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Chin exchanged glances with her chief of staff and ops officer. Commander Klim's frown was as intent as her own, but Commander DeSoto seemed unconcerned. Which didn't mean much. The ops officer was a good, sound technician, but he lacked the chief of staff's imagination.
She scooted down in her command chair and crossed her ankles as she leaned back to think. She no longer felt any inclination to fidget, as if the appearance of those drive signatures on the far side of the base had erased some of her tension, yet a nagging little spike of doubt jabbed at her mind.
They almost had to be battlecruisers to pull that accel, and they'd been doing it too long for them to be EW drones. Yet she'd been too convinced the Manties would try something before tamely surrendering a base they'd spent so much time, money, and effort building to accept it without reservation.
"Range to their base?" she asked DeSoto.
"Coming down on one-oh-eight million kilometers, Ma'am."
"Range to base is now one-zero-one million kilometers, Sir," Honor told Mark Sarnow, and the admiral nodded.
"Stand by to rotate and engage." His tenor's slight harshness was the only sign of the last two hour's nerve-wracking strain, and Honor's respect for him clicked up another notch. The dreadnoughts had closed the range by more than ninety-three million kilometers, and their velocity remained almost fifty-six hundred KPS higher than his own. If they went in pursuit at maximum power now, they could force him into energy range, despite his higher accel. She knew all about the ploys he hoped would slow them down, for she'd helped him devise them, but she also knew what would happen if his stratagems failed. There were too many enemy ships back there for merely scattering to save his battlecruisers if they pressed a resolute pursuit, and he'd deliberately accepted that to maximize the one truly heavy blow he could deliver. It required either immense moral courage or a total lack of imagination to do something like that.
She looked back at her plot and let her thoughts turn to the missile pods. Nike's redesigned inertial compensator and more powerful impellers let her tow a total of seven of them; Achilles,Agamemnon, and Cassandra could manage six each, but the older, Redoubtable-class ships could tow only five. "Only" five. The right corner of her mouth twitched at the thought.
Tension wound tighter and tighter at Honor's core, the first red claws of anticipation ripping at her professional calm as the kilometers oozed away, and then Mark Sarnow spoke from the screen at her right knee.
"Very well, Dame Honor," he said very formally. "Execute!"
CHAPTER THIRTY
"Contact!"
Admiral Chin jerked upright in her chair. DeSoto was bent intently over his display, and she frowned as seconds leaked away with no more information.
"I'm not sure what it is, Ma'am," he said finally. "I'm picking up some very small radar targets at about seven million klicks. They're not under power, and they're too small to be warships, even LACs, but they're almost exactly on our base course. We're overtaking them at about five-five-niner-four KPS, and—Jesus Christ!"
Admiral Mark Sarnow's task group had completed its turn, presenting its broadsides to the oncoming enemy, and the missile pods streamed astern like lumpy, ungainly tails.
"Stand by," Honor murmured. No active sensors were live, but they'd had literally hours to refine the data from their passive systems, and she felt her lips trying to draw back from her teeth.
The tactical net's hair-thin lasers linked the task group into a single, vast entity, and data codes flashed as each division of battlecruisers and cruisers confirmed acquisition of its assigned target. She waited two more heartbeats, then—
"Engage!" she snapped, and Task Group Hancock 001 belched fire.
Nike and Agamemnon alone spat a hundred and seventy-eight missiles at the Peeps, almost five times the broadside of a Sphinx-class superdreadnought. The other divisions of her squadron had fewer birds, but even Van Slyke's cruiser divisions had twice a Bellerophon-class dreadnought's broadside. Nine hundred missiles erupted into Admiral Chin's teeth, and every ship's drive came on line in the same instant. They swerved back onto their original heading, redlining their acceleration, and deployed decoys and jammers to cover themselves as they raced ahead down the Havenites' base course at 4.93 KPS?.
For one terrible moment, Genevieve Chin's mind froze.
Two superdreadnought squadrons couldn't have spawned that massive salvo, and the Manties only had battlecruisers! It was impossible!
But it was also happening, and forty years of training wrenched her brain back to life.
"Starboard ninety! All units roll ship!" she snapped, and her fist pounded the arm of her command chair as her ships began to turn. It was going to be close, for dreadnoughts were slow on the helm, and she cursed the precious seconds her own stu
A hurricane of missiles tore down on Havenite ships whose startled missile defense officers had been slow to start their plots. There'd been no one on their sensors to run plots on, and they weren't clairvoyant.
Countermissiles began to fire, sporadically at first, then in greater and greater numbers. Dreadnoughts were lavishly equipped with active defenses, but the Manties had targeted the full fury of their fire on just four dreadnoughts and the same number of battlecruisers... and almost a third of the incoming missiles carried neither laser heads nor nukes. They were fitted instead with the best ECM emitters and electronic penaids Manticore could build, and they played hell with Havenite tracking systems. Missile impeller signatures split apart and recombined with insane abandon, jammers scrambled defensive radar, and sheer, howling electronic noise attacked squadron tactical nets that hadn't had the least idea they were about to be assailed. Half of them went down—only for seconds, perhaps, before they recovered, but for those seconds Admiral Chin's ships found themselves suddenly alone in the path of the storm. They were forced back into local control, and without centralized direction, two and even three ships attacked some missiles... while no one at all engaged others.
Countermissiles and laser clusters tore dozens— scores—of them apart, but nothing could have stopped them all, and Chin dung to her command chair as her massive flagship heaved in agony. Laser heads stabbed at New Boston with x-ray stilettos, people and alloy blew apart and vaporized under their deadly impact, and those were the light hits, the ones that had to get through sidewalls and radiation shielding first.
Nouveau Paris, Chin's lead dreadnought, was slow getting around, and over a dozen missiles detonated almost dead ahead of her. Lethal clusters of lasers ripped straight down the wide-open throat of her wedge, and Chin stared at the visual display in sick horror as she blew apart. One instant she was six megatons of capital ship; the next she was an expanding ball of fire.
The battlecruisers Walid and Sulieman died with her, and other ships took hit after hit. The dreadnought Waldensville staggered as her forward impeller ring was blown apart, and the battlecruiser Malik careened out of formation as her wedge went down completely. A heavy cruiser division tried to cover her against Manticoran sensors with their own wedges, but with neither wedge nor sidewalls, Malik was doomed. Even as Chin watched, her crew took to their escape pods, fleeing their helpless ship before the Manties localized her despite her screen and blew her apart. Waldensville's impeller damage had cut her maximum acceleration in half, the dreadnought Kaplan had lost a quarter of her port broadside, her sister ship Havensport was almost as badly damaged, and the battlecruiser Alp Arslan trailed atmosphere and debris.