by David Weber
She'd never really expected Fire Plan Omega to be required. It was the "use-them-or-lose-them" option common to any naval force employing towed pods. Their vulnerability to proximity "soft kills" meant they had to be gotten off before that hurricane of incoming fire arrived, but no one had really expected the Monicans would be able to range on them. Yet the Captain had insisted on planning for even that unlikely eventuality. There was a different, less precise targeting sequence to meet it, one which spared only the two battlecruisers in among the civilians, and Abigail Hearns ignored the missiles screaming in to kill her. She had less than three minutes to completely revise her firing plan and get her birds off before they were destroyed. And so she shut the incoming fire out of her mind, trusting her survival and her ship's to a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise while she called up Fire Plan Omega's targeting hierarchy, handed it to the computers, allocated her pods, and fired.
It never even occurred to Helen that Abigail might have shunted her aside. She was too locked into the job at hand to think about such things, and her fingers flew across her keypads. Her heart seemed to be hammering against the backs of her teeth, yet there was a sort of surrealistic calm to it. A sense almost of floating. If she'd had time to think about it, she would have realized it was almost like the Zen-like state Master Tye had trained into her back on Old Earth, but there was more to it than that. It combined that discipline with the endless hours of drills and simulations. Her hands seemed to know what to do without ever consulting her brain, and yet her brain was whirring with a flashing speed that made even her flying fingers seem slow.
Case Romeo activated the squadron-wide layered defense system Naomi Kaplan had set up on the voyage from Point Midway. Hexapuma and Aegis, with their superior sensor suites, faster-firing counter-missile tubes, and additional control links, were responsible for the outer counter-missile zone. Warlock, Valiant, and Gallant had the intermediate zone, and Audacious and the destroyers had the close-in counter-missile zone.
It was a good plan, and Terekhov's insistence on deploying his full EW assets helped. But there were nine hundred and sixty missiles in that incredible wave. Nine hundred and sixty missiles with penetration aids far superior to anything the Monicans were supposed to have in service, with better seekers and heavier warheads.
Hexapuma and Aegis, with their own counter-missiles and enough from the other ships to fill all their redundant control links, destroyed two hundred and nineteen missiles in the outer zone, ripping them apart with precisely directed counter-missile kamikazes.
Seven hundred and forty-one missiles, each fit to blast through a superdreadnought's sidewalls and armor, broke through the outer zone and screamed into the squadron's teeth. Hexapuma and Aegis continued firing, joined by Warlock, Valiant, and Gallant as the older ships' less acute sensors locked onto the incoming tide of death. Holes appeared, ripped through the solid-looking tide of incoming warheads, and another two hundred and forty-eight of them died.
But there were still almost four hundred left, and they came howling into the inner counter-missile zone. All the Manticoran ships could see them now, but there was no time for follow-up shots on missiles which evaded the first counter-missiles targeted upon them. The maelstrom of swarming targets and outgoing counter-missiles, the sensor-blinding interference of hundreds of missile impeller wedges, and the jamming, sensor-twisting strobes of the Solarian-built missiles' sophisticated ECM created a whirling confusion no human brain could have sorted out. It was all in the hands of the computers, and Hexapuma quivered with the saw-edged vibration of counter-missile tubes in constant, maximum-rate fire.
Two hundred more missiles perished, and "only" two hundred and ninety-three kept coming.
They hit the the perimeter of the final defensive zone, too close for counter-missiles to acquire and intercept in time. Tethered decoys called to them, seducing them away from their assigned targets. Huge bursts of jamming tried to blind them. Laser clusters swiveled and spat, cycling bolts of coherent light in lethal streams, their prediction programs pitted against the best evasion patterns the Solarian League's premier naval shipbuilder could provide. The inner zone was a holocaust of shattering missiles and wreckage, and a hundred and ninety-six more were torn apart in the second and a half it took them to cross it.
