by David Weber
Obviously, Technodyne hadn’t managed to duplicate the Manties’ targeting and fire control systems, which meant long-range accuracy remained pathetic, but a sufficiently dense salvo would still generate hits. And in order to provide that density, Technodyne had come up with what it had dubbed the “Dispersed Weapons Module, Mod 2” (which, interestingly, suggested there’d been a previous “Mod 1” which it hadn’t mentioned to anyone), christened the “Husky” by the Navy’s tac officers.
Each Husky was a specialized towing drone equipped with a small impeller drive, a power receptor antenna, a telemetry relay, and eight tractor beams, each capable of towing one of Technodyne’s missile pods. The Husky’s onboard power was sufficient only for limited—very limited—independent maneuvering, but it could always be towed by a mothership’s tractors. As long as it could be hit by beamed power from that mothership, its endurance was effectively unlimited, however. And it had been designed so that each Husky could “mother” eight additional Huskies. In theory, they could be daisy-chained four-deep, with the actual missile pods forming the fifth tier of an enormous stack. That meant—again, in theory—that a single tractor aboard a single warship could tow 1,024 missile pods. The latest, tweaked version of the Cataphract was somewhat bigger than the model Filareta had taken to Manticore, and the new pods were individually smaller, able to carry only six of Technodyne’s latest mark. So in theory—in theory—that single shipboard tractor could have put 6,144 missiles into space. The power requirement would have far exceeded that of anything short of a superdreadnought, however—in fact, Isotalo doubted even a superdreadnought could have handled that many pods—and the best her battlecruisers could manage was just under a hundred Huskies and “only” 768 pods apiece, which meant the battlecruisers of the lightest of her task groups had almost twelve thousand missiles in its deployed pods.
Without the Huskies’ impellers, their acceleration would have been that of an arthritic tortoise…at best. With the Huskies’ impellers, the effect of all that mass outside the battlecruisers’ impeller wedges was negligible. And, all told, that would let her bring over 36,000 missiles to the fight.
Which didn’t even count the reserve aboard her colliers. They were packed with an additional 90,000 pods, even after deploying the Huskies in her first salvo. It seemed…unlikely…that a dozen Manty cruisers could stand up to over half a million Cataphracts.
On the other hand, the Manties had demonstrated a perverse propensity for doing “unlikely” things to the Solarian League Navy.
In addition to producing the Husky, the arms maker had tweaked its original Cataphract, increasing its first-stage acceleration by twenty percent, which upped its maximum powered envelope from rest from 13,650,172 kilometers to 19,370,400. Technodyne hadn’t been able to do anything about light-speed fire control limitations, however, and the additional acceleration wasn’t a factor, at least for this launch. Rosiak had been forced to incorporate a ballistic phase into the attack, since even with the tweaks and her closing velocity at launch, her maximum powered envelope remained less than thirty-two million kilometers. Direct hits, especially against Manticoran missile defenses, would have been few and far between even at twenty million kilometers; at thirty-six million, they were unlikely as hell, but that wasn’t really what she was after.
Show me what you’ve got, she thought silently, leaning back in her command chair as the missiles tore towards their targets. I don’t care how good your missile defense systems are; you can’t have a hell of a lot of them on that few platforms. So show me what they can do.
* * *
“Missile defense Reno,” Commodore Lessem said calmly as he, too, watched the tidal bore of missiles sweep towards him, then glanced at the plot’s vector analyses. Based on the performance of Massimo Filareta’s missiles, CIC was projecting a total flight time of 406 seconds, including a 151-second ballistic phase, and he pursed his lips as he watched the time display tick downward. There was time—if not a lot of it—to consider his options, and his brain whirred behind his thoughtful eyes.
“Missile defense Reno, aye, Sir,” Wozniak replied. “Missile Defense has good tracking data from the Ghost Riders, and bow walls are active…now.” He looked over his shoulder and smiled at the commodore. “I think these people are in for a surprise, Sir.”
