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.He turned back to the main engagement as Steadman closed to laser-range.Mosquito staggered as missiles pounded her light shields flat.More missiles streaked in, and damage signals screamed as fighter lasers added their fury to the destruction.Hannah's plot went out, and she looked up at a visual display just like the holo tank.Like the holo tank with a wrong assumption.Six of her ships were gone and more were going, but the Theban strike had shot its bolt.And then she saw the trio of kamikazes screaming straight into the display's main pickup.A lone Terran fighter was on their tails, firing desperately, and one of the Thebans exploded.Then a second.They weren't going to stop the third, Hannah thought distantly.The range fell, and the last battle-line of the Sword of Terra engaged the infidels toe-to-toe.The Theban battleship Lao-tze blew up, and the Terran superdreadnought Foraker followed.Charles P.Steadman shouldered through the melee, rocking under the fire raining upon her and smashing back savagely.Angela Martens whipped her fighter up, wrenching it around in a full-power turn, then cut power.The Theban on her tail charged past before he could react, and her fire tore him apart.She red-lined the drive, vision graying despite her heroic life support, and nailed yet another on what amounted to blind, trained instinct.Her number two cartwheeled away in wreckage, and Lieutenant Haynes closed on her wing to replace him.They dropped into a two-element formation, trying to find the rest of the squadron in the madness and killing as they went.The bleeding remnants of Hannah Avram's strike lined up on the Theban carriers, and if more were left than Admiral Panhanal would have believed possible, there still weren't enough.Lieutenant Commander Saboski was strike leader now - the fourth since they'd launched - and he made a snap decision.They couldn't nail them all, but the barges were too slow and weak to escape Admiral Berenson's strikegroups if the big carriers got in."Designate the Wolftioundsi he snapped, and the command fighter's tactical officer punched buttons and brought the single-seat fighters sweeping around behind it.The strike exploded into a dozen smaller tormations, converging on their targets from every possible direction.Bearhound emerged from the disorientation of warp transit, and the humans aboard her could do little but sweat while her catapults stabilized and her scanners fought to sort out the chaos that was the Battle of Thebes.Almost simultaneously, Primary Flight Control announced launch readiness and Plotting reported the location and vector of Hannah Avram's escort carriers.Berenson's orders crackled, and Bearhound lurched to the recoil of a full deck launch even as she turned directly away from the escort carriers with her escort, TFNS Parang.He stared at his plot, watching Bear-hound's sister ships fight around in her wake as they made transit, following their flagship through the insanity."ECM coming up!" Mendoza snapped, and the admiral grunted.They couldn't get into cloak this close to the enemy, but deception-mode ECM might help.He stared into his display and prayed it would."Fighters, Fifth Admiral!"Pannanal looked up at the cry, and his heart was ice as fresh infidel fighters raced vengefully up the tails of his shattered squadrons and the stroboscopic viciousness of the nightmare visual display redoubled.The infidel carriers vanished as the data codes of battle-cruisers replaced them.There was a moment of consternation in nis tracking sections - only an instant, but long enough for the leading infidels to turn and run while the computers grappled with the deception.Yet warp transit's destabilizing effect on their ECM systems had had its way, and the electronic brains had kept track of them.The data codes flickered back, and the admiral bared his teeth."Ignore the battle-cruisers - go for the carriers!""Aye, Fifth Admiral!"Captain Rene Dejardin had heard Winnifred Tre-vayne'sbriefings, yet he hadn't really believed it.It wasn't that he doubted her professional competence, but rather that he simply couldn't accept the notion that a race could travel in space, control thermonuclear fusion, and still be religious fanatics of the sort one read about in history books.It was too great an affront to his sense of the lightness of things.Now, as he tried desperately to fight his carrier clear of the warp point after launching his fighters, he believed.The Theban superdreadnought bearing down on Bulldog showed on visual - without magnification.The latest range read-out was something else Dejardin couldn't really believe.Five hundred kilometers wasn't even knife-range - it was the range of claws and teeth.At such a range, Bulldog's speed and maneuverability advantage meant nothing.There was no evading the colossus on the view screen.And there was no righting it - a fleet carrier was armed for self-defense against missiles and fighters; her ship-to-ship armament was little more than a sop to tradition.And the superdreadnought's indifference to the frantic attacks of Bulldog's escorting battle-cruiser removed his last doubts as to the zealotry of the beings that crewed her.Steadman's massed batteries of x-ray lasers fired as one, knifing through Bulldog's shields at a range which allowed for no attenuation, and mere metal meant nothing in that storm of invisible energy.But even as Bulldog died, her sisters Rottweiler, Dire-hound, and Malamute emerged and began to launch their broods.The wreckage of the anti-carrier strike fell back, fighting to reform, and Captain Martens cut her way through to them.The Thebans broke off, desperate to kill their attackers yet forced to retreat to rearm.They had to use the barges; none of the carriers remained.Thirty-one of the one hundred forty-four attacking fighters escaped.Hannah Avram dragged herself back to awareness and pain, to the sliminess of blood flowing from her nostrils and lungs filled with slivered glass, and knew someone had sealed her helmet barely in time.She pawed at her shockframe.Her eyes weren't working very well - they, too, were full of blood - and she couldn't seem to find the release, and her foggy brain reported that her left arm wasn't working, either.In fact, nothing on her left side was.Someone loomed beside her, and she blinked, fighting to see.The vac suit bore a captain's insignia.Danny, she thought muzzily.It must be Danny.A hand urged her back.Another found the med panel on her suit pack, and anesthetic washed her back into the darkness.TFNS Gosainthan emerged into reality at the head of Second Fleet's last five superdreadnoughts.Ivan Antonov remained expressionless as he waited for communications to establish contact with Berenson.Preliminary reports allowed him to breathe again as he studied the plot while Tsuchevsky collated the flood of data.The Theoan fighters still on the warp point were a broken, bewildered force, he saw grimly, vanishing with inexorable certainty as Berenson's pilots pursued them to destruction.Gosainthan's heading suddenly altered, and he glanced at his tactical read-outs as Captain Chen took his ship and her squadron to meet the surviving Theban super-dreadnoughts.The admiral nodded absently.Yes.things could, indeed, be worse."The Wings are rearming, sir.They'll begin launching again in seven minutes."Admiral Panhanal grunted approval, but deep inside he knew it was too late.Those cursed small carriers had diverted him, sucking his fighters off the warp point just in time for the fleet carriers to erupt into his face [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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