by David Weber
"Direct hit, Tracking Seven!"
"Direct hit, Graser Five!"
"Point Defense Niner and Ten in local control!"
"Missile Twenty-Three out of the net!"
"Fusion One, emergency shutdown!"
"CIC, direct hit! I can't get anyone on the com, Citizen Commander!"
The damage control reports poured in, a mounting litany of destruction and death. The master plot went dead as the Combat Information Center dropped out of the circuit, and it stayed dead as the auxiliaries which should have taken over to drive it died under hits of their own.
"Direct hit, Impeller Two!"
Leon Trotsky's acceleration faltered.
"Missile Defense Four is down, Citizen Commander! No response from on-mount personnel!"
"Dir—"
Adrian Luff, Millicent Hartman, Pierre Stravinsky, and every other man and woman on Leon Trotsky's flag bridge died instantly as the trailer—the lonely, orphaned, autonomously-controlled missile no one had noticed in time—slipped through the flagship's shattered defenses like a dagger.
Trotsky and Mao Tse-tung staggered onward, too hideously maimed to do more than defend themselves feebly, and Hammer Force's sixth salvo went streaking in on PNES George Washington and PNS Ho Chi Minh.
* * *
Citizen Commodore Santander Konidis stared at his plot, white-faced.
Citizen Commodore Luff's flagship was still there—barely—but there was no way to misread the lurid damage codes under her icon. Even if Luff was still somehow, impossibly, alive over there, his communications were clearly out. Which meant Santander Konidis was now the senior surviving officer of the People's Navy in Exile.
What there was of it.
He shook himself and made himself look up from his plot and meet his chief of staff's eyes.
"Pass the word to all units," he said harshly. "I'm assuming command."
"Yes, Citizen Commodore!" Citizen Commander Gino Sanchez responded immediately, and Konidis gave him a tight smile. He'd never really liked Sanchez—the man was too brutal when it came to shipboard discipline, and he had an undeniable tendency to browbeat and terrorize junior officers—but there wasn't a gram of quitter anywhere in him, and at the moment, Konidis found him remarkably reassuring.
Then the citizen commodore returned his attention to his plot, and any reassurance Sanchez might have engendered disappeared as George Washington and Ho Chi Minh staggered out of the missile holocaust.
Washington's tactical links were still up, although Sanchez would be astonished if even half her offensive and defensive weapons remained effective. Ho Chi Minh, on the other hand, was completely out of the net—another clear mission-kill.
My God, I'm down to three effective battlecruisers—and that's counting Washington as effective!
It didn't seem possible. Surely six heavy cruisers couldn't have mangled the PNE's battlecruisers this way!
It's those goddammed pods. They just keep pouring them on, and they're ripping us to pieces!
* * *
Adrian Luff's third salvo came down on Hammer Force like a guillotine.
SLNS Sniper blew up as fresh hits blasted through her defenses, adding catastrophically to her earlier damage.
There were no life pods.
David Carte's Sharpshooter lurched off course as half the beta nodes in her forward ring went down. More hits slammed into her like the hammers of hell, yet somehow she hauled back on course, maintaining her heading, her surviving missile defenses still in operation.
More missiles pounded down on the destroyer William the Conqueror. Her desperate point defense stopped twenty-seven laser heads short of detonation range; eleven others got through, and Conqueror blew up as spectacularly as Sniper . . . and with just as few survivors.
And then, with a sort of horrible inevitability, five laser heads got past the tattered defensive umbrella of Luiz Rozsak's two surviving cruisers and his three remaining destroyers. Bomb-pumped lasers ripped out yet again, enveloping SLNS Masquerade's unarmored hull in a spider web of lightning, and suddenly Rozsak had no more arsenal ships.
* * *
Citizen Commodore Konidis grinned savagely. Chao Kung Ming's master plot was less detailed than Leon Trotsky's had been, but it was good enough for him to know the impeller signature of the enemy's second ammunition ship had just disappeared. Without light-speed confirmation, he couldn't be positive that it had actually been destroyed. If it hadn't, it could probably roll another three or four pod waves before the PNE's next salvo arrived to finish it off, but either way, its end was in sight.