It was a phenomenal performance. Ninety percent of that lethal tide was stopped short of attack range. Ninety percent, by only ten warships, none heavier than a heavy cruiser.
But ninety-seven got through.
The Squadron twisted and danced, each captain maneuvering individually, desperately seeking to interpose the shield of his impeller wedge between his crew and the incoming laser heads. But their base velocity was low, and the missiles had plenty of time on their drives. Less than a third of them could be evaded that way. Last-ditch decoys sucked a few of the rest off, and four more strayed too close together and destroyed one other in fratricidal bursts of impeller interference. Two more simply failed to detonate; the rest of them did not.
Hexapuma heaved madly as bomb-pumped lasers designed to shatter the armor of superdreadnoughts slammed into her. Sidewalls did their best, clawing at the beams, bending them. Armor resisted briefly, but the savage bars of X-ray lasers smashed through it. Impeller nodes blew, superconductor capacitors exploded, hull plating shattered. Graser One, Three, and Seven were wiped away as if they had never existed, and despite Hexapuma's manpower-reducing automation, nineteen men and women died with their weapons. Missile tubes were wrecked, ripped and twisted. Frame members shattered. Three sidewall generators went down, and a quarter of her starboard counter-missile tubes and almost half her point defense clusters went with them. Gravitic Array One and Lidar One disintegrated, and a power surge blew into the superconductor ring for Spinal Five, the starboard graser in her after chase armament, like a tornado. The ring exploded, deep inside the ship, like a bomb, and the blast blew back into Auxiliary Control.
Ansten FitzGerald, Naomi Kaplan, and eleven other men and women were caught in the path of the explosion. FitzGerald and Kaplan both survived; most of the others were less fortunate.
Isidor Hegedusic felt a moment of incredible triumph as the missile pods fired.
That tsunami of destruction surpassed anything he'd ever dreamed of commanding, and only ten cruisers and destroyers stood in its path. Whatever happened to Eroica Station, those ships were doomed.
Yet even as he thought that, before the first counter-missile had intercepted the first missile, the Manticoran pods fired. He'd sent nine hundred and sixty missiles to crush the Manties; Abigail Hearns sent seventeen hundred back into his teeth, and his defenses were nowhere near as good.
Damage reports flooded into the bridge, and Helen cringed.
Javelin, Rondeau, and Gallant were gone. Audacious was -savagely damaged and lamed, with less than a quarter of her weapons left. Vigilant was little more than a hulk, and Warlock was severely damaged. Hexapuma's more modern point defense—and an inordinate share of pure luck—had let her escape with far less damage than her older sisters, but all things were relative. Her maximum acceleration, even without pods, was no better than four hundred gravities. She was down to thirty-five tubes, and a quarter of her broadside grasers—sixty percent of her starboard energy broadside—and one of her after chasers were gone. Thirty-seven of her people were confirmed dead, with at least another seventeen wounded . . . including Surgeon Commander Orban. His sick berth attendants were doing their best, but none of them were fully trained physicians.
It was her fault. She knew that was insane, yet a small, cruel voice deep down inside whispered that she'd been in charge of the missile defenses. She was the one who was supposed to stop this from happening.
She stared at the com screen still connected to the badly damaged AuxCon and saw Aikawa working frantically with two uninjured ratings as they applied first-aid to the wounded. But no matter how hard she stared, there was no sign of Paulo.
Aivars Terekhov surveyed the damage, and hi
s jaw clenched painfully.
He'd walked straight into it, and a third of the Squadron's ships had been destroyed because he had. It was all very well to remind himself no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy. He even knew it was true. But it didn't make him feel one bit better about the dead and maimed who'd counted on him to get it right.
