Battle of Manticore, part II.
Diamato nodded and looked at his com officer. "Immediate priority for the Flag. Tell them we have fifty-plus wallers deploying for a hyper translation! Tell them—"
He broke off, as the deploying impeller signatures abruptly vanished.
"Correction!" he said sharply. "Inform the Flag that fifty-plus wallers have just translated out!"
And we begin.
"The numbers are still coming in, Boss," the chief of staff told him, her expression grim. "So far, they don't sound good. At the moment, it sounds like we can write off over half our wall of battle. Probably more than that, if we don't control the star system when the dust settles."
"We always knew we were going to get hammered," Tourville said, his own voice and expression calmer than DeLaney's. And it was true. His losses were twelve percent higher than his prebattle estimate—almost twenty-five percent higher than the Octogan staff weenies had estimated—because he hadn't anticipated how tightly the Manties would bunch their salvos. But from the beginning, everyone had understood that Second Fleet was going to take severe losses.
Second Fleet losses, seems they took
heavy damage to most of their surviving ships.
He didn't have to wait long. Less than fifteen minutes after they'd vanished from the Junction, eight and a half minutes after they recepted Diamoto's warning, they reappeared dangerously close to the RZ's boundary. It was an impressive display of pinpoint astrogation—one that showed a steel-nerved willingness to cut their margin razor thin. And one which also put the Manties well out on Second Fleet's flank and headed for Sphinx on a least-time course.
"Exactly where I would have placed them myself," he said quietly to DeLaney, who nodded vigorously.
Third Fleet arrives.
Even on his current profile, his restricted acceleration meant he'd pass within less than forty million kilometers of Sphinx, but he'd be further out—and longer getting there—than almost any other heading would have produced. If he hadn't changed course at all, he would have overflown Sphinx (and its defenses) seventy minutes after the brief, titanic engagement with Home Fleet, at an effective range of zero. If he'd changed heading by ninety degrees, he would have made his closest approach to Sphinx eight minutes later than that, at a range of only thirty-five million kilometers. On his current heading, his units' closest approach would come eighty-three minutes after changing course, and the range would be 39,172,200 kilometers.
He didn't much care for any of those options, given the pounding Home Fleet had given him, but the one he'd chosen was the best of the lot. It was still going to give the planet's defenders a shot, which he'd hoped wouldn't happen—yet, at least—but it would be long-ranged enough to degrade the Manties' accuracy, and the fire wouldn't be coming straight into his teeth the way Home Fleet's had. His missile defenses would be far more effective against whatever Sphinx had, and he frankly doubted that it had anything as heavy as ninety SDs had been able to hand out, anyway. And he'd needed to break back out across the RZ boundary for several reasons. Partly to get his cripples safely out of harm's way, but mostly because—as Taverner had just pointed out—he was critically low on ammunition. He needed to rendezvous with his ammunition ships and restock his magazines before driving back into the system defenses.
But Sphinx wasn't all he had to worry about, and Kuzak had dropped her own units in further "up" the zone's outer surface than he had. That put her in a position to move quickly to Sphinx's relief, accelerating directly towards the planet on a least-time course along the shortest passage through the RZ . . . which would also catch him between her fire and Sphinx's. In fact, Third Fleet would be less than 33,000,000 kilometers from him at the moment of his closest approach to Sphinx. Yet if he turned away from her, he would have no choice but to flee deeper and deeper into the resonance zone (without reammunitioning), and her higher base acceleration would readily permit her to overhaul him there. So he had no choice but to hold his present course.
It was a masterful move on Kuzak's part . . . and exactly the one Lester Tourville had hoped for.
Even though Tourville has turned, momentum will carry Second Fleet into range of Sphinx's MDM pods. It was arranged that way, so they could predict precisely where reinforcements from the Junction would jump.
Over two-thirds of Smirnoff's ships were Cimeterre Alpha and Cimeterre Beta birds, built around the new fission power plants and improved capacitors Shannon Foraker and her technical crews had been able to produce after the windfall of technical data from Erewhon.
The Alphas were equipped with lasers powerful enough to punch through the sidewalls and armor of destroyers and cruisers at normal engagement ranges. They couldn't match the performance of the massive grasers of the Alliance's Shrikes, but they were far more dangerous in energy range than any Republican LAC had ever been before. The Betas weren't a lot more combat capable than the original Cimeterres had been, since they were still armed solely with missiles and those missiles hadn't been significantly improved. But—like the Alphas—they had bow walls and vastly enhanced power budgets and endurance.
Okay, so the
Cimeterre As and Bs aren't really the same as
Shrikes and
Ferrets. They are however, a vast improvement over the old
Cimeterre itself miles ahead of traditional LACs. So now we get the charge of Home Fleet's 2600 LACs.
The engagement was brief. It had to be, with the Manticorans barreling in at such a high closing velocity. Smirnoff had arranged her LACs "above" and "below" the sensor and firing arcs she'd left open for the screen, and her own shorter-legged missiles streaked towards the incoming strike. She had more units than the Manties did, but the Alliance's superior EW more than offset her sheer numerical advantage.
