He glared at the nine icons in his display, jaw clenched, as the stupendous wave of Cataphracts streaked towards them. He’d flushed the pods in near spinal reflex, without really analyzing his decision, and he kept all expression from his face as he did that analysis now.
Whoever was in command over there had gone unerringly for Buccaneer’s jugular. Without those missile colliers, no Solarian flag officer dared to confront an Allied task force. That would have made killing them imminently worthwhile under any circumstances, but destroying them had also cut deeply into Hajdu’s missile reserve here in Hypatia. And his decision to flush the deployed pods had just fired away everything that hadn’t been blown to hell with Troubadour, Merchant Mar t, and Stevedore.
And that, almost certainly, had been one of the Manty’s primary aims.
Doesn’t matter, he decided, watching the tenth salvo erupt from the Manticoran ships. I’ve got enough birds left in my magazines to do the job. Hell, for that matter I can take out the targets with energy fire, if I need to! And one thing I damned well know is that I’d better take these bastards out fast . . . however big a launch that takes! He grimaced. Missiles in magazines won’t matter if the ships those magazines belong to get their arses blown out of space before they ever launch.
He didn’t like thinking that, but there was no point denying the truth. The size of the incoming Manticoran salvos made it clear they had the telemetry links to actually coordinate their fire, because if those birds had been blindfired, there’d have been one hell of a lot more of them. He didn’t have those links, and he wasn’t at all sure the weight of fire he could have coordinated would be sufficient to penetrate their defenses. Not only that, but they’d put well over three thousand missiles of their own into space before his people even found them. Judging from the SLN’s previous experience, that meant an awful lot of his ships were about to die. If they were given the chance to go on launching, the death toll could only sky rocket, which was exactly what made it so imperative to completely crush them as quickly as humanly possible.
If a hundred and twenty thousand missiles can’t do the job, then nothing else can, either, he reflected grimly. And one thing about it, we’ll find out pretty damn quickly when the Alpha launch gets there. Of course, he smiled thinly, we’ll have to survive five or six of their salvos first, won’t we?
* * * * * * * * * *
Task Force 1030’s tactical officers were tight-lipped as they tracked the incoming Manticoran salvos. They seemed awfully tight, those salvos, packed much more closely together than the same number of SLN missiles would have been. Hajdu’s TOs couldn’t see any reason for the Manties to do that, and they didn’t like not knowing what the sneaky bastards were up to. There had to be a reason they’d concentrated their fire into such a tight, easily targeted zone, but what the hell was it? Why give missile defense such an ideal target? The projected numbers in the tactical computers’ constantly updated predictions spun steadily upward towards an incredible thirty-five percent interception rate, and the tac officers would have loved to believe those numbers.
Unfortunately, they didn’t.
They’d been briefed, based upon the very best intelligence available on Allied missile capabilities, but the accuracy of those briefings’ assumptions had never been tested. Worse, they were based — and every one of those TOs knew it — on little more than conjecture. Given the SLN’s staggering losses, they should have amassed a huge amount of information on Manty missile capabilities and doctrine. They hadn’t . . . because no ship which had been the target of Manty missiles had yet made it home with anything like hard sensor data, They’d all seen the imagery the Grand Alliance had provided of the destruction of Eleventh Fleet, but that imagery had been scrubbed of all useful tactical data before it was ever released. They knew that. Yet if there’d been no useful data in it, there’d been ample evidence of the horrific speed with which Massimo Filareta’s wall of battle had been reduced to wreckage.
The effectiveness of their own missile defenses had been increased by a minimum of thirty percent by the tweaks and new software — and, hopefully, new doctrine — the SLN had rammed through following Sandra Crandal’s debacle. Some of those tweaks had been in the pipeline for T-years, delayed by sheer bureaucratic inertia, although there’d been no time to get them to Eleventh Fleet before it hypered out for Manticore. Others, though, were brand-new, created on the fly by a navy not accustomed to improvisation and rapid adjustment. As a consequence, every predictive model was . . . questionable, and they knew that, too.
