by David Weber
I believe this is what the analysts call “overkill,” Kotouč thought wryly. I’m actually surprised he didn’t try to take us with just his internal tubes, given the numerical balance. To bad he didn’t. Missile defense probably could’ve handled a mere five or six hundred missiles per ship!
He surprised himself with a faint but genuine smile, yet the truth was he hadn’t wanted Hajdu to rely on his broadside tubes. Indeed, he’d just succeeded in one of his two primary goals. It looked as if the Solly had thrown everything he could at TG 110.2 in his initial salvo…which meant he’d emptied all or almost all of the missile pods he’d deployed for the execution of Buccaneer. And when Ilkova killed his freighters, she’d also killed his ability to replenish those pods. No doubt the magazines aboard his battlecruisers and their escorts carried more than sufficient missiles to do the job anyway, but they’d be shorter ranged and less efficient. It would take them longer, and every extra hour of delay was another hundred thousand lives saved.
And if TG 110.2 succeeded in its second goal, there’d be one hell of a lot fewer of those magazines to go around, too. For that matter, if Hypatia wasn’t the only star system on Hajdu’s Buccaneer list…
“Penetration EW coming up in three seconds,” Commander Ilkova said.
* * *
Did I just let the son-of-a-bitch sucker me? Hajdu Gyôzô wondered coldly.
He glared at the four icons in his display, jaw clenched, as the stupendous wave of Cataphracts streaked towards them. He’d flushed the pods in near spinal reflex, without really analyzing his decision, and he kept all expression from his face as he did that analysis now.
Whoever was in command over there had gone unerringly for Buccaneer’s jugular. Without those missile colliers, no Solarian flag officer dared to confront an Allied task force. That would have made killing them imminently worthwhile under any circumstances, but destroying them had also cut deeply into Hajdu’s missile reserve here in Hypatia. And his decision to flush the deployed pods had just fired away everything that hadn’t been blown to hell with Troubadour, Merchant Mart, and Stevedore.
And that, almost certainly, had been one of the Manty’s primary aims.
Doesn’t matter, he decided, watching the tenth salvo erupt from the Manticoran ships. I’ve got enough birds left in my magazines to do the job. Hell, for that matter I can take out the targets with energy fire, if I need to! And one thing I damned well know is that I’d better take these bastards out fast…however big a launch that takes! He grimaced. Missiles in magazines won’t matter if the ships those magazines belong to get their arses blown out of space before they ever launch.
He didn’t like thinking that, but there was no point denying the truth. The size of the incoming Manticoran salvos made it clear they had the telemetry links to actually coordinate their fire, because if those birds had been blindfired, there’d have been one hell of a lot more of them. He didn’t have those links, and he wasn’t at all sure the weight of fire he could have coordinated would be sufficient to penetrate their defenses. Not only that, but they’d put well over three thousand missiles of their own into space before his people even found them. Judging from the SLN’s previous experience, that meant an awful lot of his ships were about to die. If they were given the chance to go on launching, the death toll could only sky rocket, which was exactly what made it so imperative to completely crush them as quickly as humanly possible.
If a hundred and twenty thousand missiles can’t do the job, then nothing else can, either, he reflected grimly. And one thing about it, we’ll find out pretty damn quickly when the Alpha launch gets there. Of course, he smiled thinly, we’ll have to survive five or six of their salvos first, won’t we?
* * *
Task Force 1030’s tactical officers were tight-lipped as they tracked the incoming Manticoran salvos. They seemed awfully tight, those salvos, packed much more closely together than the same number of SLN missiles would have been. Hajdu’s TOs couldn’t see any reason for the Manties to do that, and they didn’t like not knowing what the sneaky bastards were up to. There had to be a reason they’d concentrated their fire into such a tight, easily targeted zone, but what the hell was it? Why give missile defense such an ideal target? The projected numbers in the tactical computers’ constantly updated predictions spun steadily upward towards an incredible thirty-five percent interception rate, and the tac officers would have loved to believe those numbers.
Unfortunately, they didn’t.
