Torch of Freedom

And I'm going to miss them even more badly in just a few minutes, he told himself harshly.

The Halo EW platforms deployed around the ship wove their protective cocoon, as well. He hadn't been especially impressed by Halo when his Manpower backers first showed it to him. The platforms were far less effective than the Manticoran tethered decoys the People's Navy had confronted over the years. But he'd changed his mind—provisionally, at least—once he saw them in action against his own ships' targeting capability in exercises. Yes, individually each platform was only marginally more effective than the ones which had equipped the PNE's ships when they initially fled the counterrevolutionaries. But Halo didn't depend on single platforms. It depended on multiple platforms—five of them in each broadside, for an Indefatigable, morefor ships-of-the-wall—to generate multiple false targets and provide remote jammer nodes in carefully integrated defensive plans. And since they were small enough to be carried in substantial numbers, they could be quickly replenished as they eroded—as pla

I hope to hell they work as well against these people as they did against us in those exercises! he thought grimly.

Luiz Rozsak's first salvo arrived on target, three hundred and sixty strong. But sixty of those missiles had gone to local control five seconds before they should have when Rifleman's telemetry links were taken brutally off-line at the source. The Erewhonese-built Mark-17-E's onboard seekers and AI were better than those of most navies, yet they fell immeasurably short of the capabilities of the Royal Manticoran Navy's new Apollo. They did their best, but most of them wasted themselves for minimal return, spreading out, scattering themselves among four different targets. Only two of them got through to their intended prey at all, and the damage they inflicted was scarcely crippling.

It was a very different story for their fellows.

Delta-Zulu-Niner was about as subtle as a battle ax. Luiz Rozsak was up against battlecruisers, and powerful as the Mark-17-E was, no one was going to confuse it with a true capital missile. It was more powerful than most battlecruisers' carried, but at the cost of caring fewer lasing rods. That meant fewer potential hits per missile, and those individual hits weren't going to do the sort of damage an all-up MDM could do, either. In fact, no one really knew exactly how well the Mark-17 was going to perform against targets with battlecruiser-range armor, and so Delta-Zulu-Niner concentrated all three hundred of the missiles that stayed under shipboard control until their pla

One hundred and fifty missiles hurtled in on the battlecruiser Alexander Suvorov, and sheheaved and twisted as the first few laser heads punched through her counter-missiles and her point defense clusters, through the fire being thrown up by her consorts, through the blinding efforts of her onboard EW. More laser heads followed them, howling in at over 100,000 KPS in a solid wave of destruction. The big Warlord-class battlecruiser's active defenses were far stronger than Leon Trotsky's, and her armor was thicker and better placed, but there were simply too many threats coming in too quickly, too tightly sequenced, for her to stop them. Even her armor cratered, then splintered, then ripped apart as laser after laser gouged deeper and deeper.

Point defense clusters went suddenly dead. Her emission signature flickered and flared as primary tracking and targeting systems were blown out of existence and secondaries came up in their place. Three beta nodes went down, then an alpha, and despite the redundancy built into her overpowered drive systems, her acceleration faltered. She staggered, bleeding atmosphere in clear proof of internal hull breaching, and then, abruptly, she blew apart in an expanding ball of fury.

Four seconds later, PNES Bernard Montgomery, Adrian Luff's old command, followed her into destruction.

Luff gritted his teeth as Bernard Montgomery blew up.

They're going for the Warlords first. They're trying to kill our most effective missile-defense platforms.

They were, and their laser heads were far more powerful than he would have believed anything smaller than a capital ship missile could mount. Worse, their fire was immeasurably heavier than he'd imagined six heavy cruisers could possibly control. No ships that size should have that many control links!

But these ships obviously did, and something icy ran down his spine as one of Stravinsky's secondary displays posted the percentage of hits which had gotten through to the two battlecruisers. Saturation explained a lot of it, but the defenses still should have stopped a lot more than they did. The incoming missiles clearly carried extraordinarily good penetration EW . . . and the people behind them clearly knew exactly what they were doing.

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.