Her Alphas never really got the chance to use their lasers. Their targets were too hard to lock up, streaking across their engagement window too quickly, and her firing angle meant all too many of the laser shots which were fired wasted themselves on the roofs or bellies of their targets' wedges. But her Betas' missiles, although less accurate and capable than the Katanas' Vipers, were fired in enormous numbers.
Six hundred of the Alliance LACs were killed in the fleeting moments Smirnoff had to engage them, but at a price. It was the first time the Allied LAC crews had gone up against someone else's LAC bow walls, but Alice Truman's reports from Lovat had been taken to heart. They might never have encountered it before, but they'd allowed for the possibility, and although the new technology made the new Republican LACs far harder to kill, they still lost at a two-to-one rate as the Allied strike roared past them, into the teeth of the screen's fire.
The screen killed another three hundred, but the price it paid for its success was far higher than the one Smirnoff had paid. The Alliance lost six thousand men and women aboard the LACs Smirnoff's units had killed, and she'd lost roughly eighteen thousand, in return. Now the Alliance lost another three thousand people aboard the LACs the screen had killed. But as the surviving graser-armed Shrikes crashed over the screening cruisers which could not avoid them, they wreaked havoc.
So far, Home Fleet has lost 900 LACs, 600 to the Havenite LAC screen, 300 to the normal screen of destroyers and cruisers. But Haven lost 1200 LACs.
There were "only" sixteen hundred Allied LACs left, but nine hundred of them were Shrikes, and they ignored the heavy cruisers. Those they left to the missile-armed Ferrets, whose light shipkillers were unlikely to do more than scratch the paint of a capital ship. Since they couldn't hurt wallers anyway, there was no point saving them, and three hundred Ferrets flung every missile they had into the teeth of Second Fleet's heavy cruisers. They fired at the last moment, at the shortest possible range, when their victims' defenses would have effectively no time at all to engage with anything except laser clusters. They paid heavily to get to that range, but when they reached it, they spewed out well over sixteen thousand shipkillers.
Those missiles carried only destroyer-weight laser heads, but a heavy cruiser's sidewalls were weaker than a battlecruiser's, and it mounted very little armor compared to any capital ship. Certainly not enough to survive against a fire plan which hit each ship with four hundred missiles from a range at which each laser cluster had time for—at most—a single shot.
The Ferrets fired at a range of 182,000 kilometers, and it took their missiles barely two seconds to cross the range. In those two seconds the heavy cruisers' desperate offensive fire killed another hundred and twelve LACs, but when the surviving Ferrets crossed the screen's position one and a half seconds behind their missiles, they did it in the glaring light of the failing fusion plants of the cruisers they had just slaughtered.
None of the screen's heavy cruisers, and very few of the fifty thousand men and women aboard them, survived.
So much for the heavies, 400 LAC/destroyer missiles apiece are enough, and probably overkill, to nail a CA. Another hundred and change lost.
The battlecruisers fared no better. There were fewer of them, and three times as many attackers. True, each of those attackers got only a single shot, but they were using grasers as powerful as most battlecruisers' chase weapons. They drove straight into the teeth of the battlecruisers' broadsides, closing with grim determination, and they fired at a white-knuckle range of less than seventy-five thousand kilometers.
Four hundred and eighty-one Shrikes and roughly another five thousand Allied personnel died, blown apart by the battle-cruisers' energy weapons in the brief engagement window they had. In return, twenty-eight Republican battlecruisers were completely destroyed, five more were reduced to shattered, broken wrecks, and seventy-seven thousand more of Lester Tourville's personnel were killed.
But in its destruction, Second Fleet's screen had done its job. The LACs which survived the exchange were a broken force, streaming through and past Tourville's surviving superdreadnoughts so rapidly not even the Shrikes had time to inflict significant damage on such massively armored targets. Not without numbers they no longer had.
Just shy 500
Shrikes die killing 28 BCs. Only a few hundred LACs survive, with all of their missiles gone they can no longer threaten Tourville, even if it wouldn't take forever for then to turn around. Second Fleet has effectively lost their screen.
"It looks like only about two hundred of their LACs got away," his chief of staff said. "The wall's energy weapons managed to nail most of the others as they crossed our vector."
Looks like the SDs took a heavy bite out of the LACs themselves, 200 surviving LACs out of 2600.
My God, he thought. I came into this thinking I knew what the casualties were going to be like, but I didn't. Neither did Tom Theisman, really. No one could have projected this kind of carnage, because no one's had any experience, even now, with this kind of fight. Both sides are so far outside our standard operational doctrines that we're in virtually unknown territory. Podnaughts aren't supposed to close head on until they get into mutual suicide range. And we're not supposed to let LACs get that close to our starships. Our wall is supposed to be able to kill them before they ever get to us. But I didn't have the missiles left to do it, and they whipped through our engagement window so quickly our energy weapons couldn't stop them in time, either.
He opened his eyes again, looking back into the plot. In a galaxy where indecisive maneuvers had been the norm for so many centuries, two decades—even two decades like the ones which had begun at Hancock Station—simply hadn't been enough to prepare anyone for this.
