Chin. Although she'd fired first, his missiles would reach their targets before hers.
'We are truly and royally screwed, Skipper,' Chief Warrant Officer Sir Horace Harkness said quietly from HMLAC Dacoit's engineering station.
Scotty Tremain glanced at him, then looked back at the plot, and wished there were some way he could disagree.
'You have a message from Admiral Truman, Captain,' Dacoit's com section AI said. 'Personal to you.'
'Accept, Cental,' Tremain said. A moment later, Alice Truman appeared on his com display.
'Admiral,' he said, watching the missile icons spreading like the tracks of pre-space wet-navy torpedoes.
'It looks like we're going to get hammered, Scotty,' Truman told him bluntly. 'I want you to detach your Katanas. Leave them behind to help thicken Admiral Kuzak's defenses. Then take all the rest of your birds and head for the in-system force now.'
Tremain looked at her for just a moment. He knew what she had in mind. His Ferrets and Shrikes, especially the former, were preparing to help bolster Third Fleet's missile defenses, yet compared to his Katanas, their contribution would have been relatively minor. But by sending them against the survivors of the first Havenite attack force, she might compel it to divert its fire. It no longer had a screen, its attached LACS had taken severe losses, and it couldn't simply run away from him into hyper. It would have no choice but to stand and fight, and if it let him get into attack range without severe losses of his own....
'Understood, Dame Alice,' he said. 'We'll do our best to keep their heads down.'
'Good, Scotty. Good hunting. Truman, clear.'
'Crap,' Molly DeLaney muttered, and Lester Tourville chuckled harshly.
'They're a little quicker off the mark with it than I expected,' he said, watching the Manty LACs' arc away from Third Fleet. Missile flight times were long enough-and the Manty reaction fast enough-that their course change was already evident, even though Second Fleet's first salvo had yet to reach attack range.
'Still,' he continued, 'it was the logical move, once we lost the screen. Frazier.'
'Yes, Admiral?' Commander Adamson replied.
'Send Smirnoff out to meet these people.'
'Captain Smirnoff is dead, Sir,' Adamson said. 'Commander West is COLAC now.'
Tourville winced internally. He hadn't known Alice Smirnoff well. Only met the woman twice, actually, and then only in passing. But somehow her death, unnoticed in the general carnage, suddenly seemed to symbolize the hundreds of thousands of his personnel who had perished in the last three hours.
'Very well,' he said, an edge of harshness burring his otherwise level response, 'send West out to meet them.'
'Aye, Sir.'
'Is that going to be enough, Boss?' DeLaney asked quietly, and Tourville shook his head.
'No. They aren't sending in as many, but these people are fresh, and Smirnoff-West-and his people burned too many missiles stopping the last attack. We're going to have to take them with MDMs.'
'Do you want to shift targeting?'
'Not yet.' Tourville shook his head. 'That's what they want us to do, and I'm not taking any pressure off Kuzak until we have to. But it's going to limit the number of salvos we can give her.'
He punched in a command, calling up the fleet status display. He studied it for several seconds, then looked at Adamson.
'Frazier, tell Admiral Moore and Admiral Jourdain to abort their engagement of Third Fleet. I want their squadrons to reserve their total remaining pods for use against the Manty LACs.'
'Yes, Sir.'
Tourville nodded and sat back in his command chair. Moore and Jourdain had taken the lightest losses of any of his battle squadrons. Between them, they still had fourteen SD(P)s, and much as he hated taking them out of the firing queue at this particular moment, he had a feeling he was going to need their missiles badly in another half- hour or so.
'Here it comes,' Wraith Goodrick murmured, and Alice Truman nodded.
Counter-missiles tore into the oncoming MDMs, and at least this time they hadn't been able to deploy whatever had let them throw such monster salvos at Home Fleet. These were merely 'normal' double-pattern broadsides from over a hundred SD(P)s.
Nothing to worry about, she told herself; only twelve thousand missiles or so. No more than a couple of hundred per ship. Just a walk in the park.
Except, of course, that they weren't spreading them over all of Third Fleet's ships.
Scotty Tremain's detached Katanas were tucked in close, hovering 'above' Third Fleet, rather than going out to meet the incoming missiles as normal doctrine would have dictated. Normal doctrine, after all, hadn't anticipated a situation in which a fleet would screw up so badly it found itself squarely between two widely separated enemy fleets, each numerically superior to itself, and in range of both. The LACs couldn't place themselves between one threat and the rest of Third Fleet without leaving it uncovered against the other, and so they held their position, spitting Vipers against the wall of destruction crashing towards Theodosia Kuzak's command.
Thousands of Mark 31 counter-missiles went out with the Vipers, and Truman felt Chimera quiver as her own counter-missile tubes went to rapid fire, but nothing was going to stop all of that torrent of MDMs. Decoys and Dazzlers strove to bewilder or blind the incoming missiles, but still they came on.
'They're concentrating on the Nineteenth,' Commander Janine Stanfield, Truman's operations officer, reported.
'They'll have a lot of strays at this range,' Goodrick said, and Truman nodded agreement with her chief of staff. Not that having a few hundred MDMs wander off was going to do Vice Admiral Irene Montague and her command a lot of good. Not with two thousand missiles targeted on each of her six superdreadnoughts.
Even with its attention divided between the salvos rumbling down on it from opposite directions, Third Fleet's missile defense was far more effective than Home Fleet's had been. Partly that was simply the difference in the numbers of missiles in each incoming salvo. Another part was the difference in closing velocities, which improved engagement times. And, especially against Second Fleet, it was because so many of the ships launching those missiles had themselves been damaged, in many cases severely, before they launched. They'd lost control links, sensors, computational ability, and critical personnel out of their tactical departments, with inevitable consequences for the accuracy of their fire.
But twelve thousand missiles, were still twelve thousand missiles.
Twenty percent were electronic warfare platforms. Another twelve percent simply lost lock, as Goodrick had predicted. The massed counter-missiles of Third Fleet and Alice Truman's Katanas killed almost four thousand, and the last-ditch fire of the 91st Battle Squadron and its escorts killed another fifteen hundred. It was a remarkable performance, but it still meant twenty-seven hundred got through.
The heavy laser heads detonated in rapid succession, bubbles of brimstone birthing x-ray lasers that ripped and tore at their targets. The superdreadnoughts' wedges intercepted many of those lasers. Their sidewalls bent and attenuated others. But nothing built by man could have stopped all of them.
The massively armored superdreadnoughts shuddered and bucked as transfer energy blasted into them. Armor and hull plating splintered, atmosphere gushed from gaping holes, and weapons, communications arrays, and sensors were torn apart. HMS Victorious staggered as her forward impeller ring went into emergency shutdown. Her wedge faltered, and then she staggered again, like a seasick galleon, as a half-dozen more laser heads detonated almost directly ahead of her. Her bow wall stopped most of the lasers, but at least twelve stabbed straight through it, hammering the massively armored face of her forward hammerhead. Her forward point defense clusters went down, her chase energy weapons were pounded into broken rubble, and one of her forward impeller rooms blew up as the massive capacitors shorted across.
For a moment, it looked like that was the extent of her damage. But deep inside her, invisible from the outside, the energy spike of that demolished impeller room drove deeper and deeper. Circuit breakers failed to stop it, control runs exploded, power conduits blew up in deadly sequence, and then, suddenly, the ship herself simply exploded.
There were no small craft, no life pods. No survivors. One moment she was there; the next she was an expanding sphere of fire.
Her squadron mates were more fortunate. None of them escaped unscathed, however, and HMS Warrior lost
