It wasn't a perfect distribution, a corner of his brain noted. One or two of those ships were going to get off with no more than a dozen or so birds, while others were going to be attacked by scores of them, but it didn't really matter. Shannon was already reprogramming the missiles waiting in her broadside tubes, and even as Tourville watched, a second salvo, much smaller than the first, but carefully targeted on the handful of Manties who might survive the first one, spat from his ships.
For all intents and purposes, surprise was total. Commodore Yeargin's crews were still scrambling frantically to their stations when the first wave came in. Of her six heavy cruisers, two never got their point defense on-line at all. Three more managed, somehow, to bring their laser clusters up under computer control, but only Enchanter got off a single salvo of counter-missiles. Not that it made much difference. One hundred and six incoming missiles were picked off before they reached attack range; the other eight hundred and sixty-two raced in to twenty-thousand kilometers and detonated in rippling succession.
Nuclear explosions pocked space, each one generating a thicket of bomb-pumped X-ray lasers. It wasn't even a massacre, for there was nothing, absolutely nothing, between those lasers and their targets. It took less than four seconds for all eight hundred-plus warheads to attack. Sixteen seconds later, Shannon Foraker's second salvo streaked down on the stunned, mangled survivors, and when the last of them detonated, the Manticoran Alliance had lost six RMN heavy cruisers, three RMN and seven GSN light cruisers, and nine destroyers... without getting a single shot off at their attackers.
Commander Jessica Dorcett sat frozen in her command chair, staring with numb incomprehension at the impossible tactical imagery. Hers was the senior ship of the destroyer division assigned to cover the main processing platform of the Adler System's asteroid extraction industry. The platform's Peep-built technology wasn't much by Manticoran standards, but it was still an important facility, and it was presently over fifty light-minutes from Samovar, well away from the course the enemy must have followed on his way in-system. Which meant that Dorcett's three ships had survived... and that she was now the system's senior officer. It was up to her to decide what had to be done, but what in God's name could she do?
The task group was gone. Only her own division remained, and it would be less than useless against the force decelerating towards the fresh wreckage orbiting Samovar. She had just witnessed the most crushing, one-sided defeat in the history of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.
A dull ache told her her teeth were clamped in a deathlike rictus, and she sucked in an enormous breath and made her jaw relax. Then she shook herself, like a dog throwing water from its coat, and turned to her exec. Lieutenant Commander Dreyfus was still staring at the plot, his normally dark face pale, and Dorcett cleared her throat loudly.
Dreyfus twitched as if she'd stuck a pin into him, then closed his eyes for just a moment. When he opened them again, the shock had been dragged under a ruthless pretense of control, and he met his captain's gaze squarely.
"Pass the word. We'll hyper out to Clairmont ourselves. Rondeau and Balladeer will head for Quest and Treadway respectively."
"But..." Dreyfus paused. "That won't leave anyone to picket the system and keep an eye on them, Ma'am," he pointed out quietly.
"We don't have that luxury." Dorcett’s tone was as bleak as her expression. "I don't know what the schedule was, but I do know GHQ's already detailed reinforcements for this system. The warships will probably be coming in in ones and twos, which is bad enough, but Logistics Command has supply ships and troop transports in the pipeline, as well. Individual warships won't stand a chance against a force that size, but at least they may have the speed to run for it. Transports won't... but Logistics Command is bound to stage them through Clairmont, Quest, or Treadway. Which means we have to catch them in one of those systems and warn them off in time. Besides..." she managed a death's head grin "...we're all there is. Someone's got to alert the other local pickets about what's happened here, and the only people who can do that are us."
"Yes, Ma'am." Dreyfus beckoned to the com officer, and Dorcett heard the urgent, low-pitched murmur of his voice as he passed her orders on. She knew she should be listening to be sure he'd gotten those orders right, but they'd served together for over a T-year. He wasn't the sort to make mistakes, and even if he had been, it was physically impossible for her to look away from her display and the icons of the Peep warships settling into orbit around Samovar.
Compared to the tonnages routinely destroyed when walls of battle clashed, the loss of Commodore Yeargin's task group would hardly be noticed, but Dorcett knew tonnage was the least of what had been lost here. Even the personnel casualties, terrible as they must have been, were secondary to what she'd just seen. It was the speed, the brutal, overwhelming power and efficiency, with which the task group had been killed that mattered. That was what was going to stick in the craws of the Alliance and, especially, the Manticoran Navy.
This wasn't the first victory the Peeps had won, but its totality put it in a category all its own. A category the RMN had believed was reserved for it, not for the clumsy, outclassed stumblebums of the Peoples Navy.
Well, Dorcett told herself grimly, we were wrong. And from the salvo density, they had to have been using missile pods, too. They outthought us, they outplanned us, and they outshot us, and if they can do that here, then where else can they pull it off?
She didn't know. The only two things she did know were that it was her job to spread the warning before more ships sailed into the trap this system had just become... and that whatever else happened in her career, she and every officer aboard her three ships would always be known as the people who'd watched the worst disaster in Manticoran naval history and done nothing to prevent it. It wasn't their fault. There was nothing they could have done. But that wouldn't matter, and she knew it.
"Rondeau and Balladeer are ready to pull out, Ma'am,"
Lieutenant Commander Dreyfus reported quietly, and Dorcett nodded.
"Very well, Arnie. Send the self-destruct code to the sensor platforms, then get us moving," she said.
Chapter Eleven
At his age, Howard Clinkscales was out of the habit of feeling ill at ease in public. He'd begun his career as a Sword armsman recruit, not even an officer cadet, but an enlisted man, sixty-seven T-years ago and climbed to the rank of brigadier in palace security by age thirty-six. By the time of the Mayhew Restoration, he'd been commanding general of Planetary Security, a post he'd held under Benjamin IX's father, as well, and an unofficial member of the royal family. Along the way, he'd dealt with street criminals, serial killers and other psychotics, assassination plots, and treason, and taken them all in stride.
Even more surprisingly, he'd also learned to take the monumental social changes of his home world in stride, which was something no one who'd known him before Grayson joined the Alliance would ever have predicted. He'd been almost eighty when the treaty was signed, and a more hidebound reactionary would have been hard to find. Not even his best friends would have called Clinkscales a brilliant man, he was no fool, certainly, and he liked to think he'd learned a few things in eight decades, but no one had ever considered him a genius, and that was one reason so many people had expected him to reject any sort of accommodation with the reforms rolling through the society he'd known since boyhood. But those people had overlooked the three qualities which had carried him so high from such humble beginnings: inexhaustible energy, an unyielding sense of duty, and an iron-bound integrity.