Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 82
“The starboard capacitor bank is still down,” Bosworth reminded them. “We won’t be able to engage anything coming up on that side. Helm, turn our bow forty degrees to starboard.”
“Forty degrees starboard on the bow, helm aye.”
The AIC was barely controlled chaos. Nobody had expected to hear another action stations alert on this ship, not at home and ten minutes from docking. It was like waking up to see a burglar in the room and having to go from a sleep state into a full-on fight in the span of a second or two.
“That bogey is going to outrun us. We can barely do four g. There’s nothing in the neighborhood that can catch him,” Mayler said.
“Forget him. Nothing we could do about him even with a healthy drive. He’s on AEGIS—let the fleet track him. Focus on those missiles, please.”
“Missile one will cross our bow and dip into our engagement range in twenty-three seconds. Missile two is headed for the southern continent. Kelpie Peninsula. Time to impact, one minute, ten seconds.”
This is going to be bad, Dunstan thought in dismay. A missile strike on the home world, right underneath the noses of Home Fleet.
“They’re small missiles, sir. AI says they’re 550-millimeter antiship ordnance. But there’s no signature coming from those seeker heads. They fired them dumb, sir. Ballistic.”
“Explains why they felt the need to get so damn close. Point-defense status, report.”
“Portside emitters energized; AI is tracking missile one. Crossing the edge of our engagement envelope in ten seconds,” Mayler replied. “We’ll have less than two seconds for our shot.”
“Then don’t miss,” Dunstan said. “That’s an order.”
The missile streaked across their bow and toward their port side, a hundred kilometers away, continuing its mindless run at Rhodia One. Without active guidance, it wouldn’t be able to dodge point-defense fire, but it also made the warhead impervious to the AI’s electronic warfare attempts.
“The reactor is only at sixty percent,” Bosworth warned.
“Allocate everything to the portside PD emitters.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Three . . . two . . . one. Firing,” Mayler said.
The lights and consoles in the AIC went out without so much as a residual flicker, turning off every screen projection in the room and leaving them all in complete darkness. A moment later, the emergency lighting came on, and the screens came back to life. The sudden lightness Dunstan felt could only mean that the ship’s gravmag unit had stopped.
“Reactor failsafe kicked in,” Bosworth read off his screen. “Power is gone. Sensors are down. Gravmag array is down. No propulsion. Point defense is out.”
“Hells, just read off what’s still working.”
“Not much, sir. Comms and data links are coming back on right now on reserve power. That’s not going to last long. We have thirty minutes of life support and no gravity. Sending out emergency broadcast right now.”
“Just tell me we got that missile,” Dunstan said.
Mayler looked at the screen that had just now rematerialized in front of his station. In the red glow of the emergency lighting, Dunstan could see the sweat glistening on the lieutenant’s forehead.
“We splashed the first missile, sir. The second one is thirty-five seconds to impact.”
“And not a damn thing we can do about that one,” Dunstan said. “Put out a distress call. And if you’re the praying kind, ask the gods to make sure that bird is going to hit nothing but volcanic rock down there.”
“They’re tracking it with nine different stations. It’ll hit somewhere between the Norfolk-9 and Cumbria-1 arcologies. Twenty-five seconds to impact.”
Standard medium-caliber ship killer, Dunstan thought. Deadly to a frigate, a fart in the wind against a planetary target. Even if it scores a direct hit on an arcology. They should have just fired it at the station as well.
They watched impotently as the missile followed its projected trajectory on the plot. In the last ten seconds, the AI changed the arc a little to adjust for the friction of the warhead as it sliced through the lower layer of the atmosphere. Dunstan didn’t have a visual on the bird, but he knew that the superheated plasma around the shielded warhead would make it look like it was trailing fire.
“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Impact,” Mayler narrated. “Enemy warhead strike on the planetary surface, two point six kilometers east-southeast of Norfolk-9.”
At least it wasn’t the northern half of the continent, Dunstan thought, and instantly felt shame for his selfishness, thinking about the safety of his own wife and children first.
Twenty seconds of tense silence followed as Mayler tried to get a visual feed from the target area. Then another screen popped up in front of Bosworth’s station, and the comms chatter in the background seemed to increase tenfold. Even in the dim red light of the AIC, Dunstan could tell that his XO had just gone ashen faced.
“Nuclear warhead strike on the planetary surface,” he amended Mayler’s report with a cracking voice. “They confirmed the thermal bloom and radiation spike from orbit. Two point six klicks from Norfolk-9. Estimated at twenty kilotons yield.”
There were cries of anger and shouts of disbelief in the AIC. Dunstan felt a sudden weakness that would have made his legs tremble if he hadn’t been strapped down on a gravity couch.
Not even the Gretians had used nukes against civilian targets in the war. All the combatants had followed an unspoken agreement to limit the use of nuclear warheads to space and against valid military objectives, and even then they had been employed very sparingly over the years. Everyone, including the Gretians, had been afraid of the atomic demon slipping its leash, of things going out of control in ways that ended in wholesale nuclear exchanges between planets. He didn’t think much of the Gretians, but Dunstan had always thought that even the most dedicated and fanatical Blackguard wouldn’t launch an atomic warhead at a civilian target. Once nukes started flying, there was a