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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

TFNS Aurora

Bellerophon System

Free Worlds Alliance

January 12, 2553


“I’m afraid the repair drones confirm Josephine’s estimate, Ma’am.” Captain Mariaxuri Errezola’s expression was grim on Lauren Carson’s display. “The fan’s completely shot. Nothing left to repair, really.”

“I wish that was a surprise,” Carson said bleakly.

She’d wanted to hope Commander Josephine DuPont, Aurora’s chief engineer, had been overly pessimistic in her initial estimate, but she’d known better. Which didn’t make the confirmation one bit better now that it was here.

She was as shaken by the carnage as anyone else, although at least she and her people had had more warning of what was coming than the poor bastards on the other side could have had. And she already knew what kind of nightmare fodder the deaths of so many people had laid up for her. And how much more fodder was waiting to happen on Odysseus as a consequence of her failure.

She only had to remember Inverness to know that. But it was still her job to decide what to do next.

God help her.

One thing she didn’t have to decide was what to do with Aurora. At this velocity, with her fan destroyed, she was just as much a write-off as Enlil, Perseus, Hermes, Khandoba, or Ninurta. She’d taken less substabtially less hull damage than any of them had—Pascual Aguayo’s Khandoba had actually blown up with all hands, and Enlil had broken her back and shattered into three separate, jagged chunks of wreckage—but that didn’t matter, because she was too enormous to dock on anyone’s parasite racks, and not even one of the TFN’s huge FTL repair ships was capable of a complete fan replacement. So there was no way to recover her to a dockyard, and no way to repair her without one. She still had power—and probably enough life support to keep all of Carson’s surviving people alive—but she could never take them home again. Ultimately, the only option would be to pull her people off and abandon ship.

But that presupposed there was somewhere to pull them off to, didn’t it?

“All right, Mariaxuri,” she said. “Go take care of your people.” She smiled thinly. “Looks like we’ll be waiting a while for a ride.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

The display blanked, and Carson looked at her comm officer.

“Captain Rodoulis, Gaston,” she said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Pasteur replied, and Carson scrubbed her face with both hands while she waited.

You blew it, a merciless voice said in the depths of her brain. You fucked up by the numbers. Idiot!

She lowered her hands and glanced at the master plot.

Despite the damage Aurora had taken, her deeply buried, massively protected flag deck, bridge, and combat information center were as untouched and quiet as they’d ever been, and the air circulating about Carson was as fresh as it ever was. The stink of terror and despair wasn’t a physical thing, after all.

The carrier’s sensor arrays had been brutally hammered, and most of them were down, but she still had her datalinks to her surviving parasites, and their sensors—and the Heimdallars she’d deployed—still drove her displays.

The displays that showed the second federal task force.The one busily shifting vector to avoid what was left of the Bellerophon System Navy.

And there wasn’t one damned thing she could do about it.

“Captain Rodoulis, Ma’am,” Pasteur said, and she turned back to the comm as Achilleas Rodoulis appeared upon it.

“Commodore,” he said. His expression was as grim as Carson felt, but his voice sounded almost—almost—normal.

“Achilleas,” she replied. “How bad is it over there?”

“Not good, and that’s a fact.” His voice had gone deeper, harder. “Unlike Aurora, our fan’s in good shape. Didn’t take a hit. But we’re down to Number Two and Number Four racks.”

Carson grimaced. That was even worse than she’d feared. With only two racks, Freyr could embark a grand and glorious total of four parasites, and even four battleships would be spit on a griddle against the task force still headed for Odysseus.

“Mariaxuri says we still have three over here,” she said. “Michael’s coordinating search and rescue, and we’re pretty sure we have enough life support to handle everyone. Everyone who’s left, anyway.” Her lips twisted, but she made herself go on levelly. “He’s prioritizing to get the ships with the most WIA into a docking queue that gets their worst-hurt people into our sick bay.”

“Good,” Rodoulis said. “That’s good.”

“For certain pretty piss-poor definitions of ‘good,’ maybe,” Carson said bitterly. “And it’s the only damned ‘good’ thing we’ve got. I blew it, Achilleas.” She shook her head and looked away, eyes burning. “I blew it!”

“Bullshit!”

The snapped word jerked her back to the comm, and Rodoulis glared at her.

“Every single one of us agreed with you, Lauren,” he said then, flatly. “Every. Single. One. And we kicked the ever-living hell out of the bastards! If they hadn’t seen us coming—and it’s obvious they didn’t see us until the very last minute—we’d have caught them with their parasites on the racks and they’d have been dead meat. Hell, they were dead meat! These other bastards—” he jerked his head to the side, obviously indicating his own tactical plot “—wouldn’t have had a prayer against us after that!”

“I should’ve remembered Murphy’s law,” she said. “What could go wrong damned well did go wrong. I should’ve remembered it could and not put everything on one roll of the dice!”

“Without knowing how big a fleet they were sending?” Rodoulis shook his head. “You had one shot, Lauren—one. And to make it count, you had to get them into range of the Casúrs. Sure, you could have deployed them from farther out, but how the hell were you going to hide that many thousands of Hauptman signatures from them? Keep them from deploying all their parasites? Or just changing vector and out-accelerating the best the pods could do? You had to get in close, and you did, and it worked. Even with whatever went wrong, whatever fluke let them spot us, however badly we got hurt, it worked.”

“Not against their trailers,” Carson said harshly.

“You couldn’t know they were going to do that.”

“But I should have anticipated they might. And when I realized there were only twelve carriers coming at us, I should’ve held back some of the Casúrs. If I’d held just four cargo pods, Freyr could still—”

“Oh, stop it!” Rodoulis shook his head again, harder. “I know you’re looking for clubs to beat yourself with—don’t think I’m not doing the same thing! But just what sort of godlike power of precognition was supposed to tell you that? And if it did, was it also going to tell you which of forty parasite racks to put them on so they wouldn’t get destroyed? It’s done, Lauren, and you did the best anyone could possibly have done under the circumstances.”

“But they’re getting through, Achilleas,” she half whispered. “They’re getting through to Odysseus, and there’s nothing—nothing—we can do about it.”

“Nothing except pray whoever Governor Murphy sends gets here quickly,” Rodoulis said.

It was odd, she thought. It was his star system she’d failed to defend, but he was actually trying to comfort her. And as he looked out of her comm display, his brown eyes hardened and he bared his teeth.

“Trust me,” he said flatly. “It’s going to be ugly—I know that, and I know I can’t begin to imagine how ugly, however hard I try—but my homeworld is tough. It’ll survive until Murphy’s detachment gets here. And after what we did—what you did—to these bastards’ main force, they are toast when it does.”



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