At All Costs

"They boosted for six minutes at forty-six thousand gravities, Ma'am," Spiropoulo said. "Then they just shut the hell down. I altered course as soon as their impellers went down, which they have to know is going to play hell with whatever accuracy they might have achieved. And that's not the only screwy thing they're up to. Look at this."

The ops officer punched a macro, and Chin frowned as an additional cluster of impeller signatures blinked into existence. For some reason known only to itself and God, the Manty task force ahead of them had just fired another pattern of pods-one pattern of pods, with less than sixty missiles in it. And it hadn't fired them at Chin's ships; the missile vectors made it obvious the Manties had fired at Second Fleet, almost 150,000,000 kilometers away them, inside the resonance zone.

"Well, at least now we know how they think they can get them to make attack runs once they get them into range," Sabourin said.

"I suppose," Chin said, but her expression was troubled.

Actually, it was their only real option, assuming they were going to fire from such a long range in the first place. At 46,000 g, their missiles had accelerated to almost 162,400 kilometers per second and traveled 29,230,000 kilometers before they'd shut down. That left the MDMs' third stage available for a powered attack run when they reached their targets. In sixty seconds of maximum acceleration, the remaining drive would add another 54,000 kilometers per second to the missiles' velocity. Or they could go for half that much power, and add another 81,000 over the space of three minutes. More importantly, it would permit the oncoming missiles to maneuver to engage their targets. She understood that. What she didn't understand was how they could believe it was anything but an utter waste of their missiles. They'd had to establish the targeting parameters when they launched. That meant they were gong to be looking for targets where Fifth Fleet would have been on its original heading and acceleration, and Spiropoulo's course chance during the long ballistic portion in their flight profile's center would hopelessly compromise the weapons' already poor accuracy at long range.

She glanced at the time display while she did some mental math. Assume they waited until the birds were, say, eighty seconds out and then kicked in the last stage at 46,000 gravities. That would give them eighty seconds of maneuver time, for however much good that would do them at this extended range.

If they let the missiles come all the way in ballistic, flight time from shutdown would be about four and a half minutes. But they won't. So say they do bring the drives back up eighty seconds out-that would put them about three minutes before attack range on a straight ballistic profile-they'd still have about 13,000,000 kilometers to go. So if they kick the remaining drive at 46,000 gees at that point, they'll shave maybe seven seconds off their arrival time, and they'll be coming in somewhere around 200,000 KPS. But their accuracy will still suck. And what the hell do they think they're doing with this other little cluster?

Andria

Her eyes opened wide in horror.

"General signal all units!" she shouted, spi

But it had taken Genevieve Chin two minutes too long to realize what was happening.

"Drives going active... now, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, and the missiles thirteen million kilometers short of Fifth Fleet suddenly brought their final drive stages on-line. Their icons burned abruptly bright and strong once again as they lit off their impellers... and hurled themselves at their targets under full shipboard control.

They blazed in across the remaining distance, tracking with clean, lethal precision, and their ballistic flight had dropped them off of the Republic's sensors. Chin's ships knew approximately where they were, but not exactly, and their supporting EW platforms and penetration aids came up with their impellers. They hurtled in across the Republican SD(P)s' defensive envelope at over half the speed of light, and the sudden eruption of jamming, of Dragons Teeth spilling false targets, hammered those defenses mercilessly.

The fact that the missile defense crews aboard those ships had known, without question, that the attacking missiles would be clumsy, half-blind, only made a disastrous situation even worse.

Eighth Fleet had deployed almost eight thousand pods. Those pods launched 69,984 missiles. Of that total, 7,776 were Apollo birds. Another 8,000 were electronic warfare platforms. Which meant that 54,208 carried laser heads-laser heads which homed on Genevieve Chin's ships with murderously accurate targeting.

Second Fleet's missile defenses did their best.

Their best was not good enough.

Honor sat hugging Nimitz and watched the real-time tactical download from one of the Apollos. It felt u

Fifth Fleet stopped almost thirty percent of them, which was a truly miraculous total, under the circumstances. But over thirty-seven thousand got through.

It was, she decided coldly, a case of overkill.

Lester Tourville stared at his plot in horror as the impeller signatures of sixty-eight Republican ships of the wall abruptly vanished. Seventeen continued to burn on the display for another handful of seconds. Then they, too, vanished in what he devoutly hoped was a frantic hyper translation.

There was total silence on Guerriere's flag bridge.

He never knew exactly how long he simply sat there, his mind a great, singing emptiness around a core of ice. It couldn't have been the eternity that it seemed to be, but eventually he forced his shoulders to straighten.

"Well," he said in a voice he couldn't quite recognize, "it would appear our time estimate on the deployment of their new system was slightly in error."

He turned his command chair to face Frazier Adamson.

"Cease fire, Commander."

Adamson blinked twice, then shook himself.

"Yes, Sir," he said hoarsely, and Second Fleet ceased firing at Third Fleet's tattered remnants as Adamson transmitted the order.

"Dear Lord," Dame Alice Truman murmured feelingly. "Talk about last-second reprieves."

"Did what I think happened really just happen, Ma'am?"

Wraith Goodrick's voice sounded shaky, and Truman didn't blame him a bit. Only seven of Theodosia Kuzak's superdreadnoughts were still in action, and all of them were brutally damaged. Another three had technically survived, but Truman doubted any of the ten would be worth repairing. All four of Kuzak's CLACs had been killed, and of Truman's own eight, three had been destroyed, one was a drifting cripple without impellers, and the other four-including Chimera-were severely damaged. For all intents and purposes, Third Fleet had been as totally destroyed Home Fleet.

But the merciless hail of missiles had at least stopped pounding its remnants.

And, Truman thought with grim survivor's humor, I don't blame whoever gave that order a bit, either.