That meant they couldn't run away from Yanakov in normal space, yet they were already up to something like .46 C, much too high for a survivable Alpha translation, and if they kept this nonsense up much longer, they'd put themselves in a position where he would overrun them in short order if they tried to decelerate to a safe translation speed. Which meant, of course, that for all their frantic attempts to avoid action, they were painting themselves into a corner where they had no choice but to fight.
'Captain, I'm getting something a little witchy on my active systems,' Ensign Jackson said.
'What do you mean `witchy'?'
'I can't really say, Sir.' The ensign made careful adjustments. 'It's like snow or something along the asteroid belt ahead of us.'
'Put it on my display,' Alvarez decided.
Jackson did better than that and dropped the same data onto Courvosier's plot, and the admiral frowned. He wasn't familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the Yeltsin System, but the two clumps of cluttered radar returns certainly looked odd. They were fairly far apart and neither was all that big, yet the returns were so dense Madrigal couldn't see into them, and his frown deepened. Micrometeor clusters? It seemed unlikely. He saw no sign of energy signatures or anything else unnatural out there, and they were too far off the task force's vector to pose a threat with Masadan weaponry, but their illogic prodded at his brain, and he keyed his private link to Yanakov.
'Bernie?'
'Yes, Raoul?'
'Our active systems are picking up something str—'
'Missile trace!' Lieutenant Yountz snapped suddenly, and Courvosier's eyes jerked towards her. Missiles? They were millions of kilometers outside the Masadan's effective missile envelope! Not even a panicked commander would waste ammo at this range!
'Multiple missile traces at zero-four-two zero-one-niner.' Yountz's voice dropped into a tactical officer's flat, half-chant. 'Acceleration eight-three-three KPS squared. Project intercept in three-one seconds—mark!'
Courvosier blanched. Eight hundred and thirty KPS2 was 85,000 gees!
For just a moment, a sense of the impossible froze his mind, but then the missile origins registered. They were coming from those damned 'clusters'!
'We've been suckered, Bernie!' he snapped into his com. 'Roll your ships! Those are modern missiles!'
'Second missile launch detected,' Yountz chanted. Brilliant lights flared in Alvarez's and Courvosier's plots. 'Second launch interception in four-seven seconds—mark!'
Alvarez whipped his ship up on her side relative to the incoming fire, and Yanakov's order to the rest of his command came while Courvosier was still speaking. But his lead destroyers were two light-seconds from his flagship, and it took time. Time to pass the word. Time for stunned captains to wrench their attention from the Masadan warships clearly visible before them. Time to pass their own orders and for their helmsmen to obey.
Time too many Graysons no longer had.
The destroyers Ararat and Judah vanished in savage flashes. They were the flankers, closest to the incoming fire. It reached them thirteen seconds sooner than it did Madrigal, and they never had a chance. They'd barely begun to roll their wedges up to interdict when the incoming missiles detonated, and they carried laser heads—clusters of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers that didn't need the direct hits Grayson missiles required. They had a stand-off range of over twenty thousand kilometers, and every primitive point defense system aboard the destroyers had been trained in the wrong direction.
Just as Madrigal's were.
Stunned Manticoran brains raced to keep up with their computers as their weapons went into action without them. Madrigal's people were only human, but her cybernetic reflexes—and a quite inordinate amount of pure luck—saved her from destruction in that first volley. Nine missiles tore down on her, but counter missiles went out at almost a thousand KPS? and point defense lasers tracked and slewed with calm technological haste. A dozen X-ray lasers lashed harmlessly at her impenetrable belly band, yet the two laser heads which might have pierced her sidewalls were picked off just short of detonation.
But simply surviving wasn't enough, and Courvosier cursed with silent ferocity. Their attackers had to be in those 'clusters,' and in order to hide, they'd had to shut down their own impellers and sidewalls. That meant they were not only immobile targets but buck naked to any return fire. Yet, small as the clusters might be on a solar system's scale, they were far too vast to cover with area fire. Madrigal needed a target, and she didn't have one.
'Point defense to task force coverage!' he snapped to Alvarez.
'Make it so, Tactical!' The commander listened to Yountz's acknowledgment and watched her punch the command into her console, then said, almost conversationally, 'That's going to leave us mighty weak ourselves, Sir.'
'Can't be helped.' Courvosier never looked up from his display. 'Whoever's shooting at us can't have time for more than one or two broadsides each at this velocity. If we can get the Graysons through them—'
'Understood, Sir,' Alvarez said, then wheeled back to Yountz. 'Can you get me any kind of target?' he demanded harshly.
'We can't even find them, Skipper!' The tac officer sounded more frustrated than afraid ... but the fear would come, whether it showed or not, Courvosier thought. 'They must be inside that crap, but my radar's bouncing right back in my face. That's got to be some kind of reflectors, and—' She broke off for a moment, and her voice went flat. 'Now something's jamming hell out of me, too, Skip. There's no way I can localize.'
Alvarez swore, but Courvosier made himself ignore the commander and his tactical officer and stared at his own display. The Grayson destroyer David streamed a tangled blood-trail of atmosphere, but she was still there, and she was up on her side, showing only the impenetrable belly of her impeller wedge to the second broadside already rushing down upon them.
Her sister Saul looked untouched on the far side of the formation, but both light cruisers had been hit. Covington held her course, trailing air but with little other sign of damage, while her crude point defense lasers continued firing after missiles which had already passed. She didn't have a prayer of hitting them, and it wouldn't have mattered if she had, yet the volume of her fire indicated she couldn't be too badly hurt.
Austin Grayson was another story. Debris and atmosphere trailed in her wake, and she wasn't under complete control. She'd completed her roll but was still rolling, as if she'd lost her helm, and her impeller wedge fluctuated as Courvosier watched.
'Bernie?' There was no reply. 'Bernie!' Still nothing.
'Second salvo impact on David in seventeen seconds,' Yountz snapped, but Courvosier hardly heard her.
'What's the status of the Flag, Tactical?' he demanded harshly.
'She's been hit several times, Sir.' Ensign Jackson's voice quivered, but her answer came promptly. 'I can't tell how badly, but she took at least one in her after impellers. Her accel's down to four-two-one gees and falling.'
Courvosier nodded and his mind raced even as Madrigal's counter missiles went out once more. This time her human personnel knew what was happening as well as her computers did; that should have made her fire even more effective, but she was spread thinner, trying to protect her consorts as well as herself. There were almost as many missiles in this salvo—with fewer targets to spread themselves among—and whoever had planned their targeting clearly knew what Madrigal was. The missile pattern was obviously a classic double broadside from something fairly powerful—probably a light cruiser—and he'd allocated six of the birds in his second launch to Madrigal. Whether it was an all-out bid for a kill or only an effort to drive her anti-missile systems back into self-defense was immaterial.
All of that flickered at the back of Courvosier's mind, yet he couldn't tear his eyes from Austin Grayson's silent light code. Then—
