That would have been bad enough from the Sollies' perspective even if there'd been no Apollo birds driving along behind the attack missiles. But the Mark 23-Es were there, and each of them represented a far more sophisticated and capable advanced control node than the SLN had ever imagined. The Echoes had been preloaded with dozens of alternative attack profiles, based on every permutation of Solarian defensive measures Tenth Fleet's tactical officers and the simulators had been able to come up, and their extraordinarily competent onboard AIs were far more capable of adjusting and reshaping those profiles on the fly than any previous attack missile would have been. Of course, even with those stored profiles and AIs, Lewis' fire wouldn't be remotely as effective as it would have been if he'd had the all up Keyhole-Two systems, instead.
It was simply incomparably better than anything anyone else had.
* * *
"Halo active." Horace Harkness gazed at his displays, hands moving with the precision of a pianist as he refined the data. "Looks like about a twenty percent increase on their battlecruisers' efficiency, but the filters should be solid unless it gets a lot worse. We're seeing a lot of lidar lighting off, too, though. I think we'll be looking at the first counter-missiles pretty soon."
Scotty Tremaine nodded. Twenty percent was a lower increase than the ops plan had allowed for, and he wasn't about to assume it wasn't going to go up over the next couple of minutes. But even if it did . . . .
"Bravo pods in position," Commander Golbatsi said, and a fresh wave of missile pod icons blinked with the red data codes of readiness on Tremaine's plot. "Launch codes receipted and acknowledged by all pods."
"Thank you, Guns."
"Profile Alpha- Quйbec-One-Seven," Stilson MacDonald announced suddenly.
"Execute," Tremaine said sharply.
"Executing Alpha-Quйbec-One-Seven, aye!" Adam Golbatsi responded, and sent the command that locked the entire division's first wave missiles into the final attack profile Aivars Terekhov had just ordered.
A strange spike—almost a sense of relief, or perhaps of commitment—swept Alistair McKeon 's flag bridge, as if everyone on it had inhaled simultaneously.
* * *
The same awareness flickered across Quentin Saint-James ' flag deck, but Terekhov didn't seem to notice. His eyes, like his thoughts, were on the master tactical plot, and those eyes were blue ice.
"Launch the Bravo birds," he said, and a second salvo, as massive as the first, roared out of the pods.
* * *
Thirty seconds and 14,177,748 kilometers short of their targets, the Mark 23-Es of Operation Agincourt's Alpha launch receipted their final instructions and switched to attack profile AQ-17. Their closing velocity was up to 207,412 KPS, just over sixty-nine percent of the speed of light, which was over four and a half times the maximum any Solarian missile could have generated, given the same geometry, and the differential would only increase over the last half-minute of their existence.
The Apollo missiles' AIs didn't really care about that, or about their own rapidly approaching destruction, except inasmuch as it simplified their task. They simply obeyed their instructions, considering the information transmitted to them from their slaved attack missiles' sensors and comparing the warp and woof of the Solarian defenses to the requirements of AQ-17. Certain minor adjustments were in order, and the AIs made them calmly, then sent out fresh instructions.
The EW platforms and penetration aids seeded throughout the salvo responded.
* * *
Solarian counter-missile doctrine had never envisioned a salvo density like this. Traditional missile defense planning focused on identifying the attack missiles most likely to achieve hits and then targeting each of them with multiple counter-missile launches. But there wasn't going to be time for that in the face of such a ferocious closing velocity. In fact, there would be time for only a single CM launch before the MDMs screamed completely across their engagement envelope, and even taking full advantage of the additional fire control of the Aegis refits a third of Crandall's ships had received, her superdreadnoughts could produce less than two thousand counter-missiles per launch. That was approximately one CM for every 6.5 Mark 23s slicing towards them, which would have been hopelessly inadequate under any circumstances.
Now "inadequate" became "futile" as the control missiles activated their slaved electronic warfare platforms.
Missile defense officers stared in disbelief as their displays went berserk. Dragon's Teeth blossomed like seductive flowers, flooding Task Force 496's fire control with false targets. The number of threat sources doubled, then doubled yet again, and again , hopelessly swamping the Solarian systems' ability to discriminate the true threats from the counterfeit. The computers driving those systems, and the men and women behind those computers, did their best, but their best wasn't good enough.
The incredible horde of false signatures guaranteed the limited number of counter-missiles the Solarians could bring to bear would be effectively useless, but Michelle Henke and her officers had been unwilling to settle for that. Even as the Dragon's Teeth spawned, the Dazzler platforms spread across the front of the attack salvo activated in a carefully sequenced chain, ripping huge, blinding holes in Task Force 496's sensor coverage. The Dazzlers' exquisitely choreographed chaos reduced even the last ditch laser clusters of their targets' point defense systems to impotence.
Of the ninety-two hundred Mark 23 attack birds in Aivars Terekhov's Alpha launch, Sandra Crandall's task force managed to stop exactly one thousand and seven. The other 8,209 got through.
* * *
SLNS Joseph Buckley lurched indescribably as the Manticoran missiles detonated and x-ray lasers ripped at her massive armor.
Thick as that armor was, it was no match for the stilettos of focused radiation punching into it like brimstone awls. It shattered under the transfer energy as the lasers ripped deeper and deeper, and the huge ship bucked in agony.
Jacomina van Heutz clung to the arms of her command chair as her shock frame hammered her. The fleeting instant in which the Manticoran missiles could bring their lasers to bear against her ship's sidewalls as they penetrated the Solarian formation with a closing velocity which had climbed to seventy-three percent of light-speed was far too brief for any of Joseph Buckley 's damage to register on merely human senses as individual hits. It was all delivered in one stroboscopic lightning bolt of devastation, too sudden and intense for even the ship's computers to register or sort out.
Those missile-born talons gouged and tore. Energy mounts and missile tubes, counter-missile launchers, radar arrays, point defense clusters, boat bays, gravitic sensors, impeller nodes—all of them shattered, exploding into tattered ruin in a single catastrophic moment, faster than a man could have blinked. In less time than it would have taken to cough, Sandra Crandall's flagship was transformed into a broken wreck, a splintered hulk, coasting onward under momentum alone, with three quarters of her crew wiped out of existence.
Nor did van Heutz' ship die alone. Her squadron mates Joseph Lister, Max Planck , and Joseph Hutton died with her. Like Buckley, Hutton at least avoided immediate and total destruction, but Lister and Planck were less fortunate. Lister shattered, breaking into three distinct pieces; Planck simply disappeared in a flash of white-hot fury.