The front of the Republic's missile attack eroded under TF 82's defensive fire like a cliff, crumbling under the assault of a stormy sea. But, like the cliff, it was only the front of a far larger mass. Thousands of MDMs were killed, yet more thousands remained, and Honor Harrington watched them reaching out for her command.
Emile Deutscher watched Moriarty's fire race towards the enemy. Even from here, he could see that virtually none of the attack missiles were becoming lost in midflight, as normally happened in MDM combat. All of them held their courses, and he felt totally certain no defenses, not even the Manties', could stop them.
Which left the little problem of the fire coming at him.
It took the massive attack seven minutes to reach Task Force 82. Of the seventeen thousand missiles in the initial launch, only sixty lost their telemetry links and self-destructed after wandering off course. The Mark 31s killed over three thousand in the outermost intercept zone. In the middle zone, bolstered by the Katanas' Vipers and the standard counter- missiles from the Shrikes and Ferrets, they killed another four thousand. Jammers blinded another sixteen hundred missiles as they tried to settle into final acquisition, and the incredible cauldron of missile, starship, and LAC impeller wedges was too much for Moriarty's arthritic light-speed telemetry to sort out any longer.
The surviving eighty-three hundred MDMs dropped into autonomous mode as they hit the inner counter- missile zone. Shipboard EW did its best to spoof and blind the attackers, last-second decoy launches drew some of them astray, and a seemingly solid wall of Mark 31s met them head on.
Four thousand more MDMs were wiped out of space. Another eleven hundred fell prey to decoys or jamming. Three hundred of the survivors were penetration-aid EW platforms, without laser heads, and almost half the remaining twenty-nine hundred lost lock and reacquired not starships, but the nearer, more readily seen LACs. They streaked in to the attack, but Manticoran LACs were extraordinarily difficult targets. 'Only' two hundred and eleven of them-and the twenty-one hundred of Honor's men and women aboard them-were killed.
And then the final sixteen hundred missiles attacked TF 82's starships, most of them targeted on the two superdreadnoughts.
Only one thing saved HMS Imperator, and that was the damage already inflicted on Intolerant. Imperator's consort's defenses and electronic warfare capability were simply far below par. She was both easier to see and easier to hit. The near-sighted autonomous-mode MDMs mobbed her in huge numbers, ignoring Imperator, and her last-ditch defenses weren't equal to the task of protecting her.
Warhead after warhead, literally hundreds of them, detonated in a hellish pattern of strobes-bubbles of nuclear fusion spitting deadly harpoons of coherent radiation that crashed through Intolerant's wavering sidewalls and ripped deep, deep into her massively armored hull. Mike Henke's battlecruisers did their best to beat that tide of destruction aside, but they simply lacked the firepower, and they themselves were not immune from attack.
Honor clung to the arms of her command chair, feeling Imperator shudder under the pounding of her own hits, tasting Nimitz in the back of her brain, clinging to her with all his fierce love and devotion as death thundered and bellowed about their ship. Yet even as she did, her eyes were on the plot, watching the lethal wave of fire washing over Intolerant.
No one would ever know how many hits the superdreadnought took, but however many there were, it was too many. They ripped into her again, and again, and again, until, suddenly, she simply disappeared in the most brilliant, eye-tearing flash of them all.
Nor did she go alone. The light cruisers Fury, Buckler, and Atum vanished from Honor's plot, as did the battlecruisers Priam and Patrocles. The heavy cruisers Star Ranger and Blackstone were reduced to crippled hulks, coasting onward ballistically without power or drives. And HMS Ajax faltered suddenly as her entire after impeller ring went down.
Imperator took over a dozen direct hits of her own, yet the flagship's actual damage was incredibly light. Her thick armor shrugged off most of the hits with little more than superficial cratering, and despite the loss of half a dozen energy mounts, she remained fully combat capable.
