CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TFNS Kolyma shuddered to the recoil of her last-ditch defenses.
She and her counter-missiles, like the rest of Umbrella Force, were stationed on the threat axis. Even at a miserly single gravity of acceleration, its ships had needed barely half an hour to reach their positions, fifteen thousand kilometers from Crann Bethadh and directly between the planet and the incoming shipkillers. The two strikecarriers’ Orcas were an advanced screen, forty thousand kilometers beyond that, configured for the missile defense role with short-range K-guns and lasers. Against any normal attack, they should have been confident of their ability to stop them, but these missiles were coming in at far higher velocities than normal, and sheer speed was its own defense in many ways. Not because higher velocity made them harder to track or made generating intercepts more difficult, but because it limited the number of interception attempts.
Her antimissile cannon—thirty-millimeter hypervelocity railguns—had opened fire barely seven seconds after the incoming missiles lit off their Hauptman coils, 26.5 seconds before Umbrella’s counter-missiles went active, when the range to target was still almost 260,000 kilometers. She couldn’t hope to reach a target at that range, because her cannon’s muzzle velocity was only 33,500 meters per second. That was fast enough to deliver the energy equivalent of almost 130 kilograms of old-fashioned chemical explosives to a target at rest, but from the moment she started firing, she had only forty seconds before missiles traveling at twelve hundred times the velocity of a pre-space tank cannon’s kinetic penetrators reached her. Given that much time, her projectiles could reach a maximum range of only 134 kilometers. That wasn’t knife range against a missile attack; it was razor range.
The multibarreled point defense cannon had a much higher rate of fire than her antiship cannon. A cruiser’s K-gun’s maximum rate of fire was only about eight rounds per minute, using alternating capacitor rings; capital ships, with a third capacitor ring could manage twelve. Point defense cannon, using lighter mass drivers, multiple “barrels,” and additional capacitors, could put out twenty-five rounds in a minute. Forty seconds gave Kolyma time for only sixteen rounds from each of the fourteen cannon systems in her engaged broadside, and there was little point conserving ammunition.
La Cateau’s tactical department had assigned individual targets before Umbrella opened fire, although it was almost mathematically certain they were going to miss. But Umbrella could present a total of 174 point defense cannon, and in forty seconds they could fire over 2,780 rounds. Despite the astronomical odds, a missile that dodged one superdense slug might yet run into a slug intended for one of its fellows. SCM slugs were expensive, but not that expensive. If they managed to kill even one of the incoming birds, the cost-effectiveness would all be on the defenders’ side.
Not to mention the fact that the one they stopped might be the one that would have taken out Tara if they hadn’t killed it.
In fact, two of the attack missiles actually did walk into a slug meant for one of their fellows.
The Orcas opened fire seconds after the shipboard K-guns. They had less time to engage, but they were five seconds flight time closer to the shipkillers, and they were actually more effective. None of the incoming missiles had been told to look for mere fighters, and as they streamed onward toward the cruisers behind them, the Orcas spun, blazing away with their lasers.
There was no time for a “shoot-look-shoot” solution—for follow-up shots to engage a target that evaded the first one before it was through the intercept zone. It was a matter of assigning a single shot per target and then moving to the next in the targeting queue, and even as they fired, every single human being in Umbrella hoped like hell that the assigned target would be taken down by one of their counter-missiles, instead of their shipboard systems.
As the range fell, the probability of a kill went up, but the range to intercept went down. The Zhànchuís that survived the CMs were already outside the Orcas’ engagement range, and there was time for only one more shot per point defense cannon before they reached their targets. The lasers aboard the deployed Bastet antimissile drones and laser defense systems in each broadside had time for three shots each, and those in the opposite broadside would each have time for a single shot at any missile that broke past the defenders before it ran out the other side of their engagement envelope. The cannon wouldn’t; a projectile traveling at 3.35 KPS couldn’t catch one traveling at 7,000 KPS.
