But EW or no, whatever those damned things are, they aren't MDMs, he thought. Bad as they are, they're not doing enough damage per hit for capital laser heads . . . and isn't thata comfort when there are so damned many of the bastards? I was right to shift priority to their cruisers. I just hope to hell I shifted soon enough!
His eyes went back to the main plot as the second wave of Hammer Force's missiles came slamming in twelve seconds after the first.
Rozsak's second salvo concentrated its fury on the battlecruisersNapoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne.
The PNE's missile defense officers had better data than they'd had against the previous wave, but twelve seconds wasn't enough time for them to apply it to their fire solutions, crank it into their EW profiles, adjust their formation and their thinking. Worse, the loss ofBernard Montgomery and Alexander Suvorov had punched holes into their defensive fire assignments.
Computer overrides reassigned responsibilities, spreading the load among the dead battlecruisers' consorts, and tactical officers aboard Luff's other ships responded with swift efficiency. Yet they were still off-balance, still reacting, when three hundred fresh missiles exploded into their faces.
Citizen Captain Hervé Bostwick watched his plot on PNE Charlemagne's command deck as the vortex of destruction ripped straight through the task group's defenses towards his command. Charlemagne was one of the big Warlord-class battlecruisers whose crew had fled the triumphant counter-revoutionaries, and Bostwick had been in command ever since. After so long together, he sometimes thought he knew every man and woman aboard her personally, by face and name, and now he could almost physically feel his officers' and ratings' fear—especially in the wake of how unbelievably quickly Montgomery and Suvorov had been wiped away. He felt it, yet the voices in the tactical net were crisp, clear, and Bostwick remembered the carefully hidden contempt he'd seen behind the eyes of many an officer of the old People's Navy—the contempt of professional warriors for mere secret policemen and enforcers. Contempt for the sloppy training and poor combat efficiency of State Security's warships. He remembered his own resentment of that contempt, but that wasn't what he felt now. Tension and spikes of terror might crackle in the depths of his people's voices, yet hard-won training and discipline beat them down, thrust them aside. His people were doing their jobs as well as any "professionals" in any navy in the galaxy, and despite his own undeniable fear, what Bostwick felt most of all was pride.
"Threat axis red-one-zero!" his missile-defense officer snapped. "Battery Three, take it!"
"Battery Three, red-one-zero, aye!" one of his assistants responded, punching commands into his own console. "Engaging!"
Point Defense Three retargeted the laser clusters guarding Charlemagne's port quarter, training around to meet the wave of missiles roaring in through the zone Bernard Montgomery should have been covering at thirty percent of the speed of light. laser clusters went to continuous rapid fire, but they simply didn't have enough emitters to stop that many missiles coming in that quickly.
Charlemagne quivered as the first bomb-pumped laser clawed at her armored flanks. Then another ripped home, and another, dozens of them in a tsunami of destruction, slamming into her on top of one another, so quickly it was impossible for any human sense—or even Charlemagne's computers—to isolate any single blow.
"Direct hit on Missile-Three!"
"Heavy casualties in Impeller-Two!"
"Graser-One and Graser-Three out of the net—no response, Citizen Commander!"
"Gravitic-Five destroyed! Lidar-Three's gone, too!"
"Core hull breach, Frame Three-Seven-Four! Pressure dropping—I think we've got a jammed blast door! Initiating damage control!"
"Direct hit, Boat Bay-Two! I show red board on the entire bay—no response from Boat Bay damage control parties!"
Bostwick heard the wave of damage reports rolling over the net as entire quadrants of the damage control schematic flared scarlet. Charlemagne was hurt, badly. It would take months in dock to repair the damage he could already see. Yet she was still intact, still in the fight, and her people were already bringing up backup systems, rushing repair parties towards her injuries.
"Third salvo impact in five seconds," his tactical officer announced, still focused on his own responsibilities, his own duties. "Defensive fire plan Bravo-Hotel. I want—"
"Skipper!" The voice in his earbug belonged to Citizen Commander Christy Hargraves, his senior engineer, and in all the years she'd served with him, he'd never heard that note of raw urgency in her voice before. "We're losing containment on Fusion-Tw—"
Adrian Luff expression was bleak as Charlemagne's icon disappeared from his plot. Napoleon Bonaparte, which had once been SLNS Indurate, was marginally luckier than the Warlord. She continued onward, rolling slowly on her axis, shedding bits and pieces of hull and clutches of life pods, yet at least her people were getting off. She might even have been salvageable, but she was clearly a mission-kill, completely out of the fight.
There must really be Solly attack officers back there. They sure as hell don't seem very distracted by the Halo platforms, anyway!
The thought rolled through a corner of the citizen commodore's brain without ever reaching its surface, and even as he watched the lurid damage codes flashing under Bonaparte's plot icon, Rozsak's third wave of missiles came howling in.
Luiz Rozsak seemed to feel himself flowing even more deeply down into his command chair as the second massive missile salvo plowed straight down Hammer Force's throat.
They came rocketing in, and if many of them had clearly had their telemetry links shot out from under them, far more of them hadn't. His missile-defense officers had had longer than their PNE counterparts to digest—and apply—the lessons they'd learned from Luff's first salvo, and it showed. They knew about the shipkillers' final "sprint mode" now. They were allowing for it, and their long-range counter-missile fire was far more effective . . . but it was also coming from fewer launchers, and there were fewer point defense clusters to back them up.
He winced internally as SLNS Gunner's back broke strewing the cruiser's shattered hull—and her crew—across unforgiving vacuum. In the same cataclysmic instant, her sister, Sniper, took at least five hits that sent her lurching out of formation before she somehow managed to recover.Cyrus took three more hits of her own and quietly broke up; her sister Frederick II died in a far more spectacular flash which momentarily rivaled the brilliance of Torch, itself.
And then the missile storm closed on Kabuki.
He didn't know how many missiles got through to her. There couldn't have been very many . . . not that it mattered. Her merchant hull was straw in the furnace as the bomb-pumped lasers broke her bones and spat out the splinters. She disintegrated into torn and tattered wreckage, spreading outward from the center of what once had been a two million-ton starship . . . and its crew.
Two thirds of his cruisers were damaged or destroyed, half his destroyers—and Kabuki—were gone, and it was only the second salvo.
"Fire Plan Charlie-Zulu-Omega," he said flatly.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Adrian Luff felt a small stir of satisfaction as the light-speed damage estimates from his first salvo finally came up on Stravinsky's status boards.