by David Weber
"No telling," Horster said harshly. "A freak hit. Somebody in a fusion room who punched the wrong button. Maybe God just got pissed at us! But it's not going to help them much in another sixty seconds!"
Terekhov stared at his own plot in disbelief. Eight hundred and fifty thousand tons of starship had just disappeared. Just like that.
"Good work, Guns!" he heard his own voice saying even as he tried to come to grips with the reality.
Abigail didn't look up from her console. He didn't know if she'd even heard him. She was oblivious to all distractions, wrapped in a fugue state Terekhov knew from personal experience. Every gram of attention was focused on her displays, her keypads, and the ruby icons of her targets. Anything directly pertaining to their destruction registered instantly, cleanly; everything else was extraneous and supremely unimportant.
Her next two salvos-sixty-two precious laser heads and eight EW platforms-went streaking into nothingness. Their target no longer existed, and there was no time to divert them to Bogey Two; they would continue to the end of their powered run, then detonate harmlessly. But that gave her computers an additional fifty seconds to update the first of Bogey Two's salvos. And she'd taken a different approach with its penetration aides.
It was Hurricane's turn.
Unlike Typhoon , there was nothing at all wrong with Hurricane's forward sensors. But the salvo of missiles tearing down upon her seemed totally oblivious to her ECM. They ignored her decoys, brushed aside her jamming. It was ridiculous. No one could respond that quickly to a target's electronic warfare systems!
But somehow the Manties were doing it.
Hurricane's counter-missiles roared out. The Manties' jamming didn't seem quite so intense this time-either that, or Hurricane's tactical officers were getting a better feel for it. Horster smiled as he watched the CMs tear out to meet the Manticoran missiles.
And then, suddenly, there weren't thirty-five incoming birds; there were more than seventy of them.
"Damn them! Damn them!" the tech rep muttered. "They can't do this shit!"
"What are you talking about?" Horster snarled as the intercepting counter-missiles went berserk trying to maintain lock on their designated targets in the midst of so many abruptly replicated threats.
"They can't have the power to confuse our sensors this way!" the civilian said. "They're inside our shipboard sensor envelope. They aren't dealing with remote arrays, or even smaller shipboard suites-these are battlecruisers , damn it! We should be burning through that clutter like it wasn't even there!"
"You said they had superdense fusion bottles in their missiles, why not here?" Horster demanded harshly.
"But even if they have the power, the emitters would have to be…" The Solarian's voice trailed off, and his eyes narrowed as intense speculation overcame-momentarily, at least-even his fear.
Horster glared at him, but there was more than a little envy in the glare. A part of the commodore wished something could distract him from the debacle which had engulfed his Navy. No matter what happened to the Manties in front of him, they'd accomplished their mission. When the smoke cleared, there would be no Monican System Navy.
But at least he could make sure they never got to celebrate their triumph.
The bridge lift door opened, and Midshipman Paulo d'Arezzo came through it at a run.
Terekhov saw him; Helen was so tightly focused on the input from her sensor arrays and the looming missile engagement with the oncoming battlecruisers that she never even noticed.
"Sorry, Sir!" Paulo said, as he skidded to a temporary halt beside the captain's command chair. "That explosion knocked me on my ass for a minute or two. I'm afraid it wrecked my EW station, too. So I came up here to see if I could lend Lieutenant Bagwell a hand."
There was blood on the young man's right temple, Terekhov noted, and the entire right side of his face was already beginning to bruise. But he was on his feet, and he was here, and the captain smiled tightly at him and pointed at Bagwell.
"Just don't jostle his elbow, Paulo," he said, and the midshipman bared his teeth in a half-manic grin and dashed across to Bagwell.
The miraculously increased Manticoran missile salvo slammed into Hurricane .
Horster wasn't certain how many of the real attack missiles Hurricane and Cyclone had managed to kill. Some of them, at least. But an entire cluster of them got through, and it was Hurricane's turn to twitch in agony as the X-ray needles stabbed into her. They seemed to be all over her, ripping at her like demons, yet unlike Typhoon, she shook the hits off without any apparent effect, and Horster grinned like a punch-drunk fighter. That was what it meant to be a battlecruiser fighting heavy cruisers!
