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  But possible outcomes which might have occurred under other circumstances had no bearing on the immediate tactical situation, he reminded himself.

  "Prepare to attack," he said flatly.

  * * *

  Until the last fifteen minutes, Maneka's understanding of just how much that handicapped Lieutenant Chin had been purely intellectual and theoretical. Now she felt a deep pang of sympathy for the other human as, for the first time, she personally experienced the reality of the Dinochrome Brigade's Total Systems Data-Sharing net.

  The two Bolos were as intimately fused as she and Lazarus, and as part of Maneka/Lazarus she came to know Mickey far better, in the space of a handful of seconds, than Chin would ever be able to know him. She was a part of him as they conferred, organizing a last-ditch defense of the convoy with smooth, unpanicked efficiency and speed.

  Working from Maneka/Lazarus' initial detection of the single Melconian cruiser, they had reached out through both Bolos' remote passive sensors and confirmed that at least three enemy vessels were working their way into attack position. Clearly, the Melconian squadron commander had intended to use the bulk of his force as bait, to draw Commodore Lakshmaniah out of position while he slipped his assassin's dagger into the convoy's back.

  Analysis of the forces Lakshmaniah had engaged, compared to a normal Melconian raiding squadron's order of battle, suggested that that dagger's maximum strength ought to be two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and one destroyer.

  In a standup fight, either of the two Bolos was more than a match for both of the lighter units, and either of them could probably have defeated the heavy cruisers, as well. The part of Maneka/Lazarus who had ridden Benjy's command deck at Chartres had no doubt of that. Unfortunately, the Bolos were dependent upon the transports whose hard points they rode, and those transports most emphatically were not the equal of any warship in space. They were effectively unarmed, with only the most rudimentary passive defenses. Their assault pods, each designed to carry a single Bolo or a full battalion of infantry, plus vehicles, through planetary defenses for opposed landings, had powerful normal-space drives and battle screen heavier than most heavy cruisers, but were completely incapable of independent FTL flight. The pods were also totally unarmed; if an assault pod required offensive firepower and sophisticated EW, it was normally provided by the Bolo it was transporting.

  If the transports were destroyed, the pods would drop instantly out of hyper, assuming they survived their motherships' destruction. And the chance of a Bolo's surviving the destruction of its assault pod in space was virtually nil. They could expand their own battle screen and the pods' screens to provide the transports some protection, but the instant they activated any battle screen at all, they would reveal their presence to the enemy. The Melconians might not immediately realize they faced Bolos, but they would certainly recognize that the Sleipners were not the unarmed freighters they had clearly assumed them to be. When they did, they would undoubtedly withdraw beyond effective energy range and use their missile tubes.

  A Bolo might be able to protect the ship it actually rode from missile attack, but Bolos were designed for combat at planetary ranges, not in deep space. Their defenses had never been designed to protect a sphere as vast as the one the entire convoy occupied. And their offensive missile armament, although long-ranged by the standards of planetary combat, was not designed to fight battles in deep space. They could not prevent the Melconians from devastating the convoy if the enemy decided to stand off for a missile engagement.

  But no naval commander would use missiles when there was no compelling need to do so. Missiles weren't simply expensive; they were available only in strictly limited numbers. Like an ancient submarine of pre-space Old Earth, a commerce destroyer preying upon unarmed transports and merchant shipping would come in close enough to use his energy weapons, the equivalent of the submarine's deck gun, rather than expend his precious "torpedoes." Especially when he was this far from any source of resupply and had no way of knowing if he would encounter additional hostile warships on his way home.

  Even as the battle plan—such as it was, and what there was of it—came together, a separate part of Maneka's brain wondered whether she should inform Governor Agnelli of what was happening.

