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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Close the hatch,” Than said as Captain Su followed him into the small briefing room.

The chief of staff hit the button, then turned back to his admiral with worried eyes. Than started to speak, but Su held up a hand.

“Sir, before you say anything, I know you, and I know what you’re thinking, but I’ve also come to know Xing. If you don’t strike Crann Bethadh, she will demand your head.”

“I know.” Than folded his arms and leaned back against the bulkhead, his expression tight. “I know she will. But if I do what she wants, what happens to Xie’s people? For that matter, you know we don’t have time to recover all our own people from the wrecked ships. What happens to them? If we K-strike Crann Bethadh the way Xing wants, our people—Gamma’s people—will be the ‘war criminals,’ not Xing, as far as the Federation is concerned. What happens to any of them we leave behind?”

Su looked at him for a moment, then shook his head.

“All that’s true, Sir. But I do know you. You’re seeing all of that as a justification—an excuse—to not do something we both know you’d hate.” He waved his hand again. “I’m not saying they’re not valid arguments. I’m just asking you if you’re…overinvesting in them because you’re not a murderer and you don’t want to be one.” The chief of staff’s eyes bored into the admiral’s. “I’m not at all confident the Admiralty will buy into them. This operation’s turned into the worst disaster in the Navy’s history. A lot of people had a lot invested in Dragon Fleet, and there’s a damned good chance all of that’s just been pissed right down the crapper. The people who expected it to get them credit for winning the war are going to want a scapegoat—badly—and Xing, at least, will do her damnedest to make sure the one they find is you.”

“Maybe so. But there’s such a thing as decency, Zhihao. There has to be. And if anybody wants to second-guess me, I can always point out that Xing was too busy running to save her own ass to exercise command of what’s left of her fleet. I’m the flag officer on the spot, the senior officer in command, and the Admiralty didn’t give me my stars just to see me shirk my responsibilities.”

“But what about—?”

Than cut Su’s question off with a quick shake of his head, and the chief of staff closed his mouth with an almost audible click. Of course the third admiral understood the consequences of any official displeasure wouldn’t fall only on himself. Or only upon his officers. Su Zhihao was prepared to take whatever came his own way as Than’s chief of staff, but his heart ached at the thought of what this could mean for Than Qiang’s family.

Which was something he could never say to Than.

“So what are we going to do?” he asked instead.

“I’m not going to murder a planet, but I damned well will blow their orbital infrastructure to hell,” Than said grimly. “Whatever they hit us with, it’s not a standard Fed weapon, or we’d have seen it before. I think it’s something Murphy cooked up on his own, and that means he was able to build so many of the damned things solely out of New Dublin’s industrial base, and I’ll be surprised as hell if he doesn’t come looking for us—assuming what happened in Alramal doesn’t mean his intel’s already told him where Diyu is. The last thing I want is to give him the ability to make still more of them before he finds us, and it’s obvious the Feds have upgraded the yard facilities here a lot more thoroughly than Intelligence suggested. So, given that our offensive power’s been so reduced due to the losses we sustained following Second Admiral Xing’s orders—” he showed his teeth in an almost-smile “—I’m going to task our surviving missile assets with taking out that yard capacity. The destruction of that sort of strategic asset is a legitimate act of war in anybody’s book…and probably the most effective short-term measure I can take to protect Diyu and the rest of Dragon Fleet.”

Su frowned, thinking hard. Anyone who actually looked at Than’s reasoning about “reduced offensive power” would recognize it as the fig leaf it was. But that didn’t mean he was wrong about the need to neutralize New Dublin’s industrial base, especially in the wake of Dragon Fleet’s devastating losses. And he was also right that it would be a legitimate act of war. Xing, no doubt, would argue that killing everyone on Crann Bethadh would also “neutralize” their industrial base, but Su didn’t much care what she thought. Whether Than’s decision to attack the orbital industry directly instead of striking the planet would be enough to keep the Fed admiral from taking out his rage on any prisoners was another question. Especially if—

“Will you tell…?” He let his voice trail off and arched an eyebrow at the admiral.