The new way of waging war.
"Hyper footprint at two-point-three-six million kilometers!" Commander Zucker barked. "Many footprints!"
-snip-
"Missile launch!" Zucker said. "Many missiles, incom—!"
Diamato's mouth had opened before the ops officer spoke, and his order chopped off the end of Zucker's announcement.
"All units, Code Zebra!" he barked.
RHNS William T. Sherman blinked into hyper less than three seconds before HMS Nike's missiles would have detonated. Two of Diamato's other battlecruisers were less fortunate, a bit slower off the mark. They took hits—RHNS Count Maresuke Nogi lost most of her after impeller ring—but they, too, managed to escape into hyper.
Diamato's BC squadron is driven from their post, but he managed to get all the ships out.
"It was bound to happen sooner or later, Molly. On the other hand, it may actually be good news."
"Good news, Sir?"
"Well, they didn't bother to send through screening units to chase him off before, because they were too busy bringing in their wallers. If they've sent in battlecruisers and cruisers now, it probably confirms that they've already got all their capital ships through the Junction. In which case, this—" he nodded at the oncoming rash of scarlet icons, already well inside their theoretical MDM range of his own battered survivors "—probably is all we've got to deal with."
Tourville figures based on the harrowing of Diamato that Eighth Fleet probably isn't coming.
"Whatever they're up to," she said grimly, "I think you've got a point about their ammunition supply, Jerry. In which case, they aren't going to be hitting us with any more of those monster salvos. And it also means they haven't got enough birds left to waste them firing at long range, with their hit probabilities. We, on the other hand, have full magazines."
"You want to open fire now, Ma'am?" Commander Latrell asked, but she shook her head.
"Not just yet. In fact, not until they do." Her thin smile was cold. "Every kilometer the range drops increases our accuracy by a few thousandths of a percent. As long as they're willing not to shoot, so am I."
Kuzak holding fire for now.
"Franklin, contact Admiral Caparelli. Tell him I recommend that the Sphinx defenses not fire on these people unless and until they launch against Sphinx."
"Yes, Ma'am," Lieutenant Bradshaw replied.
"Are you sure about that, Ma'am?" Smithson asked. Kuzak looked at him, and he looked back levelly. After all, one of a chief of staff's jobs was to play devil's advocate. "If they're going to bombard the planet, letting them get the first launch off unopposed is likely to cost us," he pointed out.
"But as Judson's just pointed out, if they aren't prepared to bombard the planet and the near-planet yards, and the orbital defenses open fire, they may go ahead and return it," Kuzak responded. "And they have been hammered hard. If Sphinx doesn't fire on them, they're probably going to reserve their fire for us, since we're obviously a much greater threat. Under the circumstances, I think it's worth risking letting them have one launch against the defenses, now that they're all on-line. Especially if they decide not to launch."
She also recommends Sphinx doesn't fire, because Second Fleet will return fire and do a lot of damage, maybe accidentally hit the planet.
"Hyper footprint!" one of Latrell's ratings barked suddenly. "Hyper footprint at four-one-point-seven million kilometers, bearing one-eight-zero by one-seven-six!" He paused a second, then looked up, his face white. "Many point sources, Sir! It looks like at least ninety ships of the wall."
And Genevie Chin drops almost a hundred Haven SDs on Kuzak's tail once she's headed inside the hyper limit, sandwiching Third Fleet between Haven's Second and Fifth Fleets.
Honor didn't reply. She was already turning to the sidebars of her own tactical display. Sixteen of her thirty-two superdreadnoughts were still in Trevor's Star, as were all of Samuel Miklós' carriers and thirty of her battlecruisers. She looked at the numbers for perhaps one heartbeat, then turned back to her staff.
"Mercedes, send a dispatch boat back to Trevor's Star. Inform Admiral Miller that he's in command and that he's to hold all of our battlecruisers there. Tell him he's responsible for covering Trevor's Star until we get back to him. Then instruct Judah to bring Admiral Miklós' carriers and all the rest of the wallers through in a single transit."
Suddenly, locking down the wormhole became worth it. Much of Eighth Fleet has come through.
"Theo," she continued, pointing one index finger at Commander Kgari, "start plotting a new micro-jump. We'll go straight from here; no dogleg. I want us at least fifty million kilometers outside these newcomers. Seventy-five to a hundred would be better, but don't shave it any closer than fifty."
Kgari looked at her for a moment, and she tasted his shock. She was allowing him a much larger margin of error than Admiral Kuzak had allowed Third Fleet's units, but she was also requiring him to jump straight from a point inside the RZ to one on its periphery. Safety margin or no, astrogation that precise was going to be extraordinarily difficult to deliver, given the fact that his start point's coordinates were going to be subject to significant uncertainty, whatever he did.
Jumping from within the resonance zone, apparently the RZ introduces uncertainty into exactly where you come out/in to hyper.
"Harper," she continued, turning to the communications section. "Immediate priority message to Admiral Kuzak, copied to Admiralty House. Message begins: 'Admiral Kuzak, I will be moving to your support within—" she looked at the chronometer, but nothing she could do could make time move more slowly "—fifteen minutes. If I can reduce that, I will.' Message ends."
