David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

Typhoon 's forward hammerhead was massively armored against just such an attack, but not even her armor could shrug off that staccato thunder of stabbing X-ray lasers. It stopped a dozen of them, but another half-dozen blasted straight through it. They knocked out two of her chase missile tubes, one of her chase energy mounts, two counter-missile tubes and a laser cluster. And, far worse, one shattered her forward radar array. It blinded her, put out the eye of her forward missile defenses, and a second wave of attacking missiles was only twenty-five seconds behind.

Lieutenant Julio Tyler staggered as Typhoon shuddered. The engineering officer was in charge of Power One, the battlecruiser's forward fusion plant, and he went pale as damage alarms screamed. Power One was far enough aft and heavily enough armored to make it highly unlikely any cruiser-sized laser head could reach it. But from the sound of the alarms, these laser heads were ripping much deeper than they should have.

Tyler swallowed hard and looked around the brightly lit, spacious compartment. He'd been transferred into Typhoon 's company three days after the rest of her crew to replace a man who'd managed to fall down an emergency ladder and break his hip, and he knew the rest of the battlecruiser's engineering department wasn't overly impressed with him. He was used to that jealous reaction to his rapid promotion. Relatively few officers made it to senior lieutenant's rank before their twenty-first birthday, but Tyler had always tried to do his job. To actually deserve the fast-track promotions his last name earned.

Yet this time, he was painfully aware of his shortcomings. In the last two weeks he'd begun finding his way around, well enough, at least, that he was pretty sure his ratings and petty officers were no longer laughing behind his back. And he had to admit the Technodyne technicians were right; Typhoon 's power rooms really were laid out better, with controls that were easier to use. They just weren't the controls Tyler had spent three and a half T-years learning like the back of his own hand aboard the cruiser Star Fury .

As he listened to the alarms howl, he hoped the damage control parties had learned their equipment better than he'd learned his.

"Many hits on Bogey One!" Helen Zilwicki announced, half-hunched over her displays. Her eyes were narrowed as she studied the data coming in from her remote arrays. "I think we just took out her forward radar, Sir!"

"Excellent!" Terekhov acknowledged, but he knew that had been the most effective single salvo they were going to get in, and now that they knew for certain he'd seen them, the Monicans were no longer trying to hide. Their wedges were up, and they were accelerating directly towards the Squadron at five hundred gravities. That was going to reduce his missile engagement time, he thought grimly, but it was hardly unexpected. And at least if they were going to chase him, it meant exposing the throats of their wedges to his fire.

And Indefatigable -class battlecruisers didn't mount bow walls.

He watched the plot as Abigail's second double broadside roared into the Monicans' outer defense zone. He saw the instant that its Dazzlers came on-line and the counter-missiles which had been speeding to meet them veered aside. But this time there was time for a follow-on wave of CMs to be vectored onto them. Seventeen of them were intercepted and blotted away, and then the laser clusters began to fire. Another twelve were picked off, but six got through, and Bogey One staggered as more stilettos drilled through her armor.

Typhoon shuddered as a second wave of X-ray daggers bored through her armor. She should have stopped more of them-all of them-with her lavish anti-missile defenses, but she couldn't see them. Her point defense lasers had become dependent upon relayed tracking reports from Cyclone and Hurricane , and that simply wasn't adequate against targets coming in so fast. -Especially not targets as elusive as Manticoran Mark 16 missiles. Fresh -damage reports inundated her bridge, and her acceleration faltered as four of her beta nodes blew.

Power surges cascaded through her systems, starting in Impeller One and Laser Three. Automatic circuit breakers stopped most of them, but three of the breakers themselves had been knocked out. Rampant energy surged past them, and a broadside graser's superconductor ring blew, shattering internal bulkheads and adding its own massive power to the surge.

The surge that came roaring down the graser's main feed trunk and straight into Power One.

The untamed torrent of energy thundered into the compartment, and an already nervous petty officer leapt back as his control panel blew up. He fell to the decksole on the seat of his pants as electrical fires danced through the control runs, and an alarm began to scream.

Aivars Terekhov sat in his command chair, projecting an aura of granite determination. It was all he could do. He'd given his orders; now it was up to others to execute them, and he watched Guthrie Bagwell as the EWO concentrated on the data streaming back from the remote sensor array sitting almost on top of Bogey One. It seemed incredible that the Monicans didn't know Alpha-Seven was there, but surely if they had known they'd have destroyed it already!

Bagwell was leaning forward, as if he intended to climb bodily inside his console, and his hands hovered above his keypads. Every few seconds they darted down, stabbing keys, sending another packet of information, another observation on the enemy's ECM, to Abigail Hearns' tactical computers and on to the rest of the Squadron.

Terekhov glanced at the time display. Five minutes into the engagement. Abigail's third salvo was rumbling down on Bogey One, and in a little over seventy seconds everyone on both sides would be in range.

There'd been time-barely-for Abigail's control links to update the third salvo in light of Bagwell's observation of the ECM which had greeted the first salvo, and Terekhov's eyes gleamed. The Monicans' counter-missiles had picked off twenty of the incoming missiles, but only two of the fifteen survivors succumbed to the enemy's EW. Five of the remaining thirteen fell to Bogey One's laser clusters, but three EW birds and five laser heads reached attack range.

They detonated.

"Captain, this is Tyler, in Power One!" the young voice in Captain Schroeder's earbug was raw with terror. "We're losing containment on Fusion One!"

"Shut it down!"

"Sir, I'm trying , but-"

Janko Horster's face went white as Typhoon blew up.

That shouldn't have happened , a small, stunned corner of his brain insisted. Not to a battlecruiser !

" Allah! " the Technodyne rep whispered. His face glistened with sweat now, and his hands shook. "How-?"

"No telling," Horster said harshly. "A freak hit. Somebody in a fusion room who punched the wrong button. Maybe God just got pissed at us! But it's not going to help them much in another sixty seconds!"

Terekhov stared at his own plot in disbelief. Eight hundred and fifty thousand tons of starship had just disappeared. Just like that.

"Good work, Guns!" he heard his own voice saying even as he tried to come to grips with the reality.

Abigail didn't look up from her console. He didn't know if she'd even heard him. She was oblivious to all distractions, wrapped in a fugue state Terekhov knew from personal experience. Every gram of attention was focused on her displays, her keypads, and the ruby icons of her targets. Anything directly pertaining to their destruction registered instantly, cleanly; everything else was extraneous and supremely unimportant.