“Murphy?” Than snorted. “That would be a step too far, Zhihao! You can be damned sure somebody’s going to look hard at our message logs, and I can’t offer Murphy an explicit quid pro quo.” He shook his head, his expression more worried than he wanted to admit. “We’ll just have to hope he figures it out. And—” he looked at the time display “—whatever we do, we’d better do it fast. We’re still eleven light-minutes from Crann Bethadh, but we don’t have a lot of time to dance, if we don’t want Murphy’s ambush carriers to catch us before we can wormhole out. If we don’t head back for the Powell Limit in the next thirty-five minutes, it won’t matter what the Admiralty might do to us.”

“That’s true.” Su nodded, and then he brightened. “You know, that might work for us, to some extent. If we send them in ballistic, our birds will take—what? Nine hours just to reach the planet from here?—and we’re only six hours or so from wormholing, once we start. So we won’t be around for our sensors to confirm exactly where they were targeted or what they hit.”

“It’s a nice thought,” Than said. “I wouldn’t put too much confidence in it, though.”

“Confidence? Who’s talking about confidence?” Su actually chuckled. “I’m talking about frail hopes here, Sir!”

“Well, in that case, don’t let me disabuse you,” Than said. “And now, I think we’d better get ourselves organized.”

* * *

The League SAR teams labored heroically, fighting to find and recover every RLH spacer, but all too many of them were still trapped in broken hulks coasting toward Crann Bethadh when they ran out of time thirty minutes later.

Than really ought to have blown up the surviving wrecks—especially Sun Bin’s hulk—but he couldn’t. Not with so many of his people still aboard. He did fire the scuttling charges aboard the two battleships and three battlecruisers he couldn’t fit onto his surviving parasite racks after all, but only after he’d made sure every single man and woman was off them.

And while his search-and-rescue people were doing that, his tactical officers programmed and launched their missiles.

As Su had pointed out, from this range it would take hours for something traveling at Dragon Gamma’s base velocity to reach Crann Bethadh. Burning out the missiles’ Hauptman coils at launch would have cut that flight time by twenty-five percent…but it would also have deprived them of their highest rate of acceleration when it came time to penetrate whatever antimissile defenses they might face.

There wouldn’t be much to stop them—not in a Fringe system, when all the mobile defending units were off with Murphy. And space stations couldn’t dodge any more than planets could. So they probably wouldn’t need their coils, but Than was a professional and his people had paid a bitter price to get this close to Crann Bethadh. His parting shot would go in with every advantage he could give it.

He wished he could risk staying in-system long enough to evaluate the results of his strike. Unfortunately, that was out of the question. The five Federation FTLCs no one had known were there had a lot farther to go than his two surviving carriers did, but it would take over two hours for Dragon Gamma’s battered starships just to accelerate back across the Powell Limit, and then another three and a half hours to reach the critical velocity threshold and break into wormhole space. They could intercept him on his least-time exit vector in less than six hours from their current relative velocities and positions. However much his heart railed against leaving any of his people behind, Dragon Gamma was out of time.

“Turn us around, Captain Sun,” he said, looking at the flag captain’s comm image. “It’s time to go.”

“Yes, Sir.” Sun had been with Than a long time, and he recognized the worry in her eyes—worry for him, not for herself—but she managed a smile. “I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see the last of New Dublin,” she said.

“Neither will I, Luoyang,” Than sighed. “Neither will I.”

Cai Shen and Li Shiji turned and accelerated away from Crann Bethadh at nine hundred gravities.

Behind them, eight hundred and seventeen antiship missiles—every attack bird they’d had left after Agincourt’s devastation, although Than was unaware of the bitter irony of that number, given what Murphy had fired into Xing’s teeth—hurtled toward Crann Bethadh…accompanied by 1,369 counter-missiles.

* * *

“You know, there are times I wish my dad could be wrong about something,” Callum Murphy said from his acceleration couch as TFNS Kolyma accelerated away from the New Dublin Alpha shipyard platform.

“I’m sure he is, sometimes,” Dadyar Pêşrew replied encouragingly from Callum’s display.

“Oh, when I was a kid, he was wrong all the time!” Callum rolled his eyes. “Only problem was I usually couldn’t convince Mom of that. She always took his side, no matter how unfair I told her he was being!”

“Parents are like that.”

