"Communications seizure attempt!" her com officer shouted, and her battlephone shrieked into her mastoid for a fraction of a second before the filters damped the sound.
"Data net jammed," the ensign snapped.
"Independent targeting," Naomi ordered, feeling her shock frame tighten about her. You should be my husband, her brain screamed at the gunnery officer, but she strangled the thought as she scanned the battle plot. "Take those destroyers ahead of us. We have to hold them off the flag."
"Aye, aye, sir!"
Naomi found it easier to cling to her sanity as her ship's weapons moved independently at last, reaching out to rake the oncoming ships with hetlasers and missiles. Kongo's own ECM must be jamming the tincans' data net, for their point defense was late, and Pommern's fire tore the lead ship apart.
But missiles were getting through among the squadron as their own point defense stations went to independent control. She winced as a direct hit smashed at Pommern's outer shields. Kongo was taking hits, too, and so was Oslabya, but not so many as Revenge. Naomi watched the second cruiser shudder in torment as her shields went down and the first warhead ripped at her drive field and mangled her armor.
"Shields one through three down," Gunnery reported. "Incoming missiles tracking Kongo from astern, sir. There's somebody on our ass. Somebody big. Those are capital missiles."
"Understood," Naomi said coldly, and under her crisp surface, a little girl recited ancient words. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . ."
She shook free of the thought. She'd wanted a ship-to-ship action; perhaps she had one.
"New course!" she snapped. "Bring us around on a reciprocal. Let the Commodore deal with those cans-we've got bigger fish to fry!"
Pommern snarled around in a tight turn. Even through the drive field, she felt the lateral motion as her ship fought inertia and momentum.
"Communications!" she barked. "Advise the Commodore of our heading and intent."
They steadied on course, and the author of the capital missile fire was before her.
"Battlecruiser at eleven light seconds!" Gunnery yelped. "Computer reads her as the Kris."
Naomi knew her well. She'd served on her as a lieutenant-an eternity ago. Homeported on the Yard, and no doubt as fanatically Corporate World as her own madmen were Fringer.
"Gunnery," she said softly, "there's your target. Maneuvering, I want a random evasion course and I want it now. We're up against some heavy metal; let's be where it isn't!"
The acknowledgments came, and she watched her missiles going out as the range closed. More capital missiles scorched in, but they were no longer targeted on Kongo. Kris had accepted Pommern's frail challenge.
"Kongo's opened fire on the planet, sir! Track looks good for the Taliaferro Yard!"
Naomi shut it out. She no longer wanted to think of the two cities clustered tight against the Taliaferro Yard, of the civilians with seconds to live. She no longer wanted to think of the mark of Cain she wore. She pressed one palm over the Bible in her vac suit and sealed her helmet as they entered laser range, and Pommern shook and quivered to the fury of missiles and counter missiles bursting around her hull.
"Missiles away from Oslabya, sir! Tracking for the Yard!"
But Naomi's attention was riveted to her gunnery officer.
"Laser range!" he announced, and here it came. The deadly energy sleeted from the battlecruiser and howled around Pommern's hull.
"Second strike off from Kongo! Revenge launching now!" Naomi wasn't listening. She was watching her screens as her own lasers raved defiance at Kris. Pommern's gunnery had always been good, she thought sadly as armor vaporized on the battlecruiser. Better than any capital ship's in the Fleet, Earnest had always said.
"Oslabya: Code Omega!" communications reported. So Lieutenant Jolson's first command was no more. Well, he'd soon have company.
"Oh, dear God!" Naomi's eyes jerked toward her white-faced scanner rating. "Oslabya's missiles must've been under shipboard control, sir! They're going to a standard dispersion pattern!"
Naomi's heart chilled as she stabbed a quick look at Battle Two. It was true. With her computers out of the circuit, Oslabya's missiles were spreading to cover the target with maximum devastation, and what was supposed to be a precision strike had become an atrocity. They were only tactical nukes, but they'd land all over the Reservation and dependent housing. . . .
"Good hits on target." Gunnery's almost droning report jerked her eyes away from the horror unfolding on Battle Two. "She's streaming air, sir!"
And then Kris found the range.
Pommern screamed as the lasers raped her. Naomi had always known ships had souls-she felt it now, in her own soul, as the cruiser's armor puffed to vapor and vanished under the radiant energy.
"Forward launchers gone!" Gunnery's professional calm had disappeared. "Laser One destroyed!"
Naomi turned towards him, but she never completed her order. Kris found them again, her hetlasers knifing through armor and plating and flesh. Naomi gasped involuntarily as air screamed from the holed compartment and her suit puffed tight, and Pommern lurched as a drive room died, and then another. She was toothless and naked, but Kris was badly hurt herself, and the Jamieson Archipelago was a forest of poisonous mushrooms as Toshiba blasted the shipyards and the battlecruiser's crew's homes and families burned.
Naomi looked away from her looming executioner, her own eyes burning as Oslabya's missiles laid their artificial suns across the Navy base. How many were dying down there? How many whose husbands and wives and fathers and mothers wore the same uniform as she? Yet they were only a few more deaths against the civilians dying around the other yards. How many would there be? A million? Two million? Three? Against that kind of devastation, what could a few thousand Navy dependents matter?
Kris slid alongside at point-blank range, and Naomi watched almost incuriously in an outside screen as the battlecruiser's surviving hetlasers swiveled across her ship. Kris poured fire into the gutted, mutinous cruiser.
Naomi had a tiny fraction of a second to see the end of her bridge explode into vaporized steel. Only a fraction of a second before the fury came for her-but long enough to feel the mark of Cain in her soul again and know that death would be sweet. . . .
DISASTER
"Mister Speaker," Simon Taliaferro said somberly, "I take little pleasure in being vindicated in such fashion." He looked around the Chamber of Worlds and shook his head sadly. "We should have known it would come, I suppose, when so many Fringe World delegates resigned their seats to protest the 'severity' of a decision far more merciful than just. Barbarism, Mister Speaker-the acts of little, frightened minds which must not be allowed to destroy all the Terran Federation stands for."
Oskar Dieter sat quietly, listening to the beautifully trained voice, and wished he possessed some of the same histrionic ability. But he didn't; all he could do was tell the truth, and where was the appeal of truth when lies were so convincingly presented?
"I ask you, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Assembly," Taliaferro went on, "where is the reason in this?" He waved his hard copy of the report which had originated this secret session. "Even if, as I do not for an instant believe, amalgamation is an unmeant threat to the Fringe Worlds' representation, is this the way to contest it? Where are the Fringe World delegates, ladies and gentlemen? Where are the petitions? We see none of them. Instead we see this!"