They’d been briefed, based upon the very best intelligence available on Allied missile capabilities, but the accuracy of those briefings’ assumptions had never been tested. Worse, they were based—and every one of those TOs knew it—on little more than conjecture. Given the SLN’s staggering losses, they should have amassed a huge amount of information on Manty missile capabilities and doctrine. They hadn’t…because no ship which had been the target of Manty missiles had yet made it home with anything like hard sensor data, They’d all seen the imagery the Grand Alliance had provided of the destruction of Eleventh Fleet, but that imagery had been scrubbed of all useful tactical data before it was ever released. They knew that. Yet if there’d been no useful data in it, there’d been ample evidence of the horrific speed with which Massimo Filareta’s wall of battle had been reduced to wreckage.
The effectiveness of their own missile defenses had been increased by a minimum of thirty percent by the tweaks and new software—and, hopefully, new doctrine—the SLN had rammed through following Sandra Crandal’s debacle. Some of those tweaks had been in the pipeline for T-years, delayed by sheer bureaucratic inertia, although there’d been no time to get them to Eleventh Fleet before it hypered out for Manticore. Others, though, were brand-new, created on the fly by a navy not accustomed to improvisation and rapid adjustment. As a consequence, every predictive model was…questionable, and they knew that, too.
Now the first three hundred and ninety-six missiles came tearing straight into the very teeth of their defenses in a solid, unswerving phalanx, and they wondered why.
* * *
“Counter-missile launch in five seconds,” Daphne Koopman announced. “Four…three…two…one—launching!”
She made the announcement with fierce satisfaction, and SLNS Camperdown quivered as the first salvo of counter-missiles belched from her launchers. Hajdu sensed himself leaning forward in his command chair and scolded himself for showing his own tension so clearly. It was his job to project assurance, not worry, and—
Commodore Koopman twitched upright in her own command chair, her expression shocked, as the penetration platforms seeded throughout TG 110.2’s lead salvo came up and her orderly displays disintegrated into chaos.
It was standard, absolutely predictable RMN missile doctrine. Any Havenite tac officer would have known what was coming the instant he saw that launch, saw how tight-packed the salvo was, how little clearance there was between the individual missiles’ impeller wedges. The problem was that Solarian tactical officers didn’t know that. No one in TF 1030 had ever seen that doctrine in practice. They’d seen theoretical analyses, projections based on assumed capabilities, but the people behind those analyses and projections had lacked hard data. In the absence of that data they’d extrapolated—and all too often mirror-imaged their own doctrinal assumptions into—the Manties’ thinking. It wasn’t because they were stupid; it was because they had no other base line assumptions to use, and so they’d done their best with what they had.
And because they had, their projections were deeply flawed.
The Dazzlers came up all across the salvo’s front, perfectly timed to ten seconds behind the counter-missile launch. The huge spikes of jamming blasted the Solarian sensor picture into threshed ruin, and missile defense officers swore in shocked disbelief as the entire wave of Manticoran missiles simply disappeared behind that rolling wall of interference.
The counter-missiles lost lock as their onboard sensors were blinded. Perhaps a third of them wandered
off on courses to nowhere, trying—and failing—to find new targets to acquire, but the remainder continued straight ahead. Some of them, still under shipboard control, steered towards the center of the missile swarm’s last known position. Others followed their onboard protocols, spreading a bit wider, orienting to keep their seekers targeted on the zone where their computers told them—correctly—the missiles they’d lost track of had to be.
But then the jamming went down, and Daphne Koopman slammed her fist furiously against her console.
There’d been three hundred and ninety-six missiles on her plot before the jamming; after the jamming, there were seven hundred.
No SLN analyst had yet heard a single word about the RMN’s Dragons Teeth. And because they hadn’t, Hajdu’s missile defense officers were totally unprepared for an EW platform which could generate ten totally convincing false missile signatures. Nor had they realized that Markéta Ilkova had dedicated a full fifteen percent of her initial launch to penetration aides.
Three hundred and thirty attack missiles, covered and protected by their electronic siblings, streaked towards their targets, separating onto individual, evasive approach profiles at last, and TF 1030’s missile defenses tried frantically to reacquire them as they came.