“Yours, too, huh?”

All of them, Lieutenant Murphy. All of them.”

Callum chuckled. That chuckle might have been just a bit strained, however, and he found himself wishing that Engineering offered tactical displays. He’d gotten used to seeing them on Ishtar’s flag bridge, and he hadn’t counted on how…blind he’d feel without them.

Lieutenant Commander Seydel had told them what was coming, though. That was why his stomach felt so hollow at the moment.

The good news was that the Leaguies almost certainly didn’t know Kolyma and her consorts were there. Logically, they shouldn’t have been. They should have been with their FTLCs, chasing the League carriers. Using FTLCs for something like that without every sublight parasite they could lay hands on was…contraindicated. Callum had tried it once in Federation Commander, and the result had been unpleasant.

But his father had chosen to run that risk with his own command. As he’d said, Ishtar and Gilgamesh were decoys. If they needed their parasites, they were already screwed, so he’d loaded both of Commodore Granger’s strikecarriers and every capital ship he had aboard the FTLCs of Hammer Force and run with empty racks…aside from the cargo pods of missile drones.

And he’d left every cruiser and light cruiser—and both strikecarriers—from his own task force in Crann Bethadh orbit, hiding in the sensor clutter of the shipyards and industrial platforms under strict EMCON, to provide a missile shield for the planet.

There were only thirty-seven ships, but they’d beefed up their missile defense drones, all thirty-six of the carriers’ fighters had been configured for missile defense, and Kolyma would preposition every single one of her counter-missiles when she reached her assigned spot in the defense grid. The cruiser’s launchers were mass drivers designed to get the birds out of the tubes as quickly as possible, but not to contribute to their velocity. It was to get them well clear of the ship before their Hauptman coils kicked in and irradiated everything in the vicinity. In this instance, however, Kolyma was defending a static target, and deploying the counter-missiles in space ahead of time would multiply the defensive fire she could throw up by a factor of eight. It wouldn’t be quite as accurate as it might have been, but there would be a lot of it.

It remained to be seen if there would be enough.

* * *

“Sir—”

“I see it, Zhihao.” Than shook his head. “It would appear our friend Murphy is even more revoltingly capable than I’d thought.”

Cai Shen and Li Shiji had been under acceleration for twenty-five minutes, during which they’d killed their remaining velocity toward Crann Bethadh and traveled just over fourteen million kilometers from their missiles’ launch point toward the Powell Limit. Their velocity was back up to 7,600 KPS, and the system primary was receding—not nearly so rapidly as Than might have liked—behind them.

They were still close enough to communicate with their deployed drones, however, and those drones were still traveling ballistic with their active sensors locked down. That meant they were almost certainly invisible to the system’s defenders. Than was pretty sure they were, anyway, since they were now close enough for their passive sensors to spot the TFN sublight units which had just fired up their fusion drives and begun accelerating out of concealment amid Crann Bethadh’s orbital clutter. He very much doubted that they would have abandoned hiding so soon if they’d known he could see them.

“I should have anticipated this,” he continued. “Anybody who thought far enough ahead to set up everything he did to Xing—and us—had to have considered what would happen if something got into range anyway. It looks like we may have to get used to thinking about competent Fed flag officers.”

“I don’t think they have enough platforms to stop the strike,” Su said. The chief of staff leaned forward over Lieutenant Commander Yuan’s shoulder, studying the tactical plot. “There are more than enough of them to take a big bite out of it, though.”

“And to die trying,” Than agreed grimly.

Su patted Yuan’s shoulder and walked back across the flag bridge to Than.

“Sir, I don’t like to say this,” he said very softly, “but there’s still time to retask the missiles. They might manage to save a lot of New Dublin’s industry, but—”

Than shook his head. It was a tiny shake, but an emphatic one, and Su stopped mid-sentence with a vague sense of shame.

Thirty or so Federation cruisers might, indeed, “take a big bite” out of the infrastructure strike. But if the missiles were retargeted on Crann Bethadh’s population centers, even a really “big bite” would be insufficient to save the planet. Su was certain someone—probably one of those scapegoat-hunting someones—would point that out. A prudent man would have ordered them retasked for exactly that reason, but he’d known, even before he asked, what Than Qiang’s answer would be. He’d known. But it was a chief of staff’s job to ask exactly those sorts of questions anyway…no matter how much he might loathe himself after he did.