  Technically, Agnelli was her superior, but Commodore Lakshmaniah had left Maneka in command, not the Governor. She didn't need him joggling her elbow at a moment like this, and it wasn't as if there would be time for any detailed briefing before the enemy attacked. And as she and her Bolo self conferred with Mickey, she found another reason not to inform Agnelli just yet. She/they couldn't be certain where the Melconians would begin their attack. The enemy ships might come in on vectors which would make it impossible to immediately engage all of them simultaneously, and she/they dared not reveal the Bolos' existence until she/they could engage every Melconian ship in a single firing pass. So if it came down to it, she/they might have to allow the enemy to pick off some of the convoy's defenseless transports without firing a shot in reply.

  Somehow, Maneka rather doubted Governor Agnelli would react well to that decision.

  * * *

  "Now!" Captain Ka-Sharan snapped, and his entire fist turned directly towards the convoy as its targeting systems went active.

  Death Stalker and Battle of Shilzar came in abreast. Against armed opposition, the less powerful

  (and more expendable) destroyer would normally have taken the lead, probing ahead for enemy units. In this case, though, there was no need. The reconnaissance platforms Admiral Na-Izhaaran had sent out after Emperor Ascendant initially detected the glaringly obvious emissions signatures of the transport ships had gotten a detailed count of the convoy's escorts, and every one of them had been destroyed.

  "Sir, we have confirmation on End in Honor's position!" Ha-Yanth announced, and Ka-Sharan showed the tips of his canines in a smile of grim satisfaction as he watched Tactical's fire control crosshairs settle into place across the icons of the first ships he intended to kill.

  * * *

  Maneka/Lazarus watched through the Bolo's sensors as the Melconian warships dropped out of stealth and lashed the unarmed transports with radar and lidar. The composite entity recognized the targeting systems, and the portion of it which was Maneka Trevor felt yet another stab of awe as Lazarus' flashing psychotronic brain analyzed the emissions patterns to predict the Puppies' targeting queue. She'd seen the Bolos' hyper-heuristic modeling capability in action before, but never from the inside. Never as a participant. Now she knew—knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt—exactly what targets the Melconians intended to engage, and in what order. There was no doubt in her mind at all, despite the fact that BattleComp insisted on qualifying with percentage probabilities, all of which were in the ninety-plus percent range. It was as if she had become clairvoyant. As if God Himself had tapped her on the shoulder and told her what was about to happen.

  No wonder the Bolos always seem to know exactly what to do next, a small corner of her/their shared personality which remained entirely hers thought. But most of her attention was on the geometry of the engagement, and she swallowed a bitter mental curse.

  The Puppies' tactical coordination was off. Their active sensors pinned down their positions for Maneka/Lazarus, and it was obvious they'd set up a scissors attack, with two of their ships attacking from one flank while the third attacked from the other. But the two closer ships—a heavy cruiser and a destroyer—had reached attack position before their stealthed consort. They were already sweeping into the attack on Maneka/Lazarus' side of the convoy's formation, but the light cruiser was just far enough outside its own attack range that Mickey was not yet able to engage it.

  "04.75 percent, plus or minus 1.91 percent," the Lazarus component responded before the question was fully formulated. It would have taken priceless minutes for a human to explain the logic upon which that reply rested, but his entire analysis tree flashed through Maneka's merely human brain like lightning.

&n
bsp; And he was right. If the Melconian squadron commander had been willing to detach a second heavy cruiser for this attack, he would have detached its entire fist with it, instead of retaining its consorts with his flagship. Besides, the Puppies were too good at this sort of thing for a heavy cruiser to be so badly out of position that it wouldn't already at least be bringing up its own targeting systems.

  "Chance—" Maneka began a second question.

  "97.62 percent probability destruction Kuan Yin, 96.51 percent probability destruction Keillor's Ferry, 87.63 percent probability destruction Star Conveyor."

  The numbers flickered through her brain like icy thunderbolts, and her heart spasmed in anguish as the Lazarus component provided them. Star Conveyor was one of the colony's industry ships. Her loss would be severely damaging, although not fatal. But Keillor's Ferry was a personnel transport, with over seven thousand colonists on board. And Kuan Yin was possibly even more precious than Keillor's Ferry. She was the colony's main medical ship, carrying not just the equivalent of a complete Core World hospital complex, but also seventy-five percent of the expedition's total medical staff. Some of her equipment, and especially the artificial wombs and banks of sperm and ova, were backed up and dispersed among other ships of the convoy, but her loss would be devastating to the colony's chances of survival.

