No doubt it would, Yountz thought. Life pods were very small targets, after all.
Which was the reason they carried transponder beacons…just like the ones blinking on that same tactical display. Transponder beacons designed to help shuttles—or anything else—home in on them and their fragile cargos of survivors.
“Under the circumstances, Sir,” Dantas continued, “I’d recommend we hold the launch until we have better numbers. The Task Force’s already lost a lot of its missiles. Be a good idea not to expend any more than we have to.”
His eyes held Yountz’s for a long, still moment. Then the admiral nodded.
“An excellent point, Justin,” he said. “We’ll have plenty of time to carry out Admiral Gogunov’s orders when the range’s shorter. In the meantime, let’s concentrate on picking our people up. I think—”
“Counter-missile launch, Sir!” Rochetti said suddenly. “The Manties just launched against the reconnaissance platforms!”
SLNS Lepanto
and
SLNS Yashima
Hypatia System
“Counter-missile launch!” Commodore Ham snapped, and Gogunov’s eyes darted to the icon which had just appeared in the plot. It came streaking out of nowhere, well to one side within the amber sphere indicating the Manty missiles’ possible launch site. Given counter-missiles’ extreme acceleration rates and the velocity the recon platform had built, flight time was very short. But it was long enough for the computers to nail down the point from which that counter-missile had launched.
And then, thirty seconds after the CM’s impeller signature had been detected, the RD’s final light-speed transmission reached Lepanto.
“Got them, Sir!” Ham said exultantly. “The signature’s still weak, but—Correction, Sir: signatures, plural. CIC makes it a pair of those big-assed destroyers of theirs.”
“Plot it and get the birds away!”
“Yes, Sir! Programming now.”
“Very good. And once you’ve gotten them launched, set up the Buccaneer queue.” Gogunov smiled viciously. “We’ve still got six minutes before their birds get here, even if our worst-case assumption is accurate. We might as well make use of them.
Ham flinched and his hands actually stopped moving for an instant before he completed the firing sequence. Lepanto quivered as a full salvo of Cataphract-As belched from her broadside tubes and the operations officer watched their outgoing tracks for a heartbeat or two, then looked at Gogunov. He didn’t say a word, but the admiral saw the silent question—perhaps even the silent protest—in his eyes, and his hungry smile turned into a glare.
“I gave Vangelis Admiral Hajdu’s complete time limit, despite the fact that the Manties attacked us well before we’d reached the end of it. Hell, for all they knew, the Admiral might have still relented and extended it again! But they took that possibility off the table when they bushwhacked us. So if they’ve seen fit to attack us before the expiration of our time limit—again—any consequences will be on their heads. Now set up the launch, Commodore!”
“Sir, I—”
“Set it up, or you can join Captain Turner’s court-martial!” Gogunov barked.
“Don’t do it, Greg.”
Sandra Haskell didn’t realize she’d spoken until every eye on flag bridge snapped toward her.
“What did you just say?!” Gogunov demanded, whirling towards her with incandescent eyes.
“I told Greg not to do it, Sir,” Haskell said to the flag officer she’d served and respected for so long. “Please, Sir! You don’t have to do this! Captain Turner’s right, and somewhere inside, you have to know she is! This is what the Navy was created to prevent, Sir! Don’t turn yourself into—”
“Shut your mouth and get the hell off this flag bridge!” Gogunov snarled. “You’re relieved, Commodore, and I’ll see you rot in prison! Get the hell out of my sight!”
“Sir—”
“Now, Commodore! And as for you, Commodore Ham, you can launch or face charges. And if you do, I’ll personally demand the death sentence!”
Ham paled. His eyes darted to Haskell, but then they closed.
“Yes, Sir,” he said tonelessly.
“Please, Sir,” Haskell said. “I’m begging you. Don’t—”
Gogunov punched a button on his command chair’s armrest.
“Master at Arms, lay to Flag Bridge…and bring your sidearm,” he grated in a voice of iron, his eyes never wavering from Haskell’s face.
