Shadow of Freedom Read online

  “Can’t argue with that, Sir. I’ll bet you it’s going to take all the Sollies a while to figure it out, though.”

  “Well, this bunch of Sollies had better start figuring it out in a hurry,” Zavala said grimly.

  * * *

  “Point Alpha in fifteen seconds, Ma’am,” Abigail Hearns said quietly, looking into her plot and remembering another force of Solarian battlecruisers and the massacre of Tristram’s division mates in New Tuscany. The range had dropped to thirty-eight million kilometers, and the closing velocity was down to 23,819 KPS.

  Vengeance belongs to Me; I will repay, a voice said quietly in the back of her mind. In time their foot will slip, for their day of disaster is near and their doom is coming quickly.

  Abigail Hearns had always preferred the love and gentleness of the New Testament, but this was an Old Testament moment, and her eyes were intent and her hands steady on her tactical console.

  “Stand by to engage,” Naomi Kaplan replied.

  * * *

  The Roland was the first destroyer class ever built to fire the Mark 16 dual-drive missile. That was the reason it was bigger than many navies’ light cruisers. And it was also the reason for some of the peculiarities of its design. Like the reason it had “only” twelve missile tubes, and all of them were arranged as chase armament, mounted in the hammerheads of its hull. And the reason it had so much more fire control than any other destroyer in space. It was designed to fire “off bore,” spitting missiles out of its “chase armament” to permit all its tubes to engage targets in both of a traditional ship’s broadside arcs. And its fire control redundancy was designed to let it “stack” salvos with staggered drive activations, the same way the much larger and more powerful Saganami-C-class heavy cruisers did. The Roland couldn’t control as many missiles as the Saganami-C; it was less than half the heavy cruiser’s size, and there were limits in everything. But it could stack a double salvo of twenty-four missiles, which was better than twice Captain Kelvin Diadoro’s worst-case estimate…and each of those missiles was just as deadly as anything a Saganami-C could have fired.

  * * *

  “Missile launch!” one of Diadoro’s tactical techs announced suddenly. “Multiple missile launches at three-six-point-seven million kilometers! CIC confirms one hundred and twenty—repeat, one two zero—missiles inbound. Acceleration forty-six thousand gravities! Time of flight at constant acceleration five-point-niner minutes!”

  Oxana Dubroskaya stiffened in disbelief at CIC’s shocking acceleration numbers. That was sixteen hundred gravities lower than a Javelin, but a Javelin’s maximum powered endurance at that rate was only three minutes, with a terminal velocity of 84,000 KPS from rest and a powered envelope of only 7,575,930 kilometers. If the Manties could maintain that accel for six minutes, they really could engage her ships at this preposterous range!

  That was her first thought, but an instant later the number of missiles registered, and she paled. A hundred and twenty?! That was ridiculous! No light cruiser could fire that many missiles in a single broadside! There wasn’t enough hull length to mount the damned tubes!

  “Check those numbers!” she heard Diadoro snap.

  “CIC confirms, Sir.” The tech’s voice was hoarse but steady. “Tracking’s confidence is high.”

  “My God,” someone murmured very quietly.

  “Missile Defense Bravo!” Diadoro ordered.

  “Missile Defense Bravo, aye, Sir!”

  BatCruRon 491’s ships altered course, turning their broadsides to face the incoming missiles to clear their missile defense systems’ fields of fire.

  * * *

  Oxana Dubroskaya’s and Kelvin Diadoro’s calculations had been based on six erroneous estimates. They’d gotten one thing right when they assumed, correctly, that the missiles the Royal Manticoran Navy had used at New Tuscany had been fired from pods, but they’d been wrong when they assumed that only pod-launched missiles could have such extended range. And to compound that initial error, they’d assumed their counter missiles, point defense, and electronic warfare systems were as capable as those of Manticore. Just as they’d assumed Manticore’s penetration aids would be no more capable than their own, a Manticoran launch cycle of thirty seconds, and that Rolands could fire broadsides of no more than ten missiles per ship. And, finally, they’d assumed their laser heads were heavier than anything a “light cruiser” could launch.