  Maneka/Lazarus considered every possible alternative in the glassy eye of eternity which Lazarus'

  modeling capability made available, and the human half of the fusion felt the Bolo half's anguish matching her own as the cold, uncaring probabilities burned before them.

  If she/they engaged the closer Melconians before the light cruiser entered Mickey's engagement envelope, she/they would have an eighty-five-plus percent chance of killing both of them before any of the colony ships were destroyed. But only at the cost of a ninety-six percent chance that the light cruiser would break off before Mickey could take it under fire. And in that case, the probability of the destruction of the entire convoy approached eighty-nine percent.

  The loss of those three ships, and especially of Kuan Yin, would lower the colony's probability of long-term survival to just over eighty percent, yet that was enormously greater than the eleven percent chance that the convoy would survive to find somewhere to establish the colony in the first place if Maneka/Lazarus prevented those three ships' destruction.

  Both halves of her/their soul cried out in protest, but the numbers—those heartless, brutally honest numbers—refused to relent. Mickey shared her/their anguish through the TSDS net, and in some ways, Maneka realized, it was even worse for him and Lazarus than for her. They were designed, engineered on the molecular level, to preserve human life at any cost to themselves. But this time the cost would be paid by someone else.

  "Enemy ships!" The frantic cry ripped over the convoy's communications net as someone aboard Keillor's Ferry spotted the incoming Melconians. "My God, enemy ships! They're locking us up!"

  Maneka/Lazarus heard the panic, the horror in the unknown man's voice. She/they recognized the fear of death in it, but also the darker terror, the realization that seven thousand other human beings were about to die with him, and Maneka closed her eyes in pain.

  She could have fired. Could have taken the shot, destroyed two-thirds of their attackers before they ever opened fire. A part of her cringed away from that knowledge, already recognizing the endless burden of guilt which would be hers if she did not. But Maneka Trevor knew about guilt. She had tasted it to the dregs after Chartres, and if that was the price she must pay to perform her duty, then pay it she would.

  "They're going to fi—!"

  * * *

  "Fire!" Ka-Sharan barked, and heard a deep, harsh bay of triumph from his tactical crew as Death Stalker's broadside blazed.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Lauren Hanover's face went white as she listened to the voice from Keillor's Ferry over the earbug she'd tuned to the all-ships communications net. Like every member of Kuan Yin's company, Hanover had been at "action stations" from the moment Commodore Lakshmaniah reported detection of the Melconian task force. Not that there was anything a medical ship could do in a fleet engagement except keep her head down and try to run. Now it was obvious Kuan Yin couldn't even do that.

  "Here it comes!" Captain Sminard's voice came harsh and desperate over the intercom, and Hanover yanked her seat's straps tight. It seemed like an incredibly futile thing to do, and she looked around the backup control room that was her duty station as the ship's second engineer, wishing she at least had a proper shock frame. Medical ships weren't supposed to need that sort of equipment, an idiotically pedantic voice said in the back of her mind. The voice sounded exactly like hers, but it couldn't be. She wouldn't be wasting energy at a time like this lecturing herself about—

  Lauren Hanover's universe turned suddenly into madness as the concussive shock front ripped her out of her chair and threw her at a bulkhead.

  * * *

  Ka-Sharan bared his canines as two of the hated human transports erupted into splinters and expanding gas. The forty-centimeter plasma bolts ripped through them as if they had been constructed of straw, and Battle of Shilzar was firing, too, although her lighter armament had allowed her to target only a single vessel. Two of the three twenty-centimeter Hellbores in the destroyer's starboard broadside scored direct hits; the third was a very near near-miss, and Ka-Sharan suppressed a growl of frustration.

  Lieutenant Commander Na-Shal's tactical section should have done better than that at this range! They'd certainly had long enough to plot the shot!

