fission power plants and improved capacitors Shannon Foraker and her technical crews had been able to produce after the windfall of technical data from Erewhon.

The Alphas were equipped with lasers powerful enough to punch through the sidewalls and armor of destroyers and cruisers at normal engagement ranges. They couldn't match the performance of the massive grasers of the Alliance's Shrikes, but they were far more dangerous in energy range than any Republican LAC had ever been before. The Betas weren't a lot more combat capable than the original Cimeterres had been, since they were still armed solely with missiles and those missiles hadn't been significantly improved. But-like the Alphas-they had bow walls and vastly enhanced power budgets and endurance.

Now, for the first time, they went up against the Alliance in truly significant numbers.

The engagement was brief. It had to be, with the Manticorans barreling in at such a high closing velocity. Smirnoff had arranged her LACs 'above' and 'below' the sensor and firing arcs she'd left open for the screen, and her own shorter-legged missiles streaked towards the incoming strike. She had more units then the Manties did, but the Alliance's superior EW more than offset her sheer numerical advantage.

Her Alphas never really got the chance to use their lasers. Their targets were too hard to lock up, streaking across their engagement window too quickly, and her firing angle meant all too many of the laser shots which were fired wasted themselves on the roofs or bellies of their targets' wedges. But her Betas' missiles, although less accurate and capable than the Katanas' Vipers, were fired in enormous numbers.

Six hundred of the Alliance LACs were killed in the fleeting moments Smirnoff had to engage them, but at a price. It was the first time, the Allied LAC crews had gone up against someone else's LAC bow walls, but Alice Truman's reports from Lovat had been taken to heart. They might never have encountered it before, but they'd allowed for the possibility, and although the new technology made the new Republican LACs far harder to kill, they still lost at a two-to-one rate as the Allied strike roared past them, into the teeth of the screen's fire.

The screen killed another three hundred, but the price it paid for its success was far higher than the one Smirnoff had paid. The Alliance lost six thousand men and women aboard the LACs Smirnoff's units had killed, and she'd lost roughly eighteen thousand, in return. Now the Alliance lost another three thousand people with the LACs the screen had killed. But as the surviving graser-armed Shrikes crashed over the screening cruisers which could not avoid them, they wreaked havoc.

There were 'only' sixteen hundred Allied LACs left, but nine hundred of them were Shrikes, and they ignored the heavy cruisers. Those they left to the missile-armed Ferrets, whose light shipkillers were unlikely to do more than scratch the paint of a capital ship. Since they couldn't hurt wallers anyway, there was no point saving them, and three hundred Ferrets flung every missile they had into the teeth of Second Fleet's heavy cruisers. They fired at the last moment, at the shortest possible range, when their victims' defenses would have effectively no time at all to engage with anything except laser clusters. They paid heavily to get to that range, but when they reached it, they spewed out well over sixteen thousand shipkillers.

Those missiles carried only destroyer-weight laser heads, but a heavy cruiser's sidewalls were weaker than a battlecruiser's, and it mounted very little armor compared to any capital ship. Certainly not enough to survive against a fire plan which hit each ship with four hundred missiles from a range at which each laser cluster had time for-at most-a single shot.

The Ferrets fired at a range of 182,000 kilometers, and it took their missiles barely two seconds to cross the range. In those two seconds the heavy cruisers' desperate offensive fire killed another hundred and twelve LACs, but when the surviving Ferrets crossed the screen's position one and a half seconds behind their missiles, they did it in the glaring light of the failing fusion plants of the cruisers they had just slaughtered.

None of the screen's heavy cruisers, and very few of the fifty thousand men and women aboard them, survived.

The battlecruisers fared no better. There were fewer of them, and three times as many attackers. True, each of those attackers got only a single shot, but they were using grasers as powerful as most battlecruisers' chase weapons. They drove straight into the teeth of the battlecruisers' broadsides, closing with grim determination, and they fired at a white-knuckle range of less than seventy-five thousand kilometers.