* * *

“What do you think, Sir?” Lieutenant Commander Mendez asked quietly. “Was the Admiral’s little warning enough to change the bastards’ minds?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, XO,” Abraham Whitten replied.

He sat on TFNS Austerlitz’s bridge, looking at the comm display tied into Mendez’s station in Auxiliary Control. AuxCon was right off the Combat Information Center, at the center of the heavy cruiser’s core hull. Hopefully, that meant Mendez would survive if something unfortunate happened to Whitten.

“I’ve gotta admit he’s surprised the hell out of me this far,” Mendez went on, dark brown eyes watching the master plot in CIC. At the moment, it showed the surviving League FTLCs accelerating hard for the Powell Limit. It did not—yet—show the missiles both of them were confident those carriers had left behind. “I didn’t think he could pull it off. Not in a million years.”

“I’m coming to the conclusion that everybody—yours truly, included—kind of underestimated Admiral Murphy,” Whitten said. “Not by more than, oh, five or six thousand percent, you understand. No biggie.” He smiled tightly, then shook his head. “Damned if that man can’t think outside the box. Wouldn’t have guessed that back at Jalal. But I think it’s still a crapshoot whether or not the Leaguies go after Crann Bethadh anyway.”

“If he’s really about to take sixty-three thousand Leaguie prisoners, that’s a pretty good reason for the rest of their fleet to not go around genociding any planets,” Mendez pointed out.

“Granted. ’Course, the Admiral was pretty careful about not saying he’d shoot them all if whoever’s in command over there K-strikes the planet. I think he got his point across, though.”

Murphy’s message to Admiral Than had come through in the clear to every one of his own ships, as well. It was the first time Abraham Whitten had actually heard his crew—any crew—cheering for a TFN flag officer.

“The problem,” he continued, “is how bad we’ve hurt them.” He shook his head. “We haven’t reamed a Leaguie fleet this way—especially for pretty much zero losses of our own—in…Well, hell. I don’t think we’ve ever reamed a Leaguie fleet this way! That’s gotta sting. And if whoever that is hauling ass for wormhole space is as bloody minded as that bitch Xing, he may not care what happens to those prisoners. He may just say screw it all and kill the planet anyway.”

“Unless we stop him, Sir,” Mendez said.

“Well, there is that,” Whitten agreed.

* * *

“All right, everybody,” Captain Jordan Penski announced to his COs over the all-ships net from the heavy cruiser La Cateau’s cramped flag bridge. “The outer drones have a count for us. They make it a little over two thousand, so things are about to get interesting.”

The men and women aboard “Umbrella,” the ships defending Crann Bethadh, watched him in intently listening silence. As the CO of CruRon 1102, Penski was the senior-officer-in-command. He was a well-known and thoroughly trusted quantity for the crews of his own squadron and the rest of TF 1705. He was less well-known to the other ships Murphy had begged, borrowed, and stolen.

“The good news is that we’re pretty sure a lot of them have to be counter-missiles, because they didn’t begin to have enough magazine space after Agincourt for that many shipkillers, But we don’t know how many are. We’re guessing somewhere around half, based on standard Leaguie magazine loadouts, which would mean ‘only’ about a thousand attack birds.”

More than one of his listeners winced at that estimate.

“They’re coming in ballistic,” Penski continued. “That means they’ve got their Hauptman coils, as well as their fusion stages, for terminal maneuvers. We’re tracking, and we should have solid locks on all of them by the time they get here. One thing about ballistic, it’s easy to plot.”

He smiled, and at least some of his ship commanders chuckled. Hitting a purely ballistic target, however small and however fast it was moving, was child’s play.

“The problem—” his smile disappeared “—is those damned Hauptman coils and the counter-missiles. I’m willing to bet every single one of those frigging shipkillers is programmed to jink at an entirely different target on final. Worse, they’ll be coming in hot when they cross our defensive perimeter, and they’ve got those frigging counter-missiles riding shotgun.”