I just hope to hell ours isn't, too, he thought grimly as Hammer Force's seventh salvo came rumbling in.
* * *
Luiz Rozsak was down to three cruisers, two of them badly mangled, and four destroyers, one of them crippled. That was all he had left, and the missile waves which had already been launched were the only ones he was going to get.
There were three hundred sixty missiles in each of those waves, but all three of his remaining cruisers between them could manage only a third of them, and that wasn't going to be good enough.
Which was why he'd ordered Charlie-Zulu-Omega. They'd trained for the possibility, but they'd never tried it in action. As far as Rozsak knew, no one had, and he would never have attempted it against an intact missile defense. But Hammer Force had already torn great, bleeding wounds in the StateSec renegades' anti-missile defenses. It might just work . . . and it wasn't as if he had a lot of options.
There wasn't time to implement Charlie-Zulu-Omega before his next two waves arrived, but the one after that would be different.
* * *
Santander Konidis felt his shoulders tightening as the seventh enemy salvo came slashing into the PNE. It was like watching storm-driven surf, he thought. Like watching wave after wave pound forward, driving itself up over the beach, ripping at the sand dunes behind it.
* * *
"Impact in five seconds!"
Citizen Lieutenant Commander Rachel Malenkov's soprano was higher and shriller than usual. Not that Citizen Commander Jarko Laurent blamed her. With Leon Trotsky's command deck completely cut out of the brutally wounded ship's internal communications net, she'd inherited command of what was left of Trotsky's tactical department . . . exactly as Laurent had inherited command of the entire ship from Citizen Captain Vergnier.
Not that either one of us is going to have to worry about it much longer.
"—ponse from Missile-Seventeen!"
He heard the litany of damage reports still coming in, still being faithfully attended to by the people fighting his ship's desperate wounds.
"Negative response Search and Rescue Bravo-Three-Alpha-Niner! Negative res—"
I wish there was going to be time to tell them how proud of them I am, he thought, as two fresh salvos coalesced out of the onrushing mass of shipkiller missiles. Obviously, they'd hammered the other side's control platforms into scrap. Too bad that hadn't been enough to stop what was about to happen.
* * *
Citizen Commodore Konidis felt a surge of hope as he watched the same pattern emerge.
For the first time, the enemy's targeting had gone after the wrong prey. The hammer of destruction came crashing down on what was left of Mao Tse-tung and Leon Trotsky, and neither one of them was contributing a thing to the PNE's offensive fire.
I shouldn't feel grateful for what's about to happen.
The thought flared through his brain, yet he was grateful, and rightfully so. None of his heavy cruisers carried Cataphracts, nor did any of them have the computer codes to control the long-ranged weapons. There'd been no reason they should—not with fourteen battlecruisers to launch and control them. But if he lost his final battlecruisers, he'd lose any ability to engage the enemy at all. And so, guilty as he felt, a part of him rejoiced to see that enemy wasting his own precious missiles on targets which could no longer hurt him.
* * *
Sixty Mark-17-Es ripped their
way through Leon Trotsky's enfeebled defenses, while another sixty slashed toward Mao Tse-tung. The PNE's tactical officers did their best, but too many of their platforms had already been destroyed. There was too much confusion, too many holes, too many units scrambling to reprioritize as those metronome brimstone combers smashed over them.
Despite everything, they managed to stop almost two thirds of the incoming fire. Unfortunately, Trotsky and Mao Tse-tung were already too badly hurt. Their side walls were down, their armor was already breached and broken, and their own close-in defenses had been virtually silenced.
Mao Tse-tung disappeared in a spectacular explosion. Leon Trotsky simply broke her back and disintegrated.
* * *
Santander Konidis watched their icons vanish from the plot.
It was at least possible there'd been a handful of survivors from the flagship, he thought; none of those still aboard Mao Tse-tung could possibly have gotten off.
He glanced at the time display in the corner of his plot. It didn't seem possible. Less than five minutes—five minutes!—had elapsed since Citizen Commodore Luff's order to open fire. How could so many ships have been destroyed, so many people killed, in only five minutes?!
The display ticked steadily onward, and Hammer Force's eighth wave of missiles came howling in.
