CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There was no comparison between the weights of fire being exchanged this time. None at all. The sheer density of the attack streaking outward from Tomlinson was far beyond anything any naval planner could ever have anticipated, certainly not from an opposing force of so few ships.
It’s not as bad as it looks, a small, distant part of Travis’s horrified mind tried to reassure him. The insurgents’ remaining telemetry links couldn’t possibly control that many missiles simultaneously.
But the logic was of small comfort against the enormity of the disaster zeroing in on Gerechtigkeitsgeschwader. Even if most of the missiles were essentially in fire-and-forget mode, the relative few that were under control were undoubtedly targeting the two Andermani battleships.
He was still staring at the coming onslaught when Gerechtigkeitsgeschwader launched its response.
It was larger than the first attack had been, seventy missiles this time instead of thirty-six, and under normal circumstances the fleet would have had enough telemetry links to control all of them. But with the insurgents’ missiles roaring at them the Andermani ships dared not present the throats of their wedges to such an attack. And so, moments after launch, Gerechtigkeitsgeschwader turned away once again, simultaneously yawing to starboard and pitching upward to twist its wedges into position.
The move cost Basaltberg the control he would have needed for accurate fire, and indeed Travis watched the icons of the Andermani missiles go virtual as Friedrich der Grosse’s wedge began to cut off both telemetry and sensor feeds. Like most of the insurgents’ missiles, Gerechtigkeitsgeschwader’s would have to find their own way to their targets.
On the other hand, the insurgents’ stationary position made any evasive maneuvers they might make far less effective. It could also limit their own control over the core of their alpha missile strike and badly degrade the accuracy of any follow-up salvos.
And that was clearly something they couldn’t afford. This was Hansen’s make-or-break bid, her best and most powerful launch. The next handful of minutes would determine whether she won the battle or lost everything.
The first wave of insurgent missiles crashed over Gerechtigkeitsgeschwader like a sledgehammer forged in hell.
Twenty-three of the attack birds targeted the heavy cruiser Schreien. Her class carried a powerful electronic warfare suite, specifically designed both to draw fire from higher-value units and to spoof the sensors of the missiles she decoyed, and she was equipped with heavy defenses to engage any missiles that refused to be spoofed.
But it wasn’t enough against that many threats, especially as her shifting wedge blocked her own counter-missiles and the wedges of her consorts prevented them from providing their own area defense assistance.
Five of the missiles slammed into her wedge and died. Two more were stopped by her port sidewall. But the other sixteen raced across and into the throat of her wedge. Her desperately firing autocannon stopped six of them; the final ten detonated inside her wedge.
One of them was barely five hundred meters from her bow when its proximity fuse triggered.
Fireball and radiation engulfed her, her wedge disappeared, and the uncaring void swallowed her fragments.
The destroyer Kunlun died two seconds later, and Kunlun’s sister, Xingtian lost her forward impeller ring, both missile launchers, and half her point defense as a near miss savaged the forward half of her hull.
Vergeltung’s port sidewall took two near misses in the space of less than a second and its generators failed. The battleship shuddered as blast and radiation erupted through the sudden gap in her defenses, but the sidewall had done its job and only a tithe of the warheads’ fury got through. Travis winced as he watched the telemetry flow, but Vergeltung’s thick armor absorbed the worst of the damage, and Andermani battleships carried a third generator for each sidewall. The backup snapped to life, generating a half-strength replacement wall, leaving her combat power unimpaired.
That was all of the kaleidoscope of battle that Travis had time to see before the fury of the insurgents’ attack reached Friedrich der Grosse.
A dozen missiles wasted themselves against the flagship’s wedge. One didn’t. It just scraped by the forward edge of her port sidewall, angling inward, and detonated off the battleship’s port bow. Friedrich der Grosse’s own motion carried her forward into the blast zone, and the massive ship bucked madly as the shockwave whiplashed through her.
CIC’s displays went down, then flicked almost instantly back to life as the backups cut in. Crimson damage codes glared in those displays.