"Missile range in twenty seconds, Commodore!"
"Bring the division to starboard. Clear our port broadsides."
"Yes, Sir."
The two surviving battlecruisers swung to starboard, bringing their port broadsides to bear, and Horster kicked himself mentally. He should have done this sooner. He'd been too fixated on pursuing the enemy, accelerating straight after them. He should have let them go ahead and reduce the closure rate in order to bring his broadside sensors and additional point defense to bear. But he'd been confident in the strength of his armor and the effectiveness of his EW… until Typhoon blew up, at least.
They'd just begun their turn when the second Manty heavy cruiser opened fire, followed seconds later by every surviving Manticoran ship.
Hexapuma and Aegis were the only ships in Terekhov's riven Squadron with the off-bore capacity to fire both broadsides at a single target. The light cruiser had twenty tubes. Warlock had sixteen in her less damaged broadside. Janissary had eight, Aria had six, and the severely mauled Audacious had three. Altogether, it came to eighty-eight launchers. The minimum cycle time for Warlock, Janissary, and Aegis was eight seconds per launcher; for the older Aria and Audacious , it was fourteen seconds. But penetrating the battlecruisers' defensive envelope required massed fire, so the controlling factor was the slowest cycle time of the squadron.
Hexapuma had expended four hundred and sixty-five Mark 16s and sixty of her hundred and thirty EW platforms. She had six hundred and thirty attack missiles left-only eighteen double broadsides, but her consorts had full magazines, and the last thing Aivars Terekhov wanted was to let two undamaged battlecruisers into energy range of his mangled ships. The rest of the Squadron had eleven minutes of concentrated missile fire to do something about that, which was the real reason he'd expended so many missiles while only Hexapuma had the range to engage, but Hexapuma had only another five minutes of fire.
Guthrie Bagwell's analysis of the enemy's electronic warfare capabilities had gone out to the entire Squadron, and if they lacked Hexapuma's reach, even the older destroyers could come close to matching her penetration aids over the range they did have.
If they couldn't stop, or at least severely damage, those oncoming leviathans before the two forces interpenetrated, there would be no tomorrow, and so as the range dropped to 11.4 million kilometers, they went to rapid fire at Hexapuma's maximum rate.
* * *
Janko Horster realized he'd made another mistake, one far worse than failing to open his broadsides earlier. Each of his battlecruisers had twenty-nine tubes in her broadside. With Typhoon gone, that gave him fifty-eight-two-thirds as many as the Manties had-with a minimum cycle time of thirty-five seconds. Worse, his tactical crews had no information at all on the Manties' electronic warfare capabilities, while it was quickly and dismally apparent the Manticoran CO had learned a great deal about his EW during the approach.
His people were doing their best, but seven weeks of combined simulator and hands-on training wasn't enough. It wasn't second nature to them, wasn't instinctive. The slight hesitation in their responses, the friction in the decision loops, might not have been apparent against another Verge navy. But he didn't face another Verge navy. He faced the Royal Manticoran Navy, and that was a mistake few survived.
* * *
&
nbsp; In the next two hundred and sixteen seconds, Aivars Terekhov's cruisers and destroyers fired nine hundred and ninety attack missiles and one hundred and twenty Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Seven hundred and thirteen missiles and seventy-nine of the electronic warfare birds were in space before the first salvo landed. In the same time period, Cyclone and Hurricane fired three hundred and thirty-six missiles… and no dedicated EW platforms at all.
It was a holocaust.
The Manticoran missiles went through the Monicans' electronic defenses like white-hot awls. Counter-missiles managed to kill dozens of them, point defense laser clusters killed dozens more, but for every missile that was stopped, five got through. The battlecruisers' tracking capacity was simply overwhelmed by the Dragon's Teeth's false images of incoming warheads. Their sensors were hashed by blinding bursts of static. They were a third-class navy up against what might well be the premier combat fleet of the explored galaxy, and they were outclassed in every quality but courage.
