Mission of Honor

were getting disgustingly good looks at her SDs, and she felt no inclination to start showing them an active Halo system any sooner than she had to. There was no point giving their computers additional time to analyze her EW. Still . . . .

'Activate Halo at forty million kilometers,' she said.

* * *

'Point Longbow in one minute, Ma'am.'

'Thank you, Dominica.'

Michelle Henke's acknowledgment of Dominica Adenauer's report sounded preposterously calm. Particularly, Michelle realized a moment later, because that was exactly how she felt. This moment lacked the vengefulness of New Tuscany. Instead, there was a balanced, singing tension at her core. A sense of something almost but not quite like detachment. A poised, cat-like something, she realized, that she'd seen more than once in Honor Alexander-Harrington but never expected to experience herself.

God, I refuse to turn into another Honor! The thought sent a ripple of amusement through her, a flicker of welcome warmth. Lord knows I love her, and we all need her, but I flat out refuse to grow up that much!

She shook her head, unaware of the way her staff was looking at her, or the way her sudden smile swept across her flag deck like a calming breeze.

* * *

'Point Longbow, Sir.'

Stillwell Lewis' taut-voiced announcement cut through the disciplined silence of Quentin Saint- James ' flag deck, and Sir Aivars Terekhov nodded.

'Engage,' he said simply.

* * *

'Missile launch! '

Jacomina van Heutz twitched as Commander Sambroth's warning rapped out sharply, and her eyes flicked to the fountain of fresh icons which suddenly speckled the plot.

'Range at launch five-three-point-niner-six million kilometers.' Sambroth sounded as if she couldn't really believe her own numbers. 'Assuming constant accelerations, time of flight seven-point-five minutes!'

'Stand by missile defense,' van Heutz heard her own voice say, but it seemed to come from someone else, far away, as she saw the impossible number of missiles screaming towards her ship.

* * *

The Saganami-C -class heavy cruiser massed four hundred and eighty thousand tons. It mounted forty missile launchers in each broadside, and it had been designed to fire double broadsides at its enemies, then provided with a sixty percent redundancy in control links as a reserve against battle damage. That gave each of Aivars Terekhov's cruisers one hundred and twenty eight telemetry links, and each of those links was assigned to one Mark 23-E missile, which, in turn, controlled eight standard Mark 23s.

The twelve ships of Cruiser Squadron 94 and Cruiser Division 96.1 fired just over fifteen hundred missile pods at Task Force 496, Solarian League Navy.

* * *

'Estimate twelve thousand—repeat, twelve thousand— incoming!'

Sandra Crandall's head snapped around at Ou-yang Zhing-wei's hard, flat announcement. She stared at her ops officer, eyes huge, too shocked by the numbers to register even disbelief. At that, she was doing better than Pйpй Bautista. Her chief of staff's expression was that of someone infuriated by a lie rather than someone stupefied by astonishment.

'Halo active,' Ou-yang continued. 'Missile Defense Plan Able activated.'

* * *

'Commodore Terekhov's opened fire, Ma'am.'

Dominica Adenauer's report was one of the least necessary ones Michelle Henke had ever heard. The thousands upon thousands of icons streaking across the master plot were painfully evident. None of which absolved Adenauer of her formal responsibility to tell her admiral about it.

'Acknowledged,' Michelle said softly.

* * *

Scotty Tremaine watched the hurricane racing toward the Sollies with something very like a sense of awe. He'd seen larger salvos—not once, but many times. For that matter, the mutual holocausts Home Fleet and Lester Tourville's Second Fleet had inflicted upon one another at the Battle of Manticore dwarfed even this. But a full third of these missiles had come from ships under his command, and that realization sent an icy chill through his blood.

He glanced for just a moment at Horace Harkness' profile and felt an obscure, irrational flicker of reassurance. Harkness' elemental solidity, his unflappable sense of who and what he was, was like a touchstone. It was a reminder of all the challenges Tremaine had met and surmounted in the twenty T-years since he'd first set eyes on that battered, competent face, and in the wake of finding himself cast in the role of Juggernaut, Scotty Tremaine took a warm and very human comfort from it.

* * *

Helen Zilwicki stood at Terekhov's side, watching the same plot, and thought about how different this was from the Battle of Monica.

As Terekhov's flag lieutenant, she'd been there when he and Admiral Gold Peak and Admiral Oversteegen and their ops officers threshed out their plans for Operation Agincourt. Fire distribution had been one of the critical points, and no one had been prepared to make any unwarranted assumptions about the ease with which Solly missile defenses might be penetrated. They'd all been aware that Solarian anti-missile doctrine and capabilities were . . . seriously flawed compared to those of the Republican Navy, but they'd forced themselves to adopt the most pessimistic estimates of their ability to capitalize on those flaws.

Of the 12,288 standard Mark 23s in that stupendous initial launch, fully one quarter—just over three thousand—were EW platforms. The remaining nine thousand plus were distributed over twenty-three of Sandra Crandall's seventy-one superdreadnoughts. Experience against the Republic of Haven indicated that two hundred to two hundred and fifty Mark 23 hits would destroy—or mission-kill, at least—even the latest Havenite SD(P) . . . which was why Fire Plan Alpha had allocated four hundred missiles to each of its targets.

'Spot and allocate the Bravo launch,' Sir Aivars Terekhov said.

* * *

The wavefront of destruction roared towards Sandra Crandall's superdreadnoughts from far, far beyond the Solarians' own range of Aivars Terekhov's command. There was no fear-pumped adrenaline surging through the minds of the tactical officers behind that stupendous missile launch. Despite the pygmy size of their own vessels, compared to those of their opponents, they recognized the full, deadly depth of their advantages. Knew the men and women aboard those superdreadnoughts could not effectively threaten them in any way.

Knowing that, those minds ticked with cool, merciless precision, watching their displays, monitoring their missiles and the EW environment with hawk-like attentiveness.

* * *

There was no matching coolness aboard Joseph Buckley or the other units of Task Force 496.

No one in the entire task force, in his darkest nightmare, could have anticipated the sheer weight of fire streaking towards them. By any meterstick of the Solarian League Navy, it was simply and starkly impossible. The surprise and disbelief that generated were total, yet for all of the SLN's institutional arrogance and complacency, all of their own shock, the men and women of Sandra Crandall's command were professionals. Astonishment, even terror, might reach out to paralyze them, but training slotted into place, like a bulwark between them and panic's palsy.

Jacomina van Heutz heard the quick, purposeful flow of orders and responses around her, and even in the midst of her own shock, she felt a glow of pride. Fear might flatten her people's voices, incredulity might echo in their tones, but they were doing their jobs. They were responding , doing their best, not simply gaping in horror.