“We can always hope.” Lessem glanced at Commander Thúri. “I wonder what percentage of their total birds that represents?”
“CIC makes it about twenty percent, Sir.” From the promptitude of his response, Thúri had been thinking the same sort of things his commodore had. “I’m inclined to think it was probably exactly twenty percent,” he continued, “but Brent’s not prepared to be quite that definite.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Lessem chuckled, never taking his eyes from the tactical plot.
Commander Brent Krösche, Clas Fleming’s tactical officer, was very good at his job. Joanne O’Reilly, Clas Fleming’s CO, thought the world of him, and Lessem was inclined to agree. But Krösche was a precise sort. If he wasn’t certain of his numbers to at least the tenth decimal point, the best he would give was a “probable.” And a very occasional “highly probable” if he was confident to the ninth decimal point.
“Well, if this many birds are only eight percent of what they could’ve thrown, they probably don’t expect—”
“Sir, there’s something strange about their launch profile,” Commander Wozniak said suddenly. Lessem turned from Thúri to looklat him, and the ops officer frowned unhappily. “Sir, they’re showing a lot more accel than they should. The missiles we analyzed from Eleventh Fleet maxed at seven-zero-one KPS squared; these birds are coming in at over eight hundred and forty.”
Lessem inhaled sharply, remembering his earlier thoughts about Solarian innovation and productivity.
“Assuming the drive endurance on both stages is the same as on Filareta’s, that gives them a powered envelope of almost thirty-two million klicks,” Wozniak continued. “That drops their ballistic phase to barely four million klicks and roughly twenty-four seconds, which makes their total flight time only two-seven-niner seconds.”
“I see.” Lessem’s voice was level, but his brain raced. His decision loop had just become 134 seconds shorter than he’d assumed it was, and he’d already lost ten of them finding that out.
His ships’ hyper generators were at Readiness, which meant they could pop into the alpha bands on less than a minute’s notice. Well, all of them except David K. Brown, that was. The FSV had military-grade impellers, inertial compensator, and hyper generator, but she also massed over seven times as much as Clas Fleming, and size was a factor in hyper generator cycle times, as well as acceleration rates. A Saganami-C like Clas Fleming could translate into hyper from Readiness in 44.6 seconds whereas one of the larger Solarian Nevada-class battlecruisers would need 55.7. A three million-ton FSV, however, required 118.8, and would have needed better than three minutes, if she’d mounted a civilian-grade generator. Which posed at least one interesting question, since the three transports or freighters in company with the Solly battlecruisers massed more than twice that much and they appeared to have have civilian-grade impellers. If they mounted civilian generators, as well, their minimum cycle time would be almost three and half times as long as “Brownie’s.”
Hyper cycle times meant very little under normal battle conditions, since no one could enter or leave hyper inside a star’s hyper-limit, anyway. They meant quite a lot this far outside a limit, however, as Genevieve Chin had discovered when she encountered Duchess Harrington’s Apollo-armed superdreadnoughts outside Manticore-A’s limit.
The People’s Republic’s analysts had radically underestimated Apollo’s effective range, and all of Chin’s intelligence briefings had told her she was well outside it when Eighth Fleet launched against her. The 44,000,000-kilometer ballistic phase Duchess Harrington had been forced to incorporate into her launch just to reach Chin’s ships had confirmed that she was outside effective shipb
oard fire control range, and so she had been. But not very far outside it. Eighth Fleet had been close enough to update the Apollo control platforms in near real-time just before it released them to autonomous control, and that autonomous control had been enormously better than anyone in the PRH had believed it could be. Even with that update, the Mark 23s had been far less accurate than they would have been at three light-minutes, as opposed to the four light-minutes at which they’d been launched. They’d simply been far more accurate than the Peeps had anticipated.
