Torch of Freedom

Still more hostile missile traces appeared in the plot with deadly, metronome precision, and his eyes narrowed.

"Targeting change," he said flatly. "Go for the cruisers."

"First salvo is already committed, Citizen Commodore," Citizen Lieutenant Commander Stravinsky replied. "Retargeting second salvo now."

Luff nodded, his eyes never leaving the plot. He hadn't counted on how rapidly they'd be rolling those waves of pods. He'd hoped he could kill the ammunition platforms before they got very many missiles into space, cut the hostile fire off at the source. Unfortunately, he no longer had time for that. Taking out the freighters would still be worthwhile, but with so many shipkillers already headed his way, it was more imperative that he beat down the enemy's fire control, first.

Luff's first salvo roared in on Hammer Force.

The cruisers and destroyers shuddered with the sawtoothed vibration of counter-missile launchers in rapid fire. They didn't have the massive armor, the multiply redundant control systems, of ships-of-the-wall, but they'd been designed and engineered specifically to face a massive missile threat. Luiz Rozsak had never anticipated exposing them to a storm like the one racing towards them—not without many more consorts to share the defensive load—but he and the Erewhonese designers working with him had visualized the missile environment far more accurately than the Solarian designers of Luff's Indefatigables.

X-Ray-Charlie Three was still coming fully online. There hadn't been time to complete the redeployment it envisioned, but the cruisers responsible for managing Hammer Force's defensive fire in the outer defense zone were up and tracking. Counter-missiles raced outward, using their hugely overpowered impeller wedges to sweep holes in the incoming fire. But the sudden burst of speed from the Cataphracts' second-stage "sprint drive" had taken Rozsak's tactical officers by surprise. None of the fire control solutions had allowed for it, and kill percentages in the outer zone were less than half of what they ought to have been. Far too many of the first salvo's shipkillers broke past the outer intercept zone, and more counter-missiles erupted from the destroyers tasked to back up the cruisers as they raced into the middle intercept zone.

Laser clusters trained around, tracking, waiting for the incoming fire to enter their own range, then spat rods of coherent lightning to meet them. Fireballs glared and flashed, and despite the "sprint mode" surprise, Hammer Force killed one hundred and thirty-seven of the attacking missiles.

Two hundred and sixty-five got through.

SLNS Rifleman twisted in anguish as x-ray lasers punched through her sidewall. They ripped deep, despite her cruiser-weight armor. Transfer energy shattered plating, ripped open compartments, blotted away offensive and defensive weapons—and the men and women who ma

Her wedge fluctuated as a laser slammed into her forward impeller room. Power spikes surged through her systems, and she reeled off course as her forward nodes went down. Her acceleration fell drastically, and then another laser stabbed deep into her vitals.

Her compensator failed, and even with her forward nodes down, she was still pulling over two hundred gravities.

There were no survivors.

Pain ripped through Luiz Rozsak as he watched Rifleman die, but there was no time to grieve. More hits slammed in, and Rifleman's sister ship Ranger staggered. Her impeller strength fell, over half her starboard broadside was turned into some mangled junk, but she held her place in the formation, and Lieutenant Commander Haldane was already rolling ship, bringing her port broadside to bear.

The destroyers of Lieutenant Commander Stahlin's Division 3029.2 were all on the cruisers' engaged flank when the wave of destruction swept across them. Rozsak doubted that they'd even been targeted, but his formation shift had taken them between the incoming missiles and Hammer Force's cruisers. He hadn't pla

Francisco Pizarro and Cyrus stumbled out of formation as furious lasers hammered them like brimstone lightning. Pizarro broke up seconds later, while Cyrus coasted onward, wedge down, life pods spilling from her flanks. Her sister ship Simón Bolivar, in A

And SLNS Kabuki shuddered as a pair of lasers slammed into her.

Only two of them. That was all that got past her defenders, all that got through to her, and she was two million tons of starship. Yet she was also totally unarmored, without any of a warship's armor, or internal bulkheads, or built-in survival features. Rozsak had accepted that when he conceived the class, because he'd had no choice, and now he remembered his own earlier thought about pile-drivers and soap bubbles.

The hits blew completely through that unarmored hull. They ripped massive holes straight through the heart of her, smashing missile bays, snapping structural members, shattering her fabric with contemptuous ease. Her secondary reactor went into emergency shutdown, and four of her alpha nodes exploded. Only the fact that she'd been built with mil-spec impeller rooms' massive circuit breakers saved her from instant destruction, and data codes indicating critical structural damage appeared under her icon.

Then it was over . . . for another forty-five seconds.

Adrian Luff knew his first wave of missiles had just ripped into the enemy formation. He'd seen their impeller signatures vanishing from his FTL gravitic detectors as they were picked off by defenders or reached the ends of their runs and detonated, and those same gravitics told him three of the enemy starships' wedges had also disappeared. But that was all the information he had, and it would be another half-minute before his light-speed sensors could tell him how much more damage they might have done.

In the meantime, he had other things to worry about.

Leon Trotsky's counter-missiles began to launch. The big ship's active antimissile defenses were far weaker than they ought to be for something her size, but the Aegis system which had been added to them went some way towards repairing that weakness. It was scarcely what Luff would have called a sophisticated solution, but there was a certain brutal elegance to the concept. Simply rip out a couple of broadside launchers, use the space they'd previously occupied for additional counter-missile fire control, and then use two of the remaining launchers to toss out canisters of defensive missiles. Even under optimal conditions, Aegis cost the ship which mounted it at least four offensive tubes per broadside. Normally, Luff would have considered it an equitable deal, given Trotsky's original feeble defenses; now, he missed those shipkillers badly.