* * *
Citizen Captain Noémie Beausoleil's face was haggard. Smoke hung in the air of Napoleon Bonaparte's command deck, hovering below the overhead because damage control had shut off the ventilation trunks which might have sucked it away. She couldn't smell it with her helmet sealed, but she could see it, just as she could see its crimson highlights as it reflected the damage control schematics.
She didn't know how the battlecruiser had hung together this long, and she had absolutely no illusions about what was going to happen the next time somebody shot at her. In fact, it looked like—
"Incoming!" her tactical officer barked suddenly. "One hundred-plus! Attack range in seven seconds!"
Beausoleil's eyes snapped back to the tactical plot. CIC was gone, but enough of Bonaparte's tactical department was still up, still doing its job, for her to know it was no mistake.
"Abandon ship." She heard her own voice, impossibly calm, coming up over the priority command circuit before she even realized she'd hit the button. "Abandon ship. All hands, abandon ship. Aban—"
She was still repeating the order when the missiles struck.
* * *
Konidis knew he should have felt more pain as Napoleon Bonaparte blew up. Worse than that, he knew he would feel that pain—every gram of it—if he himself survived this day. Yet for now, right this second, what he felt was something quite different. He'd lost only a single ship this time, and, once again, one which had already been mission-killed.
* * *
Luiz Rozsak's ninth salvo rumbled down on the PNE, and this time, there'd been time for Charlie-Zulu-Omega to be implemented.
Rozsak was wrong, in at least one respect; he wasn't the first tactician to come up with the same idea. Admiral Shannon Foraker had beaten him to it, although Rozsak could certainly be excused for being unaware of the fact.
He had three times as many missiles as he had control links, even with his surviving destroyers tied in. Given the toughness of their targets, and the defensive capability the enemy still possessed, sixty-missile salvos weren't going to be enough. Especially not when the missiles already in the pipeline were all he was going to get. Which was why Marksman was no longer controlling sixty missiles; she was controlling a hundred and eighty, and her wounded sisters, Ranger and Sharpshooter, were controlling another hundred and eighty.
The only way they could do it was by rotating each of their available command links through three separate missiles, and the degree of control they could exercise was significantly diminished. But "diminished" control was enormously better than no control at all.
* * *
"What the—?"
Santander Konidis bit off the question as all three hundred and sixty missiles in Hammer Force's ninth wave suddenly reacted as one. The abrupt shift took all of his remaining missile defense officers by surprise, and dozens of counter-missiles wasted themselves on missiles whose totally unexpected course changes took them out of the CMs' envelope.
Half the mighty salvo went screaming in on PNES Marquis de Lafayette, and the already badly damaged battlecruiser vanished in a bubble of hell-bright brilliance. That was terrible enough, but the other half crashed through the desperate defensive laser fire of Lafayette's so far undamaged sister, PNES Thomas Paine.
It took longer, this time. The incoming fire wasn't as finely focused, as finely controlled. More of the missiles came in staggered, not concentrated into a single devastating moment of simultaneous destruction.
Not that it mattered.
Konidis watched the battlecruiser vanish from his plot, as so many others already had, and his mouth was tight.
He had exactly one battlecruiser left, Citizen Captain Kalyca Sakellaris' Maximilien Robespierre. Oh, the hulks which had once been George Washington and Ho Chi Minh continued to stagger along in formation with her, somehow, but they were as thoroughly out of the battle as any of their consorts which had already ceased to exist.
His eyes went back to the main plot, where the impeller signatures of six hostile starships continued to burn. The PNE's fourth salvo would reach those distant signatures in another five seconds, and Thomas Paine hadn't been destroyed until she and Robespierre had already cut their telemetry links.
It's the last salvo that's going to go in before they take Robespierre out, he thought coldly. They've already cut their control links to their next wave, too—probably to the next two waves, given how tightly sequenced they are. Nothing we can do is going to affect what those missiles do, and there's no way they're going to miss targeting Robespierre. So it all comes down to this. Either we take them out this time, or they've got—he glanced at a plot sidebar—another fifteen salvos already coming down on us.
Chapter Sixty
"Here it comes."
