David Weber - In Enemy Hands

Honor nodded and gripped her hands together behind her. She pursed her lips for a moment, then sighed.

"You do realize the most likely explanation for Bandit Ten's low observed accel, of course," she said.

"Missile pods," McKeon replied grimly.

"Probably," Honor agreed. She gazed at her old friend for several seconds, but she said nothing more. She might be the commodore of CruRon Eighteen, but Alistair McKeon was the captain of HMS Prince Adrian . The responsibility for what happened to his ship was his, and so was the decision on how he fought her. Honor was as aware as McKeon that many flag officers would have refused to admit that in their own desperate need to do something, but this was no squadron-level decision, for there was no squadron. There was only Prince Adrian , on her own in a single-ship engagement, and even if she hadn't been, Honor had complete faith in Alistair McKeon's judgment. She would not insult him by interfering with his orders or second-guessing his decisions, and she saw a flicker of gratitude in his eyes before he turned back to his officers.

"Chief Harris, roll us a hundred degrees to starboard but maintain heading and acceleration," he told his helmsman crisply, and then swiveled his chair to face Metcalf. "From his accel, Bandit Ten is probably towing missile pods, Gerry, but Bandit One's accel has been too high for that all along. We could cut Ten's engagement time by altering course to starboard and diving away from him, but there's not much point. Ten minutes or thirteen, he's still going to get his initial salvo off, and there's nothing we can do about it, but Bandit One's probably got more sustained missile capacity. So we'll stay low, take Ten's best punch, and keep as far from One as we can for as long as we can."

"Understood, Sir," Metcalf replied tensely.

"Well, she's made up her mind," Helen Zachary said softly. The Manticoran cruiser had rolled ship, turning the belly of her wedge to Katana , and her EW had come on-line. With the enemy accelerating steadily towards Katana , the theoretical maximum powered range of the bigger, more powerful missiles in Zachary's pods was on the order of eight and a half million kilometers, but the Manty's ECM and decoys would reduce their effective range to barely seven million. That should still be enough, however.

"What do you mean, 'made up her mind'?" Kuttner demanded. "He hasn't done a thing except bring up his EW. He certainly hasn't altered course!"

"No, she hasn't," Zachary agreed. "And she's not going to. Her original heading will expose her to a total of just under twenty-five minutes of fire: thirteen and a half from us, and eleven from Nuada . Any course alteration would decrease the engagement window for one of us, but only by increasing it for the other. She's playing the odds, but notice the fact that she's rolled ship away from us."

"So what?" Kuttner asked, and Zachary managed not to sigh.

"By rolling her port sidewall away from us, Sir, she rolls it towards Citizen Captain Turner. It doesn't give him a very good shot, but it gives him a better one than it gives us, and she's also staying low, keeping the belly of her wedge towards us. In other words, she's more worried about protecting herself from our fire than Nuada 's, which suggests she's figured out we're towing pods." Zachary shook her head. "I told you that was a sharp customer over there, Citizen Commissioner."

Seconds dragged on Prince Adrian 's bridge even as the digital time displays raced downward. There was no brilliant, last-minute maneuver this time. The elements of the equation were brutally clear, and most of Prince Adrian 's officers had seen Allied missile pods in action. They knew what was coming, and the only real question was how many missiles Bandit Ten had available. Oh, it also mattered how good they were, and when the Peeps would choose to fire them, but if Bandit Ten had enough of them, quality and timing became secondary. Even under ideal conditions, EW could expect to fool only so many missiles. Those that got through would have to be intercepted by active defenses, and there was, quite simply, an absolute upper limit to the number of targets Prince Adrian 's defensive fire control and weapons could handle before they became saturated. And without her squadron mates to lend their weight to her defensive fire, that number was lower than Alistair McKeon or Honor Harrington wanted to think about.

"Coming into our maximum missile range in fifteen seconds," Metcalf announced finally, her voice taut with the professional calm of her training.

"Engage as specified," McKeon replied firmly.

"Hostile launch!" Citizen Lieutenant Allworth sang out. "Multiple launches. Estimate sixteen inbound."

"This soon? How can they possibly expect to hit us at this range?" Kuttner forgot to sound officious in his genuine bafflement, and Zachary smiled humorlessly.

"They're not shooting at Katana , Citizen Commissioner, and those aren't laser heads." Kuttner stared at her, and her nostrils flared. "They're old-fashioned nukes, Sir, going for proximity soft kills on the pods." She looked away from the commissioner and considered her tactical display. The Manticoran warheads sped towards her command, and if she was right about their warheads and targeting, they would detonate well astern of Katana —far enough out to be a difficult point defense solution, yet close enough to burn out the electronics of her missile pods. But they would take time to arrive, and she refused to allow their threat to spook her into a premature launch of her own missiles.

"Citizen Lieutenant Allworth," she said crisply.

"Yes, Citizen Captain?"

"You will flush your pods in... one hundred and forty seconds from now."

Honor watched Prince Adrian 's first salvo sweep towards the enemy. A second followed fifteen seconds later, and a third. A fourth, and still the Peep made no reply. Ten broadsides were in space—a hundred and sixty missiles—without drawing a single answering shot, and she felt the rising hope of some of McKeon's officers. But she didn't share their elation... and neither did McKeon. They looked at one another, and Honor didn't need Nimitz to know what McKeon was thinking.

The captain had hoped an early launch on his part might shake his enemy's nerve, push her into an early launch of her own, while her accuracy would be at its lowest. But the Peep commander had refused the bait, which left only the meager hope that she might wait too long , let the missiles of Prince Adrian 's first broadside get in close to her pods and cripple them before they could—

"Missile separation!" Geraldine Metcalf announced flatly, and Honor's nails cut into her palms as her hands fisted behind her. "Multiple missile separations," Metcalf went on. "Estimate eighty-plus inbound."

"Damn," Alistair McKeon said almost mildly.

Eighty-four missiles howled towards HMS Prince Adrian . That was little more than half the total she had already fired, but there was an enormous difference between ten separate sixteen-missile broadsides, separated in time and space so that each offered the missile defense crews its own fire solution problem, and a single, massive deluge. It was a grim equation the People's Navy had faced all too often since the war's opening battles. Now it was the turn of the Royal Manticoran Navy, and Geraldine Metcalf and her assistants did their best as the tide of destruction roared down on them.

Jammers snarled, fighting to blind the incoming missiles' homing systems, and decoys sang to them, tempting them astray. But the People's Republic's new Solarian League-upgraded missiles were far more dangerous than the ones with which the PN had begun the war. Their sensors were more sophisticated, the capability of their targeting discrimination software had been increased by a factor of three, and the RMN's lack of data on them made Metcalf's ECM much less effective than projected. Barely a quarter of the birds in that massive salvo were blinded, and only a handful more succumbed to the decoys' seduction. Fifty-seven of them burned straight through the cruiser's best EW efforts, and countermissiles zipped out to meet them. The bloodred icons began to vanish from Metcalf's plot with mechanical precision, but they died too slowly. Thirty-five broke through the countermissile envelope, and last-ditch laser clusters trained onto them, firing desperately, trying to kill them before they reached attack range.