Normally, it was impossible to combine antiship missiles and counter-missiles in the same salvo, because counter-missiles simply couldn’t keep up. They were smaller, cheaper, and less capable than attack missiles—they had to be, if ships wanted to carry enough of them—but they actually had fifty percent better acceleration. They needed that…liveliness to generate standoff range on intercepts against missiles coming in at thousands of kilometers per second. The problem was that the greater overload on their Hauptman coils limited them to two thirds of an attack missile’s acceleration time. That worked out to an almost identical maximum attainable velocity from rest—1,765 KPS—but the counter-missile burned out at a range of only 35,000 kilometers, whereas the shipkiller’s Hauptman coil had a powered envelope of 52,960 kilometers. In addition, its fusion thrusters provided a maximum of three minutes more powered flight time, which was nothing to sneer at when it came to defensive fire solutions, but only at an acceleration rate that was negligible compared to that of a Hauptman coil.

It was possible to adjust the counter-missile’s acceleration rate to match that of a shipkiller, but not its endurance, and therein lay the dilemma. Under normal circumstances, even the shipkiller’s Hauptman coil burned out well before the missile reached its target, and there wasn’t really a problem in simply giving it a longer ballistic phase than it would normally have had. But while the shipkiller had that fusion stage for midflight correction and terminal maneuvers, the counter-missile didn’t. From the instant its coil burned out, it was only an expensive, inert hunk of hardware traveling helplessly through space.

In this case, unfortunately, none of that mattered, since the entire missile cloud was traveling ballistic at Dragon Gamma’s base velocity at launch. None of them had put any time on their Hauptman coils at all.

“We don’t know how much good the counter-missiles will do them, but they have to take a bite out of our defensive fire. Not to mention the fact that they’ll make damned good decoys until Tracking can differentiate acceleration rates. So this is going to be a hell of a shoot-out, people.

La Cateau will take lead and distribute our fire, but keep an eye out for those jinks! I’m releasing your shipboard lasers and autocannon to self-defense, unless La Cateau overrides, but our number-one priority is the planet. After that, it’s the orbital platforms. I’m afraid our own precious asses come third today.”

No one felt like chuckling now.

“The thing is—and this isn’t just for you folks in BatRon Seven-Oh-Two and CruRon Nine-Sixty. I know you feel like shit over Inverness. Well, all the rest of us’ve left enough planets to get hammered, too. The whole damn Navy has. But this is our chance to make up for that. We’re not walking away this time. Not today. Not from this planet. We stop those damned missiles or we don’t go home. Are we all clear on that?”

His eyes were hard as they swept the quadrants of his flag bridge comm display aboard La Cateau. Every one of his ship commanders looked back at him, just as they saw one another on their own displays, and—as one—they nodded.

“Good,” he said then. “Now let’s kick those missiles’ asses.”

* * *

Time dragged as the personnel of Umbrella awaited the onslaught. It was something to which spacers became resigned. Their battlefields were so vast, their sensors could see so far, and their weapons were so relatively short ranged, that they routinely got to wait hours, or even days, for the holocaust they knew was coming. In some ways, it was like a reversion to the days of sail back on Earth, when seamen got to watch the approaching sails of an oncoming enemy fleet creep closer at no more than two or three knots. And, as in the days of sail, it was hardest on the personnel who’d seen the most combat. They knew what it was like from bitter, terrifying personal experience, and all those memories of other times sat in the backs of their brains, whispering that this time they might be the ones whose luck ran out at last.

There were a lot of men and women like that in Umbrella.

And then there was Callum Murphy.

He felt the tension ratcheting steadily tighter and tighter in his gut. Every time he was convinced it couldn’t get any worse, it surprised him by doing exactly that. He looked around the faces of his reactor room personnel, searching for signs of his own crippling fear, and saw very little of it. Were they all that much stronger than he was? Or were they simply better at hiding it?

“Don’t sweat it, Sir,” a voice said very, very softly from beside him.

He turned his head, and Eira smiled ever so slightly from the acceleration couch beside his. They were in microgravity at the moment, but that wasn’t the reason they were strapped in, anyway.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Don’t feel like it now, but you will.”

