It took only seconds, and when it was over, two more Peep SDs had been destroyed. At least three more were severely damaged… and every single ship of Vice Admiral Silas Markham’s task group had been obliterated.

A spreading lacework of life pods beaded the display, Manticoran and Havenite alike. The pattern they made was less dense than the missile storms had been, and here and there one winked out as battle-damaged life-support systems or transponders failed. White Haven’s lips worked as if to spit, but then he wrenched his eyes away from the secondary plot as the first Manticoran superdreadnought of Eighth Fleet came out of the Junction behind him. He darted a bitter, hating look at the dreadnoughts and battleships accelerating steadily towards him, and his face was hard.

“Our turn now, you bastards,” he murmured to himself, so softly no one else ever heard at all, and beckoned Commander Haggerston over beside him.

Javier Giscard handed the memo board back to the skinsuited yeoman. The hammering Salamis had taken in the last few seconds of the engagement made him wonder if the Manties had somehow deduced that she was the task group flagship, but it turned out that Citizen Captain Short had had good reason to feel confident about the quality of her techs back in Secour. Giscard intended to have a little talk with her, find out just how she’d managed to pull the strings to get her hands on a fully qualified engineering department in the present day People’s Navy, but for now it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that, according to the report he’d just been handed, Salamis would have all of her alpha nodes back within twenty-five minutes. That was good. In fact, it was outstanding, for it meant his flagship—unlike her consort Guichen—would be able to withdraw if that became necessary.

He sighed and lowered himself into his command chair, then raised a hand at Julia Lapisch. The com officer looked up, then trotted over to him.

“Yes, Citizen Admiral?” she asked. That withdrawn, disconnected edge remained somewhere inside her, but her gray-green eyes glowed with a sort of dark fire. Giscard wasn’t certain what that meant. It was almost as if in the last few minutes she had seen something more terrifying than even StateSec could be, a threat which had put the relative threat of the SS into a different perspective in her mind. Or it could simply be that she had just discovered that, as someone on Old Earth had once put it, “Nothing in the world is so exhilarating as to be shot at… and missed.”

“Are you ready to transmit?” he asked her now, and she nodded.

“Yes, Citizen Admiral.”

“Then do so,” he instructed, and she nodded again and headed back towards her console, right hand above her head while she whirled her index finger in a “crank it up” signal to her assistants.

Giscard leaned back in his chair and rubbed his closed eyes. His ships had been decelerating from the moment they opened fire on the Manties, and they were still decelerating hard. But their base velocity was too high to kill. He was going to slide right past Medusa, and all he could do was slow it down, stretch the pass out a bit… and give the Manties a little longer to evacuate their orbital installations.