The closing velocity of the League missiles increased the kinetic energy of the cannon’s slugs from 130 kilograms of old-fashioned explosive to over 760 megatons. It was impossible for them to shed all that energy into their targets, but they drilled through any Zhànchuís they hit like hypervelocity awls, vaporizing the material in their direct paths. They were actually more like the fabled “death rays” of pre-space popular entertainment than the lasers were, in many ways, and the shock fronts generated by their passage radiated outward in all directions, shattering the missile bodies and thoroughly demolishing internal components, before they blasted out the farther side in incandescent balls of plasma.
No active defense mounted by any shipkiller ever built could stop that kind of fire. Any missile one of those slugs hit was dead…as a missile. It was not, unfortunately, dead as a threat. Whatever was left of it continued onward, and while the impact of the interception would impart at least some change to its vector, the change would be minimal. In fact, in terms of the time to impact, it would be nonexistent, Which meant the wreckage would continue on precisely the same vector…and something the size of a Zhànchuí traveling at 7,000 KPS packed 210 megatons of kinetic energy.
The good news was that those missiles were still accelerating to reach their targets when they entered Umbrella’s engagement range, which meant that if they stopped accelerating, they weren’t going to hit their intended target, whatever it might have been.
The bad news was that while they would miss their intended targets, they might still hit something.
In a worst-case scenario, the “something” in question might be Crann Bethadh, although atmospheric entry would tend to finish ripping the wreckage to pieces, the odds of its hitting a populated area would be slight, and the planet’s citizens had all taken to their shelters. Assuming they’d been targeted on the planet to begin with, however, they were still extremely likely to hit it someplace, and if that place was a population center, casualties could be massive, despite every possible precaution.
In a next-to-worst-case scenario, the “something” might be one of the orbital platforms which had been the League’s actual targets. They had no atmosphere to break up and vaporize incoming wreckage and they were far more fragile than any planet, but the defenders had been given hours to shut down their internal processes and evacuate all but the most critical personnel from them. The destruction would still be extreme if they got hit, and losing the system’s orbital industry would be a severe blow, but at least the loss of life should be minimal, thanks to the evacuation.
In a next-to-best-case scenario, assuming they had to hit something, the “something” would be one of the defending warships. Of course, space was vast, ships were relatively small targets, and missile wreckage couldn’t redirect itself to hit one of them if it hadn’t been targeted on it to begin with. It could still happen, though—happen to any of them.
Like to a defending warship named TFNS Kolyma.
It wasn’t one of the missiles Kolyma had engaged. In fact, it had been targeted by her sister ship, Yukon, and the kinetic slug which hit it tore through it at an angle, shattering the missile body into multiple fragments, the largest of which massed only about four thousand kilograms. But those four thousand kilograms were traveling at seven thousand kilometers per second, which meant they carried “only” 23.4 megatons of kinetic energy with them. Worse, there were multiple fragments.
Yukon had nailed the missile 92 kilometers short of Umbrella Force, a tenth of a second short of Kolyma. Not even the AIs had time to react to that, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. There was time—barely—for the wreckage to begin to spread, but three chunks of the missile struck the cruiser, effectively simultaneously.
One hit her after section. It punched deep into her, ripping through her fusion drive and its fuel in a savage fireball that shook her like a toy in the jaws of a furious mastiff. Then it punched straight out the other side, trailing a plume of propellant, wreckage, and bodies.
The other two were worse. They hit her just forward of that, less than twelve meters apart and almost dead amidships, and splintered her five-hundred-meter hull into broken, dying halves.
* * *
The end of the world came for Callum Murphy in thunder and lightning.
One instant, the taut, professional chatter of the tactical crews filled his secondary comm feed. The next, a terrible concussion tore through the ship, the feed from the bridge went suddenly and dreadfully silent, and the sound of shattering alloy came to him, not through the airless vacuum about him but through the very fabric of the ship. His armored acceleration couch bucked, leapt, seemed to twist like a pretzel. The lights in Reactor Two flickered, went down, then came back up under local power, and his hands were fumbling with his harness release before he’d even realized they were moving.
