"Threat axis red-one-zero!" his missile-defense officer snapped. "Battery Three, take it!"

"Battery Three, red-one-zero, aye!" one of his assistants responded, punching commands into his own console. "Engaging!"

Point Defense Three retargeted the laser clusters guarding Charlemagne's port quarter, training around to meet the wave of missiles roaring in through the zone Bernard Montgomery should have been covering at thirty percent of the speed of light. laser clusters went to continuous rapid fire, but they simply didn't have enough emitters to stop that many missiles coming in that quickly.

Charlemagne quivered as the first bomb-pumped laser clawed at her armored flanks. Then another ripped home, and another, dozens of them in a tsunami of destruction, slamming into her on top of one another, so quickly it was impossible for any human sense—or even Charlemagne's computers—to isolate any single blow.

"Direct hit on Missile-Three!"

"Heavy casualties in Impeller-Two!"

"Graser-One and Graser-Three out of the net—no response, Citizen Commander!"

"Gravitic-Five destroyed! Lidar-Three's gone, too!"

"Core hull breach, Frame Three-Seven-Four! Pressure dropping—I think we've got a jammed blast door! Initiating damage control!"

"Direct hit, Boat Bay-Two! I show red board on the entire bay—no response from Boat Bay damage control parties!"

Bostwick heard the wave of damage reports rolling over the net as entire quadrants of the damage control schematic flared scarlet. Charlemagne was hurt, badly. It would take months in dock to repair the damage he could already see. Yet she was still intact, still in the fight, and her people were already bringing up backup systems, rushing repair parties towards her injuries.

"Third salvo impact in five seconds," his tactical officer announced, still focused on his own responsibilities, his own duties. "Defensive fire plan Bravo-Hotel. I want—"

"Skipper!" The voice in his earbug belonged to Citizen Commander Christy Hargraves, his senior engineer, and in all the years she'd served with him, he'd never heard that note of raw urgency in her voice before. "We're losing containment on Fusion-Tw—"

Adrian Luff expression was bleak as Charlemagne's icon disappeared from his plot. Napoleon Bonaparte, which had once been SLNS Indurate, was marginally luckier than the Warlord. She continued onward, rolling slowly on her axis, shedding bits and pieces of hull and clutches of life pods, yet at least her people were getting off. She might even have been salvageable, but she was clearly a mission-kill, completely out of the fight.

There must really be Solly attack officers back there. They sure as hell don't seem very distracted by the Halo platforms, anyway!

The thought rolled through a corner of the citizen commodore's brain without ever reaching its surface, and even as he watched the lurid damage codes flashing under Bonaparte's plot icon, Rozsak's third wave of missiles came howling in.

Luiz Rozsak seemed to feel himself flowing even more deeply down into his command chair as the second massive missile salvo plowed straight down Hammer Force's throat.

They came rocketing in, and if many of them had clearly had their telemetry links shot out from under them, far more of them hadn't. His missile-defense officers had had longer than their PNE counterparts to digest—and apply—the lessons they'd learned from Luff's first salvo, and it showed. They knew about the shipkillers' final "sprint mode" now. They were allowing for it, and their long-range counter-missile fire was far more effective . . . but it was also coming from fewer launchers, and there were fewer point defense clusters to back them up.

He winced internally as SLNS Gunner's back broke strewing the cruiser's shattered hull—and her crew—across unforgiving vacuum. In the same cataclysmic instant, her sister, Sniper, took at least five hits that sent her lurching out of formation before she somehow managed to recover.Cyrus took three more hits of her own and quietly broke up; her sister Frederick II died in a far more spectacular flash which momentarily rivaled the brilliance of Torch, itself.

And then the missile storm closed on Kabuki.

He didn't know how many missiles got through to her. There couldn't have been very many . . . not that it mattered. Her merchant hull was straw in the furnace as the bomb-pumped lasers broke her bones and spat out the splinters. She disintegrated into torn and tattered wreckage, spreading outward from the center of what once had been a two million-ton starship . . . and its crew.

Two thirds of his cruisers were damaged or destroyed, half his destroyers—and Kabuki—were gone, and it was only the second salvo.

"Fire Plan Charlie-Zulu-Omega," he said flatly.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Adrian Luff felt a small stir of satisfaction as the light-speed damage estimates from his first salvo finally came up on Stravinsky's status boards.

They'd damaged or destroyed a quarter of the enemy force, including what looked like it had to be major damage to one of the ammunition ships. By now, his second salvo was arriving on target, as well, and he'd seen four more impeller wedges—including what CIC thought was one of the ammunition ships—vanish from his plot.

Yet any satisfaction he felt had to be weighed against the loss of almost half his own battlecruisers. Hammer Force's Third salvo had destroyed PNE Sun Tzu and reduced PNE Oliver Cromwell to a staggering wreck. Six ships was barely twelve percent of his own total force, but they represented a far larger percentage of his total tonnage. And, infinitely worse, they were all battlecruisers . . . and only the battlecruisers had Cataphracts or the fire control to handle them.

It's a race, he thought again, grimly. It's a damned race to see which of us runs out of platforms first.

Luiz Rozsak's fourth salvo came slicing in.

His two undamaged cruisers could still handle sixty missiles each, but Ranger and Sniper, combined, could handle only sixty more. Hammer Force split its hundred and eighty shipkillers into two ninety-missile salvos and sent them ripping in on the battlecruiser Isoroku Yamamoto, Luff's last Warlord, and the limping wreck of the Oliver Cromwell.

There were fewer missiles in each salvo, and Luff's missile-defense officers had learned a great deal more about the Mark-17-E, but there was only so much they could do. They needed time to reorganize, to restore their formation, and there was no time. There were only the incoming waves of missiles, screaming into their teeth at the rate of five every minute. Their individual effectiveness might be eroding as more and more of those missiles came in without benefit of shipboard control, but they were still coming, and the defenders had to treat each of them as its own individual threat.

Isoroku Yamamoto slid out of her slot in the formation as her after impeller ring died completely. More laser heads shattered her midships armor, destroying control systems, wiping out half her starboard point defense and all but three of her starboard long-range telemetry arrays. She began to drop gradually astern, rolling to present her less damaged port broadside to the enemy while damage control parties fought frantically to get her after impellers back on line.

Oliver Cromwell took only a dozen more hits, yet they were enough. Her single remaining fusion plant went off-line, and she fell behind as her crew raced to abandon ship while there was still time.