Now the first three hundred and ninety-six missiles came tearing straight into the very teeth of their defenses in a solid, unswerving phalanx, and they wondered why.
* * * * * * * * * *
“Counter-missile launch in five seconds,” Daphne Koopman announced. “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one — launching!”
She made the announcement with fierce satisfaction, and SLNS Camperdown quivered as the first salvo of counter-missiles belched from her launchers. Hajdu sensed himself leaning forward in his command chair and scolded himself for showing his own tension so clearly. It was his job to project assurance, not worry, and —
Commodore Koopman twitched upright in her own command chair, her expression shocked, as the penetration platforms seeded throughout TG 110.2’s lead salvo came up and her orderly displays disintegrated into chaos.
It was standard, absolutely predictable RMN missile doctrine. Any Havenite tac officer would have known what was coming the instant he saw that launch, saw how tight-packed the salvo was, how little clearance there was between the individual missiles’ impeller wedges. The problem was that Solarian tactical officers didn’t know that. No one in TF 1030 had ever seen that doctrine in practice. They’d seen theoretical analyses, projections based on assumed capabilities, but the people behind those analyses and projections had lacked hard data. In the absence of that data they’d extrapolated — and all too often mirror-imaged their own doctrinal assumptions into — the Manties’ thinking. It wasn’t because they were stupid; it was because they had no other base line assumptions to use, and so they’d done their best with what they had.
And because they had, their projections were deeply flawed.
Fifteen Dazzlers came up all across the salvo’s front, perfectly timed to ten seconds behind the counter-missile launch. The huge spikes of jamming blasted the Solarian sensor picture into threshed ruin, and missile defense officers swore in shocked disbelief as the entire wave of Manticoran missiles simply disappeared behind that rolling wall of interference.
The counter-missiles lost lock as their onboard sensors were blinded. Perhaps a third of them wandered off on courses to nowhere, trying — and failing — to find new targets to acquire, but the remainder continued straight ahead. Some of them, still under shipboard control, steered towards the center of the missile swarm’s last known position. Others followed their onboard protocols, spreading a bit wider, orienting to keep their seekers targeted on the zone where their computers told them — correctly — the missiles they’d lost track of had to be.
But then the jamming went down, and Daphne Koopman slammed her fist furiously against her console.
There’d been three hundred and sixty missiles on her plot before the jamming; after the jamming, there were seven hundred.
No SLN analyst had yet heard a single word about the RMN’s Dragons Teeth. And because they hadn’t, Hajdu’s missile defense officers were totally unprepared for an EW platform which could generate ten totally convincing false missile signatures. Nor had they realized that Markéta Ilkova had dedicated a full fifteen percent of her initial launch to penetration aides.
Three hundred and eleven attack missiles, covered and protected by their electronic siblings, streaked towards their targets, separating onto individual, evasive approach profiles at last, and TF 1030’s missile defenses tried frantically to reacquire them as they came.
“Projected targets Ontario, Enterprise, Edinorg, Marengo, and Re Umberto,” Koopman said flatly. “Tracking’s confidence is not — repeat, not — high.”
Hajdu’s jaw tightened. If those projections were correct — and, looking at the hashed nightmare of the plot he understood exactly why Tracking’s confidence in them was so low — all nine of the Manties had concentrated their fire on only five of his ninety-eight battlecruisers. That would produce a density of almost seventy missiles per target, assuming an even distribution, and that promised disastrous consequences. Seventy Solarian missiles would have been enough to wreck any battlecruiser, assuming they could get through its defenses. Looking at that plot, it was obvious a lot of them were going to get through, and one thing all OpAn’s projections agreed upon was that Manticoran warheads were far more destructive on a bird-for-bird basis.
He’s not even trying to target all of us, the vice admiral realized. He’s going to go for a handful of targets in each salvo, concentrate his fire to pound through their defenses, and rip them to frigging bits.