“Projected targets Ontario, Enterprise, Edinorg, Marengo, and Re Umberto,” Koopman said flatly. “Tracking’s confidence is not—repeat, not—high.”
Hajdu’s jaw tightened. If those projections were correct—and, looking at the hashed nightmare of the plot he understood exactly why Tracking’s confidence in them was so low—the Manties had concentrated their fire on only five of his ninety-eight battlecruisers. That would produce a density of almost seventy missiles per target, assuming an even distribution, and that promised disastrous consequences. Seventy Solarian missiles would have been enough to wreck any battlecruiser, assuming they could get through its defenses. Looking at that plot, it was obvious a lot of them were going to get through, and one thing all OpAn’s projections agreed upon was that Manticoran warheads were far more destructive on a bird-for-bird basis.
He’s not even trying to target all of us, the vice admiral realized. He’s going to go for a handful of targets in each salvo, concentrate his fire to pound through their defenses, and rip them to frigging bits.
Hajdu Gyôzô’s brain went through the remorseless math. There were fifteen salvos in space now. His Cataphracts were actually faster than the missiles coming at him—their time-of-flight was seventy-one seconds shorter than the initial Manticoran salvo’s—but by the time they reached their target, the Manties would have fired a total of nineteen. If each of those salvos concentrated on five of his ships and even a third of them got through, they could reduce every single one of his battlecruisers to wreckage.
* * *
Despite their confusion, the Solarian counter-missiles intercepted almost eighty of the incoming targets. Unfortunately, fifty-one of them were electronic ghosts generated by the Dragons Teeth. Another fifteen were Dazzlers. Of Markéta Ilkova’s three hundred and thirty-five shipkillers, three hundred and twenty-one survived to streak across the point defense envelope at thirty-eight percent of the speed of light.
SLNS Enterprise’s point defense clusters had time for one shot each before the missile storm was upon her. Under the circumstances, they did remarkably well, plucking nineteen shipkillers out of the chaos of her fire control, and “only” forty-five got through to attack her.
All of them were Mark 14-ERs, not Mark 16s. The inability of the Saganami-Bs to launch the Mark 16 had forced Commander Ilkova to step down Phantom’s Mark 16s’ acceleration in order to maintain concentration. That density paid a major dividend when it came to penetrating the Solarian defenses, but the Mark 14 wasn’t fitted with the Mark 16-G’s improved laserhead. The Mark 16-G could kill superdreadnoughts; the Mark 14 couldn’t.
It was, however—unfortunately for Enterprise—quite capable of killing battlecruisers.
The Nevada-class ship heaved as bomb-pumped lasers punched through her sidewalls, ripped deep into her flanks. Men and women died, weapons disappeared. Her core hull was breached in at least seven places, belching atmosphere as it decompressed explosively. But bad as that was, the six laserheads which detonated directly ahead of her were far worse. Unlike Rear Admiral Kotouč’s ships, Enterprise had no bow-wall. There was nothing to protect her forward hammerhead, aside from its armor and her particle screening, and neither of those was remotely enough.
X-ray lasers punched effortlessly through that armor. Three of her forward impeller nodes exploded, and two graser mounts, three counter-missile tubes, and two laser clusters went with them. A fraction of a second later, power bleed and ruptured plasma conduits turned her entire forward impeller room into a crematorium for its crew. The nine hundred thousand-ton ship staggered, yawing drunkenly as half her wedge went down, and two more of those hellish lasers ripped almost directly down her central axis, tearing deep into her essential systems.
She reeled under the savage assault and her after impeller ring went down, as well, proof of the chaos raging through her brutally wounded control systems. Acceleration gone, she coasted onward, out of the fireballs of the attacking missiles.
Fourteen seconds later, she disappeared in the glare of a failing fusion bottle.
Her sister Marengo and the Indefatigable-class Edinorg were more fortunate; they survived. But they survived as hopeless wrecks. Edinorg still had her wedge, although she’d lost half a dozen nodes, and she turned brokenly away, seeking cover behind her intact consorts’ interposed wedges, while Marengo coasted onward, shedding life pods and small craft. Ontario’s back broke and her shattered hull tumbled wildly, and Re Umberto simply blew up under the pounding.