“Not so sure of that,” he said, equally softly. “I can’t decide whether I’m about to puke or pee myself. Or—” his lips quirked “—something a bit smellier than that.”

“Except for the puking, nobody else’ll know,” she pointed out, patting the chest of the armored vac suits all of them wore. “But it doesn’t matter. What matters is doing what you have to.”

“I’m afraid I’ll freeze.” He was a bit surprised he could admit that, even to her, but it was easier than he’d expected. “I’m afraid I’ll screw up and get somebody killed. Maybe even you.”

“Smaj says you’re more likely to do something stupid-brave out of ignorance and get me killed that way.” She shrugged. “I’ll take my chances. You’re more like your father than maybe you realize. Don’t expect he’d freeze, and I don’t expect you will.”

Callum looked into those pale blue eyes and wondered exactly what they saw looking back at him. They were still and calm, but there was something darker and colder beneath their surface. How much of that was the memory of what she’d endured and survived on Inverness, he wondered?

“Well, I’ll try not to get either of us killed. How’s that sound?” he said in a deliberately brighter tone, and she nodded.

“I’d like that, Sir,” she said with a slightly bigger smile.

* * *

“Pump the air, Mr. McGhee,” Kunigunde Seydel said calmly.

“Aye, aye, Ma’am!” Lieutenant Commander McGhee replied, and a buzzer sounded raucously over every intercom and earbud aboard Kolyma.

All over the ship, hatches and blast doors slammed shut. Helmets went on, vac suit seals were checked one last time, and any personnel who hadn’t done it already strapped into acceleration couches. This time, those couches were unlikely to be needed for acceleration, but they also provided their users with semi-enclosed armored shells. And as they strapped in, the life-support blowers went into reverse at maximum speed and power. Air pressure fell rapidly as Kolyma’s atmosphere was evacuated into the heavily armored, high-pressure storage cells near the center of the cruiser’s hull in the last step that brought a ship fully to battle stations. Partly, depressurizing was designed to conserve that atmosphere in case of hull breaching. Of more immediate importance, it also deprived shipboard fires of oxygen and removed the atmosphere that would otherwise transmit blast and concussion.

FTLCs seldom fully depressurized. They were larger than any sublight parasite, and the process would have taken far longer. There were also areas an FTLC couldn’t depressurize, like the hydroponics sections that were their lungs. On the flip side of the equation, their size also meant they had much deeper belts of compartmentalization between their vital sections and the void. Those compartments could be depressurized, and FTLCs were far more heavily armored than any sublight ship. Mass literally meant nothing to a Fasset-drive ship, so the mass penalty of a meter or two of armor—even SCM armor—was perfectly acceptable to them.

As Third Admiral Than’s ships had demonstrated, not even the best and thickest armor in the galaxy could fend off catastrophic damage if there was enough incoming fire, but—as they had also just demonstrated—it took a lot to get through to an FTLC’s pressurized core sections. If damage got that deep, atmosphere was usually the least of the ship’s problems.

* * *

The long, dragging wait dwindled slowly, and then—as also always happened—the minutes which had dragged so interminably became seconds, flying into eternity at FTL speeds.

The defenders’ ability to track the incoming missiles for so long was a priceless advantage, although it would have been a much greater one if the closing velocity hadn’t been so insanely high…or if they’d had a defensive weapon capable of engaging the threat farther out. But not only were their counter-missiles shorter-legged than their potential targets, attack missiles were smart and, unlike counter-missiles, had those damned fusion drives. If the TFN had attempted to intercept farther out, the shipkillers’ onboard AIs would simply have waited until the counter-missiles went ballistic, then expended however little of their fusion drives’ endurance they’d needed to evade. So if the counter-missiles wanted to intercept, they had to be capable of terminal maneuvers…which meant they couldn’t be fired until the shipkillers were in range for their own terminal attack maneuvers.

At their closing velocity, the League attack missiles had a powered attack range of just over half a million kilometers. That assumed maximum burn on their fusion-powered final stages, and that none of their acceleration was used on evasive maneuvers. But it gave Umbrella’s defensive planners a solid benchmark for the maximum range at which they might initiate their attack runs, and nerves tightened to the snapping point as they crossed that perimeter and went right on closing. They coasted onward for another thirty-four seconds, closing to 300,000 kilometers, and then—

“Hauptman activation!” La Cateau’s tracking officer barked, and eyes snapped to tactical displays throughout the defensive force.

