'Yes, Your Grace. I'll see to it.'
'Is Moriarty ready?' Rear Admiral Emile Deutscher asked his chief of staff.
'Yes, Sir,' the chief of staff replied.
'Good.' Deutscher returned his attention to his tactical display. His two obsolete wallers had almost certainly been completely dismissed by the Manties as a threat. And, by and large, the Manties would have been correct about that. After all, at this range, without pods on tow, they couldn't possibly have a weapon with the range to reach them.
But the superdreadnoughts' real purpose, from the beginning, had simply been to attract the Manties' attention away from the real threat.
'Sir?'
Deutscher looked back up at his chief of staff.
'Yes?'
'Sir, why did Admiral Foraker call it 'Moriarty'? I've been trying to figure it out for weeks now.'
'I don't really know,' Deutscher admitted. 'I asked Admiral Giscard the same question. He said one of Admiral Foraker's staffers had introduced her to some old, pre-space fiction. 'Detective stories,' he called them. Apparently this 'Moriarty' was some kind of mastermind character in one of them.' He shrugged.
'Mastermind,' the chief of staff repeated, then chuckled. 'Well, I guess that does make sense, in a way, doesn't it?'
'We'll be entering the estimated range of Arthur's pods in another forty-five seconds, Your Grace,' Jaruwalski said.
'Thank you.' Honor turned her command chair to face the Ops officer. 'Remind all of our tac officers of that.'
'Yes, Ma'am.'
'They're entering range now, Sir.'
'Thank you,' Deutscher said. 'Send the execute.'
'Aye, Sir!'
'Missile launch! Multiple missile launches, multiple sources!'
Honor snapped her command chair back around, staring at the master plot at Jaruwalski's sudden sharp announcement.
'Estimate seventeen thousand-I say again, one-seven thousand-inbound! Time to attack range, seven-point- one minutes!'
For just a moment, Honor's brain flatly refused to believe the numbers. Their scout ships' arrays had detected only four hundred pods in orbit around Arthur. The maximum number of missiles aboard them should only have been four thousand!
Her eyes darted across the plot, and then flared wide in sudden understanding. The others-all the others-were coming from the nine ships of Bogey One. Which was flatly impossible. Two superdreadnoughts and seven battlecruisers couldn't possibly have fired or controlled that many missiles, even if they'd all been pod designs! But-
'Where the hell did they all come from?' Brigham demanded, and Honor looked at her.
'The battlecruisers,' she said, her mind going back to the Battle of Hancock.
'Battlecruisers?' Brigham looked incredulous, and Honor chuckled without any humor at all.
'They aren't battlecruisers, Mercedes; they're minelayers. The Havenites build their fast fleet minelayers on battlecruiser hulls, just like we do. And we were so busy worrying about superdreadnoughts and pod-layers it never occurred to us to look closely at the 'battlecruisers.' So they've been sitting there, ever since they stopped accelerating, doing nothing but lay pods.'
'Jesus!' Brigham murmured softly, and it was a prayer, not an imprecation. Then she drew a deep breath. 'Well, at least they can't have the fire control to handle it all!'
'Don't bet on it,' Honor said grimly. 'They wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of setting this up if they hadn't figured they could actually hit something with it after they did.'
'Moriarty confirms control, Sir.'
'Good,' Deutscher said, and sat back with a hungry smile.
'Engage Bogey One!' Honor snapped.
'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Jaruwalski responded. 'Should I use the Agamemnons, too?'
'Yes,' Honor replied. 'Gamma sequence.'
'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Jaruwalski repeated, and began issuing orders over the task force's tactical net.
Given the geometry-the effective closing speed between TF 82 and the launch platforms was almost thirty-six thousand KPS-the battlecruisers' Mark 16 MDMs, with one less 'stage' than Imperator's larger missiles, had a maximum powered range of forty-two million kilometers. But the range was over fifty-three million, which meant the Mark 16s would have to coast ballistically for eleven million kilometers between stage activations. That would add an additional minute and a half to their flight time, bringing it to a total of thirteen and a half minutes, whereas Imperator's more powerful missiles could make the entire run under power, in only seven. Moreover, the smaller missiles' closing speed relative to their targets would be over twenty thousand KPS lower.
But by using the gamma sequence she and Jaruwalski had worked out months ago, Imperator would roll her first half dozen patterns with missile settings which duplicated those of the Mark 16s. The Agamemnons would roll six patterns each at the same rate, which would take seventy-two seconds, and those six salvos-each of two hundred and seventy-six missiles-would make the crossing at the Mark 16s' speed.
Only after the smaller MDMs were away would Imperator begin firing full-power patterns of her own, one double pattern every twenty-four seconds. The first of her 120-strong salvos would arrive on target eight and a half minutes after she first began rolling pods, five minutes before the battlecruisers' fire.
In Arthur orbit, the installation codenamed Moriarty came fully on-line for the first time. It wasn't a very huge installation. In fact, it was no larger than a heavy cruiser, and it had been transported in two prefabricated modules aboard a fleet supply ship, then assembled in place in less than forty-eight hours.
As a warship tonnages went, four hundred thousand wasn't a lot... unless all of it was dedicated to fire control.
Moriarty was Shannon Foraker's system defense answer to the individual inferiority of the Republic's missile pods. The control station was a flat, light-drinking black, constructed of radar absorbent materials. It was almost impossible to detect, as long as it practiced strict emission-control discipline, and the Manticoran recon arrays had missed it entirely.
Now it reached out through the other innocent looking orbital platforms which had been seeded about the system at the same time. Each of those platforms was, in effect, a less capable, simpler minded version of the RMN's own Keyholes. They formed a network, an expanding spray of tentacles, which gave Moriarty literally thousands of fire control telemetry links. And what those links lacked in Manticoran-style sophistication they made up in numbers, because they could control the missiles assigned to them without break all the way to their targets.
Moriarty had only one real weakness, aside from the fact that if it had been detected, killing it would have been relatively simple. That weakness was the light-speed limitation on its telemetry. It simply couldn't provide real-time corrections as its missiles raced down range. On the other hand, neither could Honor's telemetry links. Aside from the superior seeking systems and more capable AIs aboard the Manticoran missiles, the accuracy playing field had just been leveled.
And the Republic's salvo contained sixty-two times as many missiles as the largest salvo TF 82 was firing.
'Get on them! Get on them now!'
Captain Amanda Brankovski, Samuel Mikl¢s's senior COLAC, knew her people didn't need any exhortations from her, but she couldn't help it. She watched the incredible cyclone of missile icons streaking across her plot towards the task force, and it seemed impossible that any of its ships could survive.
The five LAC wings, arranged 'above' and 'below' the heavier ships and fifty thousand kilometers closer to Arthur, belched an answering hurricane. Vipers and standard counter-missiles began to launch from the LACs as Mark 31s roared away from the starships, and incoming missiles began to vanish.
Brankovski had five hundred and sixty LACs, one for every thirty attack missiles, and they punched a steady stream of counter-missiles into their teeth. Tethered and free-flying Ghost Rider decoys sang to the Republican MDMs' sensors. Dazzlers were launched into their faces, exploding in bursts of blinding interference. And Imperator and her consorts punched out wave after wave of Mark 31s.
