Shadow of Freedom

Inexorable’s armor had never been designed to face that sort of holocaust, and each of the ninety-nine Mark 16s which reached attack range carried six lasing rods. Five hundred and ninety-four x-ray lasers, each more destructive than anything a Solarian ship-of-the-wall could have thrown, stabbed out at McGillicuddy’s ship. Perhaps a third of them wasted their fury on the impenetrable roof and floor of Inexorable’s impeller wedge, but the others didn’t. They punched through the battlecruiser’s sidewalls with contemptuous ease, and armor shattered as the transfer energy blew into the ship’s hull. The sidewalls and the radiation shielding inside them attenuated the lasers…slightly. Nothing could have stopped them, though, and eight hundred and fifty thousand tons of battlecruiser disintegrated in an incandescent flash like the heart of a star.

The entire attack, from the detonation of the first laser head to the last, took less than a second and a half. It was one terrible, blinding eruption of fury, crashing down upon its target like the fist of God. There was no time for life pods to launch. No time for small craft to escape the catastrophe. SLNS Vanquisher’s CIC couldn’t even differentiate between the individual lasers that ripped the life out of her consort and took Inexorable’s entire ship’s company with them.

* * *

“Tango One destroyed,” Abigail Hearns heard her own voice report as the FTL Ghost Rider platforms updated her plot. “Tracking on Tango Two. Second salvo EW activation in…twenty-one seconds.”

* * *

“Raise Zavala!” Oxana Dubroskaya barked. “Tell him we surrender!”

* * *

“Sir!” Lieutenant Wilson said suddenly. “They want to surrender!”

Jacob Zavala looked at Auerbach, and his nostrils flared.

“Put them on my display!” he snapped. An instant later, Vice Admiral Dubroskaya’s face appeared before him. It was no longer the confident, angry face of a Solarian flag officer. It was ashen, the eyes huge.

“Captain—” she began over the Hermes buoy’s faster-than-light channel, but a wave of his hand chopped her off.

“You’re two light-minutes downrange, this link can’t interface with my telemetry channels, and my birds don’t have FTL links,” he said sharply. “My next salvo’s coming in in less than ten seconds. It’s already committed, and there are two more right behind it that I can’t abort before they get there. Abandon immediately!”

Dubroskaya stared at him for one more moment, then wheeled from her own pickup.

“Abandon ship!” she shouted. “All units, abandon ship—now!”

* * *

SLNS Paladin was Tango Four, the last ship on DesRon 301’s targeting queue. She got three quarters of her personnel into life pods before she was destroyed, and SLNS Success managed to get almost half of her people out…but only one hundred and eleven of Vanquisher’s two thousand crewmen escaped.

Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya and her staff were not among them.

Chapter Thirteen

“You have another com request from Captain Zavala, Sir.”

Maxence Kodou’s voice was hushed, his expression stunned, and Damián Dueñas knew his own expression was as shocked as his assistant’s. The governor looked across his office at Cicely Tiilikainen. She stood turned away from the window now, looking back at him, brown eyes wide. Then she gave herself a shake, like a cat emerging from water.

“My God, Damián,” she said softly. “Now what do we do?”

Dueñas fought down a sudden mad urge to scream at her. How the hell did he know what they did now? This couldn’t be happening. Dubroskaya had been confident—she’d promised

him!—that she could easily defeat less than half a dozen Manty light cruisers! Of course he’d taken his senior naval officer’s estimate at face value! This wasn’t his fault!

His parents had grown up on a farm planet. He’d always been faintly embarrassed among his more sophisticated colleagues by his “sod-buster” origins and his parents’ parochial turns of speech, yet he understood one of his mother’s favorite clichés at last, because there was no other way to describe it as his mind skittered around like Elizabetta Dueñas’ cow on ice, trying to grasp the immensity of the disaster which had just overwhelmed his career. There had to be some way to salvage the situation—there always was—but how?!

“I—” he began, then realized he was just sitting there behind his desk with his mouth hanging open, waiting for words which refused to come.

“We’re going to have to release their freighters,” Tiilikainen said.

“No!” The single word jerked out of him without conscious thought, and Tiilikainen’s lips tightened.

“We don’t have a choice,” she said harshly. “The man’s a lunatic! We can’t take a chance on what he’ll do next if we don’t let them go!”

“No!” Dueñas repeated, and his palm smacked down on his desk. “I’m not going to let some neobarb prick push the Solarian League around! I don’t give a damn who he thinks he is!”