Umbrella knew where every single one of those incoming missiles was. Missiles had fewer stealth features than drones, and Penski’s trackers had known where these were coming from, been able to vector recon drones into their ballistic path. That path, dictated by Dragon Gamma’s vector when the salvo launched, crossed “behind” Crann Bethadh’s orbital position, so the fire would be coming in on an oblique angle, which simplified things a bit more. The tracking computers had analyzed the potential targeting cones for every one of the RLH birds, but that hadn’t helped a lot. They were very big cones—large enough to envelop the entire planet—and until their coils went live, there was no way to predict which missile would go where. And from that range, they could reach their targets in only forty-seven seconds…which meant they would execute their terminal attack runs at three thousand gravities, not the six hundred maximum of their fusion thrusters.

“Fire Plan Bravo, Commander Tsimmerman,” Captain Penski said formally.

“Fire Plan Bravo, aye,” Sergey Tsimmerman replied, and fire distribution commands flooded outward from the cruiser.

Seven and a half more seconds fled into eternity, and then tactical displays flashed with a prairie fire of matching Hauptman signatures.

* * *

The counter-missiles lit off their coils and streaked to meet the incoming fire. Had the shipkillers gone active at the half-million-kilometer mark, there would have been a second wave, launched twenty seconds later to engage the initial intercepts’ leakers after they went to their fusion drives and became much easier kills. The actual attack profile meant there was no time for that. Even at their full 4,500 gravities of acceleration, the counter-missiles would intercept only 26,260 kilometers—and three and a half seconds—before that oncoming hammer struck.

It was an awesome concentration of defensive fire power. Warship magazines had to split capacity between shipkillers and counter-missiles, and in the TFN’s case, cruisers normally dedicated forty percent of their magazine space to ship defense. Penski’s ships’ magazines had contained 5,032 counter-missiles, and Umbrella had prespotted all of them. That worked out to just over 2.3 counter-missiles for every incoming bird, and against non-evading targets, or even targets reduced solely to their fusion thrusters, that would have been ample to stop any attack dead. Unfortunately, the targets they actually faced were not only capable of evasive maneuvering at very high gravities, but covered by penetration aids…and those damned counter-missiles of their own.

The League tac officers had stepped down their counter-missile acceleration rate to match that of the shipkillers, which made them effectively indistinguishable from one another. But only for a moment. Only until the Federation counter-missiles committed to launch and the League missiles’ sensors could see them.

Missile sensors weren’t as good as those of warships or recon drones, but they were still pretty damned good. Certainly capable of detecting and tracking incoming hostile missiles. The AI aboard a counter-missile was a bit more simpleminded than that aboard a shipkiller, and TFN AI was generally better than RLH AI. The margin of superiority was slight, however, and the League counter-missiles knew exactly what they were supposed to do when they saw that many incoming Hauptman coils.

* * *

Jesus!” Lieutenant Commander Brian Denby, TFNS La Cateau’s tactical officer, muttered.

“You think?” Sergey Tsimmerman replied as he watched the same plot. The TO had been talking to himself, Tsimmerman knew, but he had a point.

A very good one, in fact.

Over thirteen hundred of the incoming icons had abruptly increased acceleration by fifty percent, streaming to meet the defenders’ counter-missiles. The range between them was still over 200,000 kilometers, but the incoming shipkillers’ base velocity pared away distance like a knife, and their accompanying counter-missiles raced ahead of them with an acceleration advantage of fifteen hundred gravities.

And there were thirty percent more of them than anyone in Umbrella had estimated.

“Time to counter-missile intercept thirty-two seconds,” Denby announced.

Tsimmerman nodded his helmeted head without looking away from the plot and activated his dedicated link to Jordan Penski.

“That’s going to take a bigger bite out of our defensive birds, Sir,” he said.

“Probably,” Penski agreed. “But look at the bright side, Seryozha. If we were low on the counter-missile estimate, that means we were high on the shipkillers. So we’ve got less of them to deal with, right?”

