Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  Oh, yes, they could, a tiny voice told her. We've got Mark-17-Es in the pods—what if they've got something of their own over there? Something we didn't know about any more than they knew about the Mark-17?

  She remembered her own earlier thoughts about the possibility of missile pods on the other side. Escaped StateSec crews would also have known all about the existence of multidrive missiles. For that matter, Manpower had certainly known about them since shortly after their first use, and the fact that the SLN still hadn't done anything about it didn't mean everyone else was equally blind. So, yes, they could have a surprise of their own.

  She looked at the acceleration numbers coming up on the plot. So far, they looked exactly like the profile of a Javelin anti-ship missile set for a three-minute, maximum-range burn, and she wanted to believe that was what they actually were. But that tiny voice told her they weren't. That not even a bunch of StateSec lunatics would have opened fire at this range unless they genuinely believed they could hit their targets.

  * * *

  "Missile launch!" Lieutenant Womack's report interrupted Rozsak's side conversation with Edie Habib. "CIC estimates four hundred missiles inbound, Sir!"

  Rozsak's eyes whipped to the main plot, and for just a moment, he could only stare at the icons in disbelief. As he saw the missile vectors stretching out from the battlecruisers he'd pursued deeper and deeper into the Torch System for the last forty-seven minutes, they seemed just as pointless—just as foolish—as they seemed to every one of his junior officers. But then his face hardened into granite. Much as a part of his mind wanted to regard this as a panic reaction, an act of desperation as the enemy saw Alpha Two closing upon him, he knew it wasn't. His mind raced through exactly the same analysis Laura Raycraft had just considered, and for just a moment, even his formidable control wavered.

  But it was only for a moment, and his voice didn't even quaver as he turned back to Kamstra's com image.

  "Open fire," he said flatly.

  * * *

  Unlike the Solarian League Navy, the Mesan Alignment had no reservations at all about the missile ranges being reported by observers of the renewed conflict between Manticore and the Republic of Haven. They'd not only realized those reports were accurate, but figured out what the Manticorans and Havenites must have done to produce them.

  Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.

  So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.

  There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.

  The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile, could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.

  Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited. But the weapon had a powered range from rest of almost 16.6 million kilometers, nobody had ever even imagined that it might exist . . . and Luff's fourteen battlecruisers mounted over eight hundred broadside missile tubes.

  * * *

  Luiz Rozsak cursed himself with silent passion as he watched four hundred and two missiles hurtle towards his command. By the standards of the recent, ferocious confrontations between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, it was a puny effort, and he knew it. But the Manties and the Havenites clashed with entire fleets of superdreadnoughts; he had only six cruisers and eight destroyers with which to face it.

  You were so damned confident you had the fucking range advantage, weren't you? a cold, hating voice demanded harshly. You were so frigging brilliant—so goddamned, stupidly overconfident—that it never even occurred to you that someone else could be just as frigging smart as you are!

  It was vicious, that voice, filled with bitter awareness of the price his people were about to pay—the price Torch might be about to pay—for his overconfidence. But it was also buried deep, pushed down below the surface to clear his brain as he faced the cataclysm to come.

  The flight time for Luff's missile salvo was two hundred and twelve seconds. That meant it would be over three and a half minutes before the first PNE laser head reached attack range, and Luiz Rozsak's brain whirred steadily.

  "Defense plan X-Ray-Charlie-Three," he heard his voice saying. "Fire plan Delta-Zulu-Niner. Warlords are primaries."

  "Defense X-Ray-Charlie-Three, aye," Robert Womack acknowledged. "Fire plan Delta-Zulu-Niner, aye. Warlords are alpha-priority targets!"

  Hammer Force's formation began to shift. There wouldn't be time for it to make a great deal of difference before that first enormous salvo arrived, but defensive fire plans and responsibilities shifted far more rapidly—and radically—as X-Ray-Charlie-Three went into effect. And, at the same moment, Hammer Force's two arsenal ships started spitting rings of missile pods into space in massive, twelve-second spasms.

  Rozsak would have preferred to launch them even more rapidly—to get all of them out of their suddenly imperiled pod bays. They would have fallen steadily astern at Hammer Force's still mounting velocity, and they would have been vulnerable to proximity kills, but that would still have been better than what his tightly knotted stomach muscles knew was about to happen.

  Unfortunately, they didn't have the endurance. They were still the original, lightweight pods, and they had to launch their missiles almost instantly. He couldn't hold them back, and twelve seconds was about the tightest window for effective fire control he could manage, especially since his cruisers were going to have to take the missiles under control in successive waves.

