At All Costs

"Your Grace, they've ceased fire!" Andrea Jaruwalski reported jubilantly.

"No, they haven't," Honor replied quietly. Jaruwalski looked at her, and Honor smiled thinly. "What they're doing over there right this minute, Andrea, is deploying a lot more pods. I'd guess they'll probably roll at least ten or twelve patterns each. Sequencing that many launches for a simultaneous time on target will be complicated, but not all that difficult."

"You're probably right, Your Grace," Jaruwalski conceded after only a moment's thought. "It's the obvious counter, now that you've pointed it out."

"So the next salvo is going to be just a bit more difficult to kill. In which case," Honor said grimly, "it may be time to distract them just a bit. I want the battlecruisers held in reserve-they don't have enough ammo capacity to use up pods at this range-but Imperator and Intolerant will engage the enemy. Pick one superdreadnought and pound it, Andrea."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!"

"Admiral," one of Jaruwalski's ratings said, "Bogey One just killed its acceleration."

"I expected that," Honor said. "Bogey One was never strong enough to fight us. I suspect the only reason it headed towards us in the first place was to contribute to the impression of a system defense force that was thoroughly uncoordinated and panicked. Now that the trap's been sprung, they're not going to want to get any closer to us than they can help."

"We're ready, Admiral," Selma Thackeray said.

"Very well. Execute."

Javier Giscard's task group abruptly altered heading by ninety degrees, bringing its broadsides to bear on Task Force 82. The maneuver cut their acceleration towards the Manticoran ships to zero. But their relative velocity was losing ground steadily, anyway, and the turn also brought all of their broadside fire control to bear. Which meant they had many times as many control links as they'd had before. He was effectively conceding the pursuit in order to maximize his chances of crippling one or more of his foes.

"Missile launch!" Thackeray's assistant operations officer barked suddenly. "We have multiple missile separations, Admiral! Range at launch three-niner-point-four-oh-four million kilometers! Time to attack range seven-point-six minutes!"

"Well, that wasn't exactly unexpected," Giscard said, just a bit more calmly than he actually felt. "They've figured out what we're up to, and they want to force us to 'use them, or lose them.'"

"Launching now, Sir!" Thackeray said, and Giscard nodded.

"So, they have a few new wrinkles of their own," Honor observed.

Selma Thackeray had spent the last six minutes deploying missile pods. In that time, she'd positioned 1,080 of them. Now she launched all of them simultaneously.

The next best thing to eleven thousand MDMs hurled themselves at Task Force 82. Given their lower acceleration rate, and the fact that TF 82 was continuing to accelerate away from them, their flight time would be twenty-five seconds longer than TF 82's, and their closing velocity would be almost nine thousand KPS lower when they arrived, but what they lacked in performance, they more than made up in sheer numbers.

They couldn't possibly have enough control links to manage that many missiles simultaneously, Honor thought. But the way the individual components of the enormous salvo were spreading out and separating, it looked as if they'd come up with a data sharing approach similar to that of the Alliance. If she was right, their control circuits were bouncing back and forth between individual sub flights of missiles, which was going to cost them even more in accuracy. But given the size of the attack wave it made possible, they probably figured the new technique was well worth it.

And they're probably right about that, too, she told herself.

"All units, Missile Defense Sierra!" Jaruwalski snapped. "Carter, stay on the attack birds!"

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" one of her assistants replied, and Jaruwalski turned her full attention to the defensive engagement.

"We have a probable total of two hundred and eighty-eight incoming in each salvo, Sir," Thackeray reported.

Giscard nodded in understanding. Given the greater capacity per pods the Manties appeared to be getting out of their new, downsized MDMs, Thackeray's estimate worked out to a double pattern from each of the Manty superdreadnoughts. Of course, given the fiendishly capable EW capabilities of Manty missile penetration aids, an accurate count of the incoming was a virtual impossibility. Still, the interval between salvos-twenty-four seconds-accorded well with Thackeray's estimate.

"Get the Cimeterres into position," he said.

"Aye, Sir," Thackeray replied, and he heard her coaching the escorting LACs into positions from which their counter-missiles and laser clusters could engage the incoming warheads without fouling Thackeray's telemetry to her own attack birds.

"They're moving their LACs in to intercept," Lieutenant Carter a

Despite his superb instrumentation, he himself had absolutely no control over the attack. He was simply monitoring it for Honor while the tac officers of the individual ships executed the instructions Jaruwalski had already transmitted, and he was very young.

"It's to be expected," Honor told him quietly. She stood behind Jaruwalski, watching the ops officer's plot as the incredible Havenite missile storm roared towards her command. "Just take it as it comes, Jeff."

"Yes, Your Grace."

Carter drew a deep breath and settled himself in his chair, and Honor reached out to rest her right hand lightly on his shoulder for a moment. But even as she did, her eyes stayed on Jaruwalski's plot.

ONI estimated that the latest Havenite SD(P)s carried approximately the same number of missile pods as a Medusa-class. Assuming that was accurate, then each of the six superdreadnoughts pursuing her task force carried five hundred pods. They'd expended at least a hundred and sixty each in the first exchange, and there had to be at least a thousand pods in this monster salvo. That came to a total of somewhere around two thousand. So, if the six of them carried three thousand pods between them, that meant they'd have expended two thirds of their total ammunition allotment by the time these missiles arrived.

They can't sustain this level of fire, she told herself. On the other hand, if they get through with enough of it this time around, it may not matter.

"They're targeting the battlecruisers this time, too, Your Grace," Brigham said softly, and Honor nodded curtly. They weren't ignoring the superdreadnoughts, but they'd clearly devoted at least some of their total fire to Henke's battlecruisers.

"Here it comes," someone said.

The voice was low, and Giscard didn't recognize it. Nor did he try to. He doubted whoever it was realized he'd spoken aloud, anyway.

Not that anyone had required the a

The first Manticoran salvo streaked into his task group's teeth, and it was obvious the Manties had concentrated everything on a single target.

Task Force 82's missiles roared down on the superdreadnought RHNS Conquete. There were, in fact, two hundred and forty attack missiles and forty-eight EW platforms in the lead salvo. Half of the EW birds were Dragons' Teeth, and as they entered Bogie Four's counter-missile envelope, they suddenly appeared on the Havenite tracking displays as two hundred and forty additional attack missiles. Counter-missiles which had been locked onto them suffered massive confusion as their targets abruptly shoaled into literally dozens of false images. Other counter-missiles, which had been earmarked for genuine threats, diverted to the new targets, spending themselves uselessly.