“Heavy damage forward!” Carrino’s voice came over Travis’s earbud, even as the battleship bucked. “Cascade failure! Explosions in Con—”
A secondary shock rocked CIC. The voice cut off abruptly, and Damage Control Central was suddenly another pulsing damage code. Travis’s eyes darted across the list of codes, trying to see what other areas had been hit—
He felt his heart freeze. One of the codes marked damage to the flag bridge.
Where Lisa was.
He was halfway out of his restraints before the full implications even penetrated his consciousness. Flag bridge damaged—extent unknown—casualties unknown—communication impossible.
And Lisa was there.
He could get to her, Travis knew. Even with all the damage there was bound to be a route to the flag bridge he could get through. He might not be able to do anything to help, but he couldn’t just sit here and wait on someone else to do something. Damage all over the ship, but his wife was in the flag bridge, and he needed to get to her.
“CIC, this is the Kapitänin,” he heard Sternberger’s voice over the speakers. “We’ve lost contact with Flag Bridge and Damage Central.”
“CIC confirms com loss, meine Kapitänin,” Lindauer responded, his voice almost calm.
He could afford to be calm, Travis thought bitterly. It wasn’t his wife trapped on the devastated flag bridge. It wasn’t his wife injured, maybe dying, in the middle of a battle that didn’t even concern her or her navy or her kingdom.
And to his everlasting regret and guilt he’d been too self-conscious around the Andermani to even kiss her good-bye.
He pushed off Unterberger’s chair and headed toward the hatch, his face turned to the damage-status display, his eyes looking for a path—any path—to the flag bridge. Yes, he could make it. Come hell or hard vacuum, he would make it.
“We need eyes in DCC now,” Sternberger said. “Leutnant Stentz is trapped in Damage Beta, and he has no communication with repair parties forward of Frame One-Niner-Five.”
“Understood,” Lindauer said, and out of the corner of Travis’s eye he saw the XO start to unstrap. “I’ll go.”
Travis reached CIC’s main hatch, catching the handhold to stop himself, focusing one last time on the damage display—
Abruptly, the swirling emotions seemed to vanish like flame in vacuum. The red display marks—the scrolling damage codes—the controlled chaos of orders and reports he could hear from the coms—Kapitänin der Sterne Sternberger’s urgent need for someone to get to Damage Control Central—
And in that instant, Travis the husband vanished, and Lieutenant Commander Travis Uriah Long of the Royal Manticoran Navy appeared.
“It’s all right, Fregattenkapitän Lindauer,” he called to the XO across the compartment. “I’m on it.”
He had just enough time to see Lindauer’s surprised expression, and then he was through the hatchway and heading down the short passage to DCC, fighting to pull up every scrap of memory of the area that he could from Carrino’s orientation tours.
The glaring red light strobing above the DCC hatch indicated vacuum on the other side, and Travis spent the last five meters of his floating dash securing his vac suit helmet. He reached the hatch, grabbed the handhold to stop himself, and hit the latch button.
Nothing happened.
He slapped the emergency override switch. The hatch jerked open, but made it only halfway before it jammed. He twisted his body down and to the side, fighting the sudden currents as the air from the corridor rushed past him, and forced his way through. Fumbling for a grip on the far side of the bulkhead, he finally pulled himself past the jammed hatch.
And emerged into a charnel house.
He didn’t know what freakish damage was responsible, but something had blown a meter-long, twelve-centimeter wide breach in the inner bulkhead and sent fragments slashing across the entire DCC. They’d scythed through its ten-man crew like demented buzzsaws, and blood globules drifted everywhere in the microgravity. Two Andermani petty officers were still up, struggling to aid the rest of the crew.
A little way apart from the survivors, still strapped to his couch in front of the main displays, was Carrino. Blood oozed upward from his shattered helmet, joining the other globules as they eddied toward the breach on the wave of atmosphere Travis had brought with him.
Travis gave himself a shove across the compartment toward the couch, gazing with a fresh sense of loss at the remains of the man who’d spent countless hours guiding him through Friedrich der Grosse, and in the process had become the closest thing Travis had to a friend among the Andermani.
There was nothing he could do to help Carrino. But maybe he could use the knowledge Carrino had hammered into him to keep others from suffering the same fate.
