Unless… Unless he’d hurt her even worse than he knew? Maybe that was why she was still charging straight up his wake. Could his hits have gone in further aft than he’d thought? Been spread over a wider area and wrecked her broadside armament or fire control? It was a possibility. Perhaps even a probability, given the way her forward fire had dropped. If she hadn’t lost most of her broadside firepower, then she damned well ought to be using it instead of lunging doggedly forward through his missiles like a punch-drunk fighter while he pounded her!

And if that was true, then he might—

Sirius heaved like a shipwrecked galleon.

· · • · ·

“Yes!” Rafael Cardones screamed, and Honor felt her own heart leap as the savage boil of light erupted just off the Q-ship’s starboard quarter.

“Heavy damage aft. Fourteen dead in Missile Two-Five. No contact at all with Two-Four or Two-Six. Sir, we’ve lost a beta node; our acceleration is dropping.”

Lieutenant Commander Jamal was white-faced, his voice flat with a strained, unnatural calm, and Coglin stared at him in disbelief. Half their after launchers gone to a single hit? Harrington wasn’t a wizard—she was a goddamned demon!

The two ships raced onward, ripping at one another with thermonuclear fire, shedding debris, streaming atmosphere like trails of blood. The big freighter began to twist and writhe in ever more violent evasion as her tiny, battered foe clung stubbornly to her heels. Sirius was reduced to three-missile salvos, and Fearless was overhauling more and more quickly.

Lieutenant Montoya made himself stand back, shutting his ears to the groans and sobs about him while his sick berth attendants cut Lieutenant Webster out of his suit. He couldn’t look at the mass of wounded. The hatch was locked open, and burned and broken bodies spilled out of his cramped sickbay’s bunks. They were lying in the passages now, covering the decks, and more and more of them were unprotected even by the transparent tents of emergency environmental slips. His mind shuddered away from the thought of what would happen if sickbay lost pressure now, and he stepped closer to the table as Webster’s suit was stripped away. One of his assistants ran a sterilizer/depilator over the lieutenant’s chest while the other looked up from her monitors to meet Montoya’s eyes.

“Not good, Sir. We’ve got at least two ribs in his left lung. It’s completely collapsed, and it looks like we may have splinter damage to his heart, too.”

Montoya nodded grimly and reached for a scalpel.

“All right—heave!”

Sally MacBride bent her own back to the struggle, and the seventy-ton missile floated across the passage. The overhead tractor rails were out, and the passage was open to space. Her vac-suited people grunted and strained, manhandling the ten-meter-long projectile, leaning their weight desperately against it to point it down the shaft to Missile Two’s magazine. The counter-grav collars reduced its weight to zero, but they couldn’t do anything about momentum and inertia.