by David Weber
In the meantime, he had other things to worry about.
Leon Trotsky's counter-missiles began to launch. The big ship's active antimissile defenses were far weaker than they ought to be for something her size, but the Aegis system which had been added to them went some way towards repairing that weakness. It was scarcely what Luff would have called a sophisticated solution, but there was a certain brutal elegance to the concept. Simply rip out a couple of broadside launchers, use the space they'd previously occupied for additional counter-missile fire control, and then use two of the remaining launchers to toss out canisters of defensive missiles. Even under optimal conditions, Aegis cost the ship which mounted it at least four offensive tubes per broadside. Normally, Luff would have considered it an equitable deal, given Trotsky's original feeble defenses; now, he missed those shipkillers badly.
And I'm going to miss them even more badly in just a few minutes, he told himself harshly.
The Halo EW platforms deployed around the ship wove their protective cocoon, as well. He hadn't been especially impressed by Halo when his Manpower backers first showed it to him. The platforms were far less effective than the Manticoran tethered decoys the People's Navy had confronted over the years. But he'd changed his mind—provisionally, at least—once he saw them in action against his own ships' targeting capability in exercises. Yes, individually each platform was only marginally more effective than the ones which had equipped the PNE's ships when they initially fled the counterrevolutionaries. But Halo didn't depend on single platforms. It depended on multiple platforms—five of them in each broadside, for an Indefatigable, more for ships-of-the-wall—to generate multiple false targets and provide remote jammer nodes in carefully integrated defensive plans. And since they were small enough to be carried in substantial numbers, they could be quickly replenished as they eroded—as planned—under incoming fire.
I hope to hell they work as well against these people as they did against us in those exercises! he thought grimly.
* * *
Luiz Rozsak's first salvo arrived on target, three hundred and sixty strong. But sixty of those missiles had gone to local control five seconds before they should have when Rifleman's telemetry links were taken brutally off-line at the source. The Erewhonese-built Mark-17-E's onboard seekers and AI were better than those of most navies, yet they fell immeasurably short of the capabilities of the Royal Manticoran Navy's new Apollo. They did their best, but most of them wasted themselves for minimal return, spreading out, scattering themselves among four different targets. Only two of them got through to their intended prey at all, and the damage they inflicted was scarcely crippling.
It was a very different story for their fellows.
Delta-Zulu-Niner was about as subtle as a battle ax. Luiz Rozsak was up against battlecruisers, and powerful as the Mark-17-E was, no one was going to confuse it with a true capital missile. It was more powerful than most battlecruisers carried, but at the cost of carrying fewer lasing rods. That meant fewer potential hits per missile, and those individual hits weren't going to do the sort of damage an all-up MDM could do, either. In fact, no one really knew exactly how well the Mark-17 was going to perform against targets with battlecruiser-range armor, and so Delta-Zulu-Niner concentrated all three hundred of the missiles that stayed under shipboard control until their planned handoff points on just two targets.
One hundred and fifty missiles hurtled in on the battlecruiser Alexander Suvorov, and she heaved and twisted as the first few laser heads punched through her counter-missiles and her point defense clusters, through the fire being thrown up by her consorts, through the blinding efforts of her onboard EW. More laser heads followed them, howling in at over 100,000 KPS in a solid wave of destruction. The big Warlord-class battlecruiser's active defenses were far stronger than Leon Trotsky's, and her armor was thicker and better placed, but there were simply too many threats coming in too quickly, too tightly sequenced, for her to stop them. Even her armor cratered, then splintered, then ripped apart as laser after laser gouged deeper and deeper.
Point defense clusters went suddenly dead. Her emission signature flickered and flared as primary tracking and targeting systems were blown out of existence and secondaries came up in their place. Three beta nodes went down, then an alpha, and despite the redundancy built into her overpowered drive systems, her acceleration faltered. She staggered, bleeding atmosphere in clear proof of internal hull breaching, and then, abruptly, she blew apart in an expanding ball of fury.
