by David Weber
"That's speculative, Skipper," Bagwell said, "but I think it's good speculation."
"So do I." Terekhov smiled approvingly at his youthful tactical officer. And at her even more youthful assistant. Then his expression sobered.
If Abigail was right and those ships were still in the process of working up, there were likely to be weaknesses in their performance, chinks in their armor. But they were still battlecruisers. The three of them outmassed all six of his surviving ships by better than two-to-one, and they were undamaged.
He looked at the plot. Eleven minutes had elapsed from the moment the third battlecruiser was detected. Only eleven minutes, in which hundreds of his people had been killed and the Monicans' casualties had probably run well into the thousands. He was decelerating away from the oncoming battlecruisers at the highest rate the Squadron as a whole could sustain, but nothing he did was going to prevent those ships from engaging him.
The only advantage he still had was the reach of Hexapuma's internal launchers, and the geometry of the looming engagement did much to neutralize even that. The range was down to 30.9 million kilometers, and with the battlecruisers' overtake advantage of 38,985 KPS, Hexapuma's maximum powered envelope at launch was increased to almost thirty-seven million kilometers. Assuming the battlecruisers' shipboard missile performance approximated ONI's estimates, their range would be under fifteen million kilometers, despite their overtake, but at present velocities and accelerations, they would enter that range of him within another 6.3 minutes and enter energy range eleven minutes after that. Warlock would also have a slight range advantage over the Monican battlecruisers, but it wasn't great enough to change the tactical equation significantly. Her tubes were simply too small; she couldn't handle even the Mark 14 missiles the Saganami-Bs had been designed to fire, much less a Saganami-C's Mark 16s, so her advantage would be little more than three million kilometers—barely seventy-five seconds at the Monicans' rate of closure.
The range was still very long, especially against current Solarian ECM and missile defenses . . . and he didn't have all that many missles with which to penetrate them. Each of his Mark 16 missiles came in at over ninety-four tons, and Hexapuma's total designed loadout of attack missiles was 1,200. Fortunately, they'd squeezed in an extra hundred and twenty birds . . . but Abigail had expended most of them in Fire Plan Omega, and fifteen more had been in the feed queues of the five destroyed launchers. Without the redundant manpower Hexapuma didn't have, there was no way to manually reclaim those missiles, so his ship was down to an effective total of only 1,155. The cycle time on his launchers at maximum-rate fire was one round every eighteen seconds, twice the time an older ship, like Warlock, would have required. Partly because the missiles were simply larger, but even more because of the need to light up the Mark 16's onboard reactor before launch. Still, in theory, each launcher could fire fifty-four times before anyone else on either side was in range to do the same . . . except for the fact that he had only thirty-three rounds per tube.
Yet he had very little time to think about it. Flight time was going to be over three and a half minutes.
"Guns," he said to his youthful acting tactical officer, "your target is the lead bogey. I want double broadsides at twenty-five-second intervals. You can have four tubes in each salvo for Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth. Five salvos on Bogey One, then shift to Bogey Two."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Ms. Zilwicki, lock the Alpha-Seven array directly to Lieutenant Bagwell." He turned his chair to face the EWO. "These people's defenses are going to be good—very good. We need to hammer them, and to do that we need data on their EW capabilities—fast. The rest of the Squadron will have over ten minutes to engage after they enter their effective powered envelope, but for them to use that time, we need to feed them everything we can pry loose about these people's defensive systems, and our missile range advantage is the only crowbar we have. We need to make them show us their best, people."
"Understood, Sir," Bagwell said.
"Very well, Ms. Hearns—open fire!"
* * *
"Missile launch!"
"Wedge up!" Horster snapped instantly, and the division's impeller wedges sprang to full power. It didn't happen instantly, even from a maintenance power level, but there was plenty of time to get them up before the attacking missiles could arrive.
The commodore crossed quickly to the master plot, looking for the incoming fire, and his eyes narrowed as he found it.
The arrow-shaped icons of thirty-five missiles streaked towards his trio of ships, accelerating steadily at 46,000 gravities. Twenty-five seconds later, a second salvo followed. Then a third. A fourth.
"The target is Typhoon," CIC announced as the first counter-missiles went out to meet them, and Horster nodded. Typhoon was his lead ship. He'd expected her to draw the enemy's fire, assuming they weren't stupid enough to divide it among all of his units.
