"They're moving their LACs in to intercept," Lieutenant Carter announced, his voice a bit hoarse.
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 announcement.
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.
Fourteen of the Dragons' Teeth survived to cross the first interception zone. Six of them survived to cross the second interception zone. Two of them made it half way across the inner counter-missile zone. But before the last of them was destroyed, they'd carried a hundred and fifty-six attack missiles and fourteen Dazzler EW platforms with them.
Laser clusters tracked onto the surviving Manticoran missiles, but those missiles were closing at sixty-two percent of light-speed. Each cluster had an effective range of 150,000 kilometers, but Manticoran MDMs had a standoff attack range of 40,000 kilometers... and it took them barely half a second to cross the intervening 110,000 kilometers. There were literally thousands of laser clusters aboard the superdreadnoughts and their escorting Cimeterres, but they got at most one shot each.
And just before they fired, the fourteen surviving Dazzlers erupted in bursts of jamming that blinded sensors searching desperately for targets.
Despite everything the superior Manticoran EW could do, Shannon Forkner's defensive doctrine worked. Not as well as a Manticoran defense might have, perhaps, but sheer volume of firepower still made itself felt. Of the two hundred and forty attack missiles in the salvo, only eight survived to attack range.
Two of them detonated late, wasting their power on the roof of Conquete's impenetrable impeller wedge. The other six detonated between fifteen and twenty thousand kilometers off the ship's port bow, and massive bomb-pumped lasers punched brutally through her sidewall.
Alarms howled as Conquete shuddered in anguish. Five point defense clusters, two counter-missile tubes, and three graser mounts, blew apart. Beta Nodes One, Three, and Five; Radar One; Gravitic One; and three of her fire control telemetry arrays were blotted away. Fifty-one members of her crew were killed, another eighteen were badly wounded, and splinters of armor-some the size of a pinnace-blasted away from her hull. But for all the horrific power of those hits, the damage was actually minor. Superdreadnoughts were designed and built to survive the most savage punishment imaginable, and Conquete went right on rolling missile pods.
"It looks like we got at least a couple of hits through, Your Grace," Lieutenant Carter reported. "It's hard to be certain at this range, even with the remote arrays, but CIC feels fairly confident."
"Good," Honor said. "Good."
"And here comes the response," Brigham said grimly. "What was that old wet-navy saying you told me about, Your Grace? 'For what we are about to receive-'?"
"'May we be truly thankful,'" Honor finished without looking away from the plot.
"That's it," Brigham agreed, and then the MDMs were upon them.
It was the Republic's turn, and the tsunami of missiles crashed into Task Force 82's outer counter-missile zone. Havenite EW might not be as good as the RMN's, but it did its best, and that best was much better than it once had been.
Almost eleven thousand MDMs had been launched. Six hundred and seventeen had simply become lost and wandered away as Bogie Four's fire control strained to meet the demands placed on it. The remaining 10,183 continued to charge forward as the Mark 31s came to meet them. Twenty-six hundred of them died in the outer interception zone. Another three thousand two hundred died in the intermediate zone, and the Mark 31s killed another two thousand nine hundred in the inner zone. But then it was their turn to slash across the laser clusters' engagement envelope in less than a second, and there were still 1,472 of them left. Two hundred were EW platforms, and the targeting solutions of the other twelve hundred were far poorer than Task Force 82's had been, but there were a great many of them.
The last-ditch lasers aboard the warships and their escorting LACs killed over nine hundred. Of the three hundred and seventy-two surviving attack missiles, a hundred and three wasted themselves uselessly against their targets' impeller wedges. Of the other two hundred and sixty-nine, a hundred and seventy-two attacked the two superdreadnoughts, and Imperator and Intolerant heaved as lasers ripped into them. Their sidewalls intercepted and blunted most of the lasers, but it was the turn of Manticoran armor to shatter under the pounding.
Imperator emerged with relatively minor damage, including the loss of three grasers and half a dozen laser clusters, but Intolerant staggered as dozens of hits hammered her thick, multi-ply armor. Huge splinters of it blew away, energy mounts and laser clusters were wiped out, and communication and fire control emitters, radar and gravitic arrays shattered. She bucked in agony under the pounding... and then a final, freak hit ripped straight into the gaping missile hatch in the center of her after hammerhead.
Rear Admiral Morowtiz's flagship rocked as the powerful energy blast smashed forward along the unarmored, open central core of a pod-layer. Hundreds of missile pods were wrecked, turned into twisted and shattered alloy and wreckage. The missile handling rails were torn apart, and over thirty of her crew were killed.