There was a strange crunching noise in Martinez’s ears as he searched the displays for any sign of the enemy. At some point he realized that the sound was the grinding of his own teeth. He relaxed his jaw muscles through a deliberate effort.
Seconds passed, and then his heart sank as he saw ships flying out of the expanding, cooling plasma cloud.Two, he counted,three, seven. No more.
Ten had flown in. His ambush had accounted for almost a third of the Naxid strength.
It should have been more, he thought in a sudden burst of passion, and then his head snapped up at the sound of Michi Chen’s voice.
“All ships,” she said, “fire by salvo.” Coen at the comm station transmitted the order to the other ships.
Another hundred and sixty missiles launched, their precise paths guided by the individual ships’ weapons officers. Martinez felt a surge against his spine asIllustrious made a course shift, all in accordance with Starburst Pattern One.
One of the Naxid ships, he saw, was on a diverging course from the others. Its engines were no longer firing. But he saw missile flares appear near the single ship, and knew it was still in the fight.
The other six had all fallen intoIllustrious ‘s wake. Martinez had been right. Bleskoth had planned all along to hang on to Chenforce’s tail until one side or another was beaten.
The six Naxid ships ceased acceleration. Missiles leaped off their rails. Then the warships rotated and began a fierce deceleration burn, trying to slow the rate at which they were overtaking Chenforce. They knew they were in trouble.
Martinez felt a wild grin distorting his features. It was all working brilliantly.
“Another salvo,” said Michi Chen.
The enemy spat out missiles at a fantastic rate, many intended as countermissiles, the rest flying to the attack. The Naxid decoys, receiving new orders, began to home in on targets. Individual ships’ captains and weapons officers ordered countermissile fire.
Martinez watched it all, surprised by the comparative silence and order of the Flag Officer Station. In his previous battles he’d been in Command, a hive of energy as sensor operators called out their findings, signals traffic flashed back and forth, weapons officers fired missiles and worked out their plots, the officer at the engine controls repeated course and acceleration orders, and he himself shouted his own commands into the din.
Here there was very little sound, only the rumble of the engines, Lady Michi’s occasional orders, and the signals lieutenants calling out other ships’ acknowledgments. Now that the battle was fully joined, Martinez was little more than an observer. He could offer advice to Lady Michi, but she seemed to be doing fine on her own.
Throwing out too many missiles for his taste, but in general doing well.
Enemy lasers began to rip into the oncoming missile salvo. Expanding plasma shells brightened the darkness. Soon the Naxids vanished from the displays, their very existence concealed behind the plasma screen.
But the plasma bursts were closer to the enemy than they were to Chenforce, and the Naxids were racing toward the plasma screens that baffled and confused their sensors, while the loyalists were increasing their distance. Martinez felt triumph hum in his veins at the thought of the screen moving closer and closer to the enemy until it enveloped them, leaving them prey to missiles they couldn’t even see.
Chenforce’s own point-defense lasers began their fire at oncoming enemy missiles, joined shortly thereafter by the bright lances of the antiproton beams mounted on the heavy cruisers. The mutually supporting fire wove patterns through the darkness like swords clashing in the night, impaling oncoming missiles with high-energy fire. Plasma flares dotted the night. A blazing curtain seemed to have been flung across half the universe.
Martinez shifted to a virtual display so that he could better study the developing situation, and found, as the system blossomed in his skull, that he now seemed to be sailing in serene silence amid a hellish scene of unspeakable violence. He shifted his perspective so that he seemed to be closer to the enemy, just in front of the advancing plasma screen. He had moved back in time as well, the time it took for light from this point to reachIllustrious ‘s sensors. Missiles leaped out of the screen on wild, frenetic dodging paths. Lasers quested after them. A pillar of light blazed off Martinez’s right shoulder as several incoming missiles were hit at once, a line of fury pointing like a long arm toward the frigateBeacon. Martinez realized that he—or rather his position in the virtual display—was about to be engulfed by blazing plasma and his view of the action turned to electromagnetic hash. He pulled back to zoom across space, and up time’s axis, in pursuit of Chenforce.
“Fire by salvo,” said a woman’s voice.
The flashes were continuous now, a curtain of sparks winking against the cooler background of expanding plasma. Against the pulsing background lights it was difficult to perceive one area as different from any other, and so it took him a few moments to see the looping coil of missiles that were again in pursuit ofBeacon, all jumping out of the long arm of cooling plasma that he had noted earlier. It took another moment or two for Martinez to perceive thatBeacon was in genuine danger.
His pulse thundered suddenly in his ears. Martinez banished the virtual display with an angry wave of his hand and jabbed with his thumb the bright square on his display labeledtransmit, all ships.
“All ships: concentrate defensive fire to aidBeacon!Beacon is the subject of a focused attack!”
No sooner had defensive weapons begun to weave a pattern of protective energies near the frigate thanBeacon ‘s own lasers struck an attacking missile a slightly off-center blow that sent it tumbling, spilling out a spray of antimatter that flung itself into space like beach sand being flung from the hand of a child. The result was a sheet of blazing particles drawn across the night, a sheet that completely obscured a pack of attacking missiles from the ships that were trying to aid the frigate.
Beacon was on its own, and its trained Daimong crew destroyed four missiles before the fifth and sixth engulfed the frigate within their fireball. Martinez gave a roar of pure rage and smashed his couch arms with both fists.“No!” he shouted, then chanted, “damn-damn-damn” before realizing he was still transmitting to all ships, and angrily punched at the display to give himself a moment of private, scorching fury.
He had promised himself a one-sided victory like Hone-bar, where the loyalist forces suffered no casualties, and now he had broken that promise. The fact that he had not spoken the promise aloud in the presence of another person made no difference: the most important promises are those one makes to oneself. He wanted to seize Bleskoth by the throat and shriek,You made me break my word!
It was the absence ofBeacon within the squadron’s defensive fire pattern that caused the next casualty. Through the gap came one of the Naxid decoy missiles, now turned to an attacker with an overlarge radar signature. In spite of its being a seemingly easy target the missile led a charmed life, darting and rolling by pure chance behind plasma screens created by less lucky attackers.
Martinez wasn’t aware of the intruder until it got perilously close toCelestial, when it was destroyed by the light cruiser’s concentrated defensive fire at the last instant. Hard radiation slammed the ship, and the superheated fireball flashed toward its hull. Martinez shrieked out another long, frustrated string ofdamns as the cruiser disappeared into the burning plasm, and he turned his attention to the enemy with thoughts of revenge on his mind.