  It wasn’t really their fault, given the inevitable slowness of interstellar communication. They had no official reports about the Battle of Spindle. They hadn’t heard anything from the scattered Solarian forces which had already encountered Manticoran war-fighting technology during the course of the Star Empire’s Operation Lacoön. It might not have mattered if they had. The almost inevitable reaction of the Solarian League Navy in general to the sudden revelation that it was technologically inferior to any opponent had been a state of denial, and after so many centuries of unquestioned supremacy, it was going to take time for even the most flexible of its officers to realize just how inferior their hardware truly was. Yet without those reports, without word of what was happening in places like Nolan and Zunker, BatCruRon 491’s errors had been almost unavoidable.

  Which didn’t make them one bit less deadly.

  In fact, their launch cycle estimates had been six seconds low, but that was only because Zavala’s destroyers were launching stacked broadsides. The cycle time on his launchers was only eighteen seconds, but sequencing doubled broadsides put thirty-six seconds between each incoming flight of missiles. Unfortunately for BatCruRon 491, it also meant each of those salvos was better than twice as large as Kelvin Diadoro’s worst-case estimate.

  The Mark 16s streaked through space, accelerating by over four hundred and fifty kilometers per second every second, building on their motherships’ base velocity as they roared towards Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s battlecruisers. At that range, with that much time to build velocity, they would be closing at better than 180,500 KPS—just over sixty percent of the speed of light—when they entered the Solarians’ missile defense envelope, and the Indefatigable class’ software had never been intended to deal with incoming, evading targets closing at such ridiculous velocities.

  Of course, that was only part of Battlecruiser Squadron 491’s problems.

  * * *

  “Their Halo systems are active, Ma’am,” Abigail Hearns announced, monitoring her displays closely. “CIC doesn’t see any upgrades from what we observed at Spindle. The software tweaks seem to be handling it.”

  “Good,” Naomi Kaplan replied, watching her own plot as a second wave of missile icons followed the first, thirty-six seconds and thirty thousand kilometers behind it, and a third followed. Then a fourth. In one minute and forty-eight seconds, DesRon 301 launched four hundred and eighty Mark 16s.

  Given the differential in powered envelope, Zavalla’s DDs could have fired twenty-six stacked broadsides (assuming they’d had anywhere near that much ammunition) before the Solarians had the range to engage it in turn, but he’d decided four—one for each of Dubroskaya’s ships—should be enough to show her the error of her ways. And if it wasn’t, there’d be plenty of time for additional launches to convince the surviving Solarians to see reason.

  Assuming there are any surviving Solarians, of course, Kaplan thought with grim, vengeful satisfaction.

  * * *

  BatCruRon 491’s missile defense officers watched those impossible salvos stream towards them. Deep inside, every one of them hoped—prayed—the Manticoran missiles would go ballistic at any moment. That they’d been launched from so far out because the Manties had panicked, or because the enemy still thought he could bluff them. But even deeper inside, they knew that hadn’t happened.

  The only good thing about the extended range was that it gave them plenty of time to track the incoming shipkillers. A missile’s impeller wedge was hard to miss and impossible to disguise, and that was good, because the Manty missiles’ sheer closing veloci
ty was going to make them copper-plated bitches to stop. There wasn’t going to be time for more than a single counter missile launch against each shipkiller, and anything the CMs missed was going to streak clear across the defensive basket and actually pass its target in only eight seconds. That meant their counter missiles needed the best targeting and tracking data they could possibly provide, because each laser cluster was going to have a maximum of one shot before the shipkillers overflew the squadron…and each battlecruiser could bring only sixteen clusters to bear.

  “At least they’re going to be generating a lower Delta Vee for evasions than a Javelin could, Ma’am,” Tucker Kiernan murmured just loud enough for Dubroskaya to hear him. “That should help a little.”

  “Something better,” Dubroskaya replied harshly, never looking away from the plot.

  * * *

  “Coming up on initial EW activation…now,” Abigail announced.

