Coglin swore viciously. With two beta nodes gone, his maximum acceleration was going to be reduced by over nine percent—he’d be lucky to pull three hundred and eighty gees. He still had his alpha nodes, which meant he still had Warshawski capability, but how long was that going to last? Especially with half his last-ditch laser clusters gone?

“Missile fire control?” he demanded harshly.

“Still functional. And my ECM suite’s still up—for what it’s worth,” Jamal added bitterly.

“Range?”

“Coming up on one-point-five million kilometers, Sir.”

Coglin nodded to himself, his eyes bitter. With the open front of Fearless’s wedge toward him and no sidewalls to interdict, effective laser range was right on a million kilometers, but he’d lost one of his own spinal lasers, and the back of his wedge was as open as the front of the cruiser’s. If Fearless got into energy range…

Energy range, hell! His point defense was down to less than half efficiency! If Harrington realized it, turned and hit him with a multiple-missile salvo—

He bit off another curse. This couldn’t be happening to him! It wasn’t possible for a single, over-aged, under-sized light cruiser to do this to him!

“I think he’s in trouble, Guns,” Honor said, staring at the readouts from her ECM suite’s passive sensors. “I think you just took out most of his missile tracking capability.”

“I hope so, Skipper,” Cardones said hoarsely, “because I’m down to just three more birds, and—”

“Got it!” Santos shouted as she bridged the last circuit and started to slide out from under the console. Now all she had to do was cut the fuel feed and—

Fearless twisted and leapt. The savage motion picked the engineer up and smashed her down. The side of her helmet crashed against the deck, and she grunted in shock, stunned for just an instant.

It was an instant she didn’t have. She blinked back into focus, and her mouth went desert dry. She couldn’t hear the alarm in Fusion One’s vacuum, but she could see the numbers flashing blood-red on the panel. The mag bottle was going, counting down with lightning speed, and there was no longer time to kill the plasma flow.

She rolled across the deck, trying not to think, knowing what she had to do, and drove her hand toward the scarlet bulkhead switch.

“Jesus Christ, we got her!” Jamal screamed. “We nailed the bitch!”

· · • · ·

The emergency jettisoning charges hurled the entire side of Fusion One out into space a microsecond before the ejection charges blew the reactor after it. There had to be a delay, be it ever so tiny, lest a faltering mag bottle be smashed against an intact bulkhead and liberate its plasma inside the ship. But small as that delay was, it was almost too long.

Dominica Santos, Allen Manning, and Angela Earnhardt died instantly. The dying containment field failed completely just as the reactor housing blew through the opening, and the terrible fury of a star’s heart erupted back into the compartment as well as out. Fusion One vanished, along with seven hundred square meters of Fearless’s outer hull, Missile Two, Laser Three, Point Defense One, Rad Shield One, all of her forward fire control sensors, and her forward port sidewall generators, and forty-two of Fearless’s surviving crewmen died with them. A streamer of pure energy gushed out of the dreadful wound, and the light cruiser heaved bodily up to starboard in maddened response.