Four hundred and eighty-one Shrikes and roughly another five thousand Allied personnel died, blown apart by the battlecruisers' energy weapons in the brief engagement window they had. In return, twenty-eight Republican battlecruisers were completely destroyed, five more were reduced to shattered, broken wrecks, and seventy-seven thousand more of Lester Tourville's personnel were killed.

But in its destruction, Second Fleet's screen had done its job. The LACs which survived the exchange were a broken force, streaming through and past Tourville's surviving superdreadnoughts so rapidly not even the Shrikes had time to inflict significant damage on such massively armored targets. Not without numbers they no longer had.

* * *

'I've got the preliminary figures, Boss,' Molly DeLaney said. Her expression and hoarse voice showed the strain they were all under, Tourville thought, and nodded for her to continue without ever taking his own attention from the plot.

'It looks like only about two hundred of their LACs got away,' his chief of staff said. 'The wall's energy weapons managed to nail most of the others as they crossed our vector.'

'Thank you,' Tourville said, and closed his eyes briefly.

My God, he thought. I came into this thinking I knew what the casualties were going to be like, but I didn't. Neither did Tom Theisman, really. No one could have projected this kind of carnage, because no one's had any experience, even now, with this kind of fight. Both sides are so far outside our standard operational doctrines that we're in virtually unknown territory. Podnaughts aren't supposed to close head on until they get into mutual suicide range. And we're not supposed to let LACs get that close to our starships. Our wall is supposed to be able to kill them before they ever get to us. But I didn't have the missiles left to do it, and they whipped through our engagement window so quickly our energy weapons couldn't stop them in time, either.

He opened his eyes again, looking back into the plot. In a galaxy where indecisive maneuvers had been the norm for so many centuries, two decades-even two decades like the ones which had begun at Hancock Station- simply hadn't been enough to prepare anyone for this.

But the galaxy had better get used to it, he thought grimly. Because one thing he knew; the lethal genies were out of the bottle, and no one was going to get them back inside it.

'Any new orders, Sir?' DeLaney asked, and he shook his head.

'No.'

* * *

'Hyper footprint at two-point-three-six million kilometers!' Commander Zucker barked. 'Many footprints!'

Oliver Diamato's head whipped around as the erupting footprints speckled the plot. There were eighteen of them, and he swore with silent, vicious venom as they sparkled like curses in the display.

Whoever had taken the Sherman as his intended target had come in far closer than most of the others, but all of them showed remarkably good astrogation for such a short jump. Then the vector readouts came up, and he swore again. From their headings, and especially from their velocity numbers, they'd obviously managed to hyper out of the Junction without his ever noticing, then come back in after building their velocity in hyper, so the jump wasn't quite a short as he'd thought it was.

Not that he had much time to think about it.

'Missile launch!' Zucker said. 'Many missiles, incom-!'

Diamato's mouth had opened before the ops officer spoke, and his order chopped off the end of Zucker's announcement.

'All units, Code Zebra!' he barked.

RHNS William T. Sherman blinked into hyper less than three seconds before HMS Nike's missiles would have detonated. Two of Diamato's other battlecruisers were less fortunate, a bit slower off the mark. They took hits- RHNS Count Maresuke Nogi lost most of her after impeller ring-but they, too, managed to escape into hyper.

Diamato breathed a sigh of relief when he realized all his units had gotten out. But however relieved he was by their survival, the fact remained that he'd been driven off his station. Frustratingly incomplete as his observations had been, his had been the only eyes located to watch the Junction at all for Second Fleet.

* * *

'Admiral Diamato's been forced to fall back to the Alpha Rendezvous, Sir,' Lieutenant Eisenberg reported.

'Damn,' Molly DeLaney murmured, but Tourville only shrugged.

'It was bound to happen sooner or later, Molly. On the other hand, it may actually be good news.'

'Good news, Sir?'

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