David Weber - At All Costs

And then there was one brief, terrible flash as something ripped into the far end of the flag bridge. His head whipped up, and he just had time to see Selma Thackery and her tactical party torn apart by the blast front screaming towards him. Just long enough for his brain to begin to realize what was happening.

"Eloi-" he began, his voice soft in the hurricane of alarms and devastation.

He never finished her name.

"Jesus Christ," Ewan MacNaughton whispered, his face white.

The first Manticoran missile salvo had killed two of Admiral Giscard's superdreadnoughts outright... including Sovereign of Space.. The second salvo, rumbling in on the first launch's heels forty-eight seconds later, killed two more, and the one after that, two more.

It took a total of eleven salvos-less than eight minutes' fire-to kill every superdreadnought in Bogey Two.

"How the hell did they do that?"

MacNaughton didn't even realize he'd asked the question aloud, but Admiral Giovanni answered it anyway.

"I don't know," she said, her voice ugly. "But it's not going to help their lead ships in another twenty-five minutes."

"CIC estimates another twenty minutes until we hit the envelope for their inner-system pods, Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham said quietly, and Honor nodded.

Imperator's flag bridge was oddly silent. Far astern of them, Judah Yanakov's missile batteries had just finished off the helpless CLACs of Bogey Two. He wasn't wasting any of his fire on the orphaned LACs. Instead, he'd recovered his own LACs and translated back out, and Honor watched her display, waiting.

Then Task Force 82 translated back into normal-space yet again. This time, much closer to the limit, and directly behind Bogey Three.

"Admiral Yanakov is launching against Bogey Three, Your Grace," Jaruwalski reported, and Honor nodded.

"Too bad he won't have time to catch Bogey Four before it gets too far in-system for him to range on, as well, Your Grace," Brigham said. "I'd love to make a clean sweep."

Honor glanced at her, remembering what had happened to her own command at Solon. Part of her agreed entirely with Brigham, and not just because of the professional naval officer in her. But the taste of revenge had a bitter tang, and she looked back at the plot.

"We'll just have to settle for what we can get," she said calmly. "And it's about time to see how vulnerable Balder really is. Andrea," she looked back up at Jaruwalski.

"Yes, Your Grace?"

"Activate the Mistletoe platforms."

"What the-?"

Commander MacNaughton stiffened in consternation.

"Admiral Giovanni! We've got-"

Giovanni was still turning towards her display when the explosions began.

The Havenite tracking crews had become accustomed to the fact that they simply couldn't localize and destroy the highly stealthy Manticoran reconnaissance platforms used to scout their star systems. It was galling, but true. And so, aside from a certain deep-seated irritation, they'd actually paid relatively little attention to the long-endurance Ghost Rider reconnaissance drones the Manticorans had distributed throughout the inner system of Lovat.

Which was unfortunate.

Sonja Hemphill had personally chosen the name "Mistletoe" in honor of the dart which had killed the god Balder in Norse mythology, and the name proved apt.

"Where the hell are they coming from?" Giovanni demanded.

"I don't know, Ma'am!" MacNaughton replied, his voice as anguished as his expression as the Manticoran laser heads ripped into the Moriarty platforms. Not just one of the platforms; all three of them. The stealth and dispersion which were supposed to have protected them obviously hadn't, he thought, and closed his eyes for a moment as the relentless avalanche of fire blew them apart.

Alessandra Giovanni's face was white with shock. With the Moriarty platforms gone, she had nothing that could control missile salvos of the size needed to batter down Manticoran missile defenses. And given what the Manties had already done to Admiral Giscard's forces, it was painfully obvious her own anti-missile defenses were going to be at best marginally effective.

"The recon platforms!" MacNaughton said suddenly. "The bastards put laser heads on their goddamned recon platforms!"

Giovanni blinked, then shook her head and looked sharply at MacNaughton. He was right, she realized. It was the only explanation.

"But how did they find Moriarty?" she demanded. "Unless-"

"Unless what, Ma'am?" MacNaughton asked when she broke off suddenly.

"Suarez," she said sharply. "That's what Suarez was all about! They figured out what happened to them at Solon, and they used their EW drones to trick us into activating the Moriarty net at Suarez after they'd already planted their recon platforms deep enough in-system to see them. They had complete, detailed fingerprints on what they were looking for!"

"And then they mixed in armed recon drones to kill them after they found them," MacNaughton said through clenched teeth.

"That's exactly what they did," Giovanni agreed harshly. "Damn! They can't have the acceleration to be very effective against moving targets at any sort of range, but against fixed targets, especially when the attack birds know exactly what to look for...."

"Commander MacNaughton!" a rating called, and MacNaughton whipped back to his own displays. His shoulders went absolutely rigid for a moment, then slumped, and he looked back at Giovanni.

"Not just Moriarty, Ma'am," he grated. "It looks like we're going to have to start deploying the system defense pods further apart. They just took out three-quarters of the Beta echelon and almost that many of the Delta birds."

"How?" Giovanni asked flatly.

"More of their damned recon platforms. It had to be. They got old-fashioned nukes-the yields are somewhere in the five hundred megaton range-close enough to the pods to take them out with proximity explosions."

Giovanni nodded silently. Of course. If you could put laser heads on the things, then why not regular nukes? Not that they'd really had to. Given the accuracy they'd just shown against Giscard, they could take the pods out with proximity-armed MDM launches from beyond any range at which she could possibly expect to score hits in return.

"Admiral Giovanni," a shaken communications officer said, "Admiral Trask is asking for you."

Alessandra Giovanni glanced once more at the plot where the heart and mind of her defenses had just been annihilated, then drew a deep breath. Of course Trask wanted to speak to her. His obsolescent superdreadnoughts were going to be little more than targets for Harrington's SD(P)s, and Giovanni wasn't optimistic about her LACs' chance to get through Harrington's defensive fire and damned Katanas without the support of massed attacks from the system defense missile pods.

Which meant that if she committed Admiral Wentworth Trask's ships, he and all of his people were going to die..

"According to the standard recon platforms, we just took out all three of their control stations, Your Grace!" Jaruwalski announced jubilantly.

"Very good, Andrea. In that case, we'll proceed with the Alpha plan. Let's whittle their deployed pods down as far as we can before we enter their envelope."

"Aye, aye, Your Grace."

Honor nodded and turned back to her plot, hoping that whoever was in command over there would realize how helpless her defensive starships were and surrender before she had to kill them all.

"How bad is it?" Eloise Pritchart asked flatly.

Thomas Theisman looked at her for a moment before he replied.