Well, maybe so, the chief of staff told himself grimly. But there’s only so much decoys can do against a salvo that size, and they only get one more of their own in before it’s our turn to hammer them!
“Impact in five seconds,” Daphne Koopman announced hoarsely.
* * *
“Three more hard kills,” Clarke announced. “Looks like at least one additional mission-kill, too.”
That makes…at least thirty-four, Kotouč thought, doing the math. Over a third of them. These bastards frigging well know they’ve been kissed!
No doubt they did, and by any objective standard, TG 110.2 had already achieved an overwhelming victory. At least twenty-seven Solarian battlecruisers, most of them Nevadas, had been destroyed outright. That was 24.6 million tons of warships, nine times TG 110.2’s total tonnage, with 78,000 men and women aboard. TG 110.2’s total personnel amounted to only 1,900, barely two percent as many, and the Sollies were going to lose still more ships. Ilkova had already updated the next four salvos in her firing queue and cut her links to them. That meant at least another sixteen dead Solarian battlecruisers, whatever else happened.
It was a pity so few of his own people would be around to see that happen.
Phantom, Cinqueda, Talwar, and Shikomizue had rolled ship thirty seconds ago. They could do that, because Phantom’s Keyhole platforms gave Ilkova and Albamonte uninterrupted sensor coverage, light-speed telemetry to the attack birds, and FTL links to the Ghost Rider drones, and it was going to make Kotouč’s ships far harder targets than any Solly had ever dreamed of attacking. It just wasn’t going to make them hard enough.
The CM zones were a holocaust. Counter-missiles sought out Solarian shipkillers, blotting them from existence in suicidal eruptions of wedge fratricide. Some of those strikes took out more than one attack missile at a time, but not even Manticoran missile defense computers could run meaningful threat analyses on that many missiles. The Solarian tactical officers had simply pointed them in the right direction. After that, aside from the thousands of EW platforms threaded throughout the missile swarm, every one of those birds was on its own.
The penetration aides had been better than projected, knocking back kill numbers by another fifteen or twenty percent. The Loreleis offset some of that by sucking the fire aside, but there simply weren’t enough of them, because the true killer was the sheer number of threats. There was no way to parse the incoming fire, no way to predict which missiles would go for the decoys, which would lose lock and go wide, and which were likely to acquire good firing solutions. The defenders had been driven to take whatever shots they could get, not the ones they would have cherry-picked with better tracking data, and it was a mathematical certainty that many of the successful intercepts had been wasted on attackers that never would have found a firing angle, anyway.
“Impact in five seconds,” Commander Ilkova announced, looking up from her targeting displays at last. Her voice was surprisingly calm, Kotouč thought. Or perhaps the word he wanted was exhausted, because she was soaked with sweat. The sweat of concentration and determination, he thought, not fear.
“Helmets!” the quartermaster of the watch barked, and the admiral twitched. He’d forgotten his own standing orders, and his hands unhooked the helmet from his seat arm, lowered it over his head, and sealed it to his skinsuit’s locking ring.
The possibility of its making much difference was remote.
* * *
Megan Petersen’s hands were claws on her command chair armrests as that mammoth wave of missiles roared down on Rear Admiral Kotouč’s defiant handful. Arngrim was tied into the same recon drones as Phantom. The destroyer’s tactical display showed the same information Jan Kotouč and his staff could see. But unlike the flagship—unlike Jayson—Megan was safe, her ship un-threatened.
She’d never realized what a curse safety could be, a distant corner of her mind thought.
The squadron’s point defense lashed out as the incoming missiles streaked “above” and “below” those interposed impeller wedges. She knew hundreds of incoming missiles had just disappeared, ripped to pieces by those strobing laser clusters. But she couldn’t see it; the globe of nuclear explosions completely enveloping TG 110.2 made it impossible.
She tasted blood from her bitten lip as that incredible, glaring ball of plasma erupted. Tens of thousands of warheads exploded, spawning their own bomb-pumped lasers, ripping at sidewalls, bow-walls, battle steel armor…and human flesh and bone. It seemed to take forever, although at a terminal velocity almost half the speed of light the actual attack was over in a heartbeat. In less than a second.