Time to Eighth Fleet's arrival.
"I want to concentrate on this new bunch," McKeon continued. "They haven't been hit yet, their fire control and their tactical departments are going to be in better shape. We'll take them one ship at a time."
"Understood, Admiral," Slowacki said again, and McKeon pointed at the icons of Genevieve Chin's task force.
"Good. Now go kill as many of those bastards as you can."
"Aye, aye, Sir!"
"I wish Her Grace were here, Sir," Commander Roslee Orndorff said quietly beside McKeon as Slowacki and his assistants began updating their targeting solutions.
"I don't," McKeon told Orndorff, his voice equally quiet, and shook his head. "This is one not even she could get us out of, Roslee."
Most of Third Fleet will fire on Second, as the larger fleet and the more immediate threat to Sphinx. McKeon's Apollo-equipped SDs will snipe at Fifth Fleet. And in case you couldn't figure it out, this is where Honor was originally going to die, in McKeon's place adding some Apollo capability to Third Fleet before a vengeful Eighth comes charging in, and sealing her place in the legendarium of Manticore's great naval heroes.
Unlike Oliver Diamato's battlecruisers, Third Fleet couldn't dodge the pulser dart. Admiral Kuzak's command was too deep, pinned inside the RZ. Kuzak had intended to catch Second Fleet between her command and the Sphinx planetary defenses; now she was caught between the oncoming hammer of Genevieve Chin's MDMs and the battered anvil of Lester Tourville's surviving SD(P)s.
At least Third Fleet's base velocity was almost fourteen thousand kilometers per second higher than Fifth Fleet's, and almost directly away from it. Given that geometry, Chin's powered missile envelope was only fifty-one million kilometers. But the range was only 41,700,000 kilometers, and that meant Chin could keep Kuzak's ships under fire for eleven minutes before Third Fleet could run out of range.
Eleven minutes. It didn't sound like such a long time, but it was longer than Home Fleet had survived against Lester Tourville. And Home Fleet hadn't been running directly into the fire of one foe while the fire of a second came ripping into it from behind.
Geometry of the fight.
"It looks like we're going to get hammered, Scotty," Truman told him bluntly. "I want you to detach your Katanas. Leave them behind to help thicken Admiral Kuzak's defenses. Then take all the rest of your birds and head for the in-system force now."
Tremaine looked at her for just a moment. He knew what she had in mind. His Ferrets and Shrikes, especially the former, were preparing to help bolster Third Fleet's missile defenses, yet compared to his Katanas, their contribution would have been relatively minor. But by sending them against the survivors of the first Havenite attack force, she might compel it to divert its fire. It no longer had a screen, its attached LACs had taken severe losses, and it couldn't simply run away from him into hyper. It would have no choice but to stand and fight, and if it let him get into attack range without severe losses of his own . . .
Katanas stay behind for missile defense, all other LACs charge on the unscreened Second Fleet forcing them to divert MDMs to the incoming.
"Send Smirnoff out to meet these people."
"Captain Smirnoff is dead, Sir," Adamson said. "Commander West is COLAC now."
Tourville winced internally. He hadn't known Alice Smirnoff well. Only met the woman twice, actually, and then only in passing. But somehow her death, unnoticed in the general carnage, suddenly seemed to symbolize the hundreds of thousands of his personnel who had perished in the last three hours.
"Very well," he said, an edge of harshness burring his otherwise level response, "send West out to meet them."
"Aye, Sir."
"Is that going to be enough, Boss?" DeLaney asked quietly, and Tourville shook his head.
"No. They aren't sending in as many, but these people are fresh, and Smirnoff—West—and his people burned too many missiles stopping the last attack. We're going to have to take them with MDMs."
"Do you want to shift targeting?"
"Not yet." Tourville shook his head. "That's what they want us to do, and I'm not taking any pressure off Kuzak until we have to. But it's going to limit the number of salvos we can give her."
Of course Tourville knows exactly what they're doing, and will wait to the last second to shift firing priorities.
Counter-missiles tore into the oncoming MDMs, and at least this time they hadn't been able to deploy whatever had let them throw such monster salvos at Home Fleet. These were merely "normal" double-pattern broadsides from over a hundred SD(P)s.
Nothing to worry about, she told herself; only twelve thousand missiles or so. No more than a couple of hundred per ship. Just a walk in the park.
Except, of course, that they weren't spreading them over all of Third Fleet's ships.
Incoming.
Scotty Tremaine's detached Katanas were tucked in close, hovering "above" Third Fleet, rather than going out to meet the incoming missiles as normal doctrine would have dictated. Normal doctrine, after all, hadn't anticipated a situation in which a fleet would screw up so badly it found itself squarely between two widely separated enemy fleets, each numerically superior to itself, and in range of both. The LACs couldn't place themselves between one threat and the rest of Third Fleet without leaving it uncovered against the other, and so they held their position, spitting Vipers against the wall of destruction crashing towards Theodosia Kuzak's command.