Hajdu Gyôzô’s brain went through the remorseless math. There were fifteen salvos in space now. His Cataphracts were actually faster than the missiles coming at him — their time-of-flight was seventy-one seconds shorter than the initial Manticoran salvo’s — but by the time they reached their target, the Manties would have fired a total of nineteen. If each of those salvos concentrated on five of his ships and even a third of them got through, they could reduce every single one of his battlecruisers to wreckage.
* * * * * * * * * *
Despite their confusion, the Solarian counter-missiles intercepted almost seventy of the incoming targets. Unfortunately, fifty-one of them were electronic ghosts generated by the Dragons Teeth. Another fifteen were Dazzlers. Of Markéta Ilkova’s three hundred and eleven, two hundred and ninety survived to streak across the point defense envelope at thirty-eight percent of the speed of light.
SLNS Enterprise’s point defense clusters had time for one shot each before the missile storm was upon her. Under the circumstances, they did remarkably well, plucking nineteen shipkillers out of the chaos of her fire control, and “only” forty-five got through to attack her.
All of them were Mark 14-ERs, not Mark 16s. The Saganami-Bs’ inability to launch the Mark 16 had forced Commander Ilkova to step down Phantom’s Mark 16s’ acceleration in order to maintain concentration. That density paid a major dividend when it came to penetrating the Solarian defenses, but the Mark 14 wasn’t fitted with the Mark 16-G’s improved laserhead. The Mark 16-G could kill superdreadnoughts; the Mark 14 couldn’t.
It was, however — unfortunately for Enterprise — quite capable of killing battlecruisers.
The Nevada-class ship heaved as bomb-pumped lasers punched through her sidewalls, ripped deep into her flanks. Men and women died, weapons disappeared. Her core hull was breached in at least seven places, belching atmosphere as it decompressed explosively. But bad as that was, the six laserheads which detonated directly ahead of her were far worse. Unlike Rear Admiral Kotouč’s ships, Enterprise had no bow-wall. There was nothing to protect her forward hammerhead, aside from its armor and her particle screening, and neither of those was remotely enough.
X-ray lasers punched effortlessly through that armor. Three of her forward impeller nodes exploded, and two graser mounts, three counter-missile tubes, and two laser clusters went with them. A fraction of a second later, power bleed and ruptured plasma conduits turned her entire forward impeller room into a crematorium for its crew. The nine hundred thousand-ton ship staggered, yawing drunkenly as half her wedge went down, and two more of those hellish lasers ripped almost directly down her central axis, tearing deep into her essential systems.
She reeled under the savage assault and her after impeller ring went down, as well, proof of the chaos raging through her brutally wounded control systems. Acceleration gone, she coasted onward, out of the fireballs of the attacking missiles.
Fourteen seconds later, she disappeared in the glare of a failing fusion bottle.
Her sister Marengo and the Indefatigable-class Edinorg were more fortunate; they survived. But they survived as hopeless wrecks. Edinorg still had her wedge, although she’d lost half a dozen nodes, and she turned brokenly away, seeking cover behind her intact consorts’ interposed wedges, while Marengo coasted onward, shedding life pods and small craft. Ontario’s back broke and her shattered hull tumbled wildly, and Re Umberto simply blew up under the pounding.
* * * * * * * * * *
“Good hits, Sir!” Captain Clarke reported as the numbers came up on his display. Commander Ilkova was too busy for reports at the moment. “Looks like we took out all five alpha targets!”
“Good!” Kotouč acknowledged, but his eyes were on Ilkova and the master plot. That massive Solarian salvo was only ninety seconds out, and he had few illusions about what was going to happen when it arrived.
Nor was he alone in that. He could see it in the tight shoulders, the masklike faces of his flag bridge personnel. Even Clarke’s, despite his obvious satisfaction.
Only Ilkova seemed oblivious to it as her hands flew across her console. The range was forty light-seconds, but the Ghost Rider platforms reduced that to less than one. She’d already cut the control links to the next three salvos in the firing queue, but there was still time for her to refine the penetration ECM and targeting of the salvos behind that. She was totally focused on just that, her blue-green eyes fiery, and Kotouč glanced at Paul Albamonte.