Jayson…
She never knew if she’d whispered that name aloud. She only knew her heart seemed to stop as the brimstone glare faded from the plot and she saw what was left.
* * *
“Got the fuckers!” Daphne Koopman shouted.
It was scarcely a proper report, but Hajdu Gyôzô wasn’t going to call her on the carpet for it. Not when the light-speed sensors confirmed what the gravitics had already reported. The Manties’ impeller wedges had disappeared from the FTL gravitic plot; now, forty seconds later, the light-speed data from the recon drones speeding outward in the shipkillers’ wake showed him why they had.
Two of their targets were simply gone, vanished, probably the victims of their own failing fusion plants. The enormous “battlecruiser”—two and a half times Camperdown’s size—had survived, but only as a shattered wreck, and she was accompanied by what looked like half of a heavy cruiser. It was hard to be sure about that, given the ship-fragment’s splintered state.
Yet two more Manticoran salvos had slammed into TF 1030 while he waited for that confirmation. Those salvos had killed nine more of his own ships, and even as he glared triumphantly at his vanquished foes, eleven more were still inbound.
He looked at the damage sidebar, and his nostrils flared. SLNS Friedland, Charles Martel, Potemkin, Dingyuan, Iéna, Barfleur, Custoza…forty-six of his battlecruisers had been totally destroyed or hulked. Belliqueuse, Hamideieh, Ne Tron Menia, and Novgorod had joined Edinorg, Impero, Espana, and Libertad, limping away from the carnage while all but essential damage control personnel evacuated the ships, and six more of their consorts showed varying degrees of damage.
He’d gone into battle with ninety-eight battlecruisers; he was down to forty-four, and the dying wasn’t done yet.
“Finish them off,” he heard himself say flatly, eyes hard and hating on the crippled, broken wrecks of his foes.
A sudden silence enveloped Camperdown’s flag bridge, even deeper and stiller somehow against the staccato background of combat chatter, and Commodore Brigman looked at the vice admiral, his face expressionless.
“Excuse me, Sir?” he said.
“Finish those bastards off,” Hajdu grated. “Now, Commodore Koopman!”
“Yes, Sir!” If there’d been hesitation in Brigman’s voice, there was none in Koopman’s. Her hands raced across her panel, and she jabbed a final button. “Launching now, Sir.”
* * *
“Oh my God,” someone said softly, and Megan Petersen’s head snapped up from the visual display where she’d been trying desperately to determine which of Jan Kotouč’s heavy cruisers hadn’t been totally destroyed.
“Skipper,” Lieutenant Berden said, “they’ve just launched again. Estimate sixteen hundred inbound. These are slower—I think they’re the same Cataphracts Filareta had—but the range’s down to five-point-four-four million klicks. I make it one hundred twenty-four seconds.”
Megan inhaled sharply and her eyes darted back to the icons of the Solarian task force. They clung to its winnowed ranks, and shock flared in their depths as she realized Berden was right. The Sollies had fired again. Fired upon ships unable to move or maneuver in any way. Ships fighting frantically to evacuate survivors from shattered compartments and broken hulls. Ships specifically protected by the Deneb Accords…yet another interstellar protocol guaranteed by the Solarian
League.
It’s a war crime, she thought. No, it’s another war crime.
The shock in her eyes turned into something else—something cold and deadly—as the missile icons speared out at those helpless targets. Even with Ghost Rider, it was impossible to see life pod transponders or small craft at this range, and even if anyone had gotten off alive, the collateral damage from that many missiles was bound to kill a lot of them.
Oh, Jayson, she thought. Oh, Jayson.
“Make sure we get every bit of this, Guns,” she heard herself say, never looking away from the damaged ships with two more minutes to live. “We’ll need the evidence at the trial.”
* * *
Rear Admiral Kotouč opened his eyes and shook his head.
It was a mistake.
