War Of Honor

They were tough, superdreadnoughts. The most massively armored and protected mobile structures ever built by man. They could soak up almost inconceivable amounts of punishment and survive. More than survive, continue to strike back from the heart of a holocaust which would have vaporized any lesser ship. But there were limits to all things, including the toughness of superdreadnoughts, and he watched the damage report sidebars flicker and change as incoming missiles sledgehammered his own SD(P)s again and again and again.

He felt a moment of bitter shame leavened by relief as he realized most of the Manties were virtually ignoring his own flagship. He'd chosen Majestic because she'd been designed as a command ship, with the best communications and battle management systems available. But she was a pre-pod design, and so, for all her damage, she was largely spared as that first, deadly exchange of fire completely gutted a third of Tourville's SD(P)s. Two more were damaged almost as badly, and a seventh lost two alpha nodes. Only one of them escaped totally undamaged . . . and fresh Manticoran missiles were already howling in upon her in follow-on salvos.

Honor watched the return Havenite fire rip into her own formation. Her wall of battle was too far from its enemies for shipboard sensors to resolve what was happening to Second Fleet in any detail, but the Ghost Rider sensor platforms she'd had deployed were another matter entirely. Not even Manticore had yet been able to find a way for the platforms to send targeting information directly to MDMs, and even an MDM was too small for BuWeaps to cram in an FTL receiver which would have allowed real-time targeting telemetry to be relayed through the ships who'd launched them. But she could at least evaluate what happened when those missiles reached their targets, and her eyes narrowed in respectful surprise at the sheer toughness of that multilayered, tightly coordinated defensive envelope.

It was obvious that the Republic recognized the technical inferiority of its defensive systems. But Sha

And it worked.

Like Tourville, Honor had chosen her flagship for the effectiveness of its command systems more than its ship-to-ship offensive power. And even more than Second Fleet's commander, she found that flagship virtually ignored by the incoming Republican missiles. It made sense, she supposed, although she hadn't really considered it when she made her choice. After all, a carrier which had already launched its LACs automatically had a lower priority than superdreadnoughts which were busy launching missiles of their own or providing fire control to pods laid by another SD(P).

Werewolf was miraculously and completely untouched in that first, crushing exchange of fire. Other ships were less fortunate. Alistair McKeon's Troubadour was a priority target. Almost a dozen missiles broke through every electronic and active defense, and the SD(P)'s icon flashed and flickered on Honor's plot as she took damage. Her sistership Hancock was hit equally hard, and Trevor's Star took at least ten hits from individual lasers. The pre-pod ships Horatius,Romulus, and Yawata took their share of the punishment, as well, and the battlecruiser Retaliation strayed into the path of a full broadside intended for the dreadnought King Michael. All of the ships of the wall survived; Retaliation didn't.

Honor watched the battlecruiser's data code disappear from her plot and wondered how many hundreds—or thousands—of her people were wounded or dying aboard the other ships of her task force. She felt those fresh deaths pressing upon her, joining their weight to all the rest of her dead, but even as the toll mounted among her own ships, she knew the enemy was being hammered even harder.

Lester Tourville watched the mounting tide of destruction swelling up in the plot's sidebars and fought to keep his despair out of his expression and voice.

Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs' long flight times, the Manties' deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos . . . and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21's flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge . . . and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters' fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.

Nor had the SD(P)s been his only fatalities. Five more superdreadnoughts had been destroyed or so badly damaged that he'd had no option but to leave them behind while his survivors continued to run. At least one more had taken critical impeller damage; like the lamed SD(P)s, he'd be forced to leave her behind when he made translation into hyper if she couldn't get the missing alpha node back. One of his CLACs had also been destroyed, and two more were little more than air-bleeding wrecks, which meant that at least seven hundred of his two thousand LACs were going to have to be written off, whatever happened to the rest of his fleet.

He checked the maneuvering plot again, and his face clenched with pain. He was still two hours from the hyper limit, and if Harrington's task force had begun losing ground as the geometry of his vector change crabbed away from her, the Graysons were closing in steadily. Not that it mattered. He might be slowly, painfully opening the range from her launchers, but he was still over two light-minutes inside their reach.

At least some of Harrington's ships had been sufficiently battered to fall astern in the chase, he thought grimly. Some of them, judging from the recon drone's' reports, had taken serious damage. Two of her battlecruisers had been completely destroyed, as had at least three destroyers or light cruisers. CIC wasn't certain which at this range—especially when they hadn't been targeted in the first place. But MDMs were proving as indiscriminate in their targeting at long-range as Sha

Even as he watched his fleet being pounded towards destruction, he felt a fresh flicker of admiration for Sha