* * *
“Oh, Jesus,” Captain Rochetti breathed as the command codes scrolled across his display.
“What?” Yountz snapped.
TF 1030 had just launched on the Manties’ coordinates. Unlike Hajdu Gyôzô’s mammoth pod-based salvo, there were under three hundred birds in this one, and even with the RD’s latest information, accuracy at that range would be…less than stellar. He didn’t need any fresh distractions at this point.
“The Flag is launching on the orbital platforms in three minutes, Sir,” Rochetti said flatly.
Yountz stared at him. Surely he didn’t mean it! Gogunov was launching now? He’d promised the Hypatians fifty more minutes!
“Sir, the Manty missiles’ wedges just came back up!” Rochetti’s assistant announced.
Yountz’s eyes jerked back to the plot as the Manticoran shipkillers reappeared upon it. Obviously, they did have a multistage capability of their own.
“Impact in three minutes,” Rochetti said harshly. “Counter-missile launch in one hundred seconds!”
“Squadron orders,” Yountz heard himself snap. “Do not launch on the platforms!” He whirled to the chief of staff. “D’you understand me, Justin? Get that out now. Do not launch!”
“But, Sir—!” Rochetti began, and Yountz’s glare snapped back around to him.
“Goddamn it, do it, Captain! Nobody in this squadron is going to touch that frigging launch button!”
HMS Arngrim
Hypatia System
“They fell for it, Ma’am!” Lieutenant Berden crowed exultantly. “Look at that beautiful plot!”
It was scarcely a proper report, Megan Petersen reflected, but under the circumstances, she wasn’t about to complain. The Cataphracts speeding outward from Hypatia were obviously the older version, identical to the ones they’d found in Filareta’s magazines at Manticore. Flight time at this range would be forty seconds longer than for her own Mark 16s, and her attack would reach its target over seven minutes before they reached theirs.
Despite which, she knew Berden was almost certainly right. There was still time for the situation to change, if the Sollies realized they’d been snookered, but they’d have to do it before their birds’ first stages shut down. So unless they figured it out in the next two and a half minutes or so, they’d just wasted almost three hundred more missiles.
“You and Pat did good, Bill,” she said. “It looks that way so far, at least,” she added, throwing out a sheet anchor, just in case.
“I don’t think they’ve got a clue what we just did to them, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Commander Thirunavu said, shaking his head. “And they sure as hell don’t have another platform close enough to tell them in time to do anything about it!”
“I don’t think they’ve figured it out, either, Rolf,” Megan replied. “I’m just remembering what pride goes before.”
“Good point.”
The XO nodded, although it was evident he didn’t believe anything of the sort was going to happen here, and Megan honestly didn’t blame him. At the same time they’d launched their counter-missiles with inert drives, they’d spotted all half dozen of their available Loreleis in strategic locations. One of those locations had been on the far side of the counter-missiles she’d used to take out the recon drone, but almost two hundred thousand kilometers farther away from Arngrim. From the Cataphracts initial track, they certainly seemed to have been targeted on the pair of “Rolands” which were nothing of the sort.
I wish I could see Gogunov’s
face when—if—he figures it out, she thought with vicious satisfaction. In fact, the only thing that would please me more would be if he never figures it out because he comes down with a serious case of dead first.
SLNS Lepanto
and
SLNS Yashima
Hypatia System
Megan Petersen’s missiles came slicing in on what was left of TF 1030.
This time, the Dazzlers didn’t come as a surprise. Nor did the Dragon’s Teeth. The Solarian missile-defense officers had seen them before, knew what they were.
Unfortunately, knowing what they were wasn’t the same thing as knowing how to defeat them.
There were far fewer missiles this time, only thirty-six rather than the three hundred and ninety-six in each of Jan Kotouč’s salvos. On the other hand, Hajdu Gyôzô’s battlecruisers had been able to bring 1,568 broadside CMs and 1,960 point defense clusters to bear against those larger salvos. Against Arngrim’s, Gogunov’s surviving battlecruisers had only 141 launchers and 176 clusters. Despite the paucity of lighter Solarian units’ missile defenses, his cruisers and destroyers actually more than trebled his firepower as the Mark 16s tore into his formation.
