Mission of Honor

Yet behind that pride, there was another emotion—sorrow. Because however well they did their jobs, it wasn't going to matter in the end.

* * *

Hago Shavarshyan watched Ou-yang Zhing-wei and her assistants grapple with the horrifying surprise of that massive missile launch.

Shavarshyan was no tac officer, but he'd had enough tactical training to know that what was coming at them was not the blind-fired covering barrage Ou-yang had suggested to Crandall and Bautista. The most cursory analysis of those missile signatures showed that every one of them was maneuvering as part of a coherent, carefully managed whole. The fact that that was flatly impossible didn't mean it wasn't happening, and the ops officer was totally focused on her displays, on her earbug, on the reports flowing in to her from the task force's huge array of sensor platforms.

The intelligence officer envied her. At least she had something to distract her.

'It's got to be some kind of EW!' Bautista protested hoarsely. The chief of staff was staring at the plot, shaking his head again and again.

'That's no ECM, Pйpй,' Crandall grated. She jabbed her chin at the secondary displays showing Joseph Buckley 's combat information center's analysis of the incoming impeller signatures. 'They're there.'

'But . . . but they can't possibly control them.' Bautista turned his head to stare at Crandall. 'They can't have the control links! And . . . and even if they did , at this range their accuracy has to suck!'

'I doubt even Manties would have fired missiles they can't control.' Despite her own shock, despite her truculence and undeniable arrogance, Sandra Crandall's eyes were dark with a refusal to hide behind simple denial. 'You may be right about the accuracy penalty, but if they can throw enough salvos this size, even crappy accuracy's going to rip our ass off.'

Bautista's eyes went even wider at her harsh-voiced admission. He opened his mouth once more, as if to say something, but no words came, and he closed it again.

Crandall never even noticed.

* * *

'Good telemetry from the advanced platforms, Sir.' Stillwell Lewis sounded almost jubilant. 'They're bringing up their Halo platforms, but their shipboard systems show very little change. No surprises so far.'

'Let's not get overconfident, Stilt,' Terekhov replied calmly.

'No, Sir.'

Helen suppressed an inappropriate urge to smile. Lewis' tone was chastened as he acknowledged Terekhov's admonition, and she knew the commodore was right. Yet at the same time, she understood exactly where the ops officer's confidence came from.

The Ghost Rider platforms watching the Solarians were three light-minutes from Quentin Saint- James . But those three light-minutes equated to less than three seconds of transmission lag for their FTL transmitters. For all intents and purposes, Lewis was watching Crandall's ships in real time. Without Keyhole-Two platforms, there was no FTL telemetry link between Terekhov's cruisers and their missiles, yet the time lag built into their fire control and EW loop was still only half that of any navy without Ghost Rider.

That would have been bad enough from the Sollies' perspective even if there'd been no Apollo birds driving along behind the attack missiles. But the Mark 23-Es were there, and each of them represented a far more sophisticated and capable advanced control node than the SLN had ever imagined. The Echoes had been preloaded with dozens of alternative attack profiles, based on every permutation of Solarian defensive measures Tenth Fleet's tactical officers and the simulators had been able to come up, and their extraordinarily competent onboard AIs were far more capable of adjusting and reshaping those profiles on the fly than any previous attack missile would have been. Of course, even with those stored profiles and AIs, Lewis' fire wouldn't be remotely as effective as it would have been if he'd had the all up Keyhole-Two systems, instead.

It was simply incomparably better than anything anyone else had.

* * *

'Halo active.' Horace Harkness gazed at his displays, hands moving with the precision of a pianist as he refined the data. 'Looks like about a twenty percent increase on their battlecruisers' efficiency, but the filters should be solid unless it gets a lot worse. We're seeing a lot of lidar lighting off, too, though. I think we'll be looking at the first counter-missiles pretty soon.'

Scotty Tremaine nodded. Twenty percent was a lower increase than the ops plan had allowed for, and he wasn't about to assume it wasn't going to go up over the next couple of minutes. But even if it did . . . .

'Bravo pods in position,' Commander Golbatsi said, and a fresh wave of missile pod icons blinked with the red data codes of readiness on Tremaine's plot. 'Launch codes receipted and acknowledged by all pods.'

'Thank you, Guns.'

'Profile Alpha- Quйbec-One-Seven,' Stilson MacDonald announced suddenly.

'Execute,' Tremaine said sharply.

'Executing Alpha-Quйbec-One-Seven, aye!' Adam Golbatsi responded, and sent the command that locked the entire division's first wave missiles into the final attack profile Aivars Terekhov had just ordered.

A strange spike—almost a sense of relief, or perhaps of commitment—swept Alistair McKeon 's flag bridge, as if everyone on it had inhaled simultaneously.

* * *

The same awareness flickered across Quentin Saint-James ' flag deck, but Terekhov didn't seem to notice. His eyes, like his thoughts, were on the master tactical plot, and those eyes were blue ice.

'Launch the Bravo birds,' he said, and a second salvo, as massive as the first, roared out of the pods.

* * *

Thirty seconds and 14,177,748 kilometers short of their targets, the Mark 23-Es of Operation Agincourt's Alpha launch receipted their final instructions and switched to attack profile AQ-17. Their closing velocity was up to 207,412 KPS, just over sixty-nine percent of the speed of light, which was over four and a half times the maximum any Solarian missile could have generated, given the same geometry, and the differential would only increase over the last half-minute of their existence.

The Apollo missiles' AIs didn't really care about that, or about their own rapidly approaching destruction, except inasmuch as it simplified their task. They simply obeyed their instructions, considering the information transmitted to them from their slaved attack missiles' sensors and comparing the warp and woof of the Solarian defenses to the requirements of AQ-17. Certain minor adjustments were in order, and the AIs made them calmly, then sent out fresh instructions.

The EW platforms and penetration aids seeded throughout the salvo responded.

* * *

Solarian counter-missile doctrine had never envisioned a salvo density like this. Traditional missile defense planning focused on identifying the attack missiles most likely to achieve hits and then targeting each of them with multiple counter-missile launches. But there wasn't going to be time for that in the face of such a ferocious closing velocity. In fact, there would be time for only a single CM launch before the MDMs screamed completely across their engagement envelope, and even taking full advantage of the additional fire control of the Aegis refits a third of Crandall's ships had received, her superdreadnoughts could produce less than two thousand counter-missiles per launch. That was approximately one CM for every 6.5 Mark 23s slicing towards them, which would have been hopelessly inadequate under any circumstances.

Now 'inadequate' became 'futile' as the control missiles activated their slaved electronic warfare platforms.

Missile defense officers stared in disbelief as their displays went berserk. Dragon's Teeth blossomed like seductive flowers, flooding Task Force 496's fire control with false targets. The number of threat sources doubled, then doubled yet again, and again , hopelessly swamping the Solarian systems' ability to discriminate the true threats from the counterfeit. The computers driving those systems, and the men and women behind those computers, did their best, but their best wasn't good enough.