At All Costs

"Admiral, we've got eighteen superdreadnoughts or CLACs, well outside the hyper limit, directly astern of us. Range five-three-point-nine million kilometers. Velocity relative to Lovat two-point-five-zero-one thousand KPS. They-"

She broke off for just a moment, looking back down at her plot, then cleared her throat.

"Update, Sir. It's twelve SD(P)s and six carriers. The carriers just launched full LAC complements."

Giscard nodded, and hoped he looked calmer than he felt.

Mousetrapped, by God, he thought. And the same way we did it to her at Solon.

He shook his head in brief admiration, but well executed as Harrington's maneuver had been, it still wasn't perfect. The wallers coming up behind him were at almost three light-minutes' range. They had him deep enough inside the hyper limit that he couldn't avoid action, but their astrogation had been poor, and they'd made their own alpha translation 2.8 light-minutes outside the hyper limit. At that range, even Manty MDM accuracy was going to be significantly degraded, and he had sixteen pod-layers to their twelve. The LACs they were deploying outnumbered his, and they'd be more effective in the missile-defense role, but he was too far ahead of them, with too great an advantage in base velocity for them to overtake him.

And Harrington was still in front of him, driving steadily deeper into the waiting defensive missiles.

"Start rolling pods, Selma," he told his ops officer. "Fire Plan Gamma."

The outer-system FTL platforms reported the arrival of Admiral Yanakov's Task Force 82 to Alessandra Giova

Despite a brief, instinctive panic reaction, Giova

So the great 'Salamander' can fuck up just like the rest of us mere mortals, she thought. Pity about that.

"Range from Forge?" she asked.

"Still one-one-point-two light-minutes, Ma'am," MacNaughton replied. "Roughly another thirty-six minutes to missile range for Moriarty."

"Thank you," she said, and turned back to the outer-system plot as the multi-drive missiles began to launch.

The range was almost fifty-four million kilometers, and Bogey Two was ru

Except....

"Sir, there's something... odd about the Manties' launch," Thackeray said.

"What do you mean, 'odd'?" Giscard asked sharply.

"Their attack birds are coming in... well, 'clumped' is the only word I can think of for it, Sir. They aren't spreading out in a proper dispersion pattern."

"What?"

Giscard punched a command into his own repeater plot and frowned. Thackeray was right. His own outgoing missiles were spreading out, distancing themselves from one another to reduce wedge interference with their telemetry links to the ships which had launched them. Everyone's missiles did that.

But the Manties' missiles weren't.

"Query CIC," he told Thackeray. "I want an analysis of this pattern. There's got to be some reason for it."

"CIC's already on it, Sir,. So far, they don't have any explanation."

Giscard grunted in acknowledgment. Actually, he realized, the attack missiles were spreading out, just not the way they should have. They were coming in in discrete clusters, spread across an attack front which would bring them all in simultaneously in the end, but making the trip in relatively tight groups of about eight or ten missiles each.

No, he thought as a preliminary analysis from the Combat Information Center came up as a sidebar to his plot. They're coming in in clusters of exactly eight missiles each. Which is stupid, since they have twelve missiles in each pod!

It was called "Apollo," after the archer of the gods.

It hadn't been easy for the R&D types to perfect. Even for Manticoran technology, designing the components had required previously impossible levels of miniaturization, and BuWeaps had encountered more difficulties than anticipated in putting the system into production. This was its first test in actual combat, and the crews which had launched the MDMs watched with baited breath to see how well it performed.

Javier Giscard was wrong. There weren't twelve missiles in an Apollo pod; there were nine. Eight relatively standard attack missiles or EW platforms, and the Apollo missile-much larger than the others, and equipped with a down-sized, short-ranged two-way FTL communications link developed from the one deployed in the still larger Ghost Rider reco

The impeller wedges of the other missiles hid it and its pulsed transmissions from the sensors of Giscard's ships, and from his counter-missiles. But its position allowed it to monitor the standard telemetry links from the other missiles of its pod. And it also carried a far more capable AI than any standard attack missile-one capable of processing the data from all of the other missiles' tracking and homing systems and sending the result back to its mothership via grav-pulse.

The ships which had launched them had deployed the equally new Keyhole II platforms, equipped not with standard light-speed links for their offensive missiles, but with grav-pulse links. Virtually every Manticoran or Grayson ship which could currently deploy Keyhole II was in Eighth Fleet's order of battle, and Honor Alexander-Harrington had taken ruthless advantage of the capability when she formulated her attack plans.

The updated sensor information from the on-rushing missiles crossed the distance to the tactical sections and massively capable computers of the superdreadnoughts which had launched them virtually instantaneously. As did the corrections those tactical sections sent back.

In effect, Apollo gave the Royal Manticoran Navy real-time correction ability at any attainable missile range.

Javier Giscard's tactical officers didn't realize at first what they faced. In fact, most of them never did realize.

The Manty missiles ignored their decoys almost contemptuously, and those peculiar clumps of MDMs maneuvered with a precision no missile-defense officer had ever seen before. It was almost as if each clump were a single missile, one which bored in through the defensive shield of the task group's electronic warfare as if it didn't exist.

Counter-missiles began to fire, and something else very peculiar happened. The EW platforms seeded throughout the Manticoran salvo didn't come up simultaneously, or in groups, the way they ought to have. Instead, they came up individually, singly, almost as if they could actually see the counter-missiles and adjust their own sequences.

Dragons Teeth activated at precisely the right moment to draw the maximum number of counter-missiles into attacking the false targets. Dazzlers blasted the onboard sensors of other counter-missiles... just as the attack missiles behind them arced upward, or dove downward, to drive straight through the gap the Dazzlers had burned in the defensive envelope.

Not all the defensive missiles could be blinded or evaded, of course. There were simply too many of them. But their effectiveness was slashed.

The twelve superdreadnoughts of Task Force 82 had rolled quadruple patterns before they launched. Two hundred and eighty-eight Apollo pods had launched nineteen hundred attack missiles and and four hundred EW platforms, along with two hundred and eighty-eight control missiles.