The EWO was just as focused as Ilkova, but not on offense. The ops officer had assumed direct control of the attack birds’ penetration EW so that Lieutenant Albamonte could concentrate on the squadron’s defensive ECM. Just as the Ghost Rider platforms near the planet gave Ilkova a direct, real-time view of her targets, those between the task group and the Sollies had given Albamonte a real-time view of the incoming missiles. There was less he could do with it, but he wasn’t sitting on his hands.
He hit a macro on his console and the missile control which had passed to him launched Dazzlers from every tube the task group had. They didn't travel far, and then they erupted squarely in the path of the incoming Cataphracts. There weren't enough of them and the shell wasn't dense enough to block all of the Solly missiles' sensors, but it was close enough to the task group and broad enough to block the vast majority of them, and Solarian missiles didn't talk to each other the way Apollo birds did. With Apollo, everything any missile in a salvo could see was available to all missiles in that salvo, but Solly missiles at this range would be on their own. Each of them knew where its target was supposed to be, but it had to be sure that target was really there before it attacked. That meant reacquiring if it lost lock for any reason, and if there happened to be anything to confuse its sensors at that moment . . . .
Kotouč checked a secondary plot and smiled viciously as the Loreleis came to life upon it.
Suck on that one, Hajdu, he thought vindictively as his four ships suddenly became twenty-five. . . then thirty-nine.
Then the Dazzlers went down once more, clearing the task group's defensive sensor range, and Phantom quivered with the sawtooth vibration of counter-missile launchers in maximum-rate fire. They spat out thirty-two CMs every ten seconds, and his jaw tightened as the incoming salvo entered the outer intercept envelope. They'd be finding out shortly how many of those Cataphracts had been diverted to other targets.
He didn't expect it to be enough.
“Missile impact in sixty seconds,” Albamonte announced as the squadron’s defensive fire began tearing into that stupendous cloud of death. Dozens of Cataphracts — scores of them — disappeared, but there were thousands of them, and Jan Kotouč faced a far larger salvo with far less missile defense than Commodore Lessem had faced in Prime.
They’re getting through, he told himself. Accept it, Jan.
Maybe so, but in the meantime . . . .
* * * * * * * * * *
“God damn it!” Hajdu Gyôzô snapped. “Can’t we stop those fucking things?!”
Fred Brigman looked at his admiral from the corner of one eye but said nothing. It was obviously a rhetorical question . . . and the first time he’d ever heard such furious frustration from the unflappable Hajdu.
It was very unlike him, but it was also hard to blame him, Brigman thought grimly. Five of those hell-spawned salvos had smashed into TF 1030, and twenty-seven — twenty-seven — of Hajdu’s battlecruisers had been blown apart or turned into crippled wrecks that would never move again under their own power. SLNS Espana, Impero, and Libertad, like Edinorg, retained enough nodes to limp away from the carnage, but none of them were effective units any longer. Of Hajdu’s original ninety-eight battlecruisers, only sixty-seven remained in action.
A sense of shocked desperation enveloped the task force as those merciless salvos hammered home again and again, killing or crippling their battlecruisers five or six at a time, with mechanical precision. They seemed unstoppable, and whoever was behind them, he was using his electronic warfare advantages with merciless skill. The jamming patterns shifted and danced, there were more decoys in some waves, fewer in others, driving Tracking into near futility. They were knocking down more of the shipkillers in the inner counter-missile zone, and the laser clusters were claiming more kills as updated profiles on the attack missiles’ terminal maneuvers and emission signatures were relayed throughout the task force, but they were actually getting even fewer kills in the outer and middle zones. It was as if the Manties had real-time data on their own tracking and EW shifts. As if they were programming adjustments into their missiles penetration profiles right up to the instant they actually hit the Solarian defenses.
And now this, Brigman thought, glaring at the display on which the false targets had suddenly appeared. They had to be decoys — although God only knew what sort of decoys could do what these were doing! — and they were going to play hell with the blind-fired Cataphracts’ ability to find the real targets.
