David Weber - At All Costs

"Kill the weaker platforms first and attrit our missile defenses," Brigham said.

"Exactly. Each of them represents a smaller percentage of our total defensive capability, but they'd be a lot easier to kill or cripple." Honor shrugged again. "You could argue it either way, I suppose-go for the 'golden BB' on an SD(P), or chew up the weaker escorts first. Personally, I'd have done it the other way."

She stood gazing into the master tactical plot, left hand resting on the corner of a tactical rating's console, right hand slowly, gently stroking Nimitz's head, and her expression was calm, thoughtful.

"Counter-missile launch in... fifteen seconds," Jaruwalski announced.

The powered range from rest for the Mark 31 counter-missile was 3,585,556 kilometers, with a flight time of seventy-five seconds. Given the geometry of the engagement, effective range at launch was over 12.5 million kilometers, and the defensive missiles started to go out ninety seconds before the Havenite MDMs reached standoff attack range of their targets. The Mod-2-XR counter missile launcher had a cycle time of eight seconds, which meant there was time for eleven launches per tube.

In the old days-all of four T-years ago-that wouldn't have mattered all that much, since the interference of the counter-missiles' own wedges would have blinded follow-up launches. Even now, that would have been true of a Havenite ship, although with the changes Shannon Foraker had made, any ship in a Havenite formation could now "manage" any other ship's counter-missiles, as long as both units had arranged the handoff prior to launch. That meant a Republican formation with the same degree of separation between units as Task Force 82 could have managed perhaps three times the number of counter-missiles it once could have.

But the Royal Manticoran Navy had added the Keyhole platforms to its bag of tricks.

Instead of a half-dozen or a dozen counter-missiles per ship, they could bring the fire of their entire broadside counter missile batteries to bear. They weren't restricted to the telemetry links physically mounted on their after hammerheads; they had sufficient links to control all of their counter-missiles aboard each Keyhole, and each ship had two Keyholes deployed. And as missile defense Plan Romeo rolled Honor's ships up on their sides, those platforms gained sufficient "vertical" separation to see past the interference of subsequent counter-missile salvos fired at far tighter intervals than had ever before been possible.

They still couldn't control eleven salvos... but they could control eight, and each of those eight contained far more missiles than anyone else could have managed.

Javier Giscard's staff had anticipated no more than five CM launches, and they'd allowed for an average of only ten counter-missiles per ship, for a total of two hundred per launch. Their fire plans had been predicated on facing somewhere around a thousand ship-launched CMs, and perhaps another thousand or so from the Katanas.

What they got was over seventy-two hundred from Honor's starships alone.

"My God," Marius Gozzi said softly as the impeller signatures of their attack missiles vanished under the swarm of Manty counter-missiles. "How in the hell did they do that?"

"I don't know," Giscard gritted, "but that's why they didn't counter-launch MDMs. They figure their defenses can handle whatever we throw, and the bastards are simply conserving their ammo!"

He glared at the display, then looked up at Thackeray.

"Abort Baker. We're going to need a lot heavier salvos to get through that."

He jerked his head at the plot, where his second salvo had just disappeared as tracelessly as the first.

"I don't know if we can throw a dense enough salvo to get through it, Sir," Thackeray said. Her expression was almost shocked, but her eyes were intent, and it was obvious her brain was still working.

"Yes, we can," Giscard told her flatly. "Here's what I want you to do."

He explained for a few seconds, and Thackeray nodded sharply when he finished.

"It'll take me a little while to set it up, Sir."

"Understood. Go."

Giscard pointed at her console, and as she dived back into the tactical section, he returned his attention to Gozzi.

"I never counted on that level of defensive fire, either," he said. "But I think it means we're going to have to change our plans for Deutscher."

"What do you want him to do, Sir?"

"Their new vector is going to take them within fifty million kilometers of Arthur. Given that that's almost certainly Honor Harrington in command over there, I don't expect them to peg any missiles at the civilian orbital platforms as they go by. Of course, it may not be her, or I could be wrong about what she's going to do. At any rate, we're not going to be able to prevent her from passing that close. But given that, I don't want Deutscher getting any closer to her than he has to. Besides, if he stops accelerating now, he'll have extra time to build his own side of the trap."

"I understand, Sir."

"Your Grace, they've ceased fire!" Andrea Jaruwalski reported jubilantly.

"No, they haven't," Honor replied quietly. Jaruwalski looked at her, and Honor smiled thinly. "What they're doing over there right this minute, Andrea, is deploying a lot more pods. I'd guess they'll probably roll at least ten or twelve patterns each. Sequencing that many launches for a simultaneous time on target will be complicated, but not all that difficult."

"You're probably right, Your Grace," Jaruwalski conceded after only a moment's thought. "It's the obvious counter, now that you've pointed it out."

"So the next salvo is going to be just a bit more difficult to kill. In which case," Honor said grimly, "it may be time to distract them just a bit. I want the battlecruisers held in reserve-they don't have enough ammo capacity to use up pods at this range-but Imperator and Intolerant will engage the enemy. Pick one superdreadnought and pound it, Andrea."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!"

"Admiral," one of Jaruwalski's ratings said, "Bogey One just killed its acceleration."

"I expected that," Honor said. "Bogey One was never strong enough to fight us. I suspect the only reason it headed towards us in the first place was to contribute to the impression of a system defense force that was thoroughly uncoordinated and panicked. Now that the trap's been sprung, they're not going to want to get any closer to us than they can help."

"We're ready, Admiral," Selma Thackeray said.

"Very well. Execute."

Javier Giscard's task group abruptly altered heading by ninety degrees, bringing its broadsides to bear on Task Force 82. The maneuver cut their acceleration towards the Manticoran ships to zero. But their relative velocity was losing ground steadily, anyway, and the turn also brought all of their broadside fire control to bear. Which meant they had many times as many control links as they'd had before. He was effectively conceding the pursuit in order to maximize his chances of crippling one or more of his foes.

"Missile launch!" Thackeray's assistant operations officer barked suddenly. "We have multiple missile separations, Admiral! Range at launch three-niner-point-four-oh-four million kilometers! Time to attack range seven-point-six minutes!"

"Well, that wasn't exactly unexpected," Giscard said, just a bit more calmly than he actually felt. "They've figured out what we're up to, and they want to force us to 'use them, or lose them.'"

"Launching now, Sir!" Thackeray said, and Giscard nodded.

"So, they have a few new wrinkles of their own," Honor observed.

Selma Thackeray had spent the last six minutes deploying missile pods. In that time, she'd positioned 1,080 of them. Now she launched all of them simultaneously.