Luiz Rozsak was positive Edie Habib didn't realize she'd spoken out loud. For that matter, he could hardly have legitimately called that single, softly murmured sentence speaking "out loud," he supposed.
The pristine, undamaged neatness of SLNS Marksman's flag bridge was a bizarre counterpoint to what had happened to the rest of Dirk-Steven Kamstra's cruiser squadron. Flag Bridge still had that new-air-car smell, still looked like the flag bridge of a modern, lethal fighting force, despite the carnage which had ravaged LCS 7036.
There should be smoke, he thought. There should be the smell of blood, screams. There shouldn't be this . . . this antiseptic order. We should be feeling what's happened to the rest of the squadron.
Shut up, stupid, he told himself. Talk about misplaced survivor's guilt! He shook his head, surprised to feel a slight, biting smile twisting his lips. Before you start wallowing in that kind of crap, wait and see if you're going to survive after all!
"Attack range in ten seconds," Robert Womack said quietly. "Eight seconds. Seven sec—Status change!"
It was scarcely unexpected, and Rozsak watched with something very like detached calm as sixty missiles suddenly separated themselves from their companions—more than half of them in obedience to the directions of tactical officers who were already dead by the time the shipkillers obeyed their instructions—and came streaking directly in on Sharpshooter and Marksman.
The ECM on this salvo was better than it had been on any of the others. Obviously, the people who'd launched it had gone right on refining their data, updating their penetration profiles, even as they and their consorts were disintegrating under Hammer Force's relentless fire. Worse, only Marksman's missile defenses were anything like intact.
It was too late for counter-missiles—they'd been largely wasted, killing other missiles. No one had been able to identify the actual attack birds until they identified themselves by suddenly lunging fo
r their targets, and their autonomously controlled fellows—over three hundred of them—had camouflaged them, hidden them, absorbed the fire which ought to have killed them.
Now point defense clusters blazed desperately, but there was too little response time. Over half of them got through, and Luiz Rozsak's command chair shock frame hammered him viciously as SLNS Marksman's immunity came to an end at last.
* * *
"Oh, my God," Lieutenant Commander Jim Stahlin whispered.
It wasn't an imprecation; it was a prayer from the heart as the shipkillers came screaming in.
Hernando Cortés seemed to run into some invisible barrier in space. The big Warrior-class destroyer simply disintegrated, and Stahlin watched sickly as the badly damaged Simón Bolivar broke in two. His own Gustavus Adolphus, somehow miraculously still undamaged, and her division mate, Charlemagne—which most definitely was not undamaged—were suddenly Hammer Force's only surviving destroyers.
And they hadn't even been the primary targets.
* * *
"Direct hit on Impeller One!"
"Captain, we've lost helm control!"
"Direct hit Missile-One. Missile-Three and Five out of the net!"
"Counter-Missile-Niner out of the net! Counter-Missile-Eleven reports heavy casualties!"
"Sir, we've lost five betas out of the forward ring!"
"Heavy damage aft! Hull breach, Frames One-Zero-One-Five through One-Zero-Two-Zero! We have pressure drop, decks three and four!"
Luiz Rozsak heard the damage reports over his com link to Dirk-Steven Kamstra's bridge. He felt the damage in his own flesh, his own bones, as his flagship shuddered and bucked and heaved, flexing and twisting with the indescribable shock as bomb-pumped lasers transferred terajoules of energy to her hull.
And even as the energy blasted into Marksman, he saw SLNS Sharpshooter disappear from his plot forever.
* * *
Santander Konidis snarled in triumph as half the enemy impeller signatures were blotted away. But even as he snarled, Hammer Force's tenth missile salvo howled down on the People's Navy in Exile.
Three hundred and sixty Mark-17-E missiles hurtled straight into Maximilien Robespierre's teeth. It was scarcely a surprise. Everyone had known exactly who those missiles would target, but they'd had only twelve seconds to react to the knowledge. Every counter-missile that could be brought to bear, every point defense cluster which could possibly reach that wave of destruction, blazed desperately. Scores of missiles were intercepted by counter-missiles. Over seventy more were torn apart by close-in laser fire.