Four seconds later, PNES Bernard Montgomery, Adrian Luff's old command, followed her into destruction.
* * *
Luff gritted his teeth as Bernard Montgomery blew up.
They're going for the Warlords first. They're trying to kill our most effective missile-defense platforms.
They were, and their laser heads were far more powerful than he would have believed anything smaller than a capital ship missile could mount. Worse, their fire was immeasurably heavier than he'd imagined six heavy cruisers could possibly control. No ships that size should have that many control links!
But these ships obviously did, and something icy ran down his spine as one of Stravinsky's secondary displays posted the percentage of hits which had gotten through to the two battlecruisers. Saturation explained a lot of it, but the defenses still should have stopped a lot more than they did. The incoming missiles clearly carried extraordinarily good penetration EW . . . and the people behind them clearly knew exactly what they were doing.
But EW or no, whatever those damned things are, they aren't MDMs, he thought. Bad as they are, they're not doing enough damage per hit for capital laser heads . . . and isn't that a comfort when there are so damned many of the bastards? I was right to shift priority to their cruisers. I just hope to hell I shifted soon enough!
His eyes went back to the main plot as the second wave of Hammer Force's missiles came slamming in twelve seconds after the first.
* * *
Rozsak's second salvo concentrated its fury on the battlecruisers Napoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne.
The PNE's missile defense officers had better data than they'd had against the previous wave, but twelve seconds wasn't enough time for them to apply it to their fire solutions, crank it into their EW profiles, adjust their formation and their thinking. Worse, the loss of Bernard Montgomery and Alexander Suvorov had punched holes into their defensive fire assignments.
Computer overrides reassigned responsibilities, spreading the load among the dead battlecruisers' consorts, and tactical officers aboard Luff's other ships responded with swift efficiency. Yet they were still off-balance, still reacting, when three hundred fresh missiles exploded into their faces.
* * *
Citizen Captain Hervé Bostwick watched his plot on PNE Charlemagne's command deck as the vortex of destruction ripped straight through the task group's defenses towards his command. Charlemagne was one of the big Warlord-class battlecruisers whose crew had fled the triumphant counterrevoutionaries, and Bostwick had been in command ever since. After so long together, he sometimes thought he knew every man and woman aboard her personally, by face and name, and now he could almost physically feel his officers' and ratings' fear—especially in the wake of how unbelievably quickly Montgomery and Suvorov had been wiped away. He felt it, yet the voices in the tactical net were crisp, clear, and Bostwick remembered the carefully hidden contempt he'd seen behind the eyes of many an officer of the old People's Navy—the contempt of professional warriors for mere secret policemen and enforcers. Contempt for the sloppy training and poor combat efficiency of State Security's warships. He remembered his own resentment of that contempt, but that wasn't what he felt now. Tension and spikes of terror might crackle in the depths of his people's voices, yet hard-won training and discipline beat that down, thrust them aside. His people were doing their jobs as well as any "professionals" in any navy in the galaxy, and despite his own undeniable fear, what Bostwick felt most of all was pride.
> "Threat axis red-one-zero!" his missile-defense officer snapped. "Battery Three, take it!"
"Battery Three, red-one-zero, aye!" one of his assistants responded, punching commands into his own console. "Engaging!"
Point Defense Three retargeted the laser clusters guarding Charlemagne's port quarter, training around to meet the wave of missiles roaring in at thirty percent of the speed of light through the zone Bernard Montgomery should have been covering. Laser clusters went to continuous rapid fire, but they simply didn't have enough emitters to stop that many missiles coming in that quickly.
Charlemagne quivered as the first bomb-pumped laser clawed at her armored flanks. Then another ripped home, and another, dozens of them in a tsunami of destruction, slamming into her on top of one another, so quickly it was impossible for any human sense—or even Charlemagne's computers—to isolate any single blow.
"Direct hit on Missile-Three!"
"Heavy casualties in Impeller-Two!"