Honor gazed into the bitter ashes of her display, tasting the cruel irony of her flagship's apparent inviolability as she saw the harrowed wreckage of the rest of her command. Of the twenty starships and five hundred and sixty LACs she'd taken across the hyper limit, only twelve starships, all but two of them damaged, and three hundred and forty-nine LACs survived. And even as she watched, Ajax and the heavy cruiser Necromancer were falling behind due to impeller damage.
'Your Grace,' Andrea Jaruwalski said quietly. Honor looked at her. 'The remote arrays confirm the destruction of two of their minelayers and heavy damage to one of their superdreadnoughts.'
'Thank you, Andrea.' Honor was astounded by how calm, how normal, her own voice sounded. It was a pathetic return for what the Havenites had done to her, but she supposed it was better than nothing.
'Harper,' she said, 'get me a link to Admiral Henke.'
'Yes, Your Grace.'
Several seconds passed before Michelle Henke's strained face appeared on Honor's com.
'How bad is it, Mike?' Honor asked as soon as she saw her friend.
'That's an interesting question.' Henke managed to produce at least the parody of a smile. 'Captain Hamilton and his exec are both dead, and things are... a bit confused over here, just now. Our rails and pods are still intact, and our fire control looks pretty good, but our point defense and energy armament took a real beating. The worst of it seems to be the after impeller ring, though. It's completely down.'
'Can you restore it?' Honor asked urgently.
'We're working on it,' Henke replied. 'The good news is that the damage appears to be in the control runs; the nodes themselves look like they're still intact, including the alphas. The bad news is that we've got one hell of a lot of structural damage aft, and just locating where the runs are broken is going to be a copperplated bitch.'
'Can you get her out?'
'I don't know,' Henke admitted. 'Frankly, it doesn't look good, but I'm not prepared to just write her off yet. Besides,' she managed another smile, this one almost normal looking, 'we can't abandon very well.'
'What do you mean?' Honor demanded.
'Both boat bays are trashed, Honor. The Bosun says she thinks she can get the after bay cleared, but it's going to take at least a half-hour. Without that-' Henke shrugged, and Honor bit the inside of her lip so hard she tasted blood.
Without at least one functional boat bay, small craft couldn't dock with Ajax to take her crew off. There were emergency personnel locks, but trying to lift off a significant percentage of her crew that way would take hours, and the battlecruiser carried enough emergency life pods for little more than half her total complement. There was no point carrying more, since only half her crew's battle stations were close enough to the skin of the hull to make a life pod practical.
And her flag bridge was not among the stations which fell into that category.
'Mike, I-'
Honor's voice was frayed around the edge, and Henke shook her head quickly.
'Don't say it,' she said, almost gently. 'If we get the wedge back, we can probably play hide and seek with anything heavy enough to kill us. If we don't get it back, we're not getting out. It's that simple, Honor. And you know as well as I do that you can't hold the rest of the task force back to cover us. Not with Bogey Three still closing. Even just hanging around for a half-hour while we try to make repairs would bring you into their envelope, and your missile defense has been shot to shit.'
Honor wanted to argue, to protest. To find some way to make it not true. But she couldn't, and she looked her best friend straight in the eye.
'You're right,' she said quietly. 'I wish you weren't, but you are.'
'I know.' Henke's lips twitched again. 'And at least we're in better shape than Necromancer,' she said almost whimsically, 'although I think her boat bays are at least intact.'
'Well, yes,' Honor said, trying to match Henke's tone even as she wanted to weep, 'there is that minor difference. Rafe's coordinating the evacuation of her personnel now.'
'Good for Rafe.' Henke nodded.
'Break north,' Honor told her. 'I'm going to drop our acceleration for about fifteen minutes.' Henke looked as if she were about to protest, but Honor shook her head quickly. 'Only fifteen minutes, Mike. If we go back to the best acceleration we can sustain at that point and maintain heading, we'll still scrape past Bogey Three at least eighty thousand kilometers outside its powered missile range.'
'That's cutting it too close, Honor!' Henke said sharply.