A cacophony of alarms blared in his ears and lurid red damage alerts glared across his helmet HUD. There were too many of them to sort out, and he hit the key to silence them, then shoved himself out of his couch. He pushed too hard in the microgravity—hard enough he had to grab one of the discarded harness straps to anchor himself—but it wasn’t actually freefall, he realized. Not quite. The ship seemed to be spinning hard enough to exert a very faint but recognizable “downward” direction. Unfortunately, “down” was at a roughly thirty-degree angle from the compartment’s designed perpendicular axis.
The rest of his six-person reactor room crew were still strapped into their couches, but not, he realized, Eira. Of course not. She was already up, toe looped into the restraining loop on her acceleration couch, as poised and alert as any thirty-year Navy veteran.
It was amazing how…reassuring he found that, a tiny corner of his brain realized. But only a tiny corner. The rest of it was too busy.
“Bridge, Power Two,” he said over the comm.
Only silence answered.
“AuxCon, Power Two,” he tried.
Silence.
“Damage Control Central, Power Two.”
Silence.
“Sir, we’ve got a problem.”
Callum turned himself in midair to look across the sizable compartment at Chief Petty Officer Hilar Sviontak, the senior member of his crew. Sviontak’s couch back was fully upright, and his gauntleted fingers flew across his panel.
“Talk to me, Chief.”
“Sir, we got what looks like a hell of a surge when whatever the hell that was hit us. It destabilized everything in sight, and we’ve lost half our feeds to the reactor. I can’t get in to shut down the hydrogen flow, and the plant’s already eight percent over max-rated output…and it’s climbing.”
Callum bit the inside of his lip. Not good, he thought. Not good at all.
“The bottle?”
“Holding so far, Sir,” PT 1/c Sheila Clancy replied. The power tech sounded a little woozy. “Doesn’t look good, though. I’ve got warning lights on the mag ring and the bottle’s starting to fluctuate. Not too bad yet, but—”
She shook her helmeted head.
“What’ve we got, Green?” Callum asked.
“Nothing from Damage Control,” Trejean Green said. “In fact, nothing from anywhere, but I’ve deployed our local remotes.”
An image appeared on the master display, fed by a repair drone crawling along one of the conduits between Reactor Two and Reactor One. The actual conduit was only about thirty centimeters across, but the display looked like a bug’s-eye view of an old-fashioned subway tunnel filled with massive power runs.
“So far, I don’t see anything too bad, but—”
He broke off, and Callum swallowed hard.
“Oh, shit,” somebody muttered over the comm.
The drone had reached the end of the conduit a little sooner than it ought to have. But that was because the conduit had been chopped off by the ragged cleaver of some enraged god. And not just the conduit. The entire front half of the ship was gone. Just…gone.
Callum could see the distant, uncaring pinpricks of stars where Power One and its entire crew was supposed to be.
At least he knew why no one had answered from the Bridge, or AuxCon…or Damage Control.
“How’s that bottle, Clancy?” he asked.
“Not good. We’re going to lose it. I think—”
“Shock damage to the mag ring, Sir,” Green broke in. Callum looked at him, and the petty officer shrugged. “Got an eyes-on from one of the remotes and Sheila’s right. There’s a frigging crack clear across the primary ring. The only thing holding it’s the secondary, and I don’t think it’s going to be with us long.”
“Eject the bottle,” Callum ordered.
“Ejecting the bottle, aye, Sir!” Sviontak replied.
He entered the required code, then punched the EXECUTE key, and a vibration quivered through the hull.
A fresh alarm blared.
“Negative ejection!” Sviontak snapped. “Didn’t go, Sir!”
“No, but the eject charge went,” Green said. “Blasted hell out of the reactor mount!”
“I’m losing the secondary ring!” Clancy’s voice was higher-pitched.
“People, it’s time to go,” Callum heard someone else say with his voice. “Trejean, pass the word over any link you’ve got. Power Two is evacuating, and the bottle is going to blow in—?” He looked at Clancy.