"Graser-One and Graser-Three out of the net—no response, Citizen Commander!"
"Gravitic-Five destroyed! Lidar-Three's gone, too!"
"Core hull breach, Frame Three-Seven-Four! Pressure dropping—I think we've got a jammed blast door! Initiating damage control!"
"Direct hit, Boat Bay-Two! I show red board on the entire bay—no response from Boat Bay damage control parties!"
Bostwick heard the wave of damage reports rolling over the net as entire quadrants of the damage control schematic flared scarlet. Charlemagne was hurt, badly. It would take months in dock to repair the damage he could already see. Yet she was still intact, still in the fight, and her people were already bringing up backup systems, rushing repair parties towards her injuries.
"Third salvo impact in five seconds," his tactical officer announced, still focused on his own responsibilities, his own duties. "Defensive fire plan Bravo-Hotel. I want—"
"Skipper!" The voice in his earbug belonged to Citizen Commander Christy Hargraves, his senior engineer, and in all the years she'd served with him, he'd never heard that note of raw urgency in her voice before. "We're losing containment on Fusion-Tw—"
* * *
Adrian Luff's expression was bleak as Charlemagne's icon disappeared from his plot. Napoleon Bonaparte, which had once been SLNS Indurate, was marginally luckier than the Warlord. She continued onward, rolling slowly on her axis, shedding bits and pieces of hull and clutches of life pods, yet at least her people were getting off. She might even have been salvageable, but she was clearly a mission-kill, completely out of the fight.
There must really be Solly attack officers back there. They sure as hell don't seem very distracted by the Halo platforms, anyway!
The thought rolled through a corner of the citizen commodore's brain without ever reaching its surface, and even as he watched the lurid damage codes flashing under Bonaparte's plot icon, Rozsak's third wave of missiles came howling in.
* * *
Luiz Rozsak seemed to feel himself flowing even more deeply down into his command chair as the second massive missile salvo plowed straight down Hammer Force's throat.
They came rocketing in, and if many of them had clearly had their telemetry links shot out from under them, far more of them hadn't. His missile-defense officers had had longer than their PNE counterparts to digest—and apply—the lessons they'd learned from Luff's first salvo, and it showed. They knew about the shipkillers' final "sprint mode" now. They were allowing for it, and their long-range counter-missile fire was far more effective . . . but it was also coming from fewer launchers, and there were fewer point defense clusters to back them up.
He winced internally as SLNS Gunner's back broke strewing the cruiser's shattered hull—and her crew—across unforgiving vacuum. In the same cataclysmic instant, her sister, Sniper, took at least five hits that sent her lurching out of formation before she somehow managed to recover. Cyrus took three more hits of her own and quietly broke up; her sister Frederick II died in a far more spectacular flash which momentarily rivaled the brilliance of Torch, itself.
And then the missile storm closed on Kabuki.
He didn't know how many missiles got through to her. There couldn't have been very many . . . not that it mattered. Her merchant hull was straw in the furnace as the bomb-pumped lasers broke her bones and spat out the splinters. She disintegrated into torn and tattered wreckage, spreading outward from the center of what once had been a two million-ton starship . . . and its crew.
Two thirds of his cruisers were damaged or destroyed, half his destroyers—and Kabuki—were gone, and it was only the second salvo.
"Fire Plan Charlie-Zulu-Omega," he said flatly.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Adrian Luff felt a small stir of satisfaction as the light-speed damage estimates from his first salvo finally came up on Stravinsky's status boards.
They'd damaged or destroyed a quarter of the enemy force, including what looked like it had to be major damage to one of the ammunition ships. By now, his second salvo was arriving on target, as well, and he'd seen four more impeller wedges—including what CIC thought was one of the ammunition ships—vanish from his plot.
