Throne of Stars (103 page)

Julian’s face tightened, but the admiral shook his head.

“Doesn’t mean he’s failed, Sergeant,” he said, with a gentleness he seldom showed. “In fact, all the evidence suggests the attack on the Palace itself probably succeeded.”

“
What
evidence?” Julian demanded.

“The fact that the system reconnaissance platforms have been locked out, that La Paz was obviously headed in-system just as fast as he could go, and that his carrier squadron is down to only two ships,” Helmut said.

“The recon lockout had to have come from Moonbase—that’s the only communications node with the reach to shut down the entire system. And if Adoula were in control of the situation, he certainly wouldn’t be ordering his own units locked out of the system reconnaissance platforms. So the lockout order almost certainly came from someone supporting Prince Roger . . . which means
his
partisans have control of Moonbase.

“The fact that La Paz was headed in-system suggests the same thing—Adoula and Gianetto are calling in their loyalists, and they wouldn’t be doing that unless they needed the firepower because of the situation on the Old Earth.

“And the fact that La Paz is down to only two ships—that half his squadron is someplace else—suggests that someone has been doing a little creative force structure reshuffling. My money for the reshuffler is on Kjerulf. Which would also make sense of Moonbase’s defection from the Adoula camp.”

“Sir,” the Taco put in, “we’re also picking up additional phase drive signatures. Looks like four carriers coming in from out-system—we’re too far out for IFF—about half a light-minute out from Old Earth, decelerating towards orbit. We’ve got six more signatures coming out from the inner-system, decelerating towards the same destination.”

“Gajelis and . . . Prokourov,” Helmut said thoughtfully. He glanced at Julian again. “The six coming out from sunward have to be Gajelis and CarRon 14. I’m guessing the other four are CarRon 12, which
probably
means Prokorouv’s decided to back your Prince. I can’t think of any reason even Gianetto would think he needed ten carriers and over two hundred cruisers to deal with an attack on the Palace. Mind you, I could be wrong. He always did believe in bigger hammers.”

“Incoming. Many vampires incoming!” Tactical announced.

Gloria Demesne only nodded to herself. It had been obvious what was coming for the last thirty minutes. CruFlot 140 was still over fifteen minutes out, just entering its own missile range of Fatted Calf, but Gajelis’ carriers had started launching over a half-hour before. Now their big, nasty missiles were stacking up in CruFlot 140’s control basket, and the cruisers themselves had just gone to maximum rate fire. No wonder even the computers were having trouble trying to tally up the total.

She understood exactly what Gajelis was thinking. This was a bid to overwhelm Fatted Calf with firepower while his own carriers were safely out of harm’s way. Fatted Calf’s carriers had the range to engage CarRon 14, but the chances of a hit at this range, especially without cruisers of their own out there to provide final course corrections were . . . poor, to say the least. And even any of their birds which might have scored hits would still have to get through CarRon 14’s missile defenses. The term “snowball in hell” came forcibly to mind when she considered that scenario. So at the moment, he was free to concentrate
his
fire on the targets of his choice from a position of relative immunity.

For as long as his own cruisers lasted, anyway.

It might just work, but it might not, too, especially given the range at which his cruisers had opened fire. Their missiles would be coming in at high terminal velocities, but crowding the very limits of their designed fire control and with a ten-second signal lag in fire control telemetry, which gave away accuracy. The Imperial Navy’s electronic warfare capabilities were good, even against people who had exactly the same equipment. It took the computational capabilities of a major platform to distinguish between real and false targets reliably. The sensors and AI loaded into shipkiller missiles were highly capable, but not as capable as those of the cruiser or carrier which had launched them, so firing at such extreme range meant Gajelis was accepting poorer terminal guidance due to the delay in telemetry corrections.