The Manties had begun firing much sooner than he'd anticipated. For just an instant, he wondered if that meant they were planning on sending them in ballistic. But that would have been a stupid waste of precious ammunition, and they were firing their birds with low-power drive settings. That suggested that they must have the reach to engage under power even at this range, -presumably with plenty of time on their clocks for terminal attack maneuvers. Still, there were less than forty in each salvo. They had to be coming from a single ship, so perhaps the Manties actually had at least one battlecruiser of their own out there. Either way, there weren't enough birds to saturate his division's defenses, so—
His eyes narrowed still further as the lead salvo abruptly vanished from the plot. One instant it was there; the next all thirty-plus missiles just disappeared. Five seconds later, they reappeared, but not as the steady, blood-red light codes they'd been before. Now they strobed rapidly, almost flickering, and he jabbed an angry glance at the tech rep.
"I don't know!" the civilian said, correctly interpreting the look. "It must be some sort of jamming platform. That—" he stabbed an index finger at the flickering icons "—indicates we can see them, but we don't have hard locks. And look—look there! Goddamn it!"
Horster didn't swear out loud, but his teeth ground together as his division's entire initial salvo of counter-missiles lost lock and went stumbling off into ineffectuality.
Terekhov bared his teeth at the tactical plot. Despite the range, the FTL reports from Helen's recon drones gave him a real-time, close-range picture of what was happening. He hadn't given Abigail specific instructions on how to employ the EW platforms seeded into her attack salvos, but he recognized what she'd done. She'd used all of the available slots in the initial double broadside for Dazzlers but locked them down until they detected the launch of the enemy's first counter-missiles. When the powerful jammers did come on-line, the Monican CMs had already established lock and been cut loose from the launching ships' control links. But the counter-missiles' onboard seekers weren't up to the challenge of that sudden, massive pulse of jamming right in their faces.
The attack salvo jinked and wove, threading through, past, and around the suddenly dazed and clumsy interceptors which were supposed to have stopped it, then drove past the second wave of CMs, which had already locked onto Abigail's next attack wave. Four of the first wave's birds abruptly wavered, losing lock, veering away as the Monicans' own EW lured them astray. Then a fifth followed them. But thirty held lock, and their closing velocity was so great the defenders had no time to vector yet another wave of counter-missiles onto them.
Then Bogey One's forward laser clusters opened fire.
* * *
This time Janko Horster did swear.
Typhoon's shipboard sensors were less affected by the Manties' infernal jammers than the counter-missiles' seekers had been, but it was painfully obvious they hadn't been unaffected. They fired late, and their solutions were poor. An Indefatigable-class battlecruiser's point defense clusters should have been more than equal to a salvo that size, but she stopped only fourteen of them.
The other sixteen got through.
Fortunately, three of the leakers must have been EW platforms. But thirteen laser heads detonated in sequence, so rapidly it looked like one, continuous eruption, directly ahead of Typhoon. The bomb-pumped lasers stabbed straight down the throat of her wedge, unobstructed by any sidewall.
Typhoon's forward hammerhead was massively armored against just such an attack, but not even her armor could shrug off that staccato thunder of stabbing X-ray lasers. It stopped a dozen of them, but another half-dozen blasted straight through it. They knocked out two of her chase missile tubes, one of her chase energy mounts, two counter-missile tubes and a laser cluster. And, far worse, one shattered her forward radar array. It blinded her, put out the eye of her forward missile defenses, and a second wave of attacking missiles was only twenty-five seconds behind.
* * *
Lieutenant Julio Tyler staggered as Typhoon shuddered. The engineering officer was in charge of Power One, the battlecruiser's forward fusion plant, and he went pale as damage alarms screamed. Power One was far enough aft and heavily enough armored to make it highly unlikely any cruiser-sized laser head could reach it. But from the sound of the alarms, these laser heads were ripping much deeper than they should have.
Tyler swallowed hard and looked around the brightly lit, spacious compartment. He'd been transferred into Typhoon's company three days after the rest of her crew to replace a man who'd managed to fall down an emergency ladder and break his hip, and he knew the rest of the battlecruiser's engineering department wasn't overly impressed with him. He was used to that jealous reaction to his rapid promotion. Relatively few officers made it to senior lieutenant's rank before their twenty-first birthday, but Tyler had always tried to do his job. To actually deserve the fast-track promotions his last name earned.