Yet any satisfaction he felt had to be weighed against the loss of almost half his own battlecruisers. Hammer Force's third salvo had destroyed PNE Sun Tzu and reduced PNE Oliver Cromwell to a staggering wreck. Six ships was barely twelve percent of his own total force, but they represented a far larger percentage of his total tonnage. And, infinitely worse, they were all battlecruisers . . . and only the battlecruisers had Cataphracts or the fire control to handle them.
It's a race, he thought again, grimly. It's a damned race to see which of us runs out of platforms first.
* * *
Luiz Rozsak's fourth salvo came slicing in.
His two undamaged cruisers could still handle sixty missiles each, but Ranger and Sniper, combined, could handle only sixty more. Hammer Force split its hundred and eighty shipkillers into two ninety-missile salvos and sent them ripping in on the battlecruiser Isoroku Yamamoto, Luff's last Warlord, and the limping wreck of the Oliver Cromwell.
There were fewer missiles in each salvo, and Luff's missile-defense officers had learned a great deal more about the Mark-17-E, but there was only so much they could do. They needed time to reorganize, to restore their formation, and there was no time. There were only the incoming waves of missiles, screaming into their teeth at the rate of five every minute. Their individual effectiveness might be eroding as more and more of those missiles came in without benefit of shipboard control, but they were still coming, and the defenders had to treat each of them as its own individual threat.
Isoroku Yamamoto slid out of her slot in the formation as her after impeller ring died completely. More laser heads shattered her midships armor, destroying control systems, wiping out half her starboard point defense and all but three of her starboard long-range telemetry arrays. She began to drop gradually astern, rolling to present her less damaged port broadside to the enemy while damage control parties fought frantically to get her after impellers back on line.
Oliver Cromwell took only a dozen more hits, yet they were enough. Her single remaining fusion plant went off-line, and she fell behind as her crew raced to abandon ship while there was still time.
Less than one minute had passed since Hammer Force's first laser head detonated, and seven of Luff's fourteen battlecruisers had already been destroyed or crippled.
Rozsak's fifth salvo came screaming in twelve seconds later.
* * *
Our turn. It's our turn, now.
The thought flashed through Adrian Luff's mind as he saw the attack pattern develop on the plot. The deadly ruby diamond chips of incoming missiles swerved, coalescing suddenly out of chaos into a precisely targeted, tightly coordinated hammer. They drove straight through the PNE's harrowed defenses, numbers melting like snow in the furnace of defensive fire, yet somehow sweeping onward.
Luff's brain whirred like another com
puter, thinking too quickly, too furiously, for his own sudden stab of terror to register.
"Message to Citizen Commodore Konidis," he heard his own voice saying crisply, decisively. "If we lose communication, he's to continue with the mission as per our original orders."
"Yes, Citizen Com—"
The arrival of Luiz Rozsak's missile storm interrupted Citizen Lieutenant Kamerling's acknowledgment.
There was no way for Hammer Force's tactical officers to identify the PNE's flagship. That was all that had spared Leon Trotsky in their initial salvos. But probability plays no favorites. Eventually, the uncaring odds catch up with everyone, and Luff had been correct. This time it was, indeed, Trotsky's turn.
A hundred and eighty missiles hurled themselves at her and her division mate, Mao Tse-tung, and there was no stopping them. Or no stopping enough of them, anyway. They'd been lost in the clutter of autonomously-guided missiles until the very last instant, and they came down like a battle ax.
The battlecruiser heaved indescribably, writhing at the heart of a hellish latticework of bomb-pumped lasers. Entire sections of her heavily armored hull disintegrated, and raw craters blasted into her, ripping their way through deck after deck, seeking her vitals. Power surges cascaded through her systems, the heavily armored control capsules of on-mount personnel blew apart, and damage alarms screamed like tortured souls.
No mere human being could have kept track of the incredible damage which rained down on Adrian Luff's flagship. It took less than two seconds from the first hit to the last, and the carnage and devastation in its wake was impossible for the brutally shaken survivors to truly grasp. Yet even in the heart of that furnace, men and women clung to their training and their duty.