Well, maybe so, the chief of staff told himself grimly. But there’s only so much decoys can do against a salvo that size, and they only get one more of their own in before it’s our turn to hammer them!
“Impact in five seconds,” Daphne Koopman announced hoarsely.
* * * * * * * * * *
“Three more hard kills,” Clarke announced. “Looks like at least one additional mission-kill, too.”
That makes . . . at least thirty-four, Kotouč thought, doing the math. Over a third of them. These bastards frigging well know they’ve been kissed!
No doubt they did, and by any objective standard, TG 110.2 had already achieved an overwhelming victory. At least twenty-seven Solarian battlecruisers, most of them Nevadas, had been destroyed outright. That was 24.6 million tons of warships, nine times TG 110.2’s total tonnage, with 78,000 men and women aboard. TG 110.2’s total personnel amounted to only 1,900, barely two percent as many, and the Sollies were going to lose still more ships. Ilkova had already updated the next four salvos in her firing queue and cut her links to them. That meant at least another sixteen dead Solarian battlecruisers, whatever else happened.
It was a pity so few of his own people would be around to see that happen.
Phantom, Cinqueda, Talwar, and Shikomizue had rolled ship thirty seconds ago. They could do that, because Phantom’s Keyhole platforms gave Ilkova and Albamonte uninterrupted sensor coverage, light-speed telemetry to the attack birds, and FTL links to the Ghost Rider drones, and it was going to make Kotouč’s ships far harder targets than any Solly had ever dreamed of attacking. It just wasn’t going to make them hard enough.
The CM zones were a holocaust. Counter-missiles sought out Solarian shipkillers, blotting them from existence in suicidal eruptions of wedge fratricide. Some of those strikes took out more than one attack missile at a time, but not even Manticoran missile defense computers could run meaningful threat analyses on that many missiles. The Solarian tactical officers had simply pointed them in the right direction. After that, aside from the thousands of EW platforms threaded throughout the missile swarm, every one of those birds was on its own.
The penetration aides had been better than projected, knocking back kill numbers by another fifteen or twenty percent. The Loreleis offset some of that by sucking the fire aside — not as much as he'd hoped they would, but more than he'd actually anticipated. Or it looked that way, in the fleeting moments he had to absorb the display. But there simply weren’t enough of them, because the true killer was the sheer number of threats. There was no way to parse the incoming fire, no way to predict which missiles would go for the decoys, which would lose lock and go wide, and which were likely to acquire good firing solutions. The defenders had been driven to take whatever shots they could get, not the ones they would have cherry-picked with better tracking data, and it was a mathematical certainty that many of the successful intercepts had been wasted on attackers that never would have found a firing angle, anyway.
“Impact in five seconds,” Commander Ilkova announced, looking up from her targeting displays at last. Her voice was surprisingly calm, Kotouč thought. Or perhaps the word he wanted was exhausted, because she was soaked with sweat. The sweat of concentration and determination, he thought, not fear.
“Helmets!” the quartermaster of the watch barked, and the admiral twitched. He’d forgotten his own standing orders, and his hands unhooked the helmet from his seat arm, lowered it over his head, and sealed it to his skinsuit’s locking ring.
The possibility of its making much difference was remote.
* * * * * * * * * *
Megan Petersen’s hands were claws on her command chair armrests as that mammoth wave of missiles roared down on Rear Admiral Kotouč’s defiant handful. Arngrim was tied into the same recon drones as Phantom. The destroyer’s tactical display showed the same information Jan Kotouč and his staff could see. But unlike the flagship — unlike Jayson — Megan was safe, her ship un-threatened.
She’d never realized what a curse safety could be, a distant corner of her mind thought.
The squadron’s point defense lashed out as the incoming missiles streaked “above” and “below” those interposed impeller wedges. She knew hundreds of incoming missiles had just disappeared, ripped to pieces by those strobing laser clusters. But she couldn’t see it; the globe of nuclear explosions completely enveloping TG 110.2 made it impossible.