The sheer size of the salvos he was throwing was also going to have an effect. It wasn’t going to catastrophically overwhelm the fire control capability of his cruisers, but it was going to overload it, which meant the computers would have less time to spend coaxing each missile into the best attack solution. If she knew Gajelis, he was going to concentrate a lot of that fire—especially the heavier missiles from his carriers—on Fatted Calf’s carriers, instead of hammering the lighter cruisers. There were arguments in favor of either tactic, but Fatted Calf had no intention of wasting
any
of its birds on carriers. Not at this range. Demesne intended to kill cruisers, ruthlessly crushing the smaller, weaker platforms while they were out of their carriers’ cover, and Captain Atilius, Fatted Calf’s acting CO, just happened to be
Minotaur
’s skipper. Which meant the rest of the squadron’s carriers, as well as its cruisers, were conforming to Desmesne’s tactical direction.

Which was also why none of Fatted Calf’s units had fired a single shot yet. At this range, it would take almost five minutes for CruFlot 140’s missiles to reach Fatted Calf, and at their maximum rate fire the cruisers would shoot themselves dry in about fifteen minutes. They’d put a lot of missiles into space over those twenty minutes, but she had a lot of point defense to deal with them. If she waited to fire until the distance to Gajelis’ cruisers fell to decisive range,
Bellingham
and her consorts would be able to control
their
missiles all the way in, which meant they’d be at least twenty-five percent more effective. Of course, they’d have to survive Gajelis’ fire before they launched, but every silver lining had its cloud.

“Open fire, Captain?” Ensign Scargall asked. The young officer’s taut voice was higher pitched than usual and her face was pale as she looked at her readouts, and Gloria didn’t blame her a bit. There were already well over forty-five thousand missiles on the way, and
still
none of Fatted Calf’s ships had opened fire.

“No, Ensign,” Gloria said in a husky voice. She punched in a command, and the bridge was filled with a throbbing beat as she pulled out a pseudo-nic stick. She brushed a lock of red hair out of her eyes and puffed on the stick, lighting it.

“Hold your fire,” she said. “Let them come. Come to me, my love,” she whispered. “
Fifteen thousand tears I’ve cried . . .”
She’d had a hell of a singing voice, once. Before the pseudo-nic smoke had killed it. But every silver lining had its cloud. “
Screaming deceiving and bleeding for you . . .”

“They’re fighting dumb, Admiral,” Commander Talbert said.

“Not much else they can do,” Gajelis shrugged. “They have to come to meet us to keep us away from the planet. In fact, the only thing that surprises me is that they haven’t cut the cruisers loose to intercept our cruisers even further out.”

“They have to be worried about keeping us as far out as possible, Sir,” Talbert said, “but they’ve had over three hours to get their forces deployed. They ought to be further out than this by now. And where are their fighters?”

“They probably didn’t know exactly when this was coming,” Gajelis said, and grimaced. “That’s the problem with coups, Commander—it’s harder than hell to make sure everyone’s ready to kick off at the right moment. They’re probably having to make this up as they go along, and they know we’re just the first squadron they’re going to have on their backs. So they’re playing it as cautious as they can, but they still can’t afford to wait us out and let us get into kinetic range of Imperial City. As for the fighters, they’re obviously holding them aboard the carriers. Given the force imbalance, they’ll want to send them in with maximum Leviathan loads. In a minute or two, they’ll punch them to come in across the cruisers, from either system north or south.”

“Atilius is tricky,” Talbert pointed out. “And Demesne is worse. This isn’t their style, Sir.”

“There’s no
style
to a battle like this, Commander,” the admiral said, frowning. “You just throw fire until one side retires or is
gone
. We’ve got more firepower; we’ll win.”

“Yes, Sir,” Talbert said, trying to project a little enthusiasm. It was hard. Especially knowing that Prokorouv’s cruisers were going to be close enough to start “adjusting” the force imbalance in about another ten minutes. “I suppose there is a certain quality to quantity.”

“Fatted Calf Squadron has just flushed its fighters,” Tactical said.

