Shut up, stupid, he told himself. Talk about misplaced survivor's guilt! He shook his head, surprised to feel a slight, biting smile twisting his lips. Before you start wallowing in that kind of crap, wait and see if you're going to survive after all!
"Attack range in ten seconds," Robert Womack said quietly. "Eight seconds. Seven sec—Status change!"
It was scarcely unexpected, and Rozsak watched with something very like detached calm as sixty missiles suddenly separated themselves from their companions—more than half of them in obedience to the directions of tactical officers who were already dead by the time the shipkillers obeyed their instructions—and came streaking directly in on Sharpshooter and Marksman.
The ECM on this salvo was better than it had been on any of the others. Obviously, the people who'd launched it had gone right on refining their data, updating their penetration profiles, even as they and their consorts were disintegrating under Hammer Force's relentless fire. Worse, only Marksman's missile defenses were anything like intact.
It was too late for counter-missiles—they'd been largely wasted, killing other missiles. No one had been able to identify the actual attack birds until they identified themselves by suddenly lunging for their targets, and their autonomously controlled fellows—over three hundred of them—had camouflaged them, hidden them, absorbed the fire which ought to have killed them.
Now point defense clusters blazed desperately, but there was too little response time. Over half of them got through, and Luiz Rozsak's command chair shock frame hammered him viciously as SLNS Marksman's immunity came to an end at last.
"Oh, my God," Lieutenant Commander Jim Stahlin whispered.
It wasn't an imprecation; it was a prayer from the heart as the shipkillers came screaming in.
Hernando Cortés seemed to run into some invisible barrier in space. The big Warrior-class destroyer simply disintegrated, and Stahlin watched sickly as the badly damaged Simón Bolivar broke in two. His own Gustavus Adolphus, somehow miraculously still undamaged, and her division mate, Charlemagne—which most definitely was not undamaged—were suddenly Hammer Force's only surviving destroyers.
And they hadn't even been the primary targets.
"Direct hit on Impeller One!"
"Captain, we've lost helm control!"
"Direct hit Missile-One. Missile-Three and Five out of the net!"
"Counter-Missile-Niner out of the net! Counter-Missile-Eleven reports heavy casualties!"
"Sir, we've lost five betas out of the forward ring!"
"Heavy damage aft! Hull breach, Frames One-Zero-One-Five through One-Zero-Two-Zero! We have pressure drop, decks three and four!"
Luiz Rozsak heard the damage reports over his com link to Dirk-Steven Kamstra's bridge. He felt the damage in his own flesh, his own bones, as his flagship shuddered and bucked and heaved, flexing and twisting with the indescribable shock as bomb-pumped lasers transferred terajoules of energy to her hull.
And even as the energy blasted into Marksman, he saw SLNS Sharpshooter disappear from his plot forever.
Santander Konidis snarled in triumph as half the enemy impeller signatures were blotted away. But even as he snarled, Hammer Force's tenth missile salvo howled down on the People's Navy in Exile.
Three hundred and sixty Mark-17-E missiles hurtled straight into Maximilien Robespierre's teeth. It was scarcely a surprise. Everyone had known exactly who those missiles would target, but they'd had only twelve seconds to react to the knowledge. Every counter-missile that could be brought to bear, every point defense cluster which could possibly reach that wave of destruction, blazed desperately. Scores of missiles were intercepted by counter-missiles. Over seventy more were torn apart by close-in laser fire.
It wasn't enough.
"That's the last of them, Sir," Robert Womack said wearily ninety-eight seconds later.
Luiz Rozsak nodded, equally wearily, and glanced at the time display in the corner of his plot.
Five hundred and twelve seconds. Less than nine minutes. That was how long it had taken, from the enemy's initial missile launch to the attack of Hammer Force's final wave of missiles.
How could less than nine minutes leave him so exhausted? With so much sick regret?
He looked at the tally boards, wincing internally as he saw the names of all the ships Hammer Force had lost, and saw the answer. SLNS Gunner, Rifleman, Sharpshooter, Sniper, Francisco Pizarro, Simón Bolivar, Hernando Cortés, Frederick II, William the Conqueror, Kabuki, Masquerade . . .
Of the sixteen ships he'd taken into combat, only four survived—Dirk-Steven Kamstra's Marksman, her sister, Ranger, and the destroyers Gustavus Adolphus and Charlemagne. Somehow, and he couldn't pretend to understand how, Jim Stahlin's Gustavus Adolphus was totally untouched. Charlemagne and Ranger, on the other hand, were little more than still barely mobile hulks, and Marksman wasn't much better.
But then his eyes moved to the enemy's losses, and they hardened into dark brown agates.
Fourteen battlecruisers, three heavy cruisers, and two light cruisers. The light cruisers had been almost accidents, killed by the autonomous missiles of Hammer Force's last nine salvos. Marksman and Ranger, even with Gustavus Adolphus' support and even rotating telemetry links, had been able to control barely ninety missiles, which had been only a quarter of the total in each of the salvos which had been launched before Kabuki's and Masquerade's destruction. There'd been no more effective fire coming from the enemy to distract his tactical officers after Maximilien Robespierre's elimination, but less than a hundred missiles had been too little too batter through the PNE's tattered defenses if they'd been spread between multiple targets. So he'd concentrated on taking out the big Mars-class heavy cruisers and letting the rest of the shipkillers go wherever they went under their onboard AIs' direction. To be honest, he was surprised they'd achieved as much as they had.
Now, however, Hammer Force had spent its bolt. Aside from the Mark-17s in Marksman and Ranger's surviving magazines, the remaining enemy ships were far outside Rozsak's range, and between them Marksman and Ranger had only nineteen operable launchers. There was no point wasting such minuscule salvos against the PNE's surviving twenty-seven units.
"All right, Dirk-Steven," he said, turning back to the com which linked him to Marksman's bridge. "It's out of our hands now. Let's see about killing our velocity and heading back to pick up survivors."
"How bad is our damage, Irénée?"