She tasted blood from her bitten lip as that incredible, glaring ball of plasma erupted. Tens of thousands of warheads exploded, spawning their own bomb-pumped lasers, ripping at sidewalls, bow-walls, battle steel armor . . . and human flesh and bone. It seemed to take forever, although at a terminal velocity almost half the speed of light the actual attack was over in a heartbeat. In less than a second.
Jayson . . .
She never knew if she’d whispered that name aloud. She only knew her heart seemed to stop as the brimstone glare faded from the plot and she saw what was left.
* * * * * * * * * *
“Got the fuckers!” Daphne Koopman shouted.
It was scarcely a proper report, but Hajdu Gyôzô wasn’t going to call her on the carpet for it. Not when the light-speed sensors confirmed what the gravitics had already reported. The Manties’ impeller wedges had disappeared from the FTL gravitic plot; now, forty seconds later, the light-speed data from the recon drones speeding outward in the shipkillers’ wake showed him why they had.
Seven of their targets — seven of them! — were simply gone, vanished, probably the victims of their own failing fusion plants. The enormous “battlecruiser” — two and a half times Camperdown’s size — had survived, but only as a shattered wreck, and she was accompanied by what looked like half of a heavy cruiser. It was hard to be sure about that, given the ship-fragment’s splintered state.
Yet two more Manticoran salvos had slammed into TF 1030 while he waited for that confirmation. Those salvos had killed nine more of his own ships, and even as he glared triumphantly at his vanquished foes, eleven more were still inbound.
He looked at the damage sidebar, and his nostrils flared. SLNS Friedland, Charles Martel, Potemkin, Dingyuan, Iéna, Barfleur, Custoza . . . forty-six of his battlecruisers had been totally destroyed or hulked. Belliqueuse, Hamideieh, Ne Tron Menia, and Novgorod had joined Edinorg, Impero, Espana, and Libertad, limping away from the carnage while all but essential damage control personnel evacuated the ships, and six more of their consorts showed varying degrees of damage.
He’d gone into battle with ninety-eight battlecruisers; he was down to forty-four, and the dying wasn’t done yet.
“Finish them off,” he heard himself say flatly, eyes hard and hating on the crippled, broken wrecks of his foes.
A sudden silence enveloped Camperdown’s flag bridge, even deeper and stiller somehow against the staccato background of combat chatter, and Commodore Brigman looked at the vice admiral, his face expressionless.
“Excuse me, Sir?” he said.
“Finish those bastards off,” Hajdu grated. “Now, Commodore Koopman!”
“Yes, Sir!” If there’d been hesitation in Brigman’s voice, there was none in Koopman’s. Her hands raced across her panel, and she jabbed a final button. “Launching now, Sir.”
* * * * * * * * * *
“Oh my God,” someone said softly, and Megan Petersen’s head snapped up from the visual display where she’d been trying desperately to determine which of Jan Kotouč’s heavy cruisers hadn’t been totally destroyed.
“Skipper,” Lieutenant Berden said, “they’ve just launched again. Estimate sixteen hundred inbound. These are slower — I think they’re the same Cataphracts Filareta had — but the range’s down to five-point-four-four million klicks. I make it one hundred twenty-four seconds.”
Megan inhaled sharply and her eyes darted back to the icons of the Solarian task force. They clung to its winnowed ranks, and shock flared in their depths as she realized Berden was right. The Sollies had fired again. Fired upon ships unable to move or maneuver in any way. Ships fighting frantically to evacuate survivors from shattered compartments and broken hulls. Ships specifically protected by the Deneb Accords . . . yet another interstellar protocol guaranteed by the Solarian League.
It’s a war crime, she thought. No, it’s another war crime.
The shock in her eyes turned into something else — something cold and deadly — as the missile icons speared out at those helpless targets. Even with Ghost Rider, it was impossible to see life pod transponders or small craft at this range, and even if anyone had gotten off alive, the collateral damage from that many missiles was bound to kill a lot of them.
Oh, Jayson, she thought. Oh, Jayson.
“Make sure we get every bit of this, Guns,” she heard herself say, never looking away from the damaged ships with two more minutes to live. “We’ll need the evidence at the trial.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Rear Admiral Kotouč opened his eyes and shook his head.