To Chin’s credit, her own tactical instincts had overridden her ONI briefing when Duchess Harrington’s MDMs shut down and went ballistic. But it had taken a few seconds for the shutdown to be reported to her. Then it had taken fifteen or twenty more seconds for her instincts to overrule her briefing. That was really a remarkably quick response, all things considered, but the clock had been ticking, and it had taken several more seconds for her flagship to transmit the order to hyper out. Then it had taken several more seconds for her captains to receive it, and a handful more for their astrogators to respond and Engineering to begin the cycle.
She’d run out of seconds. The cycle time on her superdreadnoughts’ hyper generators, the minimum time required to translate even from full Readiness, had been over four and a half minutes, and total flight time for Eighth Fleet’s missiles from the moment their second stage drives shut down had been only 5.2 minutes.
A difference of less than forty seconds didn’t sound like all that much, but its consequences for her command had been catastrophic.
The cycle times for Lessem’s ships, even David K. Brown, were far shorter than that, and he’d thought he could wait over five minutes from the moment the Solarians launched and still get the FSV into hyper to avoid the incoming fire. For that matter, his lighter ships would have had over six minutes to play with.
Now, though…
“No need to panic just yet, I think,” he said, crossing to stand behind Wozniak and rest one hand on his shoulder as he gazed past the ops officer to his displays. “Not until they’re willing to show us more missiles in a single launch. Makes you wonder what other surprises they may have for us, though, doesn’t it?”
* * *
Task Group 47.3 sat motionless in space between the Prime Terminus and Jane Isotalo’s battlecruisers, and evasion maneuvers from a base velocity of zero would be limited. Even with a Saganami-C’s maximum acceleration of 726.2 gravities, Clas Fleming could have changed her position by no more than 587,000 kilometers and attained a velocity of only 2,890 KPS in the 6.8 minutes Lessem had expected Task Force 1027’s missiles to reach her. In the time he actually had, the best she could have managed was 277,000 kilometers and 1,980 KPS. That was less than one light-second, which was negligible against missiles coming in at eighty percent of light-speed. On the other hand, Lessem couldn’t have generated a much greater base velocity and stayed between Isotalo and the terminus.
Nor did he really need to.
Yet, at least.
The Cataphracts were much too far downrange for Rear Admiral Rosiak to control effectively. For over sixty T-years, since the introduction of the laserhead, effective missile engagements had been managed via the missiles’ telemetry links. In theory, it ought to have been simple for any missile to find something as glaringly obvious as an impeller-drive starship under power. In practice, things were a bit more complicated. It wasn’t that missiles operating in autonomous mode couldn’t find targets; it was just that they had a great deal of trouble finding—and hitting—the right targets.
True, seeing the impeller signature of a target really was technological child’s play in many ways. Unfortunately, impeller-drive starships were extremely maneuverable, their wedges sharply limited the vulnerable aspects from which they could be successfully attacked, and they mounted both active and passive defenses designed to make the task of any attack missile’s seekers as un-simple as possible.
Given the way in which a missile’s own impeller wedge narrowed its onboard seekers’ field of view (one RMN training manual likened it to steering an air car while looking at the outside world through a soda straw), the small size of its effective target (the narrow gap between the impeller wedge’s roof and floor), the decoys and electronic warfare systems designed to defeat those seekers, and the target’s ability to rapidly roll ship in order to interpose its own impeller wedge, the probability of a hit by any single missile had always been low. Higher for laserheads than for contact weapons, but still low. And prior to the introduction of the modern missile pod, salvo densities had also been low, which had made it essential to find a way to increase that probability.