* * *
“Good hits, Sir!” Captain Clarke reported as the numbers came up on his display. Commander Ilkova was too busy for reports at the moment. “Looks like we took out all five alpha targets!”
“Good!” Kotouč acknowledged, but his eyes were on Ilkova and the master plot. That massive Solarian salvo was only ninety seconds out, and he had few illusions about what was going to happen when it arrived.
Nor was he alone in that. He could see it in the tight shoulders, the masklike faces of his flag bridge personnel. Even Clarke’s, despite his obvious satisfaction.
Only Ilkova seemed oblivious to it as her hands flew across her console. The range was forty light-seconds, but the Ghost Rider platforms reduced that to less than one. She’d already cut the control links to the next three salvos in the firing queue, but there was still time for her to refine the penetration ECM and targeting of the salvos behind that. She was totally focused on just that, her blue-green eyes fiery, and Kotouč glanced at Paul Albamonte.
The EWO was just as focused as Ilkova, but not on offense. The ops officer had assumed direct control of the attack birds’ penetration EW so that Lieutenant Albamonte could concentrate on the squadron’s defensive ECM. Just as the Ghost Rider platforms gave Ilkova a direct, real-time view of her targets, they gave Albamonte a real-time view of the incoming missiles. There was less he could do with it, but he wasn’t sitting on his hands, and Kotouč checked a secondary plot just as the Loreleis came to life upon it.
Suck on that one, Hajdu, he thought vindictively as his four ships suddenly became sixteen…then twenty.
Phantom quivered with the sawtooth vibration of counter-missile launchers in maximum-rate fire, spitting out thirty-two CMs every ten seconds, and his jaw tightened as the incoming salvo entered the outer intercept envelope.
“Missile impact in sixty seconds,” Albamonte announced as the squadron’s defensive fire began tearing into that stupendous cloud of death. Dozens of Cataphracts—scores of them—disappeared, but there were thousands of them, and Jan Kotouč faced a far larger salvo with far less missile defense than Commodore Lessem had faced in Prime.
They’re getting through, he told himself. Accept it, Jan.
Maybe so, but in the meanti
me…
* * *
“God damn it!” Hajdu Gyôzô snapped. “Can’t we stop those fucking things?!”
Fred Brigman looked at his admiral from the corner of one eye but said nothing. It was obviously a rhetorical question…and the first time he’d ever heard such furious frustration from the unflappable Hajdu.
It was very unlike him, but it was also hard to blame him, Brigman thought grimly. Five of those hell-spawned salvos had smashed into TF 1030, and twenty-seven—twenty-seven—of Hajdu’s battlecruisers had been blown apart or turned into crippled wrecks that would never move again under their own power. SLNS Espana, Impero, and Libertad, like Edinorg, retained enough nodes to limp away from the carnage, but none of them were effective units any longer. Of Hajdu’s original ninety-eight battlecruisers, only sixty-seven remained in action.
A sense of shocked desperation enveloped the task force as those merciless salvos hammered home again and again, killing or crippling their battlecruisers five or six at a time, with mechanical precision. They seemed unstoppable, and whoever was behind them, he was using his electronic warfare advantages with merciless skill. The jamming patterns shifted and danced, there were more decoys in some waves, fewer in others, driving Tracking into near futility. They were knocking down more of the shipkillers in the inner counter-missile zone, and the laser clusters were claiming more kills as updated profiles on the attack missiles’ terminal maneuvers and emission signatures were relayed throughout the task force, but they were actually getting even fewer kills in the outer and middle zones. It was as if the Manties had real-time data on their own tracking and EW shifts. As if they were programming adjustments into their missiles penetration profiles right up to the instant they actually hit the Solarian defenses.
And now this, Brigman thought, glaring at the display on which the false targets had suddenly appeared. They had to be decoys—although God only knew what sort of decoys could do what these were doing!—and they were going to play hell with the blind-fired Cataphracts’ ability to find the real targets.