Torch of Freedom

apply—the lessons they'd learned from Luff's first salvo, and it showed. They knew about the shipkillers' final 'sprint mode' now. They were allowing for it, and their long-range counter-missile fire was far more effective . . . but it was also coming from fewer launchers, and there were fewer point defense clusters to back them up.

He winced internally as SLNS Gunner's back broke strewing the cruiser's shattered hull—and her crew—across unforgiving vacuum. In the same cataclysmic instant, her sister, Sniper, took at least five hits that sent her lurching out of formation before she somehow managed to recover.Cyrus took three more hits of her own and quietly broke up; her sister Frederick II died in a far more spectacular flash which momentarily rivaled the brilliance of Torch, itself.

And then the missile storm closed on Kabuki.

He didn't know how many missiles got through to her. There couldn't have been very many . . . not that it mattered. Her merchant hull was straw in the furnace as the bomb-pumped lasers broke her bones and spat out the splinters. She disintegrated into torn and tattered wreckage, spreading outward from the center of what once had been a two million-ton starship . . . and its crew.

Two thirds of his cruisers were damaged or destroyed, half his destroyers—and Kabuki— were gone, and it was only the second salvo.

'Fire Plan Charlie-Zulu-Omega,' he said flatly.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Adrian Luff felt a small stir of satisfaction as the light-speed damage estimates from his first salvo finally came up on Stravinsky's status boards.

They'd damaged or destroyed a quarter of the enemy force, including what looked like it had to be major damage to one of the ammunition ships. By now, his second salvo was arriving on target, as well, and he'd seen four more impeller wedges—including what CIC thought was one of the ammunition ships—vanish from his plot.

Yet any satisfaction he felt had to be weighed against the loss of almost half his own battlecruisers. Hammer Force's Third salvo had destroyed PNE Sun Tzu and reduced PNE Oliver Cromwell to a staggering wreck. Six ships was barely twelve percent of his own total force, but they represented a far larger percentage of his total tonnage. And, infinitely worse, they were all battlecruisers . . . and only the battlecruisers had Cataphracts or the fire control to handle them.

It's a race, he thought again, grimly. It's a damned race to see which of us runs out of platforms first.

* * *

Luiz Rozsak's fourth salvo came slicing in.

His two undamaged cruisers could still handle sixty missiles each, but Ranger and Sniper, combined, could handle only sixty more. Hammer Force split its hundred and eighty shipkillers into two ninety-missile salvos and sent them ripping in on the battlecruiser Isoroku Yamamoto, Luff's last Warlord, and the limping wreck of the Oliver Cromwell.

There were fewer missiles in each salvo, and Luff's missile-defense officers had learned a great deal more about the Mark-17-E, but there was only so much they could do. They needed time to reorganize, to restore their formation, and there was no time. There were only the incoming waves of missiles, screaming into their teeth at the rate of five every minute. Their individual effectiveness might be eroding as more and more of those missiles came in without benefit of shipboard control, but they were still coming, and the defenders had to treat each of them as its own individual threat.

Isoroku Yamamoto slid out of her slot in the formation as her after impeller ring died completely. More laser heads shattered her midships armor, destroying control systems, wiping out half her starboard point defense and all but three of her starboard long-range telemetry arrays. She began to drop gradually astern, rolling to present her less damaged port broadside to the enemy while damage control parties fought frantically to get her after impellers back on line.

Oliver Cromwell took only a dozen more hits, yet they were enough. Her single remaining fusion plant went off-line, and she fell behind as her crew raced to abandon ship while there was still time.

Less than one minute had passed since Hammer Force's first laser head detonated, and seven of Luff's fourteen battlecruisers had already been destroyed or crippled.

Rozsak's fifth salvo came screaming in twelve seconds later.

* * *

Our turn. It's our turn, now.

The thought flashed through Adrian Luff's mind as he saw the attack pattern develop on the plot. The deadly ruby diamond chips of incoming missiles swerved, coalescing suddenly out of chaos into a precisely targeted, tightly coordinated hammer. They drove straight through the PNE's harrowed defenses, numbers melting like snow in the furnace of defensive fire, yet somehow sweeping onward.

Luff brain's whirred like another computer, thinking too quickly, too furiously, for his own sudden stab of terror to register.

'Message to Citizen Commodore Konidis,' he heard his own voice saying crisply, decisively. 'If we lose communication, he's to continue with the mission as per our original orders.'

'Yes, Citizen Com—'

The arrival of Luiz Rozsak's missile storm interrupted Citizen Lieutenant Kamerling's acknowledgment.

There was no way for Hammer Force's tactical officers to identify the PNE's flagship. That was all that had sparedLeon Trotsky in their initial salvos. But probability plays no favorites. Eventually, the uncaring odds catch up with everyone, and Luff had been correct. This time it was, indeed, Trotsky's turn.

A hundred and eighty missiles hurled themselves at her and her division mate, Mao Tse- tung, and there was no stopping them. Or no stopping enough of them, anyway. They'd been lost in the clutter of autonomously-guided missiles until the very last instant, and they came down like a battle ax.

The battlecruiser heaved indescribably, writhing at the heart of a hellish latticework of bomb-pumped lasers. Entire sections of her heavily armored hull disintegrated, and raw craters blasted into her, ripping their way through deck after deck, seeking her vitals. Power surges cascaded through her systems, the heavily armored control capsules of on-mount personnel blew apart, and damage alarms screamed like tortured souls.

No mere human being could have kept track of the incredible damage which rained down on Adrian Luff's flagship. It took less than two seconds from the first hit to the last, and the carnage and devastation in its wake was impossible for the brutally shaken survivors to truly grasp. Yet even in the heart of that furnace, men and women clung to their training and their duty.

'Direct hit, Tracking Seven!'

'Direct hit, Graser Five!'

'Point Defense Niner and Ten in local control!'

'Missile Twenty-Three out of the net!'

'Fusion One, emergency shutdown!'

'CIC, direct hit! I can't get anyone on the com, Citizen Commander!'

The damage control reports poured in, a mounting litany of destruction and death. The master plot went dead as the Combat Information Center dropped out of the circuit, and it stayed dead as the auxiliaries which should have taken over to drive it died under hits of their own.

'Direct hit, Impeller Two!'

Leon Trotsky's acceleration faltered.