Кристофер Банч - Revenge of the Damned

But the effect was still grim enough:

Two Imperial battleships destroyed.

One put out of action and later scrapped.

One cruiser destroyed.

One cruiser badly damaged.

Four cruisers forced out of battle.

Mahoney had been correct in anticipating the damage potential of the berserker.

Seconds later, in-range, the Imperial ships launched.

More than 30 Kalis, each operator-guided, homed on the Forez .

It was a confusion—Kalis were homed on each other, were operator-lost, and were even lost in sympathetic explosions after nearby missiles went off.

But the huge area of space occupied by the Forez and its escorts was a hell of explosions.

The remaining Tahn destroyers were dead or smashed out of battle.

The Forez itself took two hits.

But it was still coming in, still under full drive—and still firing.

The weapons officer was slightly pleased.

Recognizing the incompetence of his weapons crews, he had come up with a plan. The Nach'kal missiles were aimed for the incoming Imperial ships, but with little expectation of success. Also, they were set on rapid fire.

More effective were the close-range weapons: the ballistically aimed Don rockets and the volley-fired Mirkas. Even the chainguns were yammering at the Kalis when they got in range. The explosions were wreaking havoc with his electronics and sensors—but his ship was still alive.

The three hits were acceptable. One had taken out a combat information center near the stern—but there was a secondary center. Another had blasted the Nach'kal's main computer. No loss there. The third shattered the crew living spaces. No one should have been in them, anyway. The fires would soon be brought under control, he assumed. Besides, that was a task for damage control.

The fourth Kali, from the Imperial second launch, smashed into the Forez at that moment. A quarter of the Leviathan died in seconds as the nuclear blast ravened.

The bridge's lights died. Atago heard a suppressed shriek in the blackness. Then the secondary lights went on. She scanned faces. Who was the weakling?

There was no clue.

"Admiral," she snapped to the Forez's CO. "Damage?"

It took a long moment. Half the bridge's screens were out or blinking nonsense. But eventually she had her information:

Engine Room: Capable of fifty percent drive. Yukawa drive units defunct.

Weapons: Percentages… percentages… Atago scanned on. Not good. The long-range missile system was dead. But she still had most of the shipkillers and even some of the Nach'kai systems left. The close-range systems had about twenty percent capability.

Casualties… Atago turned away. That was meaningless. She could still fight.

Another screen showed that the Forez would be within the heart of the Imperial fleet in minutes.

Atago's honor would be redeemed.

One of the more pointless and trivial pastimes military historians always had was trying to discover the specific person who got credit/blame for killing a great warrior/tyrant. Arguments as to whether von Richtofen was shot down by a fellow in-atmosphere pilot named Brown or potted out of the sky by a nameless Australian grunt were endlessly boring. Another Earth example: Which atmo-pilot had actually assassinated an admiral named Yamamoto—Lanphier or Barber?

More recently: Was Mordechi, battle leader of the Mueller, really killed in hand-to-hand combat by the mortally wounded Colonel Meinertzhagen, or did he in fact stumble on top of an antipersonnel mine?

So it was with Lady Atago and the Forez .

There were two main claimants.

One was a destroyer weapons officer named Bryennius. She had launched her Kali and then let it go "dead" in space, directly in the orbital trajectory she had calculated for the oncoming Forez . At the right second she brought the missile alive and aimed it at the heart of the Tahn battleship.

The other was a particularly skilled tacship commander named Alexis. He had decided to fight his mosquito battle at the same time as the big boys and had tracked the Forez . When he assumed that the Tahn had other things on their minds, such as the recent three hits, he had launched his own Kali. He had screened it against the close-range rocket and chaingun fire by punting all eight of his Goblin XII missiles in front of the shipkiller.

Neither one of them was the hero, even though both Kalis were hits.

The historians, not for the first time, were wrong.

Lady Atago and the Forez were killed by Ensign Gilmer.

Or maybe the Forez killed herself.

The tiny hit on the Forez , hours before the battle had begun, had come from the tiny missile launched from Gilmer's picket ship.

It had, as the damage control computer said, only punctured the ship's outer skin. But it had not just lodged in the baffling. A small rip was made in the inner skin.

The compartment having been evacuated, no one noticed.

It was also not noticed that:

The fire retardant system between the ship's skins failed to operate.

The storage compartment's retardant system had never been filled.

The fire alarm itself was out of circuit, as was the alarm system for that entire subsector.

And there was a fire.

It was quite a small one, glowing, barely a spark. If the hole in the center skin had been larger, the fire would have gone out in the resultant vacuum. But the ship's atmosphere system kept pumping air into the compartment.

That was enough to feed the spark.

The spark grew. Flickered.

The compartment walls should have been treated with retardant. They were not. They were also made of a relatively low-temp synthetic. The compartment itself had nonmanifested crates of waste rags.

The compartment walls melted—but not into the other corridor, where the fire could have been seen. Instead, it spread down the ship's side, toward the stern.

The damage-control computer still reported that nothing was wrong.

Finally the fire ravened, gutting through compartments. Crew members died before they could scream. Maybe, at that point, one of the computers made a report. If so, it went unnoticed in the heat of battle.

Eventually the blaze hit a firebreak. Two huge chambers ringed the ship, one above and one below the AM2 fuel storage. The chambers not only were filled with a completely inert and nonflammable material but were given multiple antiblast, antiradiation, antianything drop shields.

They did not drop when the outer wall went down.

Nor was the nonflammable substance perfection.

The Forez exploded microseconds before the two Kali's struck what had once been matter and now was energy.

Lady Atago might not have been that disappointed with her death. She had not reached the heart of the enemy, but she was firmly in command of her ship and about to issue an order—still in complete control.

But nearly instantaneously, she ceased to exist.

Along with more than 5,000 other crew members.

There were worse ways to die in a war.

Lady Atago had been responsible for many millions of people discovering almost all of them.

Lady Atago died with her honor intact. The living paid with their own. Her symbolic act of heroism backblasted all down the line, exploding every joint in the pipe of authority. Leadership collapsed in shame and despair, and the mob took to the streets, looking for someone to blame. The mob declared the season open on anyone wearing a uniform or even the lowliest badge of officialdom.

Sailors were dragged out of port bars and beaten to death. Thousands upon thousands gathered outside military posts to wail and grieve and tear their hair and then hurl themselves against the wire until they broke through. The soldiers fired on them, but only halfheartedly. Hundreds died, but still the crowds kept attacking. Many soldiers stripped off their uniforms and joined the mobs, leading the hunt for their officers. Police stations were set on fire, and the fleeing cops were pursued and hammered into gel with fists and feet. Postal workers were stoned to death on their rounds. Conductors were hauled out of their trains and hanged from light stanchions, then their bodies set ablaze to scream and struggle as living effigies. Many members of the Tahn High Council hid in their homes, beating their breasts in self-blame and remorse, not lifting a finger or even considering calling for help as their furious fellow citizens killed first their guards, then their servants, then their families, and finally them.