by David Weber
"They could be relaying through deployed platforms," Broughton countered, in the interest of considering all alternatives, not because he really disagreed with Witcinski.
"Than their platforms would have to be a lot more capable than anything they're supposed to be able to build, Sir," Witcinski returned, and Broughton nodded.
"Can't argue there, Sigismund," he conceded. "On the other hand, this looks like a straight evolution of the same basic missile defense doctrine they apparently employed at Sidemore. They're throwing everything they can at the birds, and it looks to me like they must have refitted heavily with additional counter-missile tubes and control links. It's the only way that few ships could produce that volume of defensive fire."
"I suppose it makes sense, especially if they can't deploy their version of the MDM aboard something as small as a battlecruiser," Witcinski said.
"And it's going to play hell with our calculations of the necessary salvo density for effective system defense," Broughton agreed.
* * *
Morton Schneider watched the Manticoran missiles knife towards his LACs like so many space-going sharks. A blizzard of counter-missiles raced to meet them, but the attack missiles' accompanying electronics warfare platforms were far too capable. CM after CM lost its target, wandering hopelessly off course. The first wave intercept killed only twenty of the incoming MDMs. The second wave of counter-missiles did better-over a hundred and fifty of the Manticoran missiles disappeared-but that left over twelve hundred, and he wasn't going to have time for more than another two or three CM launches. Only, if he took those launches, there wouldn't be time for Zizka, and in the face of that massive missile storm....
"Implement Zizka now!" he snapped.
"Aye, Sir. Implementing Zizka," Rothschild replied instantly, and smacked the heel of his hand down on the big, red button beside his tactical panel.
Two hundred Cimeterre-class LACs launched their full missile loads. Six thousand far-shorter ranged missiles, launched in three slightly staggered waves, went streaking to meet the incoming Manticoran MDMs, and Broughton watched his display narrowly as they spread apart, each bird positioning itself precisely to play its part in the "Triple Ripple." Designed to knock back the sensors and EW of Manty LACs, it ought to do a real number on missile sensors which had to be pointed directly towards their target at this point.
The lead wave of his missiles was almost into position when the MDMs abruptly changed heading. Schneider's jaw muscles clenched painfully as the attack missiles' vectors changed. Half of them were "climbing" sharply, while the other half "dove" equally sharply, and he swallowed a venomous oath as he realized what they were doing.
So one of their pickets who saw the Ripple did get home, he thought. And the bastards decided to do something about it. Worse, they figured out the possibilities for missile defense and did something about them, too..
The maneuver had to be the result of a preprogrammed attack profile. There was far too little time for whoever had fired them to change profiles that quickly on the fly. But whoever had done the preprogramming had timed it well. The change in attitude interposed the floors and roofs of the MDMs' impeller wedges between them and the Cimeterres' missiles just as the powerful, dirty warheads of the Republican missiles began to detonate. The solid wall of blast fronts and EMP which was supposed to blind and burn out the Manticoran missiles' seekers wasted itself against sensors which couldn't even see it.
All three Zizka waves detonated, and the flood of attack missiles which had parted around the Triple Ripple's roadblock, altered heading once more. Their noses swung back towards their targets, and there wasn't time for another counter-missile launch.
Laser heads began to detonate in deadly sequence. X-ray lasers, designed to engage superdreadnoughts, ripped and tore at mere LACs, and space was abruptly ugly with broken and dying craft. Light attack craft shattered, vomiting hull splinters and bodies. Fusion bottles flashed like funeral pyres, and a tsunami of fire washed over Schneider's formation.
The evasion maneuver programmed into the Manticoran missiles as a counter to the Triple Ripple had blunted the defensive maneuver, but it had also broken the attack missiles' locks on their designated targets. They had to reacquire on their own, without guidance from the ships which had launched them, and their onboard targeting systems were far less capable than the fire control of their motherships.
Twelve hundred missiles reached attack range, but over half of them never managed to relocate a target before their overtake velocity carried them clear past the Havenite LACs. Of the five hundred-plus which did see a target, the vast majority concentrated on the most exposed, clearly visible targets. "Only" one hundred and seventy-five of Schneider's LACs were actually attacked. Of that number, seventeen survived.
* * *
"Well, that sucks," Lieutenant Janice Kent observed.
The youthful, dark-haired lieutenant was the tactical officer aboard HMS Ice Pick, the command LAC of Captain Broughton's strike. Commander Hertz, Ice Pick's commanding officer and Broughton's COLAC, glanced sideways at her.
"It's better than a twenty percent kill of their entire formation," he pointed out, and she made a face.
"Sure it is, Skip," she agreed. "But it's less than a ten percent kill ratio for the launch as a whole. Against targets we're supposed to be killing with a single hit each."
"True," Hertz conceded. "But I'll bet you it came as a nasty surprise to them. And at least we know the pop-up maneuver works. Not well, maybe, but well enough to get at least some hits through."
"And now they know we know," Kent said. "Which means they're going to be thinking of another new wrinkle of their own."