Thousands of Mark 31 counter-missiles went out with the Vipers, and Truman felt Chimera quiver as her own counter—missile tubes went to rapid fire, but nothing was going to stop all of that torrent of MDMs. Decoys and Dazzlers strove to bewilder or blind the incoming missiles, but still they came on.
LACs on missile defense, and the modifications to cover against salvos from two directions.
Even with its attention divided between the salvos rumbling down on it from opposite directions, Third Fleet's missile defense was far more effective than Home Fleet's had been. Partly that was simply the difference in the numbers of missiles in each incoming salvo. Another part was the difference in closing velocities, which improved engagement times. And, especially against Second Fleet, it was because so many of the ships launching those missiles had themselves been damaged, in many cases severely, before they launched. They'd lost control links, sensors, computational ability, and critical personnel out of their tactical departments, with inevitable consequences for the accuracy of their fire.
Why the missile defense is going better. Not having a quarter million incoming all at once from relatively short range helps too.
Twenty percent were electronic warfare platforms. Another twelve percent simply lost lock, as Goodrick had predicted. The massed counter-missiles of Third Fleet and Alice Truman's Katanas killed almost four thousand, and the last-ditch fire of the 91st Battle Squadron and its escorts killed another fifteen hundred. It was a remarkable performance, but it still meant twenty-seven hundred got through.
The heavy laser heads detonated in rapid succession, bubbles of brimstone birthing X-ray lasers that ripped and tore at their targets. The superdreadnoughts' wedges intercepted many of those lasers. Their sidewalls bent and attenuated others. But nothing built by man could have stopped all of them.
The massively armored superdreadnoughts shuddered and bucked as transfer energy blasted into them. Armor and hull plating splintered, atmosphere gushed from gaping holes, and weapons, communications arrays, and sensors were torn apart. HMS Triumph staggered as her forward impeller ring went into emergency shutdown. Her wedge faltered, and then she staggered again, like a seasick galleon, as a half-dozen more laser heads detonated almost directly ahead of her. Her bow wall stopped most of the lasers, but at least twelve stabbed straight through it, hammering the massively armored face of her forward hammerhead. Her forward point defense clusters went down, her chase energy weapons were pounded into broken rubble, and one of her forward impeller rooms blew up as the massive capacitors shorted across.
For a moment, it looked like that was the extent of her damage. But deep inside her, invisible from the outside, the energy spike of that demolished impeller room drove deeper and deeper. Circuit breakers failed to stop it, control runs exploded, power conduits blew up in deadly sequence, and then, suddenly, the ship herself simply exploded.
Death of
Triumph. 4,000 missiles (or a third the salvo) stopped by counter missiles, another 1500 by laser clusters.
Her squadron mates were more fortunate. None of them escaped unscathed, however, and HMS Warrior lost over half her port sidewall. HMS Ellen D'Orville lost half the beta nodes in her after impeller ring, and HMS Bellona's port broadside point defense clusters and gravitic arrays were beaten into scrap. HMS Regulus escaped with only minor damage, but HMS Marduk lost a quarter of her broadside energy weapons. All of them survived, and their ability to deploy pods remained intact, but the follow-up salvo from Second Fleet was close on the heels of the first, and the first salvo from Fifth Fleet came crunching in almost simultaneously.
Damage to the squadron Second Fleet focused their fire on and look, more missiles.
Third Fleet's defenses were simply spread too thin. Twelve thousand missiles came pounding down on it from Lester Tourville. Another 11,500 came crashing in from Genevieve Chin, and there simply weren't enough counter-missiles and Katanas to stop them all.
Getting flanked is no fun at all. Note that Chin has less than half the podnoughts Tourville does but can get off almost as much fire. I suspect this is due to battle damage on the part of Tourville's ships.
Most of Fifth Fleet's wallers were more than holding their own against the Manties' fire. That was largely because at least three-quarters of that fire was still raining down on Lester Tourville's superdreadnoughts. Probably, Chin thought, because Tourville was still headed in-system. It looked as if Kuzak had decided stopping him was more important than shooting at ships which could vanish into hyper any time they chose, once their hyper generators had finished cycling from their last translation.
But if most of Third Fleet's missiles were headed in-system, three or four of Kuzak's ships were firing on Chin's wall with deadly accuracy. Their missiles threaded through the cauldron of counter-missiles, EW, and blazing laser clusters like awls. It was as if they could literally see where they were going, think for themselves, and they were coming in behind a deadly shield of closely coordinated electronic warfare platforms. Her missile defenses were hopelessly outclassed against them, and whoever was coordinating their targeting had chosen one of her battle squadrons and begun working her way through it.
Each individual salvo wasn't particularly large. Indeed, by the standards of pod-based combat, they were ludicrously tiny. But all of them seemed to be getting through. None of them wandered off. None wasted themselves by detonating high, or low, where their target's impeller wedge might stop them. And as they sent their avalanches of lasers through that target's wavering sidewall in deadly succession, they killed.
"Goddamn it!" she heard Sabourin say with soft, passionate venom as RHNS Lancelot slewed suddenly out of formation, impeller wedge dying.
