Nor had the SD(P)s been his only fatalities. Five more superdreadnoughts had been destroyed or so badly damaged that he’d had no option but to leave them behind while his survivors continued to run. At least one more had taken critical impeller damage; like the lamed SD(P)s, he’d be forced to leave her behind when he made translation into hyper if she couldn’t get the missing alpha node back. One of his CLACs had also been destroyed, and two more were little more than air-bleeding wrecks, which meant that at least seven hundred of his two thousand LACs were going to have to be written off, whatever happened to the rest of his fleet.

He checked the maneuvering plot again, and his face clenched with pain. He was still two hours from the hyper limit, and if Harrington’s task force had begun losing ground as the geometry of his vector change crabbed away from her, the Graysons were closing in steadily. Not that it mattered. He might be slowly, painfully opening the range from her launchers, but he was still over two light-minutes inside their reach.

At least some of Harrington’s ships had been sufficiently battered to fall astern in the chase, he thought grimly. Some of them, judging from the recon drone’s’ reports, had taken serious damage. Two of her battlecruisers had been completely destroyed, as had at least three destroyers or light cruisers. CIC wasn’t certain which at this range—especially when they hadn’t been targeted in the first place. But MDMs were proving as indiscriminate in their targeting at long-range as Shannon had predicted. Most of them went after their programmed victims; a significant percentage wound up going after whatever targets they could see at the ends of their runs.

Even as he watched his fleet being pounded towards destruction, he felt a fresh flicker of admiration for Shannon and her staff. Second Fleet could not have found itself in a more disastrous tactical situation than trapped between two separate enemy forces with more long-range firepower than it could muster. No tactical doctrine could have nullified those disadvantages, but although Second Fleet’s offensive firepower had been all but destroyed, he was astonished by how many of its ships still survived. They could no longer realistically hope to damage the enemy, but as long as they held together, they could continue to defend one another against the storm of destruction beating upon them. And if his single remaining SD(P) was running low on ammunition, then surely Harrington’s SD(P)s had to be doing the same thing. Maybe he could outlast her firepower after all.

· · • · ·

“Our magazines are down to twenty percent,” Alistair McKeon told Honor from her com screen. His face was grim, and Honor knew from the sidebars in her plot that Troubadour had taken serious damage and heavy casualties. But McKeon’s flagship was still in action, still rolling pods, and whatever had happened to Honor’s command, what had happened to the Havenites was worse.