He reached the couch, grabbed a handhold, and peered at the displays, distantly aware that the slow fountain of blood from Carrino’s helmet was daubing his vac suit crimson. He ran his eyes down the warnings…
“Damn,” he muttered under his breath, the knot in his stomach tightening another turn. At least now he knew where the gap in the bulkhead had come from. Plasma Conduits Five and Seven had ruptured and vented into space, but not before Seven breached DCC, sending shrapnel across the compartment and sucking out its air.
But it was worse. Much worse. Conduit Nine had been damaged, as well, not from the initial hit but from secondary damage when Seven blew.
Only that one hadn’t vented. In fact, it was still feeding power at ninety percent of design capacity, despite its damage, because no one outside DCC knew it had been hit and no one inside DCC had cut it from the circuit.
But that fragile stability wouldn’t last. The conduit’s structural integrity telltales were pinned deep into the red. If someone didn’t get control of it in a hurry—
He jerked the hardwire umbilical loose from Carrino’s helmet and jacked it into his own helmet com interface, and a torrent of German from the two petty officers slapping patches onto leaking vac suits filled his ears as his com dropped into the dedicated DCC circuit.
“Hör auf damit, verdammt!” he snarled.
The petty officers’ helmeted heads jerked toward him. The two of them had been so focused on their comrades, he realized, that they probably hadn’t even seen him enter the compartment.
He could sympathize. Some of them might still be alive, and needed to have patches applied to their suits before the rest of their life-sustaining oxygen disappeared.
But there were priorities to be followed in combat. Duty, responsibility, the greater good for the greater number. And if that greater good required that some individuals be left to die, there was nothing that could be done.
Even if one of those individuals was someone’s beloved wife.
He took a deep breath. “You can’t help anyone if you’re dead,” he bit out in German. “This ship—this entire ship—will die if you don’t get back to your stations.”
He pointed to the blood-splashed displays. “We need to get on top of that conduit before it breaches. Understand?”
For a fraction of a second the Andermani just stared at him. Then, one of them—an oberstabsbootsmann from his helmet insignia—slapped the other across the back of her helmet and both of them came flying across to join Travis.
“Understood, mein Herr,” the oberstabsbootsmann said as they braked in front of two of the control stations and began inputting commands. “Who are you?”
“Lieutenant Commander Travis Long of the Royal Manticoran Navy,” Travis said. “I was brought aboard as an observer.”
“Oberstabsbootsmann Ferber; Bootsmann Prager,” the petty officer identified himself and his colleague. “Yes, we heard about you. Our offizier—” his eyes flicked for a moment to Carrino “—spoke highly of you.”
“I’m honored,” Travis said, watching the displays closely. Conduit Nine’s status was starting to change…
“He said you would have made a fine Andermani offizier,” Ferber continued, glancing at the displays and then continuing at his board.
“Doubly honored,” Travis told him. “Sadly, I am not.”
“No, you were not.” Ferber paused to look first at Carrino, then at Travis. “But you are now.”
Travis felt his throat tighten. “For Admiral Basaltberg and the Empire, then,” he said. “Let’s get that conduit under control and then restore communications with Damage Beta—” despite himself, his voice wavered “—and flag bridge.”
* * *
The single Andermani salvo reached First Fleet.
Llyn watched the attack unfold with a growing sense of fear and futility. Preussen was, not surprisingly, Basaltberg’s primary target, but as Quint had pointed out the fleet’s defensive wedge pitching had cut off all telemetry and turned the salvo into essentially blind fire.
But blind or not, there were still seventy missiles in it, and First Fleet was a non-evading target.
Quint had ordered Revenge to stand between Preussen and the incoming fire, and the battlecruiser’s counter-missiles and paired point defense laid down a heavy defensive barrage. Her sisters Retaliation and Spark were close enough to lend their counter-missiles to the battleship’s defense as well, but far too distant to protect her with their point defense cannon.
The attack birds roared in. Over thirty of them broke through the counter-missiles. Sixteen of those fell to the autocannon. Eighteen drove straight into First Fleet’s formation.
None of them made it all the way to Preussen this time, and without midflight telemetry updates most of the ones that survived the defensive barrage missed, despite the vulnerable wedge throats presented to them.