Agony lanced through him, focused somewhere below his shoulders but radiating all the way up his spine to the top of his skull. It wasn’t a dull, throbbing agony. This was sharp, brutal, stabbing at him in ragged spasms. His left hand fumbled, trying to find the med panel on the right sleeve of his skinsuit, but his arms didn’t seem to be cooperating.
He blinked, fighting to focus through the waves of pain, and realized he was staring up at the overhead outside Flag Bridge. And he was moving. But how could he be moving? He couldn’t even feel his legs.
Panic bubbled as he realized that was true. Despite that, his brain was starting to function once more, and he blinked again. If he couldn’t walk but he was moving anyway, that could only mean—
He moved his head, craning around to look up past his shoulder. The HUD on the inside of his helmet glared with angry red medical warnings, but he looked past them, ignoring their import, and his eyes narrowed.
Commander Ilkova’s left hand was locked on his skinsuit’s shoulder-mounted purchase point. Her right arm hung at her side, and that entire side of her own skinsuit was seared and blackened as if by fire and splashed with blood. There was a lot of that, but not hers, judging from her movements.
“Others?” he got out.
“We’re it, Sir,” the ops officer replied, and his eyes closed again in a pain not of the flesh.
“What are—?”
“Flag Bridge’s life pods are gone,” she panted, dragging him down the passage in starbursts of excruciating pain. “So’s the lift.”
He frowned, trying to think through the sea of anguish. If the flag bridge’s pods were crippled and the lift was out, then she must be…
“CIC?”
“Yes, Sir.”
He shook his head. The Combat Information Center was as deeply buried as Flag Bridge. In fact, it was one deck farther down. It was also the only other compartment Ilkova could hope to reach that was fitted with the armored shafts through which a life pod could be launched. But getting there through this—the passage was clearly open to vacuum, judging by the thin haze of smoke racing along the overhead towards the hungry rents in Phantom’s hull, and God only knew what other damage there might be—would have been hard enough for someone who wasn’t encumbered and didn’t have a broken arm. Trying to drag him that far with only one working arm…
“Leave me,” he got out through the ragged bursts of pain.
“No, Sir,” she said flatly.
“Leave me!” he repeated. “Go see if…there’s anyone left…in CIC. If there is…you can…send back…a rescue party.”
“No, Sir.” Her voice was even flatter.
“I—”
“Attention all hands!”
Another voice drowned his out, blaring from the all-hands circuit. He recognized Tonová and felt a stir of surprise that Phantom’s captain was still alive. But the surprise vanished into something else an instant later.
“They’ve launched again,” Tonová said harshly. “We’ve got two minutes. Abandon ship. Everyone who can, abandon now!”
Those bastards. Oh, those bastards! We’re done, can’t they see that?!
Of course they could, he realized. They just didn’t give a damn.
“Leave me!” he snapped again. “You heard…Captain Tonová! Get…out now!”
“No, Sir,” Ilkova grated through clenched teeth, yanking harder, hauling him along the air-bleeding passage at a faster rate.
“God damn it…that’s…an order!” He twisted his shoulders, despite the agony in his damaged spine, trying to wrench out of her grasp.
“All due respect,” she panted, “no.”
“Let me go!”
“Not going to happen.” Her voice was hammered iron. “Now stop squirming, damn it! You’re slowing us down.”
“But—”
“Sir, will you just shut the hell up?!”
* * *
Hajdu Gyôzô watched Daphne Koopman’s missiles race outward, then turned his attention to the next incoming salvo, grimly satisfied by what was about to happen to the bastards who’d murdered his task force. And when they were gone, he’d deal with the rest of the traitors in this damnable star system! If they’d thought—
“Incoming!” someone screamed.
Thirteen seconds later, Hajdu Gyôzô and SLNS Camperdown ceased to exist.
And eighty-five seconds after that, so did HMS Phantom and HMS Cinqueda.
SLNS Lepanto
Hypatia System
It was very quiet on SLNS Lepanto’s flag bridge. The quiet of shock and stunned, absolute disbelief, Commodore Sandra Haskell thought within the cocoon of her own numbed incomprehension. As chief of staff for Battle Cruiser Squadron 4012, she’d had the best possible perspective, and she still couldn’t understand, couldn’t even start to process, what had just happened.
