“It better not,” Coglin growled. “It’s a hell of a long walk home.” He glared at his display and bared his teeth. So Commander Harrington wanted to show him a few surprises, did she? Well, he had one for her, as well.

“Go to rapid fire on all after tubes,” he said coldly.

· · • · ·

“A hit, Ma’am!” Cardones crowed. The gush of escaping air was clear to his sensors, like blood on a wounded animal’s flank, and a soft sound of approval rippled across the bridge.

Honor didn’t share it. She was watching her other sensors, and there was no change in Sirius’s energy profile. She understood Cardones’s jubilation perfectly—a similar hit on Fearless would have inflicted serious damage—but he’d forgotten how big Sirius was. She could suck up far more destruction than Fearless could, and—

The tactical display blinked, and Honor inhaled sharply. Sirius was no longer firing salvos of two missiles each; she was firing six at a time.

The two ships charged onward, and Fearless writhed from side to side under her opponent’s steady pounding. Honor felt sweat trickle down her temple and wiped it irritably away, hoping no one had noticed it. She was losing a tiny fraction of her effective acceleration advantage, yet she had no choice; the shallow S-turns she’d added to Killian’s wild, erratic rolls weren’t much, but she’d lost another decoy. She had only one spare left, now, and the hail of missiles sleeting at her from Sirius was inconceivable. A regular capital ship might have fired more in a single salvo, but no warship—not even a superdreadnought—boasted the magazine capacity to keep up such density for so long! She herself was able to fire little more than one salvo a minute; for every missile she sent after Sirius, the Q-ship sent twelve back into her teeth.

Sweat plastered Cardones’s hair to his scalp, and McKeon’s face was etched with strain as the two of them battled against that incredible weight of fire and tried to strike back. They were outclassed. She knew it, and every one of her officers knew it as well, but she no longer even thought of breaking off. She had to stop that ship, and somehow—

Fearless lurched. The entire ship bucked like a terrified thing, alarms howled, and Killian’s head jerked up.

“Forward impellers down!” he barked.

Dominica Santos’s face went white in Central Damage Control as the focused blast of X rays slashed into Fearless’s bows. Alarms shrieked at her, screaming like damned souls until Lieutenant Manning stabbed the button that killed them.

“Forward hold open to space. Mooring Tractor One’s gone. Heavy casualties in Fusion One,” Manning snapped. “Oh, Jesus! We’ve lost Alpha Two, Ma’am!”

“Shit!” Santos pounded on her keyboard, querying the central computers, and swore again as a scarlet-daubed schematic of the forward impeller nodes flashed before her. She studied the damage for just a moment, dark eyes bitter, then hit her intercom key.

“Bridge. Captain,” a cool soprano, barely frayed about the edges, said in her ear.