At All Costs

"That's hard to say." Honor considered the question for a few seconds, then shrugged. "Their pods would have to get awfully lucky to make any difference. If those were Shrikes or Ferrets, it might be different, but they aren't."

"Missile launch!" a Plotting rating a

"Captain Beauchamp has launched, Commodore!"

Tom Milligan looked up at the a

A pi

"Estimate eleven hundred-I say again, one-one-zero-zero-inbound," Plotting reported. "Target is Second Division."

"Makes sense," Brigham said quietly. "We're closer to most of their platforms, and two superdreadnoughts have to have less missile defense than four of them."

Honor didn't respond. In fact, she was almost certain her chief of staff didn't even realize she'd spoken aloud.

The tornado of multidrive missiles howled towards them, and whoever had programmed their launch times and accelerations had done her job well. Despite how widely separated many of the launching pods were, their coordination was flawless. All of those missiles would arrive on target simultaneously as a single, tightly focused hammer blow.

The quiet murmur of voices behind her grew louder, more clipped and intense, as Jaruwalski's plotting parties and tactical crews concentrated on their tasks. Not that there was a great deal for them to actually do at this moment. Everything an admiral's staff could do for a situation like this had to happen earlier, in the pla

As Imperator, Intolerant, and their screening heavy cruisers were performing it now.

As little as five or six T-years earlier, that many missiles, fired at a mere pair of superdreadnoughts, would have been both enormous and deadly. Today, it was different. In an era of pod-laying ships of the wall, missile densities like that had become something defense pla

Doctrine and hardware had required major modifications, and the modifying process was an ongoing one. The Mark 31 counter-missiles Honor's ships were firing represented significant improvements even over the Mark 30 counter-missiles her command had used as recently as the Battle of Sidemore, only months before. Their insanely powerful wedges were capable of sustaining accelerations of up to 130,000 for as much as seventy-five seconds, which gave them a powered range from rest of almost 3.6 million kilometers.

Kill numbers at such extreme ranges were problematical, to say the least, and the incoming Havenite missiles were equipped with the very best penetration aids and EW systems Sha

Their telemetry and control links had been increased by an even higher factor, and each of her ships had deployed additional Mark 20 electronics platforms at the ends of dedicated tractor beams. Nicknamed "Keyhole" by the Navy, the Mark 20 wasn't a traditional tethered decoy, or even an additional sensor platform or Ghost Rider EW platform. These platforms were placed much further from the ships which had launched them, and they had only one function-to serve as fire control telemetry relays. They extended well beyond the boundaries of their motherships' impeller wedges, like an old-style wet-navy submarine's periscope, and they gave the tactical crews aboard those ships the ability to look "down" past the blinding interference of their own outgoing counter-missiles' wedges.

To a civilian, that might have sounded like a small thing, but the implications were huge. The Keyhole platforms were massive and expensive, but they allowed a ship to control multiple counter-missiles for each dedicated shipboard fire control "slot." And they also allowed counter-missile launches to be much more tightly spaced, which added significant depth to the antimissile engagement envelope.

And as a final refinement, the grav-pulse com-equipped reco

Sha

The first counter-missile launch killed only a hundred and six of the incoming MDMs. The second, intercepting them less than ten seconds later killed another hundred. But the third launch, with almost twenty seconds for its controllers to react, killed three hundred.

Tom Milligan turned away from the pi

One hit, he thought. Surely one frigging hit wasn't too much to ask for!

But the Republic hadn't gotten it. Only forty of Beauchamp's MDMs had broken through the Manties' counter-missiles, and the point defense laser clusters-whose numbers also seemed to have been hugely increased-had blasted those threadbare survivors out of existence well short of attack range.

We knew they were improving their antimissile doctrine, but nothing I ever saw suggested that they'd improved it this much! And it's going to play hell with our system defense doctrine.

Hera's defenses had been weak, even by the existing standards of the Republican Navy. He should have had at least three times the missile pods he'd actually been able to deploy, and they ought to have been backed up by a much stronger LAC force, at a bare minimum. But given what he'd just seen, even the defensive strength he ought to have had wouldn't have stopped Harrington.

I've never failed this completely at anything before in my life, he thought bitterly. At least I didn't get all of my people killed for nothing, but just at the moment, that's pretty cold comfort.

He stared broodingly into the endless ebon infinity of space. It looked so peaceful out there, so calm. And that cold, merciless vista was infinitely preferable to what was about to happen closer to the life-giving beacon of the star called Hera.