It was a mistake.
Agony lanced through him, focused somewhere below his shoulders but radiating all the way up his spine to the top of his skull. It wasn’t a dull, throbbing agony. This was sharp, brutal, stabbing at him in ragged spasms. His left hand fumbled, trying to find the med panel on the right sleeve of his skinsuit, but his arms didn’t seem to be cooperating.
He blinked, fighting to focus through the waves of pain, and realized he was staring up at the overhead outside Flag Bridge. And he was moving. But how could he be moving? He couldn’t even feel his legs.
Panic bubbled as he realized that was true. Despite that, his brain was starting to function once more, and he blinked again. If he couldn’t walk but he was moving anyway, that could only mean —
He moved his head, craning around to look up past his shoulder. The HUD on the inside of his helmet glared with angry red medical warnings, but he looked past them, ignoring their import, and his eyes narrowed.
Commander Ilkova’s left hand was locked on his skinsuit’s shoulder-mounted purchase point. Her right arm hung at her side, and that entire side of her own skinsuit was seared and blackened as if by fire and splashed with blood. There was a lot of that, but not hers, judging from her movements.
“Others?” he got out.
“We’re it, Sir,” the ops officer replied, and his eyes closed again in a pain not of the flesh.
“What are —?”
“Flag Bridge’s life pods are gone,” she panted, dragging him down the passage in starbursts of excruciating pain. “So’s the lift.”
He frowned, trying to think through the sea of anguish. If the flag bridge’s pods were crippled and the lift was out, then she must be . . . .
“CIC?”
“Yes, Sir.”
He shook his head. The Combat Information Center was as deeply buried as Flag Bridge. In fact, it was one deck farther down. It was also the only other compartment Ilkova could hope to reach that was fitted with the armored shafts through which a life pod could be launched. But getting there through this — the passage was clearly open to vacuum, judging by the thin haze of smoke racing along the overhead towards the hungry rents in Phantom’s hull, and God only knew what other damage there might be — would have been hard enough for someone who wasn’t encumbered and didn’t have a broken arm. Trying to drag him that far with only one working arm . . . .
“Leave me,” he got out through the ragged bursts of pain.
“No, Sir,” she said flatly.
“Leave me!” he repeated. “Go see if . . . there’s anyone left . . . in CIC. If there is . . . you can . . . send back . . . a rescue party.”
“No, Sir.” Her voice was even flatter.
“I —”
“Attention all hands!”
Another voice drowned his out, blaring from the all-hands circuit. He recognized Tonová and felt a stir of surprise that Phantom’s captain was still alive. But the surprise vanished into something else an instant later.
“They’ve launched again,” Tonová said harshly. “We’ve got two minutes. Abandon ship. Everyone who can, abandon now!”
Those bastards. Oh, those bastards! We’r e done, can’t they see that?!
Of course they could, he realized. They just didn’t give a damn.
“Leave me!” he snapped again. “You heard . . . Captain Tonová! Get . . . out now!”
“No, Sir,” Ilkova grated through clenched teeth, yanking harder, hauling him along the air-bleeding passage at a faster rate.
“God damn it . . . that’s . . . an order!” He twisted his shoulders, despite the agony in his damaged spine, trying to wrench out of her grasp.
“All due respect,” she panted, “no.”
“Let me go!”
“Not going to happen.” Her voice was hammered iron. “Now stop squirming, damn it! You’re slowing us down.”
“But —”
“Sir, will you just shut the hell up?!”
* * * * * * * * * *
Hajdu Gyôzô watched Daphne Koopman’s missiles race outward, then turned his attention to the next incoming salvo, grimly satisfied by what was about to happen to the bastards who’d murdered his task force. And when they were gone, he’d deal with the rest of the traitors in this damnable star system! If they’d thought —
“Incoming!” someone screamed.
Thirteen seconds later, Hajdu Gyôzô and SLNS Camperdown ceased to exist.
And eighty-five seconds after that, so did HMS Phantom and HMS Cinqueda.