  The good news—such as there was and what there was of it—was that the minimum cycle time on a Flight VII Indefatigable-class battlecruiser's SL-13 shipboard launchers was thirty-five seconds. The earlier Indefatigables, with the older SL-11-b had the same theoretical cycle rate, but their feed queues were infamous for breaking down if they were pushed much above one launch every forty-five seconds. And as he watched the seconds ticking down, he realized at least some of those ex-Solarian ships had to be Flight V or Flight VI. Thirty-five seconds came and went, and still no second salvo had launched. It had to come any time now, though, and—

  There! The second salvo had finally launched, but three of Rozsak's missile waves were already slicing downrange, and more were punching steadily out of Masquerade and Kabuki.

  * * *

  Adrian Luff's lips skinned back from his teeth as his first salvo went slamming back at his
pursuers. He had no illusions about what multidrive missiles with their enormous laser heads would do to his battlecruisers, but he'd gotten at least several seconds' head start on the bastards, and they'd been coming straight up his wake for the better part of an hour. There'd been plenty of time for Stravinsky and the tactical officers aboard each of the PNE's battlecruisers to mark their targets, track them, run constantly updated firing solutions on them.

  Of course, the long range was going to work against their targeting solutions. There was no help for that, and he had no doubt that accuracy was going to be poor, to say the least. But those were only heavy cruisers behind him, not battlecruisers. If he could get his initial salvos in among them, rip up their control systems, knock back their fire control . . .

  "Enemy missile launch!" Stravinsky announced, and Luff's jaw muscles tightened. They'd been quicker off the mark than he'd expected, and MDMs had high acceleration rates. If Gowan Maddock's intelligence reports were accurate, they'd be quicker than his Cataphracts' primary drives, even over relatively short ranges, and—

  "Estimate three hundred and sixty inbound," Stravinsky continued. "Acceleration rate four-five-one KPS-squared. Time of flight, two-one-seven seconds. Missile Defense is tracking and Halo is active."

  Luff's eyes narrowed. That acceleration was lower than he'd expected—in fact, it was lower than his own birds' primary drives, far less the final sprint drive! That meant his flight time was going to be lower than theirs, not higher!

  "Second wave launch!"

  Damn! They were punching the damned things out at twelve-second intervals! At that rate, they'd be putting better than three salvos into space for every one he sent back at them! That was close to three missiles for each of his.

  "Maximum rate fire," he said harshly.

  "Maximum rate fire, aye, Citizen Commodore."

  Luff sensed Millicent Hartman looking at him and looked up from the plot to meet her gaze.

  "Better we risk jamming the tubes than let them pound us any harder than we have to," he told her.

  * * *

  Hundreds of missiles sliced through space towards one another, each of them a suicidal cybernetic agent of destruction, and their intended targets' defenses roused, dueling with their onboard sensors. Electronic warfare systems tried to blind them while others tried to trick them with false targets, and their own penetration aids did the same thing for the anti-missile targeting systems trying to lock them up. Mighty computers aboard the ships which had launched them—or, in Hammer Force's case, taken them under control after someone else launched them—monitored their telemetry links, adding their own enormous computational power to the titanic struggle. The defensive systems had more power, better AIs, and the advantage of human intuition, but starships were far bigger and far more brilliant target beacons. To offset that, the offensive telemetry links got progressively more arthritic as the attack missiles neared their targets. Exactly when to cut the control links and leave the shipkillers to their own rudimentary devices was always a judgment call, and at the next best thing to thirty-seven light-seconds' range, even the best light-speed fire control fell further and further behind the curve.

  By the time Adrian Luff's first missile wave reached attack range of Hammer Force, the PNE had sent six more on its heels . . . and the Solarian ships had put seventeen salvos of their own into space.

  * * *

  Luff's face was expressionless as he watched that incredible thicket of missiles coming at him. Their icons dusted the plot, and it was already evident that the other side's EW was better than his. Not as much better as the People's Navy had become gallingly accustomed to against the Manties, perhaps, but still at least marginally better.

  Still more hostile missile traces appeared in the plot with deadly, metronome precision, and his eyes narrowed.

  "Targeting change," he said flatly. "Go for the cruisers."

  "First salvo is already committed, Citizen Commodore," Citizen Lieutenant Commander Stravinsky replied. "Retargeting second salvo now."

  Luff nodded, his eyes never leaving the plot. He hadn't counted on how rapidly they'd be rolling those waves of pods. He'd hoped he could kill the ammunition platforms before they got very many missiles into space, cut the hostile fire off at the source. Unfortunately, he no longer had time for that. Taking out the freighters would still be worthwhile, but with so many shipkillers already headed his way, it was more imperative that he beat down the enemy's fire control, first.

  * * *

  Luff's first salvo roared in on Hammer Force.