The solution had been to turn every salvo into a network of dispersed sensor platforms. Any given missile might not see the target very well—if at all—during an attack run, especially when coming in on a profile designed to make it as difficult as possible for that target’s active defenses to intercept it. But when all the seekers aboard every missile in the attack reported what they could see to the ship which had launched them, the data could be collated, combined, and analyzed. A far better tactical picture could be assembled; enemy electronic warfare tactics could be mapped and allowed for; probable decoys could be identified and excluded from the targeting queues; the other side’s evasion maneuvers could be plugged in, tracked, and projected; and refined instructions could be sent back not simply to the missiles which had supplied the data, but to every other missile in the salvo. Not only did that increase accuracy against assigned targets, but it permitted tactical officers to adjust targeting queues on the fly, redirecting missiles as their original targets were crippled or destroyed or as newer, higher-value targets were discovered. As the range increased, transmission lag set in and grew steadily worse until it reached the point at which new instructions from the firing ship were inevitably out of date and actually began degrading its missiles’ accuracy, at which point the links were cut and each missile reverted to onboard control.
And that was TF 1027’s problem.
Missiles attacking targets 36,000,000 kilometers from their launch platforms were far beyond the effective control range of light-speed systems. Admiral Isotalo had no choice but to rely on her birds’ internal seekers and targeting AI, and that AI had always been rudimentary because it was designed to work in tandem with shipboard direction. That was what truly made Apollo so lethal, although the SLN as yet had no clue of just how true that was. The Mark 23-E control missiles could accept shipboard telemetry at sixty-four times the range light-speed telemetry made possible, but the Echoes had also been designed specifically for use beyond even Apollo’s shipboard control range, with every control missile in the salvo talking to every other control missile and acting as an individual processing node for the data even when relay to—and through—the mothership was unavailable. Its autonomous accuracy was no more than thirty percent or so of its accuracy under tight shipboard control, but that thirty percent was many times more accurate than any current-generation Solarian missile could achieve.
Sir Martin Lessem’s Mark 16s weren’t Apollo-capable, and neither were his cruisers. But the Ghost Rider platforms’ FTL links cut the telemetry loop in half. They could see better than any missile’s sensors, they could report what they saw at FTL speeds—just as they were doing now on the massive incoming Solarian salvo—and that meant TG 47.3’s telemetry lasers could continue to update far longer than its Solarian opponents.
Despite that, he chose not to waste any of his fire on Isotalo’s ships just yet. His opponent had a hell of a lot more missile pods than he did. In fact, he was pretty sure the Solly CO saw this salvo as a test, a way to get a better read on his defensive capabilities, rather than a full-blooded attempt to destroy his ships. Lessem couldn’t keep him from doing that, but he wasn’t prepared to waste any of his own ammunition on targets that could disappear into hyper before his fire ever reached them.
And under the circumstances, he had no objection to showing the Sollies th
at they’d have to get a lot closer before their fire posed any realistic threat to his command.
His cruisers and destroyers mounted a total of 520 counter-missile launchers and 672 point defense clusters, and range from rest for the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Mark 31 counter-missile was 3,585,556 kilometers. The first of Lessem’s CMs went out 205 seconds after Isotalo’s launch, one second after the Cataphracts’ second-stage impellers lit off. A second wave of Mark 31s launched ten seconds after that. A third launched ten seconds after that. Then a fourth. The fifth and final wave of counter-missiles launched forty seconds after the first—thirty-five seconds before the Cataphracts could reach attack range. And then, with 2,080 Mark 31s headed downrange, every one of TG 47.3’s units rolled ship, turning up on their sides relative to TF 1027 to present only the bellies of their impeller wedges to the enemy.
* * *
Jane Isotalo’s jaw clenched as she saw the incredible waves of counter-missiles lashing outward from the Manties.
Should’ve expected it, she told herself harshly. If the bastards routinely throw around missile salvos of their own this size, they’ve got to have been working on defensive measures, too. Damn it, you knew that going in!
Indeed she had, and she and Ramaalas and Rosiak had done their damnedest to allow for it, but their worst-case estimates hadn’t visualized something like this. No Solarian ship mounted that many CM tubes per ton of displacement, and the bastards were actually launching counter-missiles from both broadsides simultaneously. No Solarian ship could have done that, either.