral Truitt’s lost the range, so it’s all up to us, now. I want full squadron attacks—no more individual horse shit, here, people, or I will provide some unfortunate souls with new anal orifices!” She paused a moment to be sure it had sunk in, then nodded. “Good! Ensign Thomas will designate targets for the next attack run.”