“Up… to you,” she whispered, her eyes burning into his with the fiery power of a soul consuming itself in the face of approaching death. “Get—” She paused, fighting for breath. “Get my people… out. Trust… you, Oli—”

Her breathing stopped, and Oliver Diamato stared helplessly into the eyes which had suddenly ceased to burn. But something had happened to him, as if in the moment of Joanne Hall’s death, the spark had leapt from her soul into his, and his nostrils flared as he drew a deep breath and laid her gently down.

Then he rose and crossed almost calmly to his panel. Half his starboard energy weapons were gone, he noted, and most of the other half were in local control. But that meant half of them remained, with on-mount crews to fire them, and he bared his teeth as his gloved fingers flew. There was no time to set it up with proper double-checks, and his internal data transmission links had taken too much damage for him to rely on computer target designation. He was going to have to do this the hard way—the deep-space equivalent of shooting from the hip—but his eyes were cold and very still.

There, he thought. Those two.

He laid the sighting circles by eye, hit the override button that stripped the targeting lidar away from the central computer’s command, and painted his chosen targets for his energy battery crews’ on-mount sensors. Green lights blinked—he couldn’t tell exactly how many—as at least some of his crews picked up the designator codes and locked onto them. However many it was, it would have to do.

See you in hell, Manty! he thought viciously, and pressed the fire key.

A fraction of a second later, LAC 01-001, call-sign Harpy, exploded in an eye-wrenching flash as Oliver Diamato’s crews sent two capital ship grasers cleanly through her bow wall.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“CITIZEN Admiral Kellet should be hitting Hancock about now, and Citizen Admiral Shalus should already have hit Seaford Nine,” Citizen Commissioner Honeker observed. Tourville nodded but said nothing. Of course, Honeker hadn’t really expected him to reply. The people’s commissioner was just making conversation while he tried to ignore the worm of tension which had to be eating at his own belly.

“Twelve minutes to translation, Citizen Admiral.” Citizen Commander Lowe sounded as professional as ever, but there was a certain undeniable edge even in her voice.

“Thank you, Karen.” Tourville made his tone as calm and confident as possible. It wasn’t much, but when it came right down to it, that was about all any admiral could really do at a time like this.

Rear Admiral of the Green Michael Tennard bounded out of the flag deck lift still sealing his skinsuit. Alarms blared throughout the eight-and-a-half-million-ton hull of his flagship, and he swore vilely as he saw the master plot.

Fifty-plus bogies were scorching in towards Zanzibar. Their velocity was already close to fifteen thousand KPS, and it was climbing at a steady four hundred and fifty gravities. That acceleration meant the intruders couldn’t have anything heavier than a battleship, but he had only his own six ships of the wall, six RMN battlecruisers, and a handful of cruisers, destroyers, and obsolete LACs of the Zanzibar Navy to stop them.