Effectiveness of Apollo once again, even with just three podnoughts firing double-patterns, every salvo is a kill or cripple. That's 288 non-control missiles, though there will be EW birds in there. Fits with later dialogue that they need salvos of 200-250 capital or pod missiles to guarantee a modern SD kill or mission-kill. Contrast with 150 birds when the war began before everyone doubled down on missile defense.
Dame Alice Truman watched her plot sickly as missile after missile slammed its lasers into Third Fleet's superdreadnoughts. Her carriers were taking hits, too, but nothing compared to the agony of Kuzak's wall. It looked to Truman as if most of the hits on her carriers were overs or unders—MDMs which had lost the wallers on which they'd been targeted and found one of her carriers instead.
The bastards figure they can always get around to killing carriers later, she thought coldly, and felt an incredible stab of guilt as she realized how grateful she was. Yet she couldn't help it, for the people aboard her ships were her people, the people for whom she was responsible, and she wanted them to live.
"They're targeting Admiral McKeon, Ma'am!" Commander Stanfield said suddenly, and Truman's eyes snapped to the icon of HMS Intransigent.
Ignoring the carriers, but by luck they've targeted the squadron with the Apollo ships.
"Well done, Alekan!" Alistair McKeon replied, teeth bared in a wolfish grin of his own. His battle squadron had landed four salvos of Apollo-guided MDMs, and they'd killed a Havenite superdreadnought with each of them. In fact, they'd done better than that; the kill Slowacki had just announced was their fifth.
"Now go find another one," he said, and Slowacki nodded.
5 salvos, 5 kills. In case you thought I was exaggerating.
Intransigent heaved madly as the lasers blasted into her. Astern of her, HMS Elizabeth I staggered as at least eighty direct hits slammed into her. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then, like her older sister Triumph, she vanished in a brief, terrible new star. Second Yeltsin and Revenge shuddered in agony of their own as the focused hurricane of destruction swept over McKeon's squadron. HMS Incomparable, Imperator's division mate in place of the dead Intolerant, lurched out of formation, impellers dead, wreckage trailing, life pods launching. Then the last few hundred missiles of the concentrated salvo came punching in, and Second Yeltsin blew up while Revenge's wedge went down. She started to fall behind, but before she could at least twelve lasers slammed directly into the unarmored top of her hull, which was supposed to be protected by her wedge. With no armor to stop them, the powerful lasers ripped deep into the superdreadnought's core, probing until they found her heart.
Thirty-one seconds after Second Yeltsin, HMS Revenge joined her in fiery death.
Intransigent survived. The only survivor of her entire squadron, Alistair McKeon's flagship staggered onward, little more than a wreck, but still alive.
Destruction of McKeon's squadron.
Yet another hit slammed into HMS King Roger III. It stabbed deep, ripping through the wounds two of its predecessors had already torn. It breached the flagship's core hull, tearing its way into central engineering, and the superdreadnought's inertial compensator suddenly failed.
The emergency circuits shut down her impellers almost instantly, but "almost instantly" wasn't good enough for a ship under six hundred and twelve gravities of acceleration.
The ship sustained only moderate structural damage; none of her crew survived.
And here's that compensator failure I was talking about. Seems there's an emergency system to cut the impellers the moment inertial compensators fail, which may be why there was less damage.
"The flagship's gone," Goodrick said harshly. "That puts you in command."
"What about Vice Admiral Emiliani?" Truman demanded.
"Valkyrie took a hit on flag bridge. Emiliani is dead. You're next most senior."
Truman stood for perhaps two heartbeats, then she shook herself.
"Very well," she said. "Franklin," she looked at Lieutenant Bradshaw. "General signal, all units. Inform them that command has passed to Chimera."
"Yes, Ma'am." Bradshaw seemed almost calm, anesthetized, perhaps, by the intensity of the carnage. "Any orders?" he asked.
"No." Truman shook her head. "Not at this time."
Poor Theodosia Kuzak is dead, Alice Truman assumes command.
Third Fleet was finished, she thought, her grim satisfaction tinged with more than a little horror as she contemplated the losses both navies had suffered this blood-soaked day. Thirty of the Manty SDs had been destroyed or hulked. Over half the survivors had critical damage, and whoever had been equipped with that new weapons system was among the dead or disabled.
-snip-
She looked at the tally on one of her secondary displays. Second Fleet was down to only seventy-five ships—only fifty-six effectives, really—out of the two hundred and forty wallers and ninety escorts Lester Tourville had taken into the resonance zone. She herself had lost "only" eleven superdreadnoughts, and most of the crew had gotten out of three of them. But the back of the Star Kingdom's home system's defenses had been broken. She still had plenty of missile pods left aboard her remaining eighty-five wallers, and Second Fleet, despite its own brutal losses, had enough combat power to finish off Third Fleet's remnants. And then—
Losses on both sides.
"Hyper footprint!" Spiropoulo said suddenly. "Multiple hyper footprints at seven-two-point-niner-three million kilometers!"
* * *
Honor Alexander-Harrington's eyes were brown ice as Theophile Kgari, in a virtuoso display of astrogation, dropped the massed superdreadnoughts of Eighth Fleet exactly where she'd told him to in a single jump right out of the center of the resonance zone.