Most, but unfortunately not all. Three of the missiles reached their targets, and Revenge and the cruiser Saber died as spectacularly as any of Graf von Basaltberg’s ships.
* * *
Gerechtigkeitsgeschwader had completed its course change by the time the second and third of the insurgents’ massive salvos arrived. The vast majority of the incoming missiles wasted themselves against the warships’ interposed wedges, but there were enough of them to leak through anyway, and the same maneuver which used their wedges as protective shields also chopped off their sensors and telemetry links. They could neither track the insurgents’ missiles nor intercept them, and their own missile launchers faced away from Tomlinson and the ships still arrayed against them.
The insurgents’ shipkillers rained down upon them, and some of them had to get through.
The battlecruiser Seydlitz staggered as a proximity fuse detonated and the savage explosion shattered her forward hammerhead and a hundred meters of hull.
Her sister ship, Yanwang, was more fortunate. She lost her port sidewall, both of her aft missile launchers, and her after heat radiator, sending her after reactor into emergency shutdown. Personnel losses were heavy, but her forward armament was untouched.
The destroyer Xiangfei blew up.
Korvettenkapitän Scherzer’s Drachen simply disappeared as two warheads detonated almost simultaneously on either side of her.
The battlecruiser Zhong Kui lost her Number Two missile launcher and Number One point defense, but her personnel casualties were minimal and damage control parties labored frantically to put the point defense installation back online.
The heavy cruiser Landwehr, unluckier than her sister Gewalthaufen, lurched madly as her forward impeller ring went down. An instant later, a cascading power surge took her after impeller room off-line. Only for a moment…but in that moment, she had no wedge, and at least six missiles ripped her apart.
In the space of two minutes the Tomlinson insurgents inflicted the heaviest losses the Imperial Andermani Navy had ever suffered.
* * *
“Looks like we hit them hard,” Quint said, studying her displays as estimated damage scrolled across it. Her voice was steady enough, but Llyn could see the anger and ache in her eyes at the loss of Revenge and Saber.
“Indeed we did,” Hansen replied heavily. Her voice wasn’t nearly as controlled, and even in the lower resolution of the secondary com display Llyn could see the haunted look in her eyes. Wondering, no doubt, how many men and women whom she’d known for decades she’d just killed.
She would have known, of course, that unless her claim to the throne was accepted by the Andermani fleet this slaughter among friends and colleagues would inevitably be part of the outcome. But knowing in one’s head and feeling in one’s heart and gut were two entirely different things.
And Llyn had long ago learned that the first never entirely prepared one for the second.
“Unfortunately, we expended all of our orbital surprise doing it,” Hansen continued, her voice a bit steadier now. “We’re down to our internal magazines for the next phase.”
“And our battlecruisers have only eight rounds left in their box magazines,” Quint pointed out.
“Plus Preussen’s lost all but one of her forward missile batteries.” On the display, Hansen’s lips tightened. “We’ll just have to hope we hit them hard enough.”
* * *
“Flag bridge is back in the circuit, mein Herr,” Oberbootsmann Ferber said, half turning toward Travis. “They report casualties, but none fatal.”
The frozen stone which had been Travis’s heart cautiously began to come back to life. At least Lisa was alive.
But they had work to do, and there was still no time to think about that. “Bootsmann Prager?” he called.
“Nearly there, mein Herr,” Prager called from one of the control boards. She was junior to Ferber, but Ferber had sent her to deal with the ailing Conduit Fifteen while he worked to reestablish DCC’s communications.
Travis could see why. Hunched over her board, her fingers moving with a speed and confidence he’d rarely seen before, she was clearly the better choice to race the clock against the last of Friedrich der Grosse’s damaged plasma conduits. His eyes flicked back and forth between Prager and the displays…
And with a final command, the conduit safeties popped open, venting the trapped plasma to space.
Travis huffed out a relieved sigh. At least the ship wasn’t going to be blown up by her own power systems. “Outstanding work, both of you,” he said, sending a tight smile at each of them. “You very well may have saved the ship.”
“Danke, mein Herr,” Ferber said. “What next?”
“We get reconnected to Damage Beta and the bridge,” Travis told him. “I’m sure they’ll have a list of things we can do.”