“See?” the admiral said. “Flip a coin whether they go in over the cruisers, or under.”

“Here they come!”

Not exactly a professional announcement, there, Demesne thought. But under the circumstances, a pardonable slip.

The volume of space to sunward of Old Earth was a hurricane of raging destruction. Countermissiles, roaring out at thirty-five hundred gravities, charged headlong to meet a solid wall of incoming shipkillers. Proximity warheads began to erupt, flashing like prespace flash guns at some championship sporting event. Stroboscopic bubbles of nuclear fury boiled like brimstone flaring through the chinks in the front gate of Hell. The interceptions began over a million kilometers out, ripping huge holes in the comber of shipkillers racing towards Fatted Calf, but the vortex of destruction thundered unstoppably onward. Eighty-four
thousand
missiles had been fired at only one hundred targets, and nothing in the universe could have stopped them all.

Point defense laser clusters opened fire as the range fell to seventy thousand kilometers, and the fury of destruction redoubled. CruFlot 140’s missiles were coming in at twenty-seven thousand kilometers per second, which gave the lasers less than three seconds to engage, but at least tracking had had plenty of time to set up the firing solutions. Demesne’s cruisers’ point defense was lethally effective, and the four carriers’ fire was even more deadly.

Laser heads began to detonate. Against ChromSten-armored ships, even those as light as cruisers, even the most powerful bomb-pumped laser had a standoff range of less than ten thousand kilometers; against a carrier, maximum effect of standoff range was barely half that. Cruisers began to take hits, belching atmosphere and debris, but Demesne and Atilius had been right. Over seventy percent of the incoming missiles were targeted on the carriers, a hundred thousand kilometers
behind
the cruisers.

CruFlot 150 turned, keeping its better broadside sensors positioned to engage the missiles which had already run past it, even as its ships took their own hammering. And they
did
take a hammering. Thirty percent of eighty-four thousand was “only” two hundred and sixty missiles per cruiser, and even with poor firing solutions and the carriers’ support—what they could spare from their own self-defense—an awful lot of them got through.

Lieutenant Alfy Washington lay back in his seat, looking up at the stars through his glassteel canopy, his arms crossed. Fighters, and especially fighters on minimum power, had
very
little signature. Spotting them at more than a light-second or so required visual tracking, and space fighters were a light-absorbing matte black for a reason. But they were very, very fast. At an acceleration rate of eight KPS
²
, they could pile on velocity in a hurry, and even their phase drive signatures were hard to notice at interplanetary distances.

He checked his toot and nodded silently at the data that was being fed to his division over the hair-fine whisker laser.

“Christ, Gajelis is dumb as a rock,” he muttered, lying back again and closing his eyes. “And I’m glad as hell I’m not in cruisers.”

HMS
Bellingham
rocked as another blast of coherent radiation slammed into her armored flank.

“Tubes Ten and Fourteen off-line,” Tactical said tightly. “Heavy jamming from the enemy squadron, but we’ve still got control of the missiles.”

For all their toughness, cruisers were nowhere near so heavily armored as carriers. Even a capital ship graser—or the forward-bearing spinal mount weapon of a cruiser like
Bellingham
—couldn’t hope to penetrate a capital ship’s armor at any range beyond forty thousand kilometers. Missile hatches and weapons bays were more vulnerable, since they necessarily represented openings in the ship’s armored skin, but even they were heavily cofferdammed with ChromSten bulkheads to contain damage. For all practical purposes, an energy-armored combat had to get to within eighty thousand kilometers if it hoped to inflict damage, and to half of that if it wanted decisive results. Missiles had to get even closer, but, then again, missiles didn’t care whether or not they survived the experience.

Cruisers, unfortunately, were a bit easier to kill, and
Bellingham
bucked again as yet more enemy fire smashed into her.

“Heavy damage, port forward!” Damage Control snapped. “Hull breach, Frames Thirty-Seven to Forty-six. Magazine Three open to space.”