She didn't look at the pathetic remnants of Third Fleet's icons. Didn't even glance at the other icons, representing Lester Tourville's task force. She had attention only for Genevieve Chin's superdreadnoughts, and her voice was a frozen soprano sword.
"Engage the enemy, Andrea," Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington said.
Eighth Fleet arrives.
Eighth Fleet released the five thousand Apollo pods which had been tractored to its SD(P)s' hulls, then spent another three minutes rolling additional pods. In all, it deployed a total of 7,776, almost exactly half its total ammunition allotment, given the Andermani ships' lighter magazine capacity.
Then it fired.
So that'd be... ~62,000 missiles (again not counting the Apollo control relays).
Apollo had done several things. It provided something verging on genuine real-time control of her missiles even at this range. By using the Apollo birds to control the other missiles from their pods, it effectively multiplied the number of MDMs each ship could control by a factor of eight.
And it provided her tactical officers with unprecedented control over their missiles' fight profiles.
Eighth Fleet was the only formation in space fully equipped with the new system, and Honor and her captains had spent long, thoughtful hours exploring Apollo's ramifications. Now she was prepared to use them.
Apparently each pod's worth of Apollo missiles ties up a single control link, to the missile, meaning not only are Apollo missiles vastly more effective at getting more birds to target, they can handle even bigger missile swarms to boot.
"They boosted for six minutes at forty-six thousand gravities, Ma'am," Spiropoulo said. "Then they just shut the hell down. I altered course as soon as their impellers went down, which they have to know is going to play hell with whatever accuracy they might have achieved. And that's not the only screwy thing they're up to. Look at this."
The ops officer punched a macro, and Chin frowned as an additional cluster of impeller signatures blinked into existence. For some reason known only to itself and God, the Manty task force ahead of them had just fired another pattern of pods—one pattern of pods, with less than sixty missiles in it. And it hadn't fired them at Chin's ships; the missile vectors made it obvious the Manties had fired at Second Fleet, almost 150,000,000 kilometers away from them, inside the resonance zone.
Launching missiles from insane range, even for MDMs puzzles Chin and her Chief of Staff.
She glanced at the time display while she did some mental math. Assume they waited until the birds were, say, eighty seconds out and then kicked in the last stage at 46,000 gravities. That would give them eighty seconds of maneuver time, for however much good that would do them at this extended range.
If they let the missiles come all the way in ballistic, flight time from shutdown would be about four and a half minutes. But they won't. So say they do bring the drives back up eighty seconds out—that would put them about three minutes before attack range on a straight ballistic profile—they'd still have about 13,000,000 kilometers to go. So if they kick the remaining drive at 46,000 gees at that point, they'll shave maybe seven seconds off their arrival time, and they'll be coming in somewhere around 200,000 KPS. But their accuracy will still suck. And what the hell do they think they're doing with this other little cluster?
Andrianna was right. It didn't make sense, unless Nicodème was right and they were trying to panic her. But if Third Fleet was what they'd just finished destroying, then these people had to be Eighth Fleet, which meant Honor Harrington. And Harrington didn't do things that didn't make sense. So what—?
Her eyes opened wide in horror.
"General signal all units!" she shouted, spinning towards her com section. "Hyper out immediately! Repeat, hyper out—"
But it had taken Genevieve Chin two minutes too long to realize what was happening.
Chin remembers Apollo. A bit too late.
"Drives going active . . . now, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, and the missiles thirteen million kilometers short of Fifth Fleet suddenly brought their final drive stages on-line. Their icons burned abruptly bright and strong once again as they lit off their impellers . . . and hurled themselves at their targets under full shipboard control.
They blazed in across the remaining distance, tracking with clean, lethal precision, and their ballistic flight had dropped them off of the Republic's sensors. Chin's ships knew approximately where they were, but not exactly, and their supporting EW platforms and penetration aids came up with their impellers. They hurtled in across the Republican SD(P)s' defensive envelope at over half the speed of light, and the sudden eruption of jamming, of Dragon's Teeth spilling false targets, hammered those defenses mercilessly.
The fact that the missile defense crews aboard those ships had known, without question, that the attacking missiles would be clumsy, half-blind, only made a disastrous situation even worse.
Eighth Fleet had deployed almost eight thousand pods. Those pods launched 69,984 missiles. Of that total, 7,776 were Apollo birds. Another 8,000 were electronic warfare platforms. Which meant that 54,208 carried laser heads—laser heads which homed on Genevieve Chin's ships with murderously accurate targeting.
Fifth Fleet's missile defenses did their best.
Their best was not good enough.
-snip-
Fifth Fleet stopped almost thirty percent of them, which was a truly miraculous total, under the circumstances. But over thirty-seven thousand got through.
It was, she decided coldly, a case of overkill.
Missile defense against Apollo.
Only seven of Theodosia Kuzak's super-dread-noughts were still in action, and all of them were brutally damaged. Another three had technically survived, but Truman doubted any of the ten would be worth repairing. All four of Kuzak's CLACs had been killed, and of Truman's own eight, three had been destroyed, one was a drifting cripple without impellers, and the other four—including Chimera—were severely damaged. For all intents and purposes, Third Fleet had been as totally destroyed as Home Fleet.