Janko Horster saw it coming. Realized even Technodyne's "experts" had underestimated the enormous technological edge the Manticoran Navy held over their own hardware. Realized, even more gallingly, how outclassed his crews-and he-were by the crews aboard those Manticoran warships. His ships were battlecruisers, armed and armored on a scale none of his opponents could match. But what use armor when hundreds upon hundreds of laser warheads ripped and tore and gouged? What use massive energy batteries that were shattered and broken, reduced to ruined battle steel and dead and dying crewmen before ever they got into range of an enemy?
Space itself seemed to shudder around the two ships writhing at the heart of the furnace, surrounded by a seething cauldron of nuclear flame as laser head after laser head detonated and hurled its fury at them. Armor and hull plating shattered, atmosphere gushed from gaping wounds like blood, and men died-some instantly, like the switching off of a light, and some screaming in broken agony, alone and trapped in the wreckage of their ships.
By the time Cyclone and Hurricane reached energy range of the first Manticoran ship, they were little more than hulks, wedges dead, power gone, trailing atmosphere, escape pods, and wreckage.
But they didn't die alone. Outclassed they might have been, with faulty training and poor doctrine, but there was nothing at all wrong with their courage. And however justified Aivars Terekhov's actions might have been, the fury they felt at his attack burned with a clear, white heat. Three hundred of their missiles reached Terekhov's squadron before the blowtorch of his own attack seared them, and the destroyer Janissary and the light cruiser Audacious died with them. Hexapuma , Warlock , Aegis , and Aria survived. Four ships, all that was left of Terekhov's squadron, every one of them severely damaged.
"- and Surgeon Commander Simmons abandoned Vigilant successfully with a pinnace full of wounded before she blew. They'll be aboard directly, Sir," Amal Nagchaudhuri said wearily. With Ansten FitzGerald still unconscious and Naomi Kaplan even more badly injured, and with Ginger Lewis working like a titan to deal with Hexapuma's brutal wounds, Nagchaudhuri was Terekhov's acting executive officer. He looked exhausted, out on his feet, and Terekhov sympathized, for he felt exactly the same.
"Good, Amal," he said crisply, and the com officer wondered where the Captain found his energy. No one could look that clear-eyed and alert after what they'd all been through, but somehow, the Captain managed it. "We'll have to find room for the wounded somewhere," he continued. "But thank God we can get a proper doctor in here!"
"Yes, Sir," Nagchaudhuri agreed. He pressed the page key, bringing up his next screen of notes. "We've lost six beta nodes in the forward ring, and eight betas and two alphas out of the after ring. Our best acceleration's about three hundred gravities, but Ginger's working on that. We're down to two grasers in the port broadside-none at all to starboard, although Ginger thinks she may be able to get one of them back eventually. We've got eight operable tubes to starboard, and eleven to port, but we shot ourselves dry. We're even out of counter-missiles. The after chase armament's pretty much trashed, and I don't think Ginger's going to be able to do anything about that. The forward chasers came through untouched, somehow. And we still have the bow wall. But if it comes to another fight, Skipper, we've got the firepower-maybe-of a destroyer, and we have exactly one starboard sidewall generator."
Terekhov grimaced. They were no unexpected revelations in Nagchaudhuri's report. Indeed, if anything surprised him it was that they had even one broadside energy mount left.
"And our people?" he asked quietly, and Nagchaudhuri winced.
"We're still working on the numbers, and we've still got people unaccounted for who may be alive in the wreckage. But so far, Skipper, it looks like sixty dead and twenty-eight wounded."
Terekhov's jaw clenched. Eighty-eight might not sound like very much compared to what the Monicans had lost. Or the other ships of his own squadron, for that matter. But Hexapuma's total company, including Marines, was only three hundred and fifty before her earlier casualties and detachments. Nagchaudhuri's numbers-which still weren't complete, he reminded himself-represented thirty percent of the people he'd taken into battle with him.
And Hexapuma was one of the lucky ships.
"What about the rest of the Squadron?"