  * * *

  Three hundred and forty-five seconds after launch, thirty-five million kilometers downrange from HMS Tristram, the electronic warfare platforms seeded throughout DesRon 301’s lead missile salvo came to sudden life. They were carefully sequenced, the Dazzlers blowing holes in the Solarians’ tracking systems, blinding them with furious strobes of interference, one thin sliver of an instant before the Dragon’s Teeth spawned sudden shoals of false targets.

  It came at the worst possible moment—just as they crossed the perimeter of Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s counter missile envelope and half a heartbeat after the battlecruisers fired.

  Fire control lost lock, throwing the CMs back onto their rudimentary seeking systems, but those onboard seekers had lost lock, as well. And when the Dazzlers faded, instead of a hundred and twenty incoming missiles, there were over five hundred. BatCruRon 491’s pathetic total of thirty-two counter missiles managed to reacquire and kill exactly one actual shipkiller…and its point defense clusters had barely seven seconds in which to try to find the one hundred real laser heads buried in that blinding confusion before they reached their standoff detonation range of thirty thousand kilometers.

  The lasers failed. The computers and human beings behind them were still fighting desperately to find their targets when a tsunami of thermonuclear explosions sent a hurricane of bomb-pumped lasers into SLNS Inexorable.

  * * *

  Missile fire had always become progressively less accurate as the target got further away from the firing ship and lightspeed lag began degrading the quality of the fire control information feeding the missiles’ onboard computers. That creeping arthritis had thrown an ever greater load onto the missiles’ more limited sensors and less capable computers as the range was extended, and the question of exactly when to cut the telemetry links and let the missiles look after themselves had been more of an art than a science, in many ways. That was the very reason the Royal Manticoran Navy had created Apollo, and the ability to control missiles—and EW platforms—in real time even when they were literally light-minutes downrange explained the deadly lethality of Manticoran multidrive missiles.

  Under normal circumstances, DesRon 301 could have anticipated that a significant percentage of its missiles would have lost lock, been lured aside by decoys, fooled by jamming. But the circumstances weren’t normal. First, the Ghost Rider platforms virtually on top of the Solarian battlecruisers did have FTL capability, which cut the effective communications lag between the squadron and its sensors in half. Second, Zavala had known his Dazzlers and Dragons Teeth were going to hammer Dubroskaya’s missile defenses into ineffectuality, so his missiles hadn’t been forced to engage in the last-minute evasion maneuvers normally required to squirm through the close-in fire of their targets’ laser clusters. They’d been able to steady down sooner, maintain lock without losing sensor contact at a critical moment, and deploy their lasing rods further out, with more time to align themselves and stabilize before detonation.

  But perhaps even more importantly, the Royal Manticoran Navy had captured well over half of Sandra Crandall’s fleet intact at the Battle of Spindle. They’d examined the Solarian League Navy’s latest electronic warfare systems in detail. They’d analyzed their capabilities, noted their parameters and their weaknesses. Manticoran tactical officers like Abigail Hearns and Alice Gabrowski had pored over copies of the SLN’s technical and tactical manuals like misers gloating over the Philosopher’s Stone. They’d even been able to run captured Solarian simulations from inside the Sollies’ systems, doctrine, and hardware during the two-week voyage from Montana to Saltash.

  BatCruRon 491 might as well not have had any ECM. In fact, it would have fared better if it hadn’t, because its EW systems didn’t fool a single incoming missile. Instead, the defenses which were supposed to protect those ships actually became homing beacons, helping their executioners find them, and the effectiveness of his squadron’s fire astounded even Jacob Zavala.

  * * *

  Shock bleached Oxana Dubroskaya’s face bone-white as hundreds of lasers ripped into Captain Borden McGillicuddy’s ship.

  The number of missiles, alone, had already made a mockery of her pre-engagement calculations. Their blinding speed, and the incredible power and effectiveness of the electronic warfare systems the Mark 16’s onboard fusion plant made possible were even worse. She had no way of knowing her entire squadron’s total defensive fire had destroyed only one shipkiller, but she knew it hadn’t stopped many, and the survivors completely ignored the decoys of her deployed Halo platforms. They scorched in on Inexorable, and her stomach clenched in horrified disbelief as CIC’s estimate of the laser heads’ throughput appeared on her tactical plot’s sidebar.