  Still, it scarcely matters, he told himself, watching the crippled, two-thirds shattered hull stagger.

  The broken ship dropped instantly out of hyper, still barely alive—possibly—but vanished from his sensors. He glanced at Lieutenant Sa-Uthmar, and his frustration eased as Sa-Uthmar automatically tagged the exact coordinates at which the target had gone sub-light. Finding that wreck to guarantee its total destruction would be time-consuming but relatively straightforward, he thought, and turned back to the targeting displays as Death Stalker rolled slightly to bring her next pair of victims under her guns.

  "End in Honor is beginning her firing run, sir!" Ha-Yanth announced.

  * * *

  The voice from Keillor's Ferry chopped off in mid-syllable as the huge transport exploded.

  Fragments of her hull—and her passengers—spewed outward, each piece of debris individually falling out of hyper and into normal-space. The shattered wreckage was strewn across a volume of space at least a light-week in diameter, and in that moment, Maneka Trevor wished she had been aboard the murdered ship.

  There was, she discovered, a special and dreadful curse in her union with Lazarus. Her thoughts now moved at the speed of his, and a second was a yawning eternity for her/them. Ample time for her to choke down the bitter poison of knowing she might have stopped the Melconians from firing. Yet there was this mercy, at least, she discovered; she also shared the absolute certitude that her/their probability analysis had been accurate. That much, at least, she would never have to second-guess.

  Captain Ka-Sharan was a highly experienced naval officer. He was also a very quick thinker. So quick that he actually had time to find the icon on the tactical plot from which that terrifyingly powerful shot had come. But quick as he was, he had too little time to complete his thought.

  Bolo transpor—!

  Four seconds after destroying Battle of Shilzar, Maneka/Lazarus put a 110-centimeter Hellbore bolt straight through Death Stalker's forward power room and scored a direct hit on Reactor Number One. Not that it actually mattered, in light of the catastrophic structural damage to the heavy cruiser's hull.

  All the reactor's failing antimatter containment field really did was to make Death Stalker's destruction even more spectacular.

  * * *

  "—terrible! Simply terrible!" Adrian Agnelli's face was ashen on Maneka Trevor's com screen as he spoke to her from Harriet Liang'shu, the convo
y's civilian flagship. "My God! Commodore Lakshmaniah's entire squadron, and now this!"

  "At least we're still alive, Governor," Maneka said. He glared at her, as if infuriated by the banality of her response.

  To her own surprise, she returned his glare levelly. This was her very first one-on-one conversation with the Governor, and she had expected her anxiety level to be far higher. It wasn't. Instead, she felt as if some of Lazarus' calm, a trace of his psychotronic dispassion, had remained with her after she withdrew from the neural linkage.

  Or maybe it's just that after watching the Puppies shoot three transports right out of a convoy that's my responsibility, a mere Governor is small beer, she thought with a sort of graveyard humor.

  "Of course we're still alive, Captain," Agnelli said after a moment. "If we weren't, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And before we continue, allow me to say that I fully realize that the only reason we are alive is your and Lieutenant Chin's Bolos. But that doesn't make our situation any less parlous.

  The destruction of Keillor's Ferry is a tragedy any way you look at it. Seven thousand lives—plus Captain Haroldson and his entire crew—would be a horrible thing under any circumstances. But their deaths also represent almost thirty percent of our entire colonial population! Star Conveyor's loss is almost as serious a blow to our basic industrial capabilities. But the loss of Kuan Yin—!"

  He shook his head, his face tight, and Maneka had to nod in agreement with his assessment.

  "Governor Agnelli's daughter and son-in-law are physicians aboard Kuan Yin," Lazarus' tenor voice murmured suddenly in the Brigade implant in her left mastoid bone, and her belly twisted in an abrupt resurgence of guilt.

  "Governor," she said, as soon as she was certain she had control of her voice, "it's possible," she stressed the qualifying adverb, "that Kuan Yin wasn't totally destroyed."