  The cruisers and destroyers shuddered with the sawtoothed vibration of counter-missile launchers in rapid fire. They didn't have the massive armor, the multiply redundant control systems, of ships-of-the-wall, but they'd been designed and engineered specifically to face a massive missile threat. Luiz Rozsak had never anticipated exposing them to a storm like the one racing towards them—not without many more consorts to share the defensive load—but he and the Erewhonese designers working with him had visualized the missile environment far more accurately than the Solarian designers of Luff's Indefatigables.

  X-Ray-Charlie Three was still coming fully online. There hadn't been time to complete the redeployment it envisioned, but the cruisers responsible for managing Hammer Force's defensive fire in the outer defense zone were up and tracking. Counter-missiles raced outward, using their hugely overpowered impeller wedges to sweep holes in the incoming fire. But the sudden burst of speed from the Cataphracts' second-stage "sprint drive" had taken Rozsak's tactical officers by surprise. None of the fire control solutions had allowed for it, and kill percentages in the outer zone were less than half of what they ought to have been. Far too many of the first salvo's shipkillers broke past the outer intercept zone, and more counter-missiles erupted from the destroyers tasked to back up the cruisers as they raced into the middle intercept zone.

  Laser clusters trained around, tracking, waiting for the incoming fire to enter their own range, then spat rods of coherent lightning to meet them. Fireballs glared and flashed, and despite the "sprint mode" surprise, Hammer Force killed one hundred and thirty-seven of the attacking missiles.

  Two hundred and sixty-five got through.

  * * *

  SLNS Rifleman twisted in anguish as X-ray lasers punched through her sidewall. They ripped deep, despite her cruiser-weight armor. Transfer energy shattered plating, ripped open compartments, blotted away offensive and defensive weapons—and the men and women who manned them. Her sidewalls blunted the onslaught; they couldn't possibly stop it, and for all her toughness, she was only a cruiser.

  Her wedge fluctuated as a laser slammed into her forward impeller room. Power spikes surged through her systems, and she reeled off course as her forward nodes went down. Her acceleration fell drastically, and then another laser stabbed deep into her vitals.

  Her compensator failed, and even with her forward nodes down, she was still pulling over two hundred gravities.

  There were no survivors.

  * * *

  Pain ripped through Luiz Rozsak as he watched Rifleman die, but there was no time to grieve. More hits slammed in, and Rifleman's sister ship Ranger staggered. Her impeller strength fell, over half her starboard broadside was turned into some mangled junk, but she held her place in the formation, and Lieutenant Commander Haldane was already rolling ship, bringing her port broadside to bear.

  The destroyers of Lieutenant Commander Stahlin's Division 3029.2 were all on the cruisers' engaged flank when the wave of destruction swept across them. Rozsak doubted that they'd even been targeted, but his formation shift had taken them between the incoming missiles and Hammer Force's cruisers. He hadn't planned it that way, but the effect was to turn them into living missile decoys, and the Warriors' sheer size worked against them. The missiles raining down on them were in autonomous control, this far from the ships which had launched them, and they were nearsighted and narrow-minded without their telemetry links. Those which had lost the
ir original targets as a result of the formation shift looked around for new ones, and a Warrior-class ship was more than big enough to satisfy the targeting criteria of AIs which had been told to go and kill cruisers.

  Francisco Pizarro and Cyrus stumbled out of formation as furious lasers hammered them like brimstone lightning. Pizarro broke up seconds later, while Cyrus coasted onward, wedge down, life pods spilling from her flanks. Her sister ship Simón Bolivar, in Anne Guglik's Division 3029.3, staggered as she took half a dozen hits of her own, then turned away, rolling ship, fighting to bring her un-mangled broadside's counter-missile tubes and point defense clusters to bear.

  And SLNS Kabuki shuddered as a pair of lasers slammed into her.

  Only two of them. That was all that got past her defenders, all that got through to her, and she was two million tons of starship. Yet she was also totally unarmored, without any of a warship's armor, or internal bulkheads, or built-in survival features. Rozsak had accepted that when he conceived the class, because he'd had no choice, and now he remembered his own earlier thought about pile-drivers and soap bubbles.

  The hits blew completely through that unarmored hull. They ripped massive holes straight through the heart of her, smashing missile bays, snapping structural members, shattering her fabric with contemptuous ease. Her secondary reactor went into emergency shutdown, and four of her alpha nodes exploded. Only the fact that she'd been built with mil-spec impeller rooms' massive circuit breakers saved her from instant destruction, and data codes indicating critical structural damage appeared under her icon.

  Then it was over . . . for another forty-five seconds.

  * * *

  Adrian Luff knew his first wave of missiles had just ripped into the enemy formation. He'd seen their impeller signatures vanishing from his FTL gravitic detectors as they were picked off by defenders or reached the ends of their runs and detonated, and those same gravitics told him three of the enemy starships' wedges had also disappeared. But that was all the information he had, and it would be another half-minute before his light-speed sensors could tell him how much more damage they might have done.