"Very good," Michelle said, and leaned back in her command chair, watching the last few seconds speed into eternity.
Josef Byng sat in his own command chair, watching another time display count down towards zero, and his belly was a knotted lump of tension.
Captain Mizawa had tried one last time to convince him to lie down, like a dog rolling belly-up to show its submission. Now they were no longer speaking, for there was nothing to speak about.
It was easy for Mizawa to put forward his arguments, Byng thought resentfully. Mizawa wouldn't be the one censored for cowardice. Mizawa wouldn't be the first Solarian flag officer in history to surrender to an enemy force. Mizawa wouldn't be known as the officer who'd rolled over for a batch of neobarbs without firing even a single shot.
It's not just "easy" for him, a voice said in Byng's brain. It's also his way of making sure I'll never be in a position to hammer him like the disloyal, traitorous bastard he is. Well, it's not going to happen, Captain—trust me! It's not going to be that simple for you.
Despite his fury at Mizawa, he'd come to the conclusion that there probably was at least a little something to the flag captain's arguments. Oh, there was no way the Manties had the magic missiles Mizawa was yammering about, but they could have substantially better missiles than Intelligence had suggested. If they did, it was entirely likely he was going to lose at least a few ships on his way out of the system. That would be regrettable, of course, but with the recent upgrades in the SLN missile defense and so many targets to spread their fire between, it was extremely unlikely that the Manties could get through with enough missiles to cripple more than a handful—half a dozen at the most. And they were only Frontier Fleet units. They could be replaced relatively easily, and once the survivors were past the Manties, the decisiveness of Byng's actions would be obvious. As the admiral who'd cut his way past the Manties to carry home word of their unprovoked attack on the Solarian League, he'd be immunized against the sort of wild allegations Mizawa had threatened to make about events in New Tuscany. In fact, he'd be well positioned to crush Mizawa, after all, and he couldn't deny that he'd take a sweetly savage satisfaction when the time came.
Of course—
"Missile separation!" Ingeborg Aberu announced suddenly. "Multiple missile separations! Range, forty-five million kilometers. Missile acceleration four-six-thousand KPS2! Estimated flight time at constant acceleration, five-point-seven minutes."
"Missile Defense Aegis Five!" Byng's snapped command was automatic, a response which never had to consult his forebrain at all . . . which was fortunate, since his forebrain wasn't working very well at the moment.
My God, she actually didit! She actually launched missiles at the Solarian Navy! I didn't think anyone could bethat crazy! Doesn't she know where this has to end?
Yet even as that thought ripped through him, there was another, one that was darker and more terrifying by far. Gold Peak wouldn't have launched from that far out unless she genuinely had the range to score on his ships, and that meant Mizawa's concerns hadn't been so much blathering nonsense after all.
The range at launch was over two and a half light-minutes, but with a closing velocity of 53,696 KPS, the geometry meant the Mark 23's maximum powered envelope was well over ninety-five million kilometers. Even a Mark 16, with only a pair of drive systems, would have had a powered envelope of almost forty-nine million kilometers . . . which meant her Mark 23s could reach their targets without ever activating their third drive system and still have the necessary endurance for final attack maneuvers. That was the real reason Michelle Henke had closed to that range before firing. It would give her ample opportunity to make her point, but she could do so while concealing a full third of the MDMs' powered endurance. At the same time, she wanted to finish this without using her broadside launchers at all, if she could. No doubt the Solarian survivors—If there are any, her mind supplied grimly—would figure out that she'd used pod-launched missiles, and that was the way she preferred it. If the hammer was really coming down, she wanted the Mark 16's existence to come as a complete surprise to the first Solarian officer unfortunate enough to face it in combat.
"Sir, CIC estimates that these things were launched from pods, not tubes." Ingeborg Aberu's voice was harsh, tight with fear and also with something else. Something plaintive, almost petulant. An anger stoked by the sudden realization that the Star Kingdom of Manticore really could produce technology well in advance of anything the Solarian League had even considered deploying. "They must have had them tractored inside their wedges. That's why their acceleration dropped just before they launched; they had to deploy them clear of the wedge perimeter."
"Understood," Byng replied tersely.
At least I was right about that much, he thought bitterly. They can't launch things this big from the broadside tubes we saw at Monica . . . not that that's going to make things any better. Unless they don't have very many of the damned pods available.
"Sir," Aberu said a moment later, her voice flatter than it had been, "CIC is projecting that all their missiles have been targeted on a single unit." She turned her head to look at him.
"On us," she said.
Warden Mizawa swore viciously as Ursula Zeiss reported the same conclusion to him.
That fucking idiot! That stupid, arrogant, Battle Fleet prick! Now he's going to get all of us killed, and for absolutely nothing!
"Time to impact five minutes," Zeiss said harshly.
"Stand by missile defense," Mizawa said, and glanced into the display which showed him the face of Hildegard Bourget, in Command Beta. From her tight, bitter expression, she'd obviously guessed exactly the same thing he had.
Looks like getting you off the ship worked out even better than I'd expected, Maitland, a corner of his brain thought even now. Sorry I never told you personally what a job you did for me, but I guess I'm not going to have the chance to make up for it. Good luck, boy—and watch your ass! The Navy's going to need you, I think.
God, I wish I'd been wrong, Maitland Askew thought sickly, his face white and clenched as he watched the master tactical plot on Admiral Sigbee's flag bridge and thought of all the men and women he knew aboard Josef Byng's flagship. God, why couldn't I have been wrong?!
Despite all of the simulations BuWeaps and BuTrain had been able to put together after examining the hardware captured at Monica, Michelle and Dominica Adenauer were only too well aware that their knowledge of actual Solarian capabilities was limited, to say the least. They had no real meter stick for the toughness of the Sollies' missile defenses, so they'd decided to err on the side of caution. Each of their Nikes had eighty "flat pack" pods limpeted to her hull, and each of theSaganami-Cs had forty. That gave Michelle a total of nine hundred and sixty pods, or the next best thing to ten thousand missiles. Operating on her assumption that the Sollies' actual defensive capability was twice that of the captured vessels examined at Monica, Michelle had decided that two hundred and fifty of those missiles ought to do the trick. They might not destroy their target outright, but that was fine with her. In fact, she would really prefer that outcome. She wasn't the sort of homicidal maniac who enjoyed killing people, after all. She'd be more than willing to settle for demonstrating that she could destroy their vessels . . . and she'dbe delighted if that convinced them to throw in the towel before she actually had to.