War Of Honor

"Uh, they're—" The ops officer shook himself physically. "I mean, they're about as good as we could hope for at this range, Sir," he said more crisply.

"Well, in that case I suppose we'd better use them before we lose them," Maitland replied. "Reprioritize the firing sequence. Flush them all—now."

"Aye, aye, Sir."

"Here they come," Auderska murmured.

"Had to get them off before our birds got close enough for proximity kills," Kirkegard agreed, watching the sidebars of his plot as CIC assigned threat values to the incoming warheads. "More of them than I expected, too," he acknowledged.

"Yes, Sir. We're going to get hurt," Auderska said.

"Price of doing business," Kirkegard replied with a shrug. "And at this range, not even Manty targeting systems are going to be able to score a very high percentage of hits. Neither are ours, of course, but—" his smile was thin and hungry "—we can fire heavy follow-on salvos . . . and they can't."

"Tracking reports that their missile ECM is much better than it's supposed to be, Sir," Maitland's chief of staff said very quietly into his ear. Sir Ronald looked at him, and he grimaced unhappily. "They're estimating that our point defense is going to be at least twenty-five percent less effective than we'd projected. At least."

Maitland grunted and turned his gaze back to the master plot while his brain raced. It was obvious from the weight of fire coming at him that the Peep superdreadnoughts on that plot were a pod design. But the situation wasn't completely hopeless, he told himself. Everything the LACs' sensors had reported so far indicated that the Peeps' EW capabilities, while substantially better than anticipated—as CIC's new estimate of their missile ECM confirmed—were still far below Manticoran standards. That would give Maitland an enormous advantage in a long-range missile duel like this. Or it would have, if he'd been able to shoot back at all.

He gritted his teeth as bitter memory replayed his repeated requests for at least one SD(P). But the Admiralty had not seen fit to assign such scarce, valuable units to a secondary system like Maastricht. At least the launchers aboard two of the three older ships he did have had been refitted to handle multi-drive missiles. Which meant that once his pods were exhausted, he wouldn't be completely unable to return fire. It only meant that he could respond with less than twenty percent of the Peeps' weight of fire until he somehow managed to close to within six million klicks of them.

Which none of his starships could possibly survive long enough to do.

"Are those new acceleration figures for their superdreadnoughts confirmed?" he asked his ops officer.

"Yes, Sir," the commander confirmed unhappily. "They're still lower than ours, but the difference is almost thirty percent less than ONI's estimates."

"That figures," Sir Ronald half-snarled before he could stop himself. Then he closed his mouth, drew a deep breath, and looked back at the chief of staff.

"Transmit an immediate message to Commodore Rontved," he said. "Instruct her to activate Case Omega immediately."

"Yes, Sir." The complete absence of surprise in the chief of staff's voice showed that he'd already reached the same conclusion Maitland had. Rontved commanded the small, three-unit squadron of maintenance and support ships the Admiralty had deployed to support Maitland's picket. They were effectively unarmed, aside from a strictly limited point defense capability, and under Case Omega their job was simply to be sure that as much as possible of the infrastructure which had been built up to support the system picket was destroyed before they themselves ran for it.

"Warn her not to waste any time about it," Maitland emphasized. "We know they have multi-drive missiles now. If ONI can be that completely wrong about one thing, they can be wrong about another. So I wouldn't be surprised if a CLAC or two turned up in their order of battle."

"Yes, Sir." The chief of staff paused for just a moment, then nodded his head sideways at the master plot. "Speaking of LACs, Sir, what about ours?"

"They'll continue the attack. After all, they can't run if we lose Incubus," Maitland said harshly. Then he grunted again. "Just in case Rontved doesn't make it out, though, detach one of the tin cans. We need to be certain someone gets home with a warning."

Lieutenant Commander Jeffers stood at Henry Stevens' shoulder, staring down the tactical display while Starcrest continued to accelerate towards the hyper limit at maximum military power. The fact that their inertial compensator might fail at any moment and turn all of them into so much strawberry jam was completely beside the point as they stared at the chaos and devastation behind them.

Two of Rear Admiral Maitland's superdreadnoughts were already gone, and the flagship was dying. Incubus was still in action, but her acceleration had fallen by over fifty percent as the damage to her beta nodes mounted. The only reason she hadn't been destroyed outright, Jeffers thought grimly, was that her ship-to-ship combat capability was so limited. The Peeps had concentrated on anyone who might hurt them first; they could always finish Incubus off any time they chose.

It hadn't been entirely one-sided—only almost.

Maitland's single pod-spawned wave of missiles had hammered one Peep superdreadnought into an air-bleeding wreck and damaged two more of them. His internal launchers had concentrated on one of the two wounded SD(P)s and inflicted substantially more damage on her, and one Peep battlecruiser had been destroyed outright, while another seemed to be in little better condition.

But that was it. The LACs had done their best, and their efforts had helped to account for the one destroyed battlecruiser and inflicted damage on most of her consorts. But the Peeps aboard those starships were no longer confused and panicked by the mere sight of an impossible "super LAC." They'd had time to think and analyze, and they recognized the weaknesses of such small, relatively fragile attackers. The LAC crews had bored in with all the guts and gallantry in the universe, and they'd actually managed to inflict at least a little damage in the process. But these superdreadnoughts' sidewalls were intact, the vulnerable throats of their wedges were protected by bow walls almost as good as the RMN's own, their point defense and energy gu

Incubus' group had gotten in one good firing pass on the ships of the wall. After that, the survivors had been swatted almost negligently when they tried for a second one.

Jeffers tried not to let his own sense of shocked disbelief show. It was obvious that the Peeps still hadn't quite equalized the gap between Manticoran hardware and their own. Their ECM was still nowhere near as good. Their missile pods seemed to carry fewer birds per pod, which suggested that they'd had to accept a more massive design. That meant lighter broadsides from the same to