" Aegis is the closest thing we've got to combat-capable, Sir, and she's down to sixty-two missiles and five grasers. Warlock doesn't have a single operable weapon left, and Aria is almost that bad. Lieutenant Rossi says-"
"Excuse me, Skipper." Terekhov looked up. It was Jefferson Kobe.
"Yes, Jeff? What is it?"
"Sir, Helen's arrays are picking up several Monican warships headed our way. It looks like half a dozen LACs, four destroyers, and a pair of light cruisers. And we've just received a message from an Admiral Bourmont. He demands that we surrender or be destroyed."
Terekhov looked at him, then at Nagchaudhuri. The lieutenant commander's expression was tight, his eyes dark, and Terekhov understood that, too. Obsolete though the regular Monican Navy might be, it was more than adequate to destroy his own shattered survivors.
"How long for their first unit to get here?"
"Toby says four hours for a zero/zero, Sir. Three hours, fifty minutes if they settle for a flyby firing pass."
"Very well." Terekhov strode out of the briefing room onto Hexapuma's bridge and waved for Kobe to resume his station at Communications. He felt his bridge crew's tension, felt them wanting to turn and look at him even as discipline kept them focused on their displays. These people hovered on the ragged brink of exhaustion, and they knew as well as he that they couldn't fight the Monicans.
"First, Jeff," Terekhov said calmly, "get Commander Badmachin on the FTL."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
It took less than a minute to make the connection. Hexapuma and her three battered consorts floated in space, less than nine million kilometers from Eroica Station with zero relative motion. That put the ammunition ship, still hovering at the hyper limit, 12.2 million kilometers further out.
"Yes, Captain?" Badmachin's expression was eloquent with concern.
"Captain Badmachin, I want you to join the rest of the Squadron here at your best speed."
" There , Sir?"
"Yes. You should have time to join us, drop off a couple of hundred more pods, and still return across the hyper limit before any Monican unit is in range to fire on you. Please get underway immediately."
"Yes, Sir. Immediately!" she said.
"Good. Terekhov, clear." He looked back at Kobe. "Now record for Admiral Bourmont, please."
"Yes, Sir. Standing by to record."
"Admiral Bourmont," Terekhov faced the visual pickup, his shoulders square, his expression confident, and his voice was icy. "You've called upon my Squadron to surrender. Unfortunately, I can't do that. I came here to do a job-to neutralize the battlecruisers your star nation has been assembling to attack mine. I have not yet completed that task. Two of your battlecruisers remain undamaged, because I refrained
from firing upon them in light of their proximity to the civilian portions of your Eroica Station complex. Should any of your armed vessels continue to approach my own command-and we have all of them under surveillance as I speak-I will have no option but to complete my task before withdrawing into hyper before any of your warships can reach me . I regret to say it, but this will require a bombardment of the battlecruisers in question with contact nuclear warheads, and it will be impossible for me to permit the evacuation of your civilian workforce first."
He heard someone inhale sharply behind him, but his own expression never wavered.
"Should you choose to stand down your warships, and to maintain the present status quo unchanged pending the arrival of the approaching Manticoran relief force, I will be spared that unpleasant necessity. Should you choose not to stand down your warships and maintain the status quo , I will proceed with the bombardment. And under no circumstances will I permit the evacuation of your civilians. The choice is yours, Sir. You have two hours in which to make it and get your decision to me. Terekhov, clear."
He stopped and looked at Kobe. The lieutenant looked severely shaken, but he nodded.
"Good copy, Sir," he said with only the slightest tremor in his voice.
"Very well. Attach the latest tactical summary, including the positions of all of their units we currently have under observation. Then send it, please."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Now, Amal," Terekhov said calmly, turning back to Nagchaudhuri, "I believe you have a report to complete. We'll have time for that before Volcano arrives. If you please."
He walked back across the deathly silent bridge to the briefing room, his boot heels sounding clearly on the decksole, and Nagchaudhuri followed after only a brief hesitation. So did Van Dort. He hadn't been invited, but Terekhov wasn't surprised at all to see him after the hatch closed and he turned back to Nagchaudhuri.
"Yes, Bernardus?" he asked in that same, calm voice.