It wasn’t enough—not in the face of the Dazzlers and the Dragon’s Teeth, and not when Lieutenant Brendan and Lieutenant Crouch had the detailed emissions signatures of every unit under Gogunov’s command, relayed by the Ghost Rider platform they still hadn’t realized was there. The range was too great for any last-second adjustments, but their missiles had been told precisely what to look for and where to find it.
The counter-missiles picked off five genuine shipkillers and twenty-six Dragons Teeth “ghosts.” Point defense stopped fourteen more shipkillers, which was a better performance than Megan Petersen had anticipated. In the end, only thirty-two percent of her birds got through everything the desperate defenders of TF 1030 could throw at it.
Just nine laserheads. But each of those Mark 16-G laserheads was more powerful than a Solarian Trebuchet capital missile, and every one of them was looking for the same target.
Its name was Lepanto.
* * *
Sandra Haskell’s shock frame hammered her savagely as the Manty laserheads ravaged her ship.
Only someone who’d actually experienced the reality of missile combat—and until today, Sandra Haskell hadn’t, whatever she might have thought—could have truly imagined what it was like. The long, drawn out minutes while you knew dozens of missiles were driving towards you to kill you. The frozen ball of ice in your belly as you realized they were targeting your ship, not her consorts. The crisp commands, the voices that got more clipped, went higher in pitch, as the minutes turned into seconds, racing through your fingers. The heart-stopping terror when the incoming fire burst through the counter-missile zones and the laser clusters went to frantic maximum-rate fire.
And then the sledgehammer. The shock like Thor’s hammer as the laserheads detonated and bomb-pumped lasers shredded battle steel and human flesh with demonic fury. It wasn’t a series of detonations, not really. Oh, it was a series, but at those closing velocities, in the finely focused, impeccably sequenced attack that was the Royal Manticoran Navy’s hallmark, no human brain, no human senses, could measure the sequence. It was one pitiless, pulverizing instant ripped from the heart of eternity and burned indelibly into the blood, bone, and brain of anyone who managed to survive it.
The universe heaved insanely. Damage alarms screamed, three quarters of the ship schematic on the after bulkhead simply flashed from green to lurid crimson, more quickly than the human eye could follow. Something ripped through Flag Bridge’s heart—something so vast, so terrible, a mere mortal couldn’t even start to grasp it. The bridge depressurized—not gradually, the way it did in simulations; instantly, with an explosive decompression, a hellhound howl that shrieked over her skinsuit helmet’s pickups…and then went suddenly, abruptly silent.
And then it was over.
She felt the air sobbing in her lungs as she gasped for breath. As she realized she was still alive. That somehow, someway, she’d survived that holocaust.
So far, at least. There was still time for the ship to break up—or blow up. God knew she’d seen enough of that this horrific day!
The gravity died suddenly, and her nostrils flared as every primary lighting element went dead and the emergency lights came up. For an instant, she sat paralyzed before she realized that was probably a good sign. Losing power was far better than having a fusion bottle fail, and if there was no power to the grav plates, then there was no power to the impellers, either, and that meant a failing inertial compensator wasn’t going to let Lepanto’s impeller drive turn all of her surviving crew into gruel.
It meant she might get to go on surviving…unless someone on the Manties’ side was in the mood for reprisal after Vice Admiral Hajdu’s Deneb Accords violation.
Nothing you can do about it if they are, Sandy, she told herself. Best to be concentrating on what you can do something about.
She unfastened her shock frame and pushed off from her command chair, pirouetting in midair—well, in mid-vacuum, she supposed—as her eyes took in the savagely maimed bridge and the drifting bodies who’d been friends of hers thirty seconds before.
“All hands channel,” she told her skinsuit’s computer.
“Shipboard all hands channel disabled,” the suit’s musical contralto told her.
“General skinsuit broadcast, then.”
“General broadcast link opened,” the computer said, and she drew a deep breath.
