She shook the thought aside, forcing her mind back to the task at hand. She had one MDM left-only one. The Kanga cruisers and the Grendel were as dead as her destroyers, but three heavy units remained ... three targets for her single missile. They had expended most of their own MDMs on her destroyers, but her increasingly unreliable instruments could not tell her exactly how many they still had. It could be as few as two or as many as six-she simply didn't know. And the only way to find out, she thought grimly, was to offer her own ship as a target.

"All right," she said finally, "how close do we have to get under these ... conditions?"

"Two hundred thousand kilometers, Ma'am." Onslow's mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his words, and she flinched inwardly. Less than one light-second? That wasn't point-blank-it was suicide range. Under normal circumstances, that was. Here? Who could know? "Even then," Onslow continued slowly, "Gunnery can't guarantee to hit the Ogre. They're still holding translation lock-God knows how-and sensor conditions are so bad that the seeking systems can't possibly differentiate target sources, however close we come."

"All right," she sighed. "We're sixty-five hours from the theta wall, but our options won't change." She met his eyes levelly and drew a breath. "Close the range, Captain," she said formally. "Get us close enough to score just once more."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Onslow said simply, and the drive shrieked as it was suddenly reversed.

The abrupt alteration was a strange and terrible anguish in the uncanny surrealism of the eta bands, and Santander fought the quivering pain in her muscles and nerves, watching her plot as the range to the fuzzily defined dots of the enemy shrank. The glowing diamond of her last escort clung immovably to Defender's flank as the heavy cruiser Dauntless matched her flagship's maneuver.

"Range twelve light-seconds," Miyagi reported. "Eleven ... ten ... nine ..."