Michael Tennard knew that. He admitted it to himself, draining the bitter cup of his own assumptions as he watched a corona of fire envelop his lead superdreadnought. It flashed back along his formation, reaching for his flagship like some monstrous dragon from Old Earth’s legends, and then there was only the terrible, unending, world-shattering succession of blows as laser after laser blasted into his flagship. He clung to the master plot, fighting to stay on his feet, watching the lights flicker, the dust filter from the overhead, and then there was a final, smashing concussion and a brilliant flash of light… and darkness.

· · • · ·

“My God,” Yuri Bogdanovich muttered. “It’s like Adler all over again!”

“Not quite, Yuri,” Tourville said grimly, looking at the icons of his dead and wounded ships. Three of the twenty battleships he’d taken into the final exchange had suffered severe damage. All told, the enemy had put twenty-nine percent of his wall out of action… but they’d completely ignored his battlecruisers to do it. Now those ships joined their fire with that of the remaining seventeen battleships, battering the Manty battlecruisers into wreckage one by one with merciless concentration. Here and there a Manticoran missile still got through to wreak more damage, but there weren’t enough of them… and there were still fewer in each successive salvo as Shannon Foraker’s precise fire demolished the enemy launch platforms in ruthless succession.

Nausea stirred in Tourville’s belly as he looked out at the spreading patterns of wreckage, the life pods and unidentifiable debris which had once been megaton ships of the wall, each with a crew of over five thousand, and wondered how many of them had survived.

Not many, he thought. No, not many at all. And what the hell am I thinking of? Would I rather it was my people who’d died out there in such numbers? Hell, I have lost eight or nine thousand of my own! I should be glad the bastards who killed them are dead.

But he wasn’t. Proud of his own people, yes, and grimly determined to carry through with the job for which so many had paid so much. But no one could look at that display and count all those dead and be glad. Or not anyone Lester Tourville ever wanted to know, at any rate.

He shook himself as the last Manticoran battlecruiser blew apart. The surviving cruisers and destroyers and LACs kept boring in, trying to get to energy range with utter gallantry and total despair, and he turned away, unable to watch their dying.

“Put us on course for Zanzibar again, Karen,” he told his astrogator quietly, and looked at Shannon Foraker.

“Start calculating your fire patterns, Shannon,” he said. “I hope to God they’re smart enough to surrender, and if they are, I’ll give them up to twelve hours to evacuate their orbital installations before we take them out. But I don’t intend to spend much time discussing it with them.” He produced a wintry smile. “If this can’t convince them to accept sanity, then nothing I can say will, now will it?”