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 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.