But the merciless hail of missiles had at least stopped pounding its remnants.
Agree with Chin, that's the end of Third Fleet which fought bravely and did everything right, but still got caught in a mouse-trap designed to kill the larger Eighth Fleet.
"That's ridiculous! They're a hundred fifty million klicks away!"
"Well, they're coming in on us now anyway," Tourville said sharply as Guerriere's missile defense batteries began to fire once more.
They didn't do much good. He watched sickly as the missiles which had suddenly brought up their impellers, appearing literally out of nowhere, hurtled down on his battered and broken command. They drove straight in, swerving, dancing, and his sick feeling of helplessness frayed around the edges as he realized there were less than sixty of them. Whatever they were, they weren't a serious attack on his surviving ships, so what—?
His jaw tightened as the missiles made their final approach. But they didn't detonate. Instead, they hurtled directly through his formation, straight through the teeth of his blazing laser clusters.
His point defense crews managed to nail two-thirds of them, despite the totality of the tactical surprise they'd acieved [sic]. The other twenty pirouetted, swerved to one side, then detonated in a perfectly synchronized, deadly accurate attack . . . on absolutely nothing.
Tourville's a smart man, so I trust he gets the point of this demonstration.
An instant later, a face appeared on Tourville's display. He'd seen that face before, when its owner surrendered to him. And again, when she had been clubbed down by the pulse rifle butts of State Security goons. Now she looked at him, her eyes like two more missile tubes.
"We meet again, Admiral Tourville," she said, and her soprano voice was cold.
"Admiral Harrington," he replied. "This is a surprise. I thought you were about eight light-minutes away."
He gazed at her hard eyes, eyes like leveled missile tubes, and waited. The transmission lag for light-speed communications should have been eight minutes—sixteen minutes, for a two-way exchange—at that range, but she spoke again barely fifteen seconds after he finished.
"I am. I'm speaking to you over what we call a 'Hermes buoy.' It's an FTL relay with standard sub-light communication capability." The expression she produced was technically a smile, but it was one that belonged on something out of deep, dark oceanic depths.
"We have several of them deployed around the system. I simply plugged into the nearest one so that I could speak directly to you," she continued in that same, icy-cold voice. "I'm sure you observed my birds' terminal performance. I'm also sure you understand I have the capability to blow every single one of your remaining ships out of space from my present position. I hope you aren't going to make it necessary for me to do so."
The Hermes buoy allows a near real-time chat. Lester's got a choice to make.
"No, Your Grace," he said quietly. "I won't make it necessary."
Another endless fifteen seconds dragged past. Then—
"I'm glad to hear that," she told him, "however my acceptance of your surrender is contingent upon the surrender of your ships—and their databases—in their present condition. Is that clearly understood, Admiral Tourville?"
He hovered on the brink of refusing, of declaring that he would scrub his databases, as was customary, before surrendering a ship. But then he looked into those icy eyes again, and the temptation vanished.
"It's . . . understood, Your Grace," he made himself say, and sat there tasting the bitter poison of defeat. Defeat made all the more poisonous by how close Beatrice had come to success . . . and how completely it had failed, in the end.
Smart choice. Honor insists they don't wipe their computers, as is usually customary when surrendering.
Honor felt drained and empty. She supposed she should feel triumph. After all, she'd just destroyed almost seventy superdreadnoughts, and captured another seventy-five. That had to be an interstellar record, and for a bonus, her people had saved the Star Kingdom's capital system from invasion. But after so much carnage, so much destruction, how was a woman supposed to feel triumphant?
There is that.
"Your Grace, most of our ships are gone," Jaruwalski said softly, "but I've got transponder codes on both Chimera and Intransigent."
-snip-
"I can't raise Chimera," Brantley continued. "It looks like she's actually in better general shape than Intransigent, but her grav com seems to be down. I've got Captain Thomas on the FTL, though."
-snip-
"I've accepted the surrender of the remaining Havenite vessels," Honor continued. "Since you're so much closer to them than I am, it would make more sense to let Admiral McKeon or Admiral Truman handle the final details. Could I speak to Admiral McKeon, please?"
She sat there, waiting, her mind running ahead to all the things she needed to discuss with Alistair. If he could take over the actual surrender formalities, get some pinnaces loaded with Marines aboard Tourville's ships quickly, then—
"I—" Thomas began thirteen seconds later, then paused and closed her eyes for just a moment, her weary face wrung with pain.
"Your Grace," she said softly, "I'm sorry. We took a direct hit on Flag Bridge. There were . . . no survivors."
And we lost McKeon. Again, this is where in the series Honor would have died. With the spin-off books introducing the twin menace of shadowy Mesan puppetmasters and the grasping Solarian League those threads would have been picked up again 20-30 years down the line by Honor's son, Raoul Harrington. But Weber backed out from his planned execution, even though Honor has sort of reached the logical end of her character arc.
EDIT: tagged one quote as code instead, fixed.