"If you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined," Hertz told her, and she chuckled sourly.
* * *
Oliver Diamato watched his plot as the counter-missiles tore into the cloud of attacking missiles. Despite their relatively poor targeting solutions and limited tracking capability, the sheer mass of Republican CMs had to have some effect, and dozens of Manticoran missiles began to disappear.
Unfortunately, there were hundreds of them.
Next time, a distant corner of Diamato's brain thought, we hold some of the LACs back. We need their point defense.
The second and third waves of counter-missiles killed still more of the attackers, but the Manticoran electronic warfare platforms were fully active, now, and intercept accuracy plummeted.
The torrent of MDMs slammed across the outer and middle intercept zones, and shipboard point defense laser clusters began to fire. Broadside energy weapons joined them, blazing away in defiant fury as the heavy warheads thundered down upon them.
Everard Broughton had fired eight hundred and thirty missiles at Diamato's squadron and the CLACs he was escorting. Counter-missiles killed two hundred and eleven of them. The close-in energy weapons killed another two hundred and six. Of the remaining four hundred and thirteen, fifty-one were EW platforms, and another hundred and six were defeated by Republican ECM and simply lost lock and wandered off course until they self-destructed at the end of their run.
But that meant that two hundred and fifty-six reached attack range and detonated.
The long range had aided the Republic's defenses by giving them longer tracking time and a deeper engagement envelope. The capability of Manticoran EW had gone a long way towards offsetting that, but nothing the Manticorans could do could magically erase the fire control problems inherent in targeting a maneuvering starship at a range of almost three light-minutes. Every one of the attack missiles had been initially targeted upon one of the CLACs, but a third even of those which reached attack range had lost their original targets and took whatever they could find in replacement.
Some of them reacquired one or the other of the CLACs. Others didn't.
William T. Sherman staggered as a dozen X-ray lasers gouged at her. Half of them wasted their fury against her impeller wedge, and her sidewalls caught at the other half-dozen, bendi
ng and deflecting them. Only two actually struck the ship, but they blasted deep into her, shattering her relatively light armor with contemptuous ease.
"Heavy damage starboard forward! Graser Three and Five are gone-heavy casualties on both mounts! Missile One, Three, and Seven are out of the net! We have a breach in the core hull between Frame Sixty and Frame Seventy!"
Diamato heard the damage reports, but his eyes were riveted to the icons of RHNS Skylark and Peregrine as the full brunt of the Manticoran attack slammed down upon them.
Skylark heaved as the X-ray lasers blasted into her. Over half the total surviving laser heads went after her, and the big ship shuddered in agony as laser after laser ripped into her. The carrier division's flagship was big-bigger than most superdreadnoughts-but she wasn't a superdreadnought. She was a CLAC, her flanks studded with launch bays which simply could not be as massively armored as a superdreadnought's hull. Her core hull, wrapped around her fusion plants, her magazines, her life-support and other critical systems, could be and was, but it lacked the layer upon layer of defenses built into the outer structure of a ship of the wall.
Hull plating shattered. Glowing splinters-some bigger than one of her own LACs-flew like sparks from some hideous forge. Counter-missile tubes and point defense stations were blasted away, along with their crews, and the stilettos of bomb-pumped fury tore deeper and deeper into her.
Diamato would never know exactly how many of them stabbed into her, but, in the end, it was one too many.
Her entire forward impeller room exploded in a chain reaction of arcing capacitors. Her wedge faltered, letting still more lasers through to rend and tear, and power surges blew through her systems like demons.
One of them reached her inertial compensator. It failed, and the two hundred-plus gravities of acceleration from her still-active after impeller ring killed every man and woman aboard her in the fleeting seconds before it broke her back. The white-hot flare of her failing fusion bottles simply punctuated her destruction.
The light cruiser Phantom went with her, victim of at least three MDMs intended for her betters, and Peregrine was severely damaged. All of Diamato's battlecruisers took at least some damage of their own, but Peregrine was far more badly hit.
"She's down two alphas and five betas out of her after ring, Sir," Zucker reported. "Half her starboard bays are out of action, and she's lost at least thirty percent of her missile defense. Her starboard sidewall's down to about forty percent, and Captain Joubert reports very heavy casualties."
"Thank you, Robert," Diamato said, projecting a calm he was far from feeling.
He looked back at his master plot. With Duval-and Skylark-dead, the full responsibility of command had just landed squarely on his shoulders, and he forced himself to draw a deep breath. As Captain Hall had once said, there was always time to think. Maybe not a lot, but there was always some time... or else you were already so screwed it didn't matter what you did.
His mouth quirked mordantly at the thought, and his brain began sorting through the situation.
Sherman was hurt, but still combat capable... except for the minor fact that he couldn't see anything to engage other than the Manty LACs who were far, far out of his range. And while it seemed likely that the torrent of missiles which had ravaged the task group had come from independently deployed pods, it was entirely possible they hadn't. There might well be Manty battlecruisers-or even a couple of ships of the wall-out here. A couple of old-style wallers, without onboard MDM capability, would make mincemeat out of his remaining strength without breaking a sweat, and if there were even a single pod-layer in range....
