And they hadn't even been the primary targets.
"Direct hit on Impeller One!"
"Captain, we've lost helm control!"
"Direct hit Missile-One. Missile-Three and Five out of the net!"
"Counter-Missile-Niner out of the net! Counter-Missile-Eleven reports heavy casualties!"
"Sir, we've lost five betas out of the forward ring!"
"Heavy damage aft! Hull breach, Frames One-Zero-One-Five through One-Zero-Two-Zero! We have pressure drop, decks three and four!"
Luiz Rozsak heard the damage reports over his com link to Dirk-Steven Kamstra's bridge. He felt the damage in his own flesh, his own bones, as his flagship shuddered and bucked and heaved, flexing and twisting with the indescribable shock as bomb-pumped lasers transferred terajoules of energy to her hull.
And even as the energy blasted into Marksman, he saw SLNS Sharpshooter disappear from his plot forever.
Santander Konidis snarled in triumph as half the enemy impeller signatures were blotted away. But even as he snarled, Hammer Force's tenth missile salvo howled down on the People's Navy in Exile.
Three hundred and sixty Mark-17-E missiles hurtled straight into Maximilien Robespierre's teeth. It was scarcely a surprise. Everyone had known exactly who those missiles would target, but they'd had only twelve seconds to react to the knowledge. Every counter-missile that could be brought to bear, every point defense cluster which could possibly reach that wave of destruction, blazed desperately. Scores of missiles were intercepted by counter-missiles. Over seventy more were torn apart by close-in laser fire.
It wasn't enough.
"That's the last of them, Sir," Robert Womack said wearily ninety-eight seconds later.
Luiz Rozsak nodded, equally wearily, and glanced at the time display in the corner of his plot.
Five hundred and twelve seconds. Less than nine minutes. That was how long it had taken, from the enemy's initial missile launch to the attack of Hammer Force's final wave of missiles.
How could less than nine minutes leave him so exhausted? With so much sick regret?
He looked at the tally boards, wincing internally as he saw the names of all the ships Hammer Force had lost, and saw the answer. SLNS Gunner, Rifleman, Sharpshooter, Sniper, Francisco Pizarro, Simón Bolivar, Hernando Cortés, Frederick II, William the Conqueror, Kabuki, Masquerade . . .
Of the sixteen ships he'd taken into combat, only four survived—Dirk-Steven Kamstra's Marksman, her sister, Ranger, and the destroyers Gustavus Adolphus and Charlemagne. Somehow, and he couldn't pretend to understand how, Jim Stahlin's Gustavus Adolphus was totally untouched. Charlemagne and Ranger, on the other hand, were little more than still barely mobile hulks, and Marksman wasn't much better.
But then his eyes moved to the enemy's losses, and they hardened into dark brown agates.
Fourteen battlecruisers, three heavy cruisers, and two light cruisers. The light cruisers had been almost accidents, killed by the autonomous missiles of Hammer Force's last nine salvos. Marksman and Ranger, even with Gustavus Adolphus' support and even rotating telemetry links, had been able to control barely ninety missiles, which had been only a quarter of the total in each of the salvos which had been launched before Kabuki's and Masquerade's destruction. There'd been no more effective fire coming from the enemy to distract his tactical officers after Maximilien Robespierre's elimination, but less than a hundred missiles had been too little too batter through the PNE's tattered defenses if they'd been spread between multiple targets. So he'd concentrated on taking out the big Mars-class heavy cruisers and letting the rest of the shipkillers go wherever they went under their onboard AIs' direction. To be honest, he was surprised they'd achieved as much as they had.
Now, however, Hammer Force had spent its bolt. Aside from the Mark-17s in Marksman and Ranger's surviving magazines, the remaining enemy ships were far outside Rozsak's range, and between them Marksman and Ranger had only nineteen operable launchers. There was no point wasting such minuscule salvos against the PNE's surviving twenty-seven units.
"All right, Dirk-Steven," he said, turning back to the com which linked him to Marksman's bridge. "It's out of our hands now. Let's see about killing our velocity and heading back to pick up survivors."
"How bad is our damage, Irénée?"
Santander Konidis hoped his voice sounded a lot crisper and more confident than he felt.
"Actually, Citizen Commodore, we got off pretty lightly," Citizen Captain Irénée Egert, PNES Chao Kung Ming's commanding officer, replied. "We're down a couple of point defense clusters, and I've lost two launchers out of the port broadside. Aside from that and the primary gravitic array, it's all pretty much cosmetic."
Konidis managed not to snort, although it was difficult. Egert had a point about the minor nature of Chao Kung Ming's damage. Unfortunately, the heavy cruiser was only one unit of a force which had been unbelievably mauled.
Worse, we've been identified, Konidis thought grimly. They knew we were State Security before anybody even opened fire, and there must be thousands of life pods headed for the planet right now. Our life pods. If they make planetfall and the people inside them get captured, they'll talk, sooner or later, whether they want to or not. And when they do, there won't be any question in any one's mind about who we are. For that matter, I'm sure that bastard Theisman and that traitorous bitch Pritchart would be delighted to make positive identifications from our personnel files back home. And once the Sollies start spreading our ships' emission signatures around . . .
He kept his face expressionless, but his thoughts were grim as he considered the decision which had become his and the unpalatable options available to him.
We can break off without attacking the planet. We can take our losses and run, and no one will ever be able to prove we had an Eridani Edict violation in mind when we arrived. For that matter, Torch has formally declared war on Mesa. That would make us legitimate mercenaries in Mesan service, if that was what we wanted to claim . . . and if we don't violate the Edict. So, in theory, at least, our survivors should become prisoners of war if they do make it to the planet, which would put them under the Deneb Accords' protection.
In theory.
He tipped back in his command chair, thinking hard.
The problem was that he couldn't quite convince himself that a planet of ex-slaves, whose government contained quite a few theoretically retired members of the Audubon Ballroom, were going to just forgive and forget. If Rear Admiral Rozsak knew why the PNE had come to Torch, it was extraordinarily unlikely that the Torches didn't know it, too. Which suggested to Santander Konidis that they weren't going to be extraordinarily concerned about how the rest of the galaxy might regard the "welcome" they extended to the people who'd been about to genocide their home world.
If we go ahead and take out the planet, we can hang around to pick up our life pods afterward. What's left of Rozsak's force isn't going to want to tangle with us, now that it's lost its ammunition ships. And I've still got eleven cruisers and sixteen destroyers. I don't care if the entire frigging "Royal Torch Navy" is waiting in orbit around the planet, they aren't going to be able to stand up to thatwithout Rozsak's magic missiles to back them up! But if we do hit the planet, Rozsak's surviving ships are never going to let us get into range to take them out, too. And that means he'll get away clean with his sensor data . . . and the entire galaxy will know who did it.