The entire engagement had lasted less than eight minutes. How could that be possible? How could TF 1030 have begun it with ninety-eight battlecruisers, forty cruisers, and thirty-two destroyers and have only ninety-three warships left—total—less than eight minutes later?
Yet it had happened…and the task force’s current effective strength was even lower than that: twenty-nine destroyers, thirty-six cruisers…and eleven battlecruisers. She was pretty sure the four cruisers and three destroyers they’d lost had been accidents. The Manties’ concentration on the battlecruisers had been obvious, crushing, and lethal. All of the combat effective survivors—aside from SLNS Hamidieh and Lepanto herself—had taken at least some damage. Technically, there were another seventeen whose hulks might have been repairable, if there’d been some way to get them home. There wasn’t. Which meant they were effectively as dead as Troubadour, Stevedore, and Merchant Mart.
And as Vice Admiral Hajdu Gyôzô.
That thought took Haskell’s eyes away from the tactical display to the tall, powerfully built man in the command chair at the center of the flag bridge. Rear Admiral Martin Gogunov, CO, BatCruRon 4012. Aside from Lepanto, only two of Gogunov’s original eight units survived: SLNS Queen and SLNS Revanche.
And despite its sixty percent loss rate, Gogunov’s squadron had the most survivors of any of TF 1030’s original thirteen battlecruiser squadrons.
Four ships, Haskell thought, looking at the man who had just inherited of what remained of Vice Admiral Hajdu’s task force. They did it to us with four ships.
She gave herself a mental shake. Yes, the Manties had done it with only four ships, but those deadly eight minutes had been time enough for them to put ninteen salvos into space before TF 1030’s enormous launch took them off the board. Seventy-five hundred missiles was barely six percent of the fire the Manties had taken, which made the loss ratio even more grotesquely unbalanced, but Haskell had come up as a tactical officer. As she’d watched those missiles, watched their ECM, those massive jammers and incredible decoy penaids, watched their attack profiles shift and adjust, she’d realized there truly had to be an FTL component to the Manties’ fire control. It was the only way they could have adapted that quickly or maintained their telemetry links so long, and if she’d needed any proof, there was what had happened to the final incoming salvos. There’d been no one left to provide them w
ith additional updates, and their accuracy and—especially—target selection had dropped markedly, despite the fact that TF 1030’s missile-defense net had been torn to shreds by the earlier launches.
So when you come down to it, it’s not really surprising somebody with that kind of range, that kind of EW advantage, and FTL telemetry links kicked the living shit out of us. Especially not when you add complete and total surprise into the equation.
Despite her shock, despite her chill awareness of what the technology revealed here portended, despite even the loss of at least a hundred and fifty thousand more SLN lives, she felt an unwilling admiration for those Manties. She hated what Vice Admiral Hajdu had done to any survivors aboard their ships, and she regretted it even more deeply as she contemplated the sheer courage it must have taken for just four ships, however great their tactical advantage, to take on a hundred and seventy.
They couldn’t have known how badly they’d hurt us, not really. They probably expected our losses to be heavy, but they couldn’t have expected them to be this heavy. And whatever they thought they might do to us, they damned well knew they weren’t going home.
And it wasn’t even their star system.
She didn’t like to contemplate what that might mean for the future, either. Nor did she care for the “Grand Alliance’s” inevitable reaction to TF 1030’s violation of the Deneb Accords. The Accords were pretty damn specific about not targeting obviously disabled ships while they evacuated their crews. It happened sometimes, of course. Often, it simply wasn’t possible to abort an attack on a ship, however disabled it might have been, especially with missiles. But that wasn’t what had happened here. The salvo which had finished off the Manty cripples had been launched only after it was obvious they’d been totally incapacitated.
There’ll be hell to pay when the Manties and their friends find out about this one, she reflected grimly. And there should be. There damned well should be. There’s a reason the Deneb Accords were written in the first place, and—