Yet this time, he was painfully aware of his shortcomings. In the last two weeks he'd begun finding his way around, well enough, at least, that he was pretty sure his ratings and petty officers were no longer laughing behind his back. And he had to admit the Technodyne technicians were right; Typhoon's power rooms really were laid out better, with controls that were easier to use. They just weren't the controls Tyler had spent three and a half T-years learning like the back of his own hand aboard the cruiser Star Fury.
As he listened to the alarms howl, he hoped the damage control parties had learned their equipment better than he'd learned his.
* * *
"Many hits on Bogey One!" Helen Zilwicki announced, half-hunched over her displays. Her eyes were narrowed as she studied the data coming in from her remote arrays. "I think we just took out her forward radar, Sir!"
"Excellent!" Terekhov acknowledged, but he knew that had been the most effective single salvo they were going to get in, and now that they knew for certain he'd seen them, the Monicans were no longer trying to hide. Their wedges were up, and they were accelerating directly towards the Squadron at five hundred gravities. That was going to reduce his missile engagement time, he thought grimly, but it was hardly unexpected. And at least if they were going to chase him, it meant exposing the throats of their wedges to his fire.
And Indefatigable-class battlecruisers didn't mount bow walls.
He watched the plot as Abigail's second double broadside roared into the Monicans' outer defense zone. He saw the instant that its Dazzlers came on-line and the counter-missiles which had been speeding to meet them veered aside. But this time there was time for a follow-on wave of CMs to be vectored onto them. Seventeen of them were intercepted and blotted away, and then the laser clusters began to fire. Another twelve were picked off, but six got through, and Bogey One staggered as more stilettos drilled through her armor.
* * *
Typhoon shuddered as a second wave of X-ray daggers bored through her armor. She should have stopped more of them—all of them—with her lavish anti-missile defenses, but she couldn't see them. Her point defense lasers had become dependent upon relayed tracking reports from Cyclone and Hurricane, and that simply wasn't adequate against targets coming in so fast. -Especially not targets as elusive as Manticoran Mark 16 missiles. Fresh -damage reports inundated her bridge, and her acceleration faltered as four of her beta nodes blew.
Power surges cascaded through her systems, starting in Impeller One and Laser Three. Automatic circuit breakers stopped most of them, but three of the breakers themselves had been knocked out. Rampant energy surged past them, and a broadside graser's superconductor ring blew, shattering internal bulkheads and adding its own massive power to the surge.
The surge that came roaring down the graser's main feed trunk and straight into Power One.
The untamed torrent of energy thundered into the compartment, and an already nervous petty officer leapt back as his control panel blew up. He fell to the decksole on the seat of his pants as electrical fires danced through the control runs, and an alarm began to scream.
* * *
Aivars Terekhov sat in his command chair, projecting an aura of granite determination. It was all he could do. He'd given his orders; now it was up to others to execute them, and he watched Guthrie Bagwell as the EWO concentrated on the data streaming back from the remote sensor array sitting almost on top of Bogey One. It seemed incredible that the Monicans didn't know Alpha-Seven was there, but surely if they had known they'd have destroyed it already!
Bagwell was leaning forward, as if he intended to climb bodily inside his console, and his hands hovered above his keypads. Every few seconds they darted down, stabbing keys, sending another packet of information, another observation on the enemy's ECM, to Abigail Hearns' tactical computers and on to the rest of the Squadron.
Terekhov glanced at the time display. Five minutes into the engagement. Abigail's third salvo was rumbling down on Bogey One, and in a little over seventy seconds everyone on both sides would be in range.
There'd been time—barely—for Abigail's control links to update the third salvo in light of Bagwell's observation of the ECM which had greeted the first salvo, and Terekhov's eyes gleamed. The Monicans' counter-missiles had picked off twenty of the incoming missiles, but only two of the fifteen survivors succumbed to the enemy's EW. Five of the remaining thirteen fell to Bogey One's laser clusters, but three EW birds and five laser heads reached attack range.
They detonated.
* * *
"Captain, this is Tyler, in Power One!" the young voice in Captain Schroeder's earbug was raw with terror. "We're losing containment on Fusion One!"
"Shut it down!"
"Sir, I'm trying, but—"
Janko Horster's face went white as Typhoon blew up.
That shouldn't have happened, a small, stunned corner of his brain insisted. Not to a battlecruiser!
"Allah!" the Technodyne rep whispered. His face glistened with sweat now, and his hands shook. "How—?"
"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 th
e 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.
