In Arthur orbit, the installation codenamed Moriarty came fully on-line for the first time. It wasn't a very huge installation. In fact, it was no larger than a heavy cruiser, and it had been transported in two prefabricated modules aboard a fleet supply ship, then assembled in place in less than forty-eight hours.
As a warship tonnages went, four hundred thousand wasn't a lot... unless all of it was dedicated to fire control.
Moriarty was Shannon Foraker's system defense answer to the individual inferiority of the Republic's missile pods. The control station was a flat, light-drinking black, constructed of radar absorbent materials. It was almost impossible to detect, as long as it practiced strict emission-control discipline, and the Manticoran recon arrays had missed it entirely.
Now it reached out through the other innocent looking orbital platforms which had been seeded about the system at the same time. Each of those platforms was, in effect, a less capable, simpler minded version of the RMN's own Keyholes. They formed a network, an expanding spray of tentacles, which gave Moriarty literally thousands of fire control telemetry links. And what those links lacked in Manticoran-style sophistication they made up in numbers, because they could control the missiles assigned to them without break all the way to their targets.
Moriarty had only one real weakness, aside from the fact that if it had been detected, killing it would have been relatively simple. That weakness was the light-speed limitation on its telemetry. It simply couldn't provide real-time corrections as its missiles raced down range. On the other hand, neither could Honor's telemetry links. Aside from the superior seeking systems and more capable AIs aboard the Manticoran missiles, the accuracy playing field had just been leveled.
And the Republic's salvo contained sixty-two times as many missiles as the largest salvo TF 82 was firing.
"Get on them! Get on them now!"
Captain Amanda Brankovski, Samuel Mikl¢s's senior COLAC, knew her people didn't need any exhortations from her, but she couldn't help it. She watched the incredible cyclone of missile icons streaking across her plot towards the task force, and it seemed impossible that any of its ships could survive.
The five LAC wings, arranged "above" and "below" the heavier ships and fifty thousand kilometers closer to Arthur, belched an answering hurricane. Vipers and standard counter-missiles began to launch from the LACs as Mark 31s roared away from the starships, and incoming missiles began to vanish.
Brankovski had five hundred and sixty LACs, one for every thirty attack missiles, and they punched a steady stream of counter-missiles into their teeth. Tethered and free-flying Ghost Rider decoys sang to the Republican MDMs' sensors. Dazzlers were launched into their faces, exploding in bursts of blinding interference. And Imperator and her consorts punched out wave after wave of Mark 31s.
The front of the Republic's missile attack eroded under TF 82's defensive fire like a cliff, crumbling under the assault of a stormy sea. But, like the cliff, it was only the front of a far larger mass. Thousands of MDMs were killed, yet more thousands remained, and Honor Harrington watched them reaching out for her command.
Emile Deutscher watched Moriarty's fire race towards the enemy. Even from here, he could see that virtually none of the attack missiles were becoming lost in midflight, as normally happened in MDM combat. All of them held their courses, and he felt totally certain no defenses, not even the Manties', could stop them.
Which left the little problem of the fire coming at him.
It took the massive attack seven minutes to reach Task Force 82. Of the seventeen thousand missiles in the initial launch, only sixty lost their telemetry links and self-destructed after wandering off course. The Mark 31s killed over three thousand in the outermost intercept zone. In the middle zone, bolstered by the Katanas' Vipers and the standard counter-missiles from the Shrikes and Ferrets, they killed another four thousand. Jammers blinded another sixteen hundred missiles as they tried to settle into final acquisition, and the incredible cauldron of missile, starship, and LAC impeller wedges was too much for Moriarty's arthritic light-speed telemetry to sort out any longer.
The surviving eighty-three hundred MDMs dropped into autonomous mode as they hit the inner counter-missile zone. Shipboard EW did its best to spoof and blind the attackers, last-second decoy launches drew some of them astray, and a seemingly solid wall of Mark 31s met them head on.
Four thousand more MDMs were wiped out of space. Another eleven hundred fell prey to decoys or jamming. Three hundred of the survivors were penetration-aid EW platforms, without laser heads, and almost half the remaining twenty-nine hundred lost lock and reacquired not starships, but the nearer, more readily seen LACs. They streaked in to the attack, but Manticoran LACs were extraordinarily difficult targets. "Only" two hundred and eleven of them-and the twenty-one hundred of Honor's men and women aboard them-were killed.
And then the final sixteen hundred missiles attacked TF 82's starships, most of them targeted on the two superdreadnoughts.
Only one thing saved HMS Imperator, and that was the damage already inflicted on Intolerant. Imperator's consort's defenses and electronic warfare capability were simply far below par. She was both easier to see and easier to hit. The near-sighted autonomous-mode MDMs mobbed her in huge numbers, ignoring Imperator, and her last-ditch defenses weren't equal to the task of protecting her.
Warhead after warhead, literally hundreds of them, detonated in a hellish pattern of strobes-bubbles of nuclear fusion spitting deadly harpoons of coherent radiation that crashed through Intolerant's wavering sidewalls and ripped deep, deep into her massively armored hull. Mike Henke's battlecruisers did their best to beat that tide of destruction aside, but they simply lacked the firepower, and they themselves were not immune from attack.
Honor clung to the arms of her command chair, feeling Imperator shudder under the pounding of her own hits, tasting Nimitz in the back of her brain, clinging to her with all his fierce love and devotion as death thundered and bellowed about their ship. Yet even as she did, her eyes were on the plot, watching the lethal wave of fire washing over Intolerant.
No one would ever know how many hits the superdreadnought took, but however many there were, it was too many. They ripped into her again, and again, and again, until, suddenly, she simply disappeared in the most brilliant, eye-tearing flash of them all.
Nor did she go alone. The light cruisers Fury, Buckler, and Atum vanished from Honor's plot, as did the battlecruisers Priam and Patrocles. The heavy cruisers Star Ranger and Blackstone were reduced to crippled hulks, coasting onward ballistically without power or drives. And HMS Ajax faltered suddenly as her entire after impeller ring went down.
Imperator took over a dozen direct hits of her own, yet the flagship's actual damage was incredibly light. Her thick armor shrugged off most of the hits with little more than superficial cratering, and despite the loss of half a dozen energy mounts, she remained fully combat capable.
Honor gazed into the bitter ashes of her display, tasting the cruel irony of her flagship's apparent inviolability as she saw the harrowed wreckage of the rest of her command. Of the twenty starships and five hundred and sixty LACs she'd taken across the hyper limit, only twelve starships, all but two of them damaged, and three hundred and forty-nine LACs survived. And even as she watched, Ajax and the heavy cruiser Necromancer were falling behind due to impeller damage.
"Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said quietly. Honor looked at her. "The remote arrays confirm the destruction of two of their minelayers and heavy damage to one of their superdreadnoughts."