David Weber - Torch of Freedom

One hundred and fifty missiles hurtled in on the battlecruiser Alexander Suvorov, and sheheaved and twisted as the first few laser heads punched through her counter-missiles and her point defense clusters, through the fire being thrown up by her consorts, through the blinding efforts of her onboard EW. More laser heads followed them, howling in at over 100,000 KPS in a solid wave of destruction. The big Warlord -class battlecruiser's active defenses were far stronger than Leon Trotsky 's, and her armor was thicker and better placed, but there were simply too many threats coming in too quickly, too tightly sequenced, for her to stop them. Even her armor cratered, then splintered, then ripped apart as laser after laser gouged deeper and deeper.

Point defense clusters went suddenly dead. Her emission signature flickered and flared as primary tracking and targeting systems were blown out of existence and secondaries came up in their place. Three beta nodes went down, then an alpha, and despite the redundancy built into her overpowered drive systems, her acceleration faltered. She staggered, bleeding atmosphere in clear proof of internal hull breaching, and then, abruptly, she blew apart in an expanding ball of fury.

Four seconds later, PNES Bernard Montgomery , Adrian Luff's old command, followed her into destruction.

Luff gritted his teeth as Bernard Montgomery blew up.

They're going for the Warlords first. They're trying to kill our most effective missile-defense platforms .

They were, and their laser heads were far more powerful than he would have believed anything smaller than a capital ship missile could mount. Worse, their fire was immeasurably heavier than he'd imagined six heavy cruisers could possibly control. No ships that size should have that many control links!

But these ships obviously did, and something icy ran down his spine as one of Stravinsky's secondary displays posted the percentage of hits which had gotten through to the two battlecruisers. Saturation explained a lot of it, but the defenses still should have stopped a lot more than they did. The incoming missiles clearly carried extraordinarily good penetration EW . . . and the people behind them clearly knew exactly what they were doing.

But EW or no, whatever those damned things are, they aren't MDMs, he thought. Bad as they are, they're not doing enough damage per hit for capital laser heads . . . and isn't that a comfort when there are so damned many of the bastards? I was right to shift priority to their cruisers. I just hope to hell I shifted soon enough!

His eyes went back to the main plot as the second wave of Hammer Force's missiles came slamming in twelve seconds after the first.

Rozsak's second salvo concentrated its fury on the battlecruisers Napoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne .

The PNE's missile defense officers had better data than they'd had against the previous wave, but twelve seconds wasn't enough time for them to apply it to their fire solutions, crank it into their EW profiles, adjust their formation and their thinking. Worse, the loss of Bernard Montgomery and Alexander Suvorov had punched holes into their defensive fire assignments.

Computer overrides reassigned responsibilities, spreading the load among the dead battlecruisers' consorts, and tactical officers aboard Luff's other ships responded with swift efficiency. Yet they were still off-balance, still reacting , when three hundred fresh missiles exploded into their faces.

Citizen Captain Hervé Bostwick watched his plot on PNE Charlemagne 's command deck as the vortex of destruction ripped straight through the task group's defenses towards his command. Charlemagne was one of the big Warlord -class battlecruisers whose crew had fled the triumphant counter-revoutionaries, and Bostwick had been in command ever since. After so long together, he sometimes thought he knew every man and woman aboard her personally, by face and name, and now he could almost physically feel his officers' and ratings' fear—especially in the wake of how unbelievably quickly Montgomery and Suvorov had been wiped away. He felt it, yet the voices in the tactical net were crisp, clear, and Bostwick remembered the carefully hidden contempt he'd seen behind the eyes of many an officer of the old People's Navy—the contempt of professional warriors for mere secret policemen and enforcers. Contempt for the sloppy training and poor combat efficiency of State Security's warships. He remembered his own resentment of that contempt, but that wasn't what he felt now. Tension and spikes of terror might crackle in the depths of his people's voices, yet hard-won training and discipline beat them down, thrust them aside. His people were doing their jobs as well as any "professionals" in any navy in the galaxy, and despite his own undeniable fear, what Bostwick felt most of all was pride.

"Threat axis red-one-zero!" his missile-defense officer snapped. "Battery Three, take it!"

"Battery Three, red-one-zero, aye!" one of his assistants responded, punching commands into his own console. "Engaging!"

Point Defense Three retargeted the laser clusters guarding Charlemagne 's port quarter, training around to meet the wave of missiles roaring in through the zone Bernard Montgomery should have been covering at thirty percent of the speed of light. laser clusters went to continuous rapid fire, but they simply didn't have enough emitters to stop that many missiles coming in that quickly.

Charlemagne quivered as the first bomb-pumped laser clawed at her armored flanks. Then another ripped home, and another, dozens of them in a tsunami of destruction, slamming into her on top of one another, so quickly it was impossible for any human sense—or even Charlemagne 's computers—to isolate any single blow.

"Direct hit on Missile-Three!"

"Heavy casualties in Impeller-Two!"

"Graser-One and Graser-Three out of the net—no response, Citizen Commander!"

"Gravitic-Five destroyed! Lidar-Three's gone, too!"

"Core hull breach, Frame Three-Seven-Four! Pressure dropping—I think we've got a jammed blast door! Initiating damage control!"

"Direct hit, Boat Bay-Two! I show red board on the entire bay—no response from Boat Bay damage control parties!"

Bostwick heard the wave of damage reports rolling over the net as entire quadrants of the damage control schematic flared scarlet. Charlemagne was hurt, badly. It would take months in dock to repair the damage he could already see. Yet she was still intact, still in the fight, and her people were already bringing up backup systems, rushing repair parties towards her injuries.

"Third salvo impact in five seconds," his tactical officer announced, still focused on his own responsibilities, his own duties. "Defensive fire plan Bravo-Hotel. I want—"

" Skipper! " The voice in his earbug belonged to Citizen Commander Christy Hargraves, his senior engineer, and in all the years she'd served with him, he'd never heard that note of raw urgency in her voice before. " We're losing containment on Fusion-Tw —"

Adrian Luff expression was bleak as Charlemagne 's icon disappeared from his plot. Napoleon Bonaparte , which had once been SLNS Indurate , was marginally luckier than the Warlord . She continued onward, rolling slowly on her axis, shedding bits and pieces of hull and clutches of life pods, yet at least her people were getting off. She might even have been salvageable, but she was clearly a mission-kill, completely out of the fight.