“All due respect, Sir, but that’s a pretty dim ‘bright side.’”

“Yep. On the other hand, it’s the only one we’ve got.”

* * *

Two vast clouds of kamikazes streaked toward one another.

The defending counter-missiles had no interest in their League counterparts. Their business was with the shipkillers, and the acceleration of the League counter-missiles took them out of the shipkiller category. Unfortunately for Umbrella, Than Qiang’s counter-missiles had been programmed to look for exactly that sort of acceleration to identify their targets. No one in Dragon Gamma had expected to actually need to plow the road for their attack missiles, but Third Admiral Than wasn’t in the habit of leaving things to chance.

Kinetic kills—bullets-hitting-bullets—were the preferred mode for both navies, but counter-missiles were routinely fitted with proximity warheads and laserheads as backup. The Federation favored the laserhead because of its greater reach and ability to engage “off-bore” targets, whereas the League favored the simpler, more robust proximity warhead’s cloud of shrapnel, but both navies used both.

Thirty-four and a half seconds after Fire Plan Bravo had launched, 6,400 missiles’ vectors merged, 26,263 kilometers from Crann Bethadh.

The vacuum blazed as the counter-missiles built a wall of lightning. Their closing velocity was over 8,437 KPS. At that speed, the entire interception was over so quickly not even the computers could sort it out. It was one blinding, eye-searing cataclysm, an instant borrowed from Armageddon, that saw 853 of the TFN counter-missiles blotted out of existence in the fireballs of kinetic impact, the stilettos of bomb-pumped lasers, and the shotgun shrapnel of blast-fragmentation warheads.

And then, as quickly as it had flashed into existence, the holocaust vanished. Clouds of debris sped onward, potentially lethal to anything that got into their path, but space was once again empty and dark.

For a fleeting moment, at any rate. Then, 3.1 seconds later, the surviving counter-missiles ripped into Dragon Gamma’s shipkillers.

There were still over four thousand of them, with barely 800 targets, but those targets were far harder than the counter-missiles had been. Counter-missiles didn’t come lavishly equipped with penaids; shipkillers like the RLH’s Zhànchuí did.

Decoys ripple-salvoed from the lead missiles—brief-lived but powerful, mimicking the Hauptman signature of actual shipkillers. Bǎobiāo missiles, equipped with active protection systems, targeting incoming counter-missiles with hypervelocity slugs, broke trail for the Zhànchuís behind them, and Míngqín missiles—dedicated electronic warfare platforms seeded throughout the salvo—radiated massive spikes of active jamming to blind the counter-missiles’ sensors.

Nothing could possibly spoof or defeat six thousand threats. Not all of them. And a second, smaller holocaust flared with equal brilliance—and brevity—as Umbrella’s fire tore through the heart of Dragon Gamma’s attack wave. The sheer density of the massive prespotted counter launch was impossible to stop, and despite all defenses, all countermeasures, eighty-five percent of the shipkillers died in that titanic instant of collision.

But if eighty-five percent had died, that meant just over a hundred and twenty Zhànchuís burst through the furnace intact, screaming in on their targets at seven thousand KPS.

There was no time for any additional orders from La Cateau. Umbrella had barely three and a half seconds to identify the surviving threats. Every ship in Captain Penski’s force had been tracking continuously as the massive salvo came in. Probable targets had refined themselves steadily as the seconds until impact flashed downward and the targeting cone of each missile shrank. Targeting hierarchies had been established by La Cateau’s tactical department, but Penski’s flagship had no choice but to hand off to the individual vessels of his command as the surviving Zhànchuís came slashing in.

Human command-and-control was hopelessly inadequate to the speed and ferocity of the moment. It was all up to the computers, and the uncaring, unflustered, un-self-aware AIs aboard every ship, managing every drone, assigning targeting criteria to every manned fighter, reprioritized firing solutions as the counter-missiles ripped holes in La Cateau’s assigned hierarchies. None of the people aboard any of those ships, piloting any of those fighters, had time to realize precisely what targets their ships, their fighters, had been assigned. They had time only to feel the terror, to know Apocalypse was upon them, and then every defensive weapon they mounted flamed as one and the wave of fire engulfed them.


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Framed