Torch of Freedom

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.

And they hadn't even been the primary targets.

"Direct hit on Impeller One!"

"Captain, we've lost helm control!"

"Direct hit Missile-One. Missile-Three and Five out of the net!"

"Counter-Missile-Niner out of the net! Counter-Missile-Eleven reports heavy casualties!"

"Sir, we've lost five betas out of the forward ring!"

"Heavy damage aft! Hull breach, Frames One-Zero-One-Five through One-Zero-Two-Zero! We have pressure drop, decks three and four!"

Luiz Rozsak heard the damage reports over his com link to Dirk-Steven Kamstra's bridge. He felt the damage in his own flesh, his own bones, as his flagship shuddered and bucked and heaved, flexing and twisting with the indescribable shock as bomb-pumped lasers transferred terajoules of energy to her hull.

And even as the energy blasted into Marksman, he saw SLNS Sharpshooter disappear from his plot forever.

Santander Konidis snarled in triumph as half the enemy impeller signatures were blotted away. But even as he snarled, Hammer Force's tenth missile salvo howled down on the People's Navy in Exile.

Three hundred and sixty Mark-17-E missiles hurtled straight into Maximilien Robespierre's teeth. It was scarcely a surprise. Everyone had known exactly who those missiles would target, but they'd had only twelve seconds to react to the knowledge. Every counter-missile that could be brought to bear, every point defense cluster which could possibly reach that wave of destruction, blazed desperately. Scores of missiles were intercepted by counter-missiles. Over seventy more were torn apart by close-in laser fire.

It wasn't enough.

"That's the last of them, Sir," Robert Womack said wearily ninety-eight seconds later.

Luiz Rozsak nodded, equally wearily, and glanced at the time display in the corner of his plot.

Five hundred and twelve seconds. Less than nine minutes. That was how long it had taken, from the enemy's initial missile launch to the attack of Hammer Force's final wave of missiles.

How could less than nine minutes leave him so exhausted? With so much sick regret?

He looked at the tally boards, wincing internally as he saw the names of all the ships Hammer Force had lost, and saw the answer. SLNS Gu