"Incoming!" her tactical officer barked suddenly. "One hundred-plus! Attack range in seven seconds!"
Beausoleil's eyes snapped back to the tactical plot. CIC was gone, but enough of Bonaparte's tactical department was still up, still doing its job, for her to know it was no mistake.
"Abandon ship." She heard her own voice, impossibly calm, coming up over the priority command circuit before she even realized she'd hit the button. "Abandon ship. All hands, abandon ship. Aban—"
She was still repeating the order when the missiles struck.
Konidis knew he should have felt more pain as Napoleon Bonaparte blew up. Worse than that, he knew he would feel that pain—every gram of it—if he himself survived this day. Yet for now, right this second, what he felt was something quite different. He'd lost only a single ship this time, and, once again, one which had already been mission-killed.
Luiz Rozsak's ninth salvo rumbled down on the PNE, and this time, there'd been time for Charlie-Zulu-Omega to be implemented.
Rozsak was wrong, in at least one respect; he wasn't the first tactician to come up with the same idea. Admiral Shannon Foraker had beaten him to it, although Rozsak could certainly be excused for being unaware of the fact.
He had three times as many missiles as he had control links, even with his surviving destroyers tied in. Given the toughness of their targets, and the defensive capability the enemy still possessed, sixty-missile salvos weren't going to be enough. Especially not when the missiles already in the pipeline were all he was going to get. Which was why Marksman was no longer controlling sixty missiles; she was controlling a hundred and eighty, and her wounded sisters, Ranger and Sharpshooter, were controlling another hundred and eighty.
The only way they could do it was by rotating each of their available command links through three separate missiles, and the degree of control they could exercise was significantly diminished. But "diminished" control was enormously better than no control at all.
"What the—?"
Santander Konidis bit off the question as all three hundred and sixty missiles in Hammer Force's ninth wave suddenly reacted as one. The abrupt shift took all of his remaining missile defense officers by surprise, and dozens of counter-missiles wasted themselves on missiles whose totally unexpected course changes took them out of the CMs' envelope.
Half the mighty salvo went screaming in on PNES Marquis de Lafayette, and the already badly damaged battlecruiser vanished in a bubble of hell-bright brilliance. That was terrible enough, but the other half crashed through the desperate defensive laser fire of Lafayette's so far undamaged sister, PNES Thomas Paine.
It took longer, this time. The incoming fire wasn't as finely focused, as finely controlled. More of the missiles came in staggered, not concentrated into a single devastating moment of simultaneous destruction.
Not that it mattered.
Konidis watched the battlecruiser vanish from his plot, as so many others already had, and his mouth was tight.
He had exactly one battlecruiser left, Citizen Captain Kalyca Sakellaris' Maximilien Robespierre. Oh, the hulks which had once been George Washington and Ho Chi Minh continued to stagger along in formation with her, somehow, but they were as thoroughly out of the battle as any of their consorts which had already ceased to exist.
His eyes went back to the main plot, where the impeller signatures of six hostile starships continued to burn. The PNE's fourth salvo would reach those distant signatures in another five seconds, and Thomas Paine hadn't been destroyed until she and Robespierre had already cut their telemetry links.
It's the last salvo that's going to go in before they take Robespierre out, he thought coldly. They've already cut their control links to their next wave, too—probably to the next two waves, given how tightly sequenced they are. Nothing we can do is going to affect what those missiles do, and there's no way they're going to miss targeting Robespierre. So it all comes down to this. Either we take them out this time, or they've got—he glanced at a plot sidebar—another fifteen salvos already coming down on us.
Chapter Sixty
"Here it comes."
Luiz Rozsak was positive Edie Habib didn't realize she'd spoken out loud. For that matter, he could hardly have legitimately called that single, softly murmured sentence speaking "out loud," he supposed.
The pristine, undamaged neatness of SLNS Marksman's flag bridge was a bizarre counterpoint to what had happened to the rest of Dirk-Steven Kamstra's cruiser squadron. Flag Bridge still had that new-air car smell, still looked like the flag bridge of a modern, lethal fighting force, despite the carnage which had ravaged LCS 7036.
There should be smoke, he thought. There should be the smell of blood, screams. There shouldn't be this . . . this antiseptic order. We should be feeling what's happened to the rest of the squadron.
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.