“Bastard might hold another five minutes, Sir. Maybe.”
“The bottle’s going to blow in four minutes,” Callum said.
“Sending the word, Sir. God only knows if anyone’s hearing it!”
“Best we can do is all we can do. Now, let’s go, people!”
“You got that right, Sir!” Sviontak said. “You heard the Lieutenant! Let’s move!”
Four of Callum’s crew unbuckled, but not PT Clancy or Arnold Shapiev, Green’s backup on the repair drones. Clancy tugged at her harness release, but it refused to unlock. Shapiev didn’t even move.
“Crap!” Callum sent himself hurtling through the feeble gravity toward Shapiev. “Sviontak, get Clancy!”
“On it, Sir!”
Callum reached Shapiev and cursed himself when he got there. He should have required a sound-off. Maybe then he would have realized how badly Shapiev was hurt.
There was a hull breach. Not a big one. Just big enough for whatever had torn it to punch through into the back of Shapiev’s acceleration couch, and the petty officer’s medical display flashed with lurid warning codes. Internal bleeding, broken bones, punctured lung… The lung must be from a bone fragment, because the only good news was that his vac suit’s armor appliqué seemed to have stopped the damage short of an actual puncture.
Someone landed beside Callum. He wasn’t a bit surprised that it was Eira.
“I’ve got this, Sir,” she said. “You go. Now.”
“No way.” Callum shook his head and reached for the acceleration couch’s medical override.
“Sir, the rest of your people need you.”
“No way!” he repeated, his voice harder.
“Sir—”
“Either help me, or get the hell out of the way!” he snapped.
He punched the override, and the acceleration couch separated from the deck plating in a crackle of small explosive charges, silent in the vacuum. Shapiev’s medical readout flashed brighter, then stabilized just a bit as the couch’s built-in medi-kit began pumping coagulants and blood expanders through his system.
Callum grabbed the foot of the couch, and Eira took the head. The sideways thrust of the spin-induced microgravity was a bigger problem than he’d expected, but they got it moving in the right direction.
“Sir, Pod One’s down,” Sviontak reported. “Refuses to eject.”
“Shit. Of course it does. Okay, you guys take Three. Eira and I will get Shapiev into Two.”
“Sir, I’m headed back—”
“Not enough room for you and us in Two.”
“But, Sir—”
“Get. Them. Into. Three,” Callum grated.
“I—Aye, aye, Sir.”
Callum could feel Eira’s disapproval. Neither of the secondary escape pods could accommodate the entire power room crew. They were designed to accommodate only four evacuees apiece. Fitting Shapiev’s acceleration couch into one of them would be harder than hell, and Pod Three was the nearer of the two. The odds that any of Power Two’s people would make it clear before the bottle blew were no more than even, but his and Eira’s odds had just gone down drastically.
If I get myself killed, she will so never forgive me, a lunatic corner of his mind told him. And just my luck, there is a Heaven, and she’ll spend the next million years giving me grief.
“Pod Three separating,” Sviontak said. “Luck, Sir!”
The ship quivered slightly as the pod blasted down the escape shaft and clear of the hull. Callum pictured its thrusters flaring to life, driving it away from Kolyma’s wreckage at fifteen gravities, as he and Eira panted down the access way with Shapiro. The hatch to Pod Three’s bay was sealed, and Eira flung herself at the hatch to Pod Two. It cycled open, and she squirmed aside to shove the front end of the acceleration couch into it.
Callum heaved at the other end, shoving it farther into the pod, but it jammed. Eira skidded around beside him, putting her shoulders against the end of the couch and the soles of her boots against the opposite bulkhead. Then she straightened her spine with an explosive grunt clearly audible across the comm, and the couch shot suddenly through the hatch.
“Good girl!” Callum panted, punching her in the shoulder. “Now—”
Something flashed.
He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t have time to find out. There was only time to fling himself at Eira, wrap his arms about her, and bend his helmeted head forward across her.
Then Leviathan kicked him in the back, and there was only darkness.