Torch of Freedom

Laser clusters trained around, tracking, waiting for the incoming fire to enter their own range, then spat rods of coherent lightning to meet them. Fireballs glared and flashed, and despite the 'sprint mode' surprise, Hammer Force killed one hundred and thirty-seven of the attacking missiles.

Two hundred and sixty-five got through.

* * *

SLNS Rifleman twisted in anguish as x-ray lasers punched through her sidewall. They ripped deep, despite her cruiser-weight armor. Transfer energy shattered plating, ripped open compartments, blotted away offensive and defensive weapons—and the men and women who manned them. Her sidewalls blunted the onslaught; they couldn't possibly stop it, and for all her toughness, she was only a cruiser.

Her wedge fluctuated as a laser slammed into her forward impeller room. Power spikes surged through her systems, and she reeled off course as her forward nodes went down. Her acceleration fell drastically, and then another laser stabbed deep into her vitals.

Her compensator failed, and even with her forward nodes down, she was still pulling over two hundred gravities.

There were no survivors.

* * *

Pain ripped through Luiz Rozsak as he watched Rifleman die, but there was no time to grieve. More hits slammed in, and Rifleman's sister ship Ranger staggered. Her impeller strength fell, over half her starboard broadside was turned into some mangled junk, but she held her place in the formation, and Lieutenant Commander Haldane was already rolling ship, bringing her port broadside to bear.

The destroyers of Lieutenant Commander Stahlin's Division 3029.2 were all on the cruisers' engaged flank when the wave of destruction swept across them. Rozsak doubted that they'd even been targeted, but his formation shift had taken them between the incoming missiles and Hammer Force's cruisers. He hadn't planned it that way, but the effect was to turn them into living missile decoys, and the Warriors' sheer size worked against them. The missiles raining down on them were in autonomous control, this far from the ships which had launched them, and they were nearsighted and narrowminded without their telemetry links. Those which had lost their original targets as a result of the formation shift looked around for new ones, and a Warrior-class ship was more than big enough to satisfy the targeting criteria of AIs which had been told to go and kill cruisers.

Francisco Pizarro and Cyrus stumbled out of formation as furious lasers hammered them like brimstone lightning. Pizarro broke up seconds later, while Cyrus coasted onward, wedge down, life pods spilling from her flanks. Her sister ship Simón Bolivar, in Anne Guglik's Division 3029.3, staggered as she took half a dozen hits of her own, then turned away, rolling ship, fighting to bring her un-mangled broadside's counter-missile tubes and point defense clusters to bear.

And SLNS Kabuki shuddered as a pair of lasers slammed into her.

Only two of them. That was all that got past her defenders, all that got through to her, and she was two million tons of starship. Yet she was also totally unarmored, without any of a warship's armor, or internal bulkheads, or built-in survival features. Rozsak had accepted that when he conceived the class, because he'd had no choice, and now he remembered his own earlier thought about pile-drivers and soap bubbles.

The hits blew completely through that unarmored hull. They ripped massive holes straight through the heart of her, smashing missile bays, snapping structural members, shattering her fabric with contemptuous ease. Her secondary reactor went into emergency shutdown, and four of her alpha nodes exploded. Only the fact that she'd been built with mil-spec impeller rooms' massive circuit breakers saved her from instant destruction, and data codes indicating critical structural damage appeared under her icon.

Then it was over . . . for another forty-five seconds.

* * *

Adrian Luff knew his first wave of missiles had just ripped into the enemy formation. He'd seen their impeller signatures vanishing from his FTL gravitic detectors as they were picked off by defenders or reached the ends of their runs and detonated, and those same gravitics told him three of the enemy starships' wedges had also disappeared. But that was all the information he had, and it would be another half-minute before his light-speed sensors could tell him how much more damage they might have done.

In the meantime, he had other things to worry about.

Leon Trotsky's counter-missiles began to launch. The big ship's active antimissile defenses were far weaker than they ought to be for something her size, but the Aegis system which had been added to them went some way towards repairing that weakness. It was scarcely what Luff would have called a sophisticated solution, but there was a certain brutal elegance to the concept. Simply rip out a couple of broadside launchers, use the space they'd previously occupied for additional counter-missile fire control, and then use two of the remaining launchers to toss out canisters of defensive missiles. Even under optimal conditions, Aegis cost the ship which mounted it at least four offensive tubes per broadside. Normally, Luff would have considered it an equitable deal, given Trotsky's original feeble defenses; now, he missed those shipkillers badly.

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 planned—under incoming fire.

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 planned handoff points on just two targets.

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