Captain Schneider's LACs were shaking back down into formation, he saw, and made his decision. The Republic's FTL communications ability continued to lag far behind that of the Manticorans, despite the tech windfall from Erewhon. It was better than it had been, and there were promises of better still, but the new Havenite systems were more massive than their Manty counterparts, and they were difficult to refit to an existing ship's impeller nodes. New-build ships would come from the yards with vastly improved capabilities, but older ships-like Sherman-remained far more limited. Still, what Diamato has was going to be enough for what he had to do.
"We've got to get Peregrine clear, Serena," he said flatly. "Instruct Captain Joubert to translate out immediately. He's too take his ship to the Alpha rendezvous and wait for us there. If he hasn't seen any of us within forty-eight hours of his own arrival, he's to return independently to base. Instruct Specter to escort Peregrine."
"Yes, Sir," Commander Taverner said quietly, and Diamato's mouth twitched in a bitter almost-smile at the chief of staff's tone. Detaching Peregrine meant Diamato was writing off all of his LACs, but the rear admiral had no choice. The ship was simply too badly damaged, and the Republic couldn't afford for him to lose her as he'd already lost Skylark.
"Send a message to Captain Schneider," Diamato continued, turning to Communications. "Inform him that Plan Zulu-Three is in effect."
"Aye, Sir."
Diamato sat back in his command chair, watching his plot with hard blue eyes, as his orders went out. Peregrine's icon turned away, accompanied by the surviving light cruiser, and disappeared into the concealing safety of hyper-space.
At least I got her safely out of here, he thought. He knew his bitter self-recrimination was undeserved. He and Harold Duval had done exactly what their orders had specified, and the people who'd written those orders had known something like this might happen. The entire point of the attack had been to discover how the Manties' system defense doctrine was evolving, and in the callous calculus of war, the price the Republic had paid to achieve that goal was not excessive. Or, at least, it was far lower than the price the same sort of defenses might have exacted against a heavier, serious attack in force which didn't know about them.
But that made him feel no better about Skylark's destruction. Even with her LACs away, there had been over three thousand men and women aboard that ship, and not one of them had survived. That was a bitter price, excessive or not. And it did not include the eight thousand-plus Republican naval personnel aboard the task group's LACs. Too many of them were already dead, more of them were going to die, and Oliver Diamato had just ordered the only ship which could have recovered their LACs out of the system.
He watched the impeller signatures of Schneider's LACs breaking down into three- and four-squadron formations, scattering on individual evasion courses. This, too, had been planned for, however little anyone had actually expected the plan to be needed. Under Zulu-Three, Schneider's units would make for half a dozen widely separated rendezvouses beyond the hyper limit, where Diamato's battlecruisers would recover as many of their crewmen as possible.
It was going to be tight, and difficult. The odds were that Schneider's escape courses would take his LACs into the reach of still more of the deployed system defense pods. It was possible none of his ships would survive to reach a rendezvous, or that the Manties would manage to deduce the rendezvouses locations and get something into position to interdict them. Or that the faster, more capable Manty LACs would intercept the Cimeterres short of the limit.
But Oliver Diamato was grimly determined that anyone who did reach one of the rendezvous points would find someone waiting there to take him home.
"All right," he said. "Take us into hyper. Astrogation, start your update on the Zulu-Three positions."
Chapter Ten
"Everyone is here now, Your Grace."
Honor looked up from the report she'd been reading. James MacGuiness stood in the open door of her Jason Bay mansion's office, and she shook her head wryly at his expression and the taste of his emotions.
"You needn't sound quite so disapproving, Mac," she said. "I'm not really overworking myself, you know."
"That depends on your definition of overwork, doesn't it, Your Grace?" he responded. "I've certainly seen you work harder and on less sleep. But I don't recall ever having seen you with a stomach bug tha
t's lasted as long as this one. Neither," he added pointedly, "does Miranda."
"Mac," she said patiently to the man who had once been her steward and remained her keeper, "it's not that bad. It's just a little stomach upset. For that matter, maybe it's nerves." Her lips twitched. "It's not like my new assignment is stress-free, you know!"
"No, Ma'am, it isn't." Honor's eyes narrowed as MacGuiness reverted to the old, military form of address. He was careful not to use it these days, for the most part. "But I've seen you under stress before," he continued. "After you were wounded on Grayson, for example. Or after the duel. And with all due respect, Ma'am," he said very seriously, "nerves have never put you off your feed the way you've been lately."
Honor regarded him thoughtfully for several seconds, then sighed.
"You win Mac," she surrendered. "Call Doctor Frazier. Ask her if she can see me Monday, all right?"
"Perfectly, Your Grace," he said, rationing himself to only the slightest flicker of satisfaction.