Torch of Freedom

and control them. But if he lost his final battlecruisers, he'd lose any ability to engage the enemy at all. And so, guilty as he felt, a part of him rejoiced to see that enemy wasting his own precious missiles on targets which could no longer hurt him.

* * *

Sixty Mark-17-Es ripped their way through Leon Trotsky's enfeebled defenses, while another sixty slashed toward Mao Tse-tung. The PNE's tactical officers did their best, but too many of their platforms had already been destroyed. There was too much confusion, too many holes, too many units scrambling to reprioritize as those metronome brimstone combers smashed over them.

Despite everything, they managed to stop almost two thirds of the incoming fire. Unfortunately, Trotsky and Mao Tse-tung were already too badly hurt. Their side walls were down, their armor was already breached and broken, and their own close-in defenses had been virtually silenced.

Mao Tse-tung disappeared in a spectacular explosion. Leon Trotsky simply broke her back and disintegrated.

* * *

Santander Konidis watched their icons vanish from the plot.

It was at least possible there'd been a handful of survivors from the flagship, he thought; none of those still aboard Mao Tse-tung could possibly have gotten off.

He glanced at the time display in the corner of his plot. It didn't seem possible. Less than five minutes— five minutes!—had elapsed since Citizen Commodore Luff's order to open fire. How could so many ships have been destroyed, so many people killed, in only five minutes?!

The display ticked steadily onward, and Hammer Force's eighth wave of missiles came howling in.

* * *

Citizen Captain Noémie Beausoleil's face was haggard. Smoke hung in the air of Napoleon Bonaparte's command deck, hovering below the overhead because damage control had shut off the ventilation trunks which might have sucked it away. She couldn't smell it with her helmet sealed, but she could see it, just as she could see its crimson highlights as it reflected the damage control schematics.

She didn't know how the battlecruiser had hung together this long, and she had absolutely no illusions about what was going to happen the next time somebody shot at her. In fact, it looked like—

'Incoming!' her tactical officer barked suddenly. 'One hundred-plus! Attack range in seven seconds!'

Beausoleil's eyes snapped back to the tactical plot. CIC was gone, but enough of Bonaparte's tactical department was still up, still doing its job, for her to know it was no mistake.

'Abandon ship.' She heard her own voice, impossibly calm, coming up over the priority command circuit before she even realized she'd hit the button. 'Abandon ship. All hands, abandon ship. Aban—'

She was still repeating the order when the missiles struck.

* * *

Konidis knew he should have felt more pain as Napoleon Bonaparte blew up. Worse than that, he knew he would feel that pain—every gram of it—if he himself survived this day. Yet for now, right this second, what he felt was something quite different. He'd lost only a single ship this time, and, once again, one which had already been mission-killed.

* * *

Luiz Rozsak's ninth salvo rumbled down on the PNE, and this time, there'd been time for Charlie-Zulu-Omega to be implemented.

Rozsak was wrong, in at least one respect; he wasn't the first tactician to come up with the same idea. Admiral Shannon Foraker had beaten him to it, although Rozsak could certainly be excused for being unaware of the fact.

He had three times as many missiles as he had control links, even with his surviving destroyers tied in. Given the toughness of their targets, and the defensive capability the enemy still possessed, sixty-missile salvos weren't going to be enough. Especially not when the missiles already in the pipeline were all he was going to get. Which was why Marksman was no longer controlling sixty missiles; she was controlling a hundred and eighty, and her wounded sisters, Ranger and Sharpshooter, were controlling another hundred and eighty.

The only way they could do it was by rotating each of their available command links through three separate missiles, and the degree of control they could exercise was significantly diminished. But 'diminished' control was enormously better than no control at all.

* * *

'What the—?'

Santander Konidis bit off the question as all three hundred and sixty missiles in Hammer Force's ninth wave suddenly reacted as one. The abrupt shift took all of his remaining missile defense officers by surprise, and dozens of counter-missiles wasted themselves on missiles whose totally unexpected course changes took them out of the CMs' envelope.

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.