David Drake - When the Tide Rises

Neither was a threat on the face of it, given the complete failure of the attack to this point. They were changes, though, and nobody likes to see a change when everything's been going well. Especially when the situation involves other people shooting at you.

Since theColumbine was out of the battle until it reloaded, the antiship battery shifted its tracking to theHeartsease. The latter was one of the smaller Bagarian vessels and carried only three missiles. It'd been a late arrival, and though it appeared to receive signals, it hadn't emitted any since the seventh-planet rendezvous.

In past years Adele would've assumed the ship's transmitter had gone out, but she'd seen enough of fringe-world navies to realize that the captain might be in a snit and refusing to respond verbally. That would be insane, of course, but it was by no means impossible.

TheColumbine 's six rounds had been tracking smoothly, but the second one launched slowly diverged from the path of the others. There wasn't anything obviously wrong with it; perhaps its gyrocompass had gone awry. Still, if the others The fifth missile dived straight downward, splashing into the ocean half the planetary circumference short of Hafn Teobald. Adele felt a wash of disappointment.

Daniel had done all he could. Nobody was successful all the time, not even the most brilliant officer in the RCN. There'd be another way to overcome the Alliance forces, there was always another way. Daniel wouldn't stop-they'd none of them stop-until they'd found a way to TheColumbine 's first missile plunged into the Alliance base, striking theS81 amidships. There was a huge white flash, the friction of steel hitting steel at high velocity. The boat's hull sank, dragging the outriggers with it. An underwater blast emptied the slip momentarily of water and demolished one of the concrete piers.

The sea gushed back; an outrigger bobbed to the surface. Steam drifted across the harbor on the light breeze, the cloud expanding slowly.

Adele smiled in self-mockery. She should've given Daniel more credit. Though assuming failure as she'd just done wasn't a problem so long as she went ahead with her tasks regardless. As, of course, she always did.

High Drive missiles were expected to be on a ballistic course at impact, so they didn't have guidance systems. Despite their relative simplicity, the Bagarian plasma missilesdid have sensor-activated controls. They homed on modulated laser signals reflecting from the target. In this case the laser designators were on theLadouceur, not on the ships launching the missiles.

Given how crude the missiles were, Adele had wondered if the guidance system could possibly work well enough to matter. Apparently it would.

The third missile-the second was off-course, thirty miles to the west of Hafn Teobald-had been aimed at the antiship battery. Instead it slammed into the center of the tidal pond behind the site. Reflection from the water must've confused the homing system.

Adele's smile twitched. The shrieking terror of the battery captain talking to Alliance HQ was worth something, though.

The fourth missile hit Alliance Headquarters; the center of the sprawling, U-shaped building, unfortunately, since Adele by now knew that the real command center was in a bunker under the north wing. Nonetheless, it was very satisfying to watch the magnified image of the walls shattering in a pall of pulverized concrete. The roof of plastic sheeting fell in and began to burn.

The final missile was aimed at theCesare Rossarol; likely one or both of those which failed had targeted the vessel also. The cloud from theS81 's ruptured fusion bottle drifted over the destroyer, not concealing it but providing a medium to reflect the laser illuminator. The incoming missile spiked the center of the false bull's-eye and plunged into the far wall of the slip beyond theRossarol 's.

Chunks of concrete flew in all directions. The destroyer pitched and bucked, but apart from the shaking it must be unharmed.

TheHeartsease was starting her second circuit. Adele's interest in the attack had always been secondary to her duty of listening to intercepted Alliance communications. Now she manually keyed the 20-meter transmitter and shouted, "Heartsease, change direction! They're about to launch at you. Stop your attack now, stop!"

A plasma missile separated from theHeartsease. The ship rocked and threw off a second missile.

"Heartsease, pull up or do something! They're going to-"

The blast of an antiship missile ripped a huge divot from the ground behind the rotating launcher. The projectile itself was a needle glinting in the sunlight; shock diamonds formed in back of its triple nozzles, and far behind swelled a white blanket as the borate exhaust plume absorbed moisture from the air.

"Pull up, you fools!" Adele screamed. "Dodge, do something!"

She wasn't sure that theHeartsease would be able to do anything that'd help it survive. Inertia and air resistance might be binding it into a practically fixed course. But the crew ought to try instead of going on with what was effectively a march to the scaffold.

The third plasma missile dropped away from the Bagarian ship which shuddered as its captain started to pull up at the end of his attack run. The Alliance missile spitted it like an ice pick through an egg. The round depended on velocity, not an explosive warhead; it continued to scream upward into the stratosphere as a thin silver streak.

TheHeartsease flew apart, wrecked by its own speed once it'd been gutted. Chunks of hull and rigging battered each other to fragments that rained toward the surface. The initial impact had probably killed the whole crew; regardless, nothing human-even wearing a hard suit-could survive the hundred-thousand-foot fall.

Adele's face was grim. She'd tried to warn them, but they hadn't listened. It wasn't her fault, not as anybody else would judge blame.

Besides, people die in wars. She'd killed a lot of them herself…

One of the missiles from theHeartsease dropped; its thruster hadn't lighted. The second blew up after thirty seconds of operation. The third curved into a helical course that'd probably be twenty miles in diameter by the time it landed somewhere in the ocean west of Hafn Teobald.

"Squadron, this is Squadron Six," Daniel said crisply. "Well done, spacers, we've got their measure now. One more attack will do the job, but this time the entire bombardment flotilla will go in together and swamp the defenses. At the same time, theLadouceur, IndependenceandDeMarcewill approach at low level. The garrison'll panic, I expect, and if they don't we'll burn them out with plasma cannon regardless of what the bombardment missiles-"

"Like hell we will, you bloody Cinnabar madman!" Captain Seward shouted in fury. "You're just trying to get us all killed so that we can't tell the government that your notion of shooting down at Churchyard was a waste of time. I'm going back to Pelosi, and when I get there I'll call for you to be removed for unfitness. Out!"

TheStager Brothers had reloaded with plasma missiles from theSacred Independence while Daniel was attacking with theColumbine. Now it began to accelerate, its High Drive motors stabbing blue-white sparks into vacuum.

"Stager Six, this is Squadron Six," Daniel said sharply. TheColumbine was on what the Plot Position Indicator predicted to be an approach course with theLadouceur. "Shut down your motors soonest, Captain Stout. We'll be attacking all together after I work out courses, over."

Stout didn't answer; instead the bead markingStager Brothers faded off the PPI. Stout had fled from the sidereal universe.

The other small ships were vanishing also. Adele had seen how long it took their captains to plot a course; it seemed likely that all they were doing was getting out of the immediate vicinity of theLadouceur 's heavy cannon. None of them directly addressed Daniel or the cruiser; they were simply leaving.