Extremis by Charles E. Gannon, Steve White Page A

lot rougher, real soon.” As if to punctuate the admiral’s exhortation, a bone-jarring convulsion rippled through the hull.
    Wethermere complied. “But, sir, some of those birds—”
    “—date back to before the Insurrection. Their on-board weapons are at least two marks behind current systems, and I’d wager that some of those airframes don’t have more than a hundred good hours left in them.” Then she smiled like a tiger seeing a steak. “But their external ordnance is all brand-new. Now record your recording and let me work.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    She smiled before looking away and barking, “Ops: update.”
    “Shields good, net secure.”
    “Relay of targeting data?”
    “Brigadier McCullough confirms he received it five-by-five. He concurs with Tactical’s assessment as to which SDHs are their datalink hubs.”
    “Let’s hope all this mutual admiration on the tactical intel side is warranted. Missile batteries, prepare to cease fire as soon as the fighters have launched their ordnance. Then give me all beams, sustained fire.”
    “Admiral, that might burn out the capacitors.…”
    “Then let them burn. After McCullough has shot his bolt, I want the Baldies to focus their defensive fire on him. And yes, I know what that means for the Flight Brigade.” There was silence on the bridge. Even Wethermere, new to combat, had an inkling of what the concentrated defensive fire of the Baldy SDs and SDHs would do to fighters with obsolete ECM packages and outdated evasion characteristics.
    In the tacplot, the cloud of green gnats that had swarmed out from behind Beaumont now merged into the outermost red membranes of the enemy fleet.
    “McCullough’s launching.”
    “How many survived to make the run?”
    Tactics checked his board. “Two hundred eighty-three out of four hundred, sir.”
    In the plot, the blood-red mass of the enemy fleet did not seem to move so much as churn, like a bloated organ bulging and flexing in distress. And in fact, that was what was occurring: the Baldy fleet was trying to wheel about and keep their aft-drive decks—and therefore, defensive blind spot—faced away from a mass attack by fighters. And clearly, not all of the enemy battlewagons were succeeding: omega icons started sprouting inside the organ.
    “Admiral, the enemy fighters around us are breaking off en masse. They’re heading back to protect their dreadnoughts.”
    “As expected. All beams: right up their ass.”
    “All beams on the fighters, aye, sir.”
    That was when the bulk of McCullough’s missiles started hitting—and his fighters started disappearing from the tacplot in swathes. But they were no longer disappearing as fast as Wethermere had expected: several of the Baldy datanets had died along with their SDH master-hubs.
    Yoshikuni pulled forward against her shock harness as if she wanted to jump to her feet when she gave the order. “Fleet order to all missile batteries. Best rate of fire. Second screen to flush its racks. Internal magazines launch until they are ten birds away from dry.”
    The admiral’s flagship, the RFNS supermonitor Jellicoe, began—and kept—trembling as though a freight train were speeding through its bowels: outbound missiles. Hundreds of them.
    With many of their datanets gone, the enemy ships had been forced to concentrate even more of their less-effective defensive fire on the Flight Brigade’s fighters. Ironically, most of McCullough’s pilots had already launched all their ship-killing weapons. And now, before the van of the Baldy fleet could yet again shift the primary focus of their ill-coordinated defenses back toward Yoshikuni’s massive missile salvo, the first of those immense weapons began to strike.
    Inside the red mass of the Baldy fleet, the steady trickle of enemy Omega icons suddenly escalated into a flood. Wethermere tried to match the humble death symbols with his imagination of the titanic forces being unleashed upon those enemy ships. A dozen or more