“All personnel, this is Commodore Haskell,” she said as clearly and levelly as she could. “Flag Bridge had been hit hard. I need search and rescue personnel ASAP. I repeat, Flag Bridge has been hit, and I need—”
She broke off, barely managing to stifle a yelp of surprise, as something fastened on her left ankle. She looked down, and her eyes widened as she saw Martin Gogunov.
The rear admiral was still alive. In fact, he didn’t appear to have been injured at all, which was remarkable, given the tangled wreckage to which his command chair had been reduced. His shock frame was buckled, broken, and jammed—she could see where he’d pulled the emergency release pin, and nothing at all had happened—and the panel on his skinsuit’s right pauldron had been half torn away. It seemed impossible that it could’ve taken that much damage without ripping clear through the skinsuit, but it obviously hadn’t. Looking through the crystoplast of his helmet, she could see the green glow that confirmed good suit pressure.
But there was no way they were getting him free without cutting gear.
That was her first thought, but then she wondered why he’d grabbed her ankle instead of calling for assistance over his com. It would have been—
He looked up at her, made eye contact, then released her ankle and thumped the side of his helmet with his right hand. He pointed through it at his right ear and nodded vigorously. Then he opened his mouth, obviously saying something, and shook his head with equal force.
Of course, she thought. The com was mounted behind the right shoulder in an SLN skinsuit. He could still hear her, but he couldn’t transmit.
She nodded to show that she understood, but then he pointed again, and she frowned. He pointed a third time, harder than ever, and her eyes widened. He was pointing at the tactical section…where the corpse which had been Commodore Gregory Ham sat headless in his chair. She looked back at him, and his lips moved again, shaping a single word she couldn’t hear, forming it slowly enough she could read it, instead.
“Launch.”
She looked down at him for a handful of seconds, and then, slowly, shook her head.
He froze. For a moment, he didn’t seem to react at all. Then his face contorted, dark with fury, and his mouth moved again. She knew he was shouting the command again and again, but only he could hear it. And when she didn’t respond, his lips started shaping other words, a torrent of invective.
She gazed at him almost compassio
nately. As far as she could tell, he was uninjured, and that meant he was still in command. But to be in command, he had to be able to exercise command, and that required the ability to communicate.
The Articles of War were clear. She knew exactly what her commanding officer was ordering her to do, assuming she could somehow get the order out beyond Lepanto’s broken hull. That meant she had no option, as his chief of staff, but to see that order was relayed and executed.
“General skinsuit broadcast,” she told the computer again.
“General broadcast link opened,” the computer replied.
“All personnel,” she said crisply, strongly, gazing down into Martin Gogunov’s furious blue eyes, “Commodore Haskell. If anyone has access to a working intership com, contact Rear Admiral Yountz immediately. Inform him that he’s in command. Repeat, inform Admiral Yountz that he is in command.”
Gogunov twisted furiously, ripping at the imprisoning shock frame, roaring the curses no one could hear, and Haskell pushed herself down onto the deck beside him, just beyond the reach of his flailing arms. She switched to the flag command link built into her skinsuit com. If he could hear the general link, perhaps he could hear this one, too.
“I’m sorry, Sir,” she said. “I’m so sorry. But I can’t let you. I just can’t. And I think Yountz won’t, without your specific order. I’m sorry.”
* * *
“Sir, I have a com request,” Commander Holečková said in an odd voice.
“I’ve got plenty of those already, Taťána!” Thomas Yountz snapped at his com officer, and God knew it was true. Including one he wished to hell he hadn’t gotten, from Captain Indira Turner, relaying Commodore Haskell’s message passing command to him.
He’d always wanted task force command, but not like this! The only good thing was that Gogunov hadn’t had time to execute the Buccaneer launch before his flagship was taken out.
“Sir, this one’s from the Manties,” Holečková said, and Yountz froze.
From the Manties? It couldn’t be! The salvo Gogunov had gotten off before Lepanto was crippled had taken out both Manties. They had positive confirmation of that from the second recon drone vectored in on their location! There wasn’t even any wreckage left! But—