He drew a deep breath and turned his attention to Eroica Station and felt a stab of vengeful satisfaction. Those damned missile pods had savaged his squadron, killed his people, but their own fire had shattered the military components of the Station. The close-in drones made it obvious that at least eight of the nine battlecruisers in the military yard had been wrecked beyond any hope of repair even by a Solarian shipyard, far less Monica's facilities. The other one might be repairable, but it would take a fully equipped shipyard months, possibly T-years, to do the job. The two on the civilian side of the installation were still intact, but there wasn't much he could do about that, even using laser heads instead of conventional nukes, without killing hundreds of civilians. He didn't want to do that, and he wouldn't . . . if he had any choice at all. And at least Eroica Station itself had been thoroughly neutralized as a threat.
Which, unfortunately, wasn't true of the oncoming battlecruisers.
Janko Horster's face was white with mingled shock and fury. His sensors couldn't give him as clear a picture of what had happened to Eroica Station as Terekhov's could, but he didn't need details to know the Monican Navy had just been mangled. Most—probably all—of the other battlecruisers were gone, and the same was almost certainly true of the older units which had been laid up at Eroica to provide personnel for his own ships. First Division, by itself, probably had ten times the firepower of the entire Monican Navy before Levakonic had delivered the new ships, but it would be impossible to carry out the operational plan with what was left.
And that didn't include the casualties. The men he'd known and served and trained with for decades. The friends.
Yet the Manties had been hurt, too. Badly. And they must have fired every pod they had to inflict such damage on Eroica Station.
Their long-range missile advantage was gone, and the bastards who'd raped his Navy couldn't get away from him now.
"Get me Vigilant," Terekhov grated.
"Aye, aye, Sir," Nagchaudhuri acknowledged, and fifteen seconds later, he found himself facing a lieutenant he'd never seen before.
"Commander Diamond?" he asked.
"Dead, Sir," the lieutenant said hoarsely. "We took a direct hit on the bridge. No survivors, I'm afraid." He coughed on the thin haze of smoke swirling about him, and Terekhov realized he was connected to Damage Control Central.
"Who's in command, Lieutenant?" he asked as gently as he could.
"I guess I am, Sir. Gainsworthy, third engineer. I think I'm the senior officer left."
Dear God, Terekhov thought. Their casualties must be almost as bad as Defiant's were.
"What's your maximum acceleration, Lieutenant Gainsworthy?"
"I don't know for sure, Sir. It can't be much over a hundred gravs. We've lost the entire after ring, and the forward ring's badly damaged."
"That's what I was afraid of." Terekhov drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. "You're going to have to abandon, Lieutenant."
"No!" Gainsworthy protested instantly. "We can save her! We can get her home!"
"No, you can't, Lieutenant," Terekhov said, gently but implacably. "Even if she could be repaired, which is doubtful, she can't stay with the rest of the Squadron. Those bogeys will run right over her. So get your people off and set the scuttling charges, Lieutenant Gainsworthy. That's an order."
"But, Sir, we—!" A tear carved a white streak down one dirty cheek, and Terekhov shook his head.
"I'm sorry, son," he said, cutting the lieutenant off quietly. "I know it hurts to lose her—I've done it. But however much you love her, she's only a ship, Lieutenant." A lie, his brain shouted. You know that's a lie! "She's only alloy and electronics. It's her people that matter. Now get them off."
The final sentence came slowly, measured, and Gainsworthy nodded.
"Yes, Sir."
"Good, Lieutenant. God bless."
Terekhov cut the circuit and turned back to the ships he might still be able to save.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
"They know we're here," Janko Horster muttered.
"What?"
Horster glanced up, irritated by the interruption. But it was the senior tech rep, not one of his officers. The civilian obviously didn't realize he wasn't supposed to interrupt a flag officer's thought processes with questions at a time like this, and Horster decided to answer him.
"They know we're here," he repeated, and gestured at the plot. "Or at least they're afraid someone's out here."
The range was still too great for his passive sensors to provide detailed information, but some things were brutally clear. Four of the Manties' ten impeller signatures had disappeared. Three had vanished with abrupt finality during the vicious missile exchange. Those three, he felt grimly confident, had been hard kills by Eroica Station. The fourth had gone off the display about four minutes after the others. Its strength had dropped precipitously before that, obviously because of battle damage. So either it had finally failed completely because of that damage, or else it had been shut down, which would almost certainly indicate a ship in the process of being abandoned. Whichever it was, the damned Manties had lost forty percent of their strength, and most, if not all, of their surviving units had to have been hurt.
