Shadow of Freedom

The Mark 16s streaked through space, accelerating by over four hundred and fifty kilometers per second every second, building on their motherships’ base velocity as they roared towards Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s battlecruisers. At that range, with that much time to build velocity, they would be closing at better than 180,500 KPS—just over sixty percent of the speed of light—when they entered the Solarians’ missile defense envelope, and the Indefatigable class’ software had never been intended to deal with incoming, evading targets closing at such ridiculous velocities.

Of course, that was only part of Battlecruiser Squadron 491’s problems.

* * *

“Their Halo systems are active, Ma’am,” Abigail Hearns announced, monitoring her displays closely. “CIC doesn’t see any upgrades from what we observed at Spindle. The software tweaks seem to be handling it.”

“Good,” Naomi Kaplan replied, watching her own plot as a second wave of missile icons followed the first, thirty-six seconds and thirty thousand kilometers behind it, and a third followed. Then a fourth. In one minute and forty-eight seconds, DesRon 301 launched four hundred and eighty Mark 16s.

Given the differential in powered envelope, Zavalla’s DDs could have fired twenty-six stacked broadsides (assuming they’d had anywhere near that much ammunition) before the Solarians had the range to engage it in turn, but he’d decided four—one for each of Dubroskaya’s ships—should be enough to show her the error of her ways. And if it wasn’t, there’d be plenty of time for additional launches to convince the surviving Solarians to see reason.

Assuming there are any surviving Solarians, of course, Kaplan thought with grim, vengeful satisfaction.

* * *

BatCruRon 491’s missile defense officers watched those impossible salvos stream towards them. Deep inside, every one of them hoped—prayed—the Manticoran missiles would go ballistic at any moment. That they’d been launched from so far out because the Manties had panicked, or because the enemy still thought he could bluff them. But even deeper inside, they knew that hadn’t happened.

The only good thing about the extended range was that it gave them plenty of time to track the incoming shipkillers. A missile’s impeller wedge was hard to miss and impossible to disguise, and that was good, because the Manty missiles’ sheer closing velocity was going to make them copper-plated bitches to stop. There wasn’t going to be time for more than a single counter missile launch against each shipkiller, and anything the CMs missed was going to streak clear across the defensive basket and actually pass its target in only eight seconds. That meant their counter missiles needed the best targeting and tracking data they could possibly provide, because each laser cluster was going to have a maximum of one shot before the shipkillers overflew the squadron…and each battlecruiser could bring only sixteen clusters to bear.

“At least they’re going to be generating a lower Delta Vee for evasions than a Javelin could, Ma’am,” Tucker Kiernan murmured just loud enough for Dubroskaya to hear him. “That should help a little.”

“Something better,” Dubroskaya replied harshly, never looking away from the plot.

* * *

“Coming up on initial EW activation…now,” Abigail announced.

* * *

Three hundred and forty-five seconds after launch, thirty-five million kilometers downrange from HMS Tristram, the electronic warfare platforms seeded throughout DesRon 301’s lead missile salvo came to sudden life. They were carefully sequenced, the Dazzlers blowing holes in the Solarians’ tracking systems, blinding them with furious strobes of interference, one thin sliver of an instant before the Dragon’s Teeth spawned sudden shoals of false targets.

It came at the worst possible moment—just as they crossed the perimeter of Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s counter missile envelope and half a heartbeat after the battlecruisers fired.

Fire control lost lock, throwing the CMs back onto their rudimentary seeking systems, but those onboard seekers had lost lock, as well. And when the Dazzlers faded, instead of a hundred and twenty incoming missiles, there were over five hundred. BatCruRon 491’s pathetic total of thirty-two counter missiles managed to reacquire and kill exactly one actual shipkiller…and its point defense clusters had barely seven seconds in which to try to find the one hundred real laser heads buried in that blinding confusion before they reached their standoff detonation range of thirty thousand kilometers.

The lasers failed. The computers and human beings behind them were still fighting desperately to find their targets when a tsunami of thermonuclear explosions sent a hurricane of bomb-pumped lasers into SLNS Inexorable.

* * *