"I'm sorting, sir. Here! A roboscout got a straight five-second plot before they downed it!"
"Intelligence!" Tulan snapped. "Get the co-ordinates and bring me photos!"
There were already pictures of the area where the salvo must have originated, and one of them showed a cave-like opening in a crater wall. "That's it!" Tulan jabbed a pencil at it. "You could hide a dozen ships in there. Let's get a strike organized!"
The strike group included four Heavies besides the flagship, with twelve Mediums and twenty Lights. They slanted down in a jerky evasive course while pictures flashed on screens to be compared with the actual terrain.
Ground fire, chemically propelled missiles, erupted ahead of them and the small craft went to work intercepting it. They were down to a hundred miles, then fifty, streaking along the jagged surface so close they seemed to scrape it. This was point-blank range; as the computers raced with the chaos of fire and counter-fire, human senses could only register a few impressions—the bruising jerks, the shudder of concussions, white streaks of rocket-trails, gushers of dirt from the surface, winking flashes of mid-air interception.
Then the Heavies were on target. The flagship jumped as the massive salvo leaped away—not chemical missiles, but huge space torpedoes propelled by Pulsor units like the ships' drives, directing their own flocks of smaller defensive missiles by an intricate network of controls. The small stuff, augmented by fire from the lighter ships, formed momentarily a visible tube down which the big stuff streaked untouched.
The whole crater seemed to burst upward, reaching out angry fingers of shattered rock as they ripped by, rocking and bucking with the blasts. Tulan's viewer swivelled aft to hold the scene. Secondary blasts went off like strings of giant firecrackers. Great black-and-orange fungi-like clouds swirled upward, dissipating fast in the thin atmosphere. Then Tulan spotted what he was looking for: three small ships flashing over the area, to get damage-assessment pictures. There was still a lot of ground-fire from farther out, and it caught one of the three, which wobbled crazily then disappeared in a flash which blanked out the viewscreen.
"Intelligence!" Tulan shouted. "Casualties?"
Intelligence was listening to his earphones and punching buttons. "Two Lights lost, sir. Slight damage to seven more and to one Medium."