"They've increased their deceleration to four hundred gravities," he told the civilian. "That's an increase of fifty gees over what they were holding it down to on the way in—probably because of their frigging pods—but it's a hell of a lot less than they ought to be capable of. So obviously they have impeller damage. But they've also got a ship out there somewhere that survived the shooting only to have its signature go off the display just a couple of minutes ago. So either its impeller damage was even worse than theirs, and its nodes just packed it in, or they're abandoning her. But they wouldn't be doing that this quickly unless they were afraid someone was in position to engage them."
"How can you be so sure?"
"I can't be positive, but they'd have taken longer to reverse course if they weren't. No captain's going to abandon his ship that quickly, not without surveying her damage and being certain he can't save her. And no commodore would leave her behind unless he figured he was going to have a fight on his hands and couldn't afford to be handicapped looking after cripples."
The civilian nodded slowly, and Horster smiled. It was an ugly expression, one that mingled fury over what had happened to his navy with vengeful satisfaction.
"They're dead meat," he said flatly. The civilian stopped nodding and looked at him with undisguised anxiety, and the commodore barked a laugh. "They don't have any of those damned pods left," he said, "and they never had anything bigger than a heavy cruiser to begin with, according to Admiral Hegedusic's tac analysis. At least a hundred of our missiles got into attack range before they detonated, too. They've been hammered—hammered hard—and they're going to be up against modern battlecruisers. Battlecruisers that can shoot back this time."
The civilian still looked dubious, and Horster could almost hear the thoughts running through the other man's brain. Yes, he had modern battlecruisers to kill them with, but Horster's crews had been aboard their ships for less than three weeks. Their people were still learning how to use their systems, how to master the capabilities, but it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Their engineering and astrogation departments had been forced to wait until they could actually get aboard the new ships, but the tactical crews had managed to spend over two months in the simulators Levakonic had brought with him. That might not be the same as hands-on training, but it was one hell of a lot better than nothing.
And they were battlecruisers, with all the armor and sheer toughness that implied.
*
* *
"They're definitely battlecruisers, Sir," Helen said.
She was focused on her displays, trying not to think about how many people had just been killed and wounded aboard the Squadron's ships. Aboard Hexapuma. She knew Aikawa was still alive, but where was Paulo? Was he even—
She pushed the thought aside again. She had no time for it. Other people were depending on her.
"The arrays are close enough to see them now despite their EW," she continued. "They're definitely running with wedges at maintenance levels, but we're getting enough signature off them to be confident of their tonnage range."
"Can we tell if they're more Indefatigables?"
"No, Sir. We're not getting much besides the impeller signatures and some neutrino leakage."
"Skipper," Lieutenant Bagwell said from the electronic warfare station, "until they go active with their sensor suites, we're not going to get any more off of them. From the quality of their stealth technology, though, they've got to be Solly designs."
"Another thing, Sir," Abigail said. "Whoever these people are, they were obviously already on a ballistic course for Eroica Station when we turned up, or we'd have picked up their drives. I suppose it's possible they had their impellers up and their stealth system simply hid it from us, but I don't think so. I think they'd already cut their drives. Which suggests some sort of fleet maneuver."
"And?" Terekhov prompted in an encouraging tone when she paused, although he was fairly certain he knew where she was headed.
"Well, Sir, I suppose it's possible an SLN commander might want to exercise his crews, but it doesn't seem likely he'd have pulled out all the stops that way against typical Verge sensor technology. I think it's more likely these are more of the same—additional ships being turned over to the Monicans, but already through the refit process and working up new crews."
"That's speculative, Skipper," Bagwell said, "but I think it's good speculation."