Torch of Freedom

There were three hundred sixty missiles in each of those waves, but all three of his remaining cruisers between them could manage only a third of them, and that wasn't going to be good enough.

Which was why he'd ordered Charlie-Zulu-Omega. They'd trained for the possibility, but they'd never tried it in action. As far as Rozsak knew, no one had, and he would never have attempted it against an intact missile defense. But Hammer Force had already torn great, bleeding wounds in the StateSec renegades' anti-missile defenses. It might just work . . . and it wasn't as if he had a lot of options.

There wasn't time to implement Charlie-Zulu-Omega before his next two waves arrived, but the one after that would be different.

Santander Konidis felt his shoulders tightening as the seventh enemy salvo came slashing into the PNE. It was like watching storm-driven surf, he thought. Like watching wave after wave pound forward, driving itself up over the beach, ripping at the sand dunes behind it.

"Impact in five seconds!"

Citizen Lieutenant Commander Rachel Malenkov's soprano was higher and shriller than usual. Not that Citizen Commander Jarko Laurent blamed her. With Leon Trotsky's command deck completely cut out of the brutally wounded ship's internal communications net, she'd inherited command of what was left of Trotsky's tactical department . . . exactly as Laurent had inherited command of the entire ship from Citizen Captain Vergnier.

Not that either one of us is going to have to worry about it much longer.

"—ponse from Missile-Seventeen!"

He heard the litany of damage reports still coming in, still being faithfully attended to by the people fighting his ship's desperate wounds.

"Negative response Search and Rescue Bravo-Three-Alpha-Niner! Negative res—"

I wish there was going to be time to tell them how proud of them I am, he thought, as two fresh salvos coalesced out of the onrushing mass of shipkiller missiles. Obviously, they'd hammered the other side's control platforms into scrap. Too bad that hadn't been enough to stop what was about to happen.

Citizen Commodore Konidis felt a surge of hope as he watched the same pattern emerge.

For the first time, the enemy's targeting had gone after the wrong prey. The hammer of destruction came crashing down on what was left of Mao Tse-tung and Leonid Trotsky, and neither one of them was contributing a thing to the PNE's offensive fire.

I shouldn't feel grateful for what's about to happen.

The thought flared through his brain, yet he was grateful, and rightfully so. None of his heavy cruisers carried Cataphracts, nor did any of them have the computer codes to control the long-ranged weapons. There'd been no reason they should—not with fourteen battlecruisers to launch and control them. But if he lost his final battlecruisers, he'd lose any ability to engage the enemy at all. And so, guilty as he felt, a part of him rejoiced to see that enemy wasting his own precious missiles on targets which could no longer hurt him.

Sixty Mark-17-Es ripped their way through Leon Trotsky's enfeebled defenses, while another sixty slashed toward Mao Tse-tung. The PNE's tactical officers did their best, but too many of their platforms had already been destroyed. There was too much confusion, too many holes, too many units scrambling to reprioritize as those metronome brimstone combers smashed over them.

Despite everything, they managed to stop almost two thirds of the incoming fire. Unfortunately, Trotsky and Mao Tse-tung were already too badly hurt. Their side walls were down, their armor was already breached and broken, and their own close-in defenses had been virtually silenced.

Mao Tse-tung disappeared in a spectacular explosion. Leon Trotsky simply broke her back and disintegrated.

Santander Konidis watched their icons vanish from the plot.

It was at least possible there'd been a handful of survivors from the flagship, he thought; none of those still aboard Mao Tse-tung could possibly have gotten off.

He glanced at the time display in the corner of his plot. It didn't seem possible. Less than five minutes—five minutes!—had elapsed since Citizen Commodore Luff's order to open fire. How could so many ships have been destroyed, so many people killed, in only five minutes?!

The display ticked steadily onward, and Hammer Force's eighth wave of missiles came howling in.

Citizen Captain Noémie Beausoleil's face was haggard. Smoke hung in the air of Napoleon Bonaparte's command deck, hovering below the overhead because damage control had shut off the ventilation trunks which might have sucked it away. She couldn't smell it with her helmet sealed, but she could see it, just as she could see its crimson highlights as it reflected the damage control schematics.

She didn't know how the battlecruiser had hung together this long, and she had absolutely no illusions about what was going to happen the next time somebody shot at her. In fact, it looked like—

"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 Sha

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.