  The Mark 16’s original fifteen-megaton warhead had been more destructive than any destroyer or light cruiser missile ever previously deployed, although dealing with battlecruiser armor—as Abigail Hearns had learned aboard HMS Hexapuma in the Monica System—had pushed it to its limits. But Tristram and her sisters were equipped with the Mod G version, with a forty-megaton warhead and improved gravity generators. That increased its effectiveness by a factor of over five…which made it more powerful than the brand-new Trebuchet capital ship missile the Solarian League Navy had just begun to deploy.

  Inexorable’s armor had never been designed to face that sort of holocaust, and each of the ninety-nine Mark 16s which reached attack range carried six lasing rods. Five hundred and ninety-four x-ray lasers, each more destructive than anything a Solarian ship-of-the-wall could have thrown, stabbed out at McGillicuddy’s ship. Perhaps a third of them wasted their fury on the impenetrable roof and floor of Inexorable’s impeller wedge, but the others didn’t. They punched through the battlecruiser’s sidewalls with contemptuous ease, and armor shattered as the transfer energy blew into the ship’s hull. The sidewalls and the radiation shielding inside them attenuated the lasers…slightly. Nothing could have stopped them, though, and eight hundred and fifty thousand tons of battlecruiser disintegrated in an incandescent flash like the heart of a star.

  The entire attack, from the detonation of the first laser head to the last, took less than a second and a half. It was one terrible, blinding eruption of fury, crashing down upon its target like the fist of God. There was no time for life pods to launch. No time for small craft to escape the catastrophe. SLNS Vanquisher’s CIC couldn’t even differentiate between the individual lasers that ripped the life out of her consort and took Inexorable’s entire ship’s company with them.

  * * *

  “Tango One destroyed,” Abigail Hearns heard her own voice report as the FTL Ghost Rider platforms updated her plot. “Tracking on Tango Two. Second salvo EW activation in…twenty-one seconds.”

  * * *

  “Raise Zavala!” Oxana Dubroskaya barked. “Tell him we surrender!”

  * * *

  “Sir!” Lieutenant Wilson said suddenly. “They want to surrender!”

  Jacob Zavala looked at Auerbach, and his nostrils flared.

  “Put them on my display!” he snapped. An instan
t later, Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s face appeared before him. It was no longer the confident, angry face of a Solarian flag officer. It was ashen, the eyes huge.

  “Captain—” she began over the Hermes buoy’s faster-than-light channel, but a wave of his hand chopped her off.

  “You’re two light-minutes downrange, this link can’t interface with my telemetry channels, and my birds don’t have FTL links,” he said sharply. “My next salvo’s coming in in less than ten seconds. It’s already committed, and there are two more right behind it that I can’t abort before they get there. Abandon immediately!”

  Dubroskaya stared at him for one more moment, then wheeled from her own pickup.

  “Abandon ship!” she shouted. “All units, abandon ship—now!”

  * * *

  SLNS Paladin was Tango Four, the last ship on DesRon 301’s targeting queue. She got three quarters of her personnel into life pods before she was destroyed, and SLNS Success managed to get almost half of her people out…but only one hundred and eleven of Vanquisher’s two thousand crewmen escaped.

  Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya and her staff were not among them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You have another com request from Captain Zavala, Sir.”

  Maxence Kodou’s voice was hushed, his expression stunned, and Damián Dueñas knew his own expression was as shocked as his assistant’s. The governor looked across his office at Cicely Tiilikainen. She stood turned away from the window now, looking back at him, brown eyes wide. Then she gave herself a shake, like a cat emerging from water.

  “My God, Damián,” she said softly. “Now what do we do?”

  Dueñas fought down a sudden mad urge to scream at her. How the hell did he know what they did now? This couldn’t be happening. Dubroskaya had been confident—she’d promised him!—that she could easily defeat less than half a dozen Manty light cruisers! Of course he’d taken his senior naval officer’s estimate at face value! This wasn’t his fault!