Bolo!

And while those missiles were attacking, the fighters from Indomitable flung themselves upon their leviathan foes.

Twenty of them died before they got into engagement range. It would have been even worse, Maneka thought, sickened by the carnage, if the Melconians had held back that initial missile launch, targeted it on the fighters they ought to have known had to be coming. But twenty-five percent losses before the surviving fighter pilots even crossed the missile envelope was quite bad enough.

The sixty survivors ignored the destroyers shooting at them. Instead, they charged straight towards the cruisers. Close-in weapons opened up on them, but the fighters bored in grimly, holding their fire. The fleet little vessels carried plasma torpedoes-triple-barreled, short-ranged weapons with an even heavier punch than Benjy’s Hellbore, but slow-firing. The launchers took long enough to recharge that each fighter would be able to fire only a single salvo per firing pass. But their other energy weapons were intended for dogfighting against other fighters, too light to significantly damage something as heavily armored as a warship, and the pilots were determined to make their single launch each count.

Half of them died before they reached the range they sought and salvoed their torpedoes, but unlike missiles, plasma torpedoes were light-speed weapons. They ripped in, impossible to intercept, and all four of the heavy cruisers and one of the light cruisers disappeared in the hellish glare of impacting plasma. Each torpedo was the equivalent of a shaped-charge fusion warhead, slamming its target with a megaton awl of brimstone, and battle screen failed and armor and hull plating vaporized as those man—made thunderbolts disemboweled their targets.

One of the three surviving light cruisers was severely damaged, staggering sideways in a shower of shattered debris and the telltale shroud of venting atmosphere. Her emissions signature flickered uncertainly, and her drive field went down completely, but her consorts had been luckier. The fighter group targeted on one of them had taken murderous casualties on its way in. Only two of its pilots had survived to fire, and their launch sequence had been badly desynchronized. The plasma torpedoes came in as separate, individual attacks, without the focus and precise timing which had killed the cruiser’s fellows, and the ship’s battle screen managed to deflect most of their effectiveness. She was hurt, but not badly, and she continued to belch missiles at the transports.

But the fourth light cruiser had clearly taken heavy damage. Her weapons fire ceased almost entirely, and her battle screen fluctuated wildly for a fraction of the second before it came back up to full strength and steadied. But there was nothing wrong with her drive, and she changed course abruptly.

“Collision vector,” Benjy a

The carrier’s AI altered course, dodging hard, but her evasion options were too limited. The geometry was against her, and although her light shipboard weapons fired desperately, carriers weren’t supposed to get this close to enemy main combatants. They were supposed to operate under the cover and protection of an entire task force, providing a fighter umbrella to operate at ranges of up to several light-hours from their flight decks, or on independent operations at extreme range from anything but the enemy’s fighters. And so they were equipped primarily with antifighter weapons, designed to provide volume of fire against swarms of attacking fighters, not to batter their way through a cruiser’s battle screen. But Indomitable had had no choice but to go to meet the enemy this time, as she and her escorting destroyers fought to clear the way and keep the Melconians away from the transports which had to reach the surface of Chartres.

She was too far ahead of Ta

Maneka swore bitterly as both icons disappeared from her plot, but even as she cursed, and even as she felt the horror of the deaths of almost three thousand fellow human beings, she knew that at this moment, right here and now, Indomitable had been expendable. And she and her massacred fighter group, of which only eleven survived, had done their job. Only one of the intercepting Melconian cruisers remained, and a merciless corner of Maneka’s mind wondered if the crew of that ship truly realized what was about to happen to it.

The cruiser and all four enemy destroyers bored in, and the Concordiat destroyers went to meet them. They were faster than the Melconians, more maneuverable, and fought with a deadly efficiency, but there were only two of them, and if their AI-human fusions used their weapons far more effectively, they were outgu

They died. But they took three of the four intercepting destroyers with them, and the fourth was so badly damaged that it reeled out of the engagement with its battle screen entirely down.

The light cruiser burst through the engagement, streaming atmosphere but with its energy weapons intact, and all her surviving batteries opened fire on CNS Ta

Maneka felt her face locking in a snarl of triumph as the cruiser spat death at her. The battle screen which now protected the transports was Bolo battle screen, designed to deflect the fire of Benjy’s own main armament at anything beyond point-blank range, and it sneered at the lesser energy weapons mounted by a mere light cruiser. Benjy’s screen brushed the long-range fire aside almost contemptuously. Then his main turret traversed slightly and fired once.

When the Mark XXVIII had first been introduced, its main armament had been equivalent to that mounted in the Concordiat Navy’s current-generation ships-of-the-line. Technology had moved on since then, into newer, deadlier, more powerful weaponry, but even today, nothing lighter than a battlecruiser—and precious few of them—mounted anything approaching the lethality of his 110-centimeter Hellbore. Certainly no light cruiser did… and none of them had been designed to survive its fury.

Benjy’s target shattered, blowing apart and then, abruptly, vaporizing as the ship’s antimatter powerplant’s containment fields went down. The fierce, blinding flash of the fireball polarized Benjy’s direct visual display, and Maneka heard her own soprano shriek of triumph as the cruiser disappeared.

The remaining crippled cruiser and destroyer died almost as spectacularly seconds later under the vengeful fire of other Bolos, and then the transports were clear, racing towards the planet they had come to save or die trying.

Despite its population, which was certainly of respectable size for any world outside the Core Sectors, the planet of Chartres had been touched relatively lightly by the imprint of mankind. All of its developed, terraformed cropland was concentrated on only one of its three major land masses, along with virtually all of its citizens, two-thirds of whom had lived in a relatively small number of large urban centers surrounded by rolling farmland or virgin forest.