David Weber - At All Costs

Home Fleet's Fire Plan Avalanche called for the pre-pod superdreadnoughts to deploy their pods as quickly as possible. They had to jettison them anyway, in order to clear their own defensive systems, and D'Orville had known from the beginning that he was going to lose a huge percentage of their total pod loads without ever actually firing their missiles. There was nothing he could do about that, however, and the older ships passed control of as many of their additional missiles as they could to their more capable consorts.

The Medusa, Harrington, Adler, and Invictus-class ships didn't deploy a single pod of their own in the initial broadsides. They used solely the pods deployed by D'Orville's older ships, reserving their better protected, internally stowed pods for the follow-up salvos it was at least possible they might live to launch. And since they were firing pods which had been effectively deployed in a single massive pattern, Avalanche also fired its salvos in closer, more tightly spaced intervals than the Republican Navy had yet seen out of any Allied fleet. In fact, Avalanche was almost-not quite, but almost-conceptually identical to Shannon Foraker's rotating control doctrine.

Each fleet's salvo density took the other fleet by surprise. Neither had anticipated such heavy fire... but Tourville's projections had been closer than D'Orville's to what he actually got. D'Orville had expected the battle to be short and violent, lasting no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

The first half of his expectations was more than fulfilled.

In the seven and a half minutes it took the lead salvo to cross between Home Fleet and Second Fleet, Sebastian D'Orville's ships fired seven salvos at sixty-five-second intervals, each of 1,800 pods, containing a total of 21,600 missiles. Over a hundred and fifty thousand missiles, the maximum Home Fleet's fire control could manage, went screaming through space... and 524,000 Havenite missiles rampaged out to meet them. Fire control sensors and reconnaissance platforms all over the star system found themselves half-blinded by the interference and massive impeller source of almost seven hundred thousand attack missiles and many times that many counter-missiles. And then the EW platforms began to add their own blinding efforts to the chaos.

No human could have hoped to sort it out, keep track of it. There was simply no way protoplasmic brains could do it. Tactical officers concentrated on their own tiny pieces of the howling maelstrom, guiding their attack missiles, allocating their defensive missiles. Counter-missiles and MDMs blotted one another from existence as their impeller wedges slammed together. Decoys, jammers, Dazzlers, and Dragons Teeth matched electronic wiles against tactical officers' telemetry links and onboard control systems. Standard counter-missiles, Mark 31s, and Vipers hurled themselves into the teeth of the mighty salvos. Great gaps and gulfs appeared in the onrushing wavefronts of destruction, but the gaps closed. The gulfs filled in. Laser clusters blazed in desperate last-ditch efforts to intercept missiles with closing speeds eighty percent that of light. MDMs lost their targets, reacquired, lost them again in the howling confusion. Onboard AIs took whatever targets they could find, and the sudden, abrupt changes in their targeting solutions made their final approach runs even more erratic and unpredictable.

And then wave after wave of laser heads began to detonate. Not in scores, or hundreds, or even in thousands. In tens of thousands in each roaring comber of fury.

The battle no one had been able to adequately envision was over in 11.9 minutes from the moment the first missile launched.

"My God," someone whispered on HMS King Roger III's flag bridge.

Theodosia Kuzak didn't know who it was. It didn't matter. The imagery coming in from the FTL surveillance platforms was brutally clear.

Home Fleet was... gone. Simply gone.

Ninety superdreadnoughts, thirty-one battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, and twenty-six light cruisers had been effectively destroyed in less than twelve minutes. At least twenty shattered, broken hulks continued to coast towards the hyper limit, but they were only wrecks, gutted hulls streaming atmosphere, debris, and life pods while deep within them frantic rescue parties raced against time, fighting with grim determination and courage about which all too often no one would ever know, to rescue trapped and wounded crewmates.

But Home Fleet had not died alone. Sebastian D'Orville mght have been taken by surprise by the weight of Second Fleet's fire, and his computation of the exchange rate might have been overly optimistic as a result, but his ships and people had struck back hard. Ninety-seven Republican ships of the wall had been destroyed outright or beaten into dead, shattered hulks. Nineteen more had lost at least one impeller ring completely. And of the remaining hundred and twenty-four SD(P)s Lester Tourville had taken into the battle, exactly eleven were undamaged.

Second Fleet's brutally winnowed ranks continued onward, but its acceleration had been reduced to less than 2.5 KPS2 by its cripples. At that rate, it would be unable to decelerate for its zero/zero intercept with Sphinx, and the Manticoran System's defenders weren't done with it yet.

Home Fleet's LAC screen had suffered massive losses of its own, mostly from MDMs which had lost their original targets and taken whatever they could find in exchange. Despite that, over two thousand of them survived, and they were driving hard to get into their own range of Second Fleet. They could expect to take fewer losses, now that they were free to maneuver defensively and to protect themselves, not Home Fleet's superdreadnoughts, and their crews had only one thought in mind.

More LACs were still streaming towards Second Fleet from the inner system, as well, and it was obvious the Havenites had no desire to tangle with Sphinx's fixed defenses, at least until they could get their own damages sorted out. Second Fleet was changing course, crabbing away from Sphinx as it shepherded its cripples protectively out of harm's way.

But that, Theodosia Kuzak thought grimly, was going to prove just a bit more difficult than the bastards thought.

"How much longer?" she asked harshly.

"Our last units should clear the Junction in the next eleven minutes, Ma'am," Captain Smithson said.

"Good." Kuzak nodded once, then turned to Commander Astrid Steen, her staff astrogator.

"Plot me a couple of micro jumps, Astrid," she said coldly. "Those people have just had the crap kicked out of them. Now we're going to finish the job Home Fleet began."

"Admiral Kuzak's preparing to head in-system, Your Grace," Harper Brantley said quietly.

"Thank you, Harper."

Honor looked up from the holographic com display hovering above the briefing room's table at which she, Nimitz, Mercedes Brigham, Rafael Cardones, and Andrea Jaruwalski sat under her armsmen's watchful eye. The display was separated into individual quadrants, showing the faces of Vizeadmiral Hasselberg, Judah Yanakov, Samuel Mikl¢s, and the commanders of every squadron in company with Imperator. Alice Truman and Alistair McKeon weren't there, and she tried to hide the cold, bleak anxiety she felt at their absence.

"Please inform the Admiral that we're still on schedule for our own ETA," Honor continued.

"Of course, Your Grace," her communications officer said quietly, and withdrew. The briefing room hatch closed behind him, and Honor returned her attention to the discussion at hand.

Most of the faces on her display showed a greater or lesser degree of shock at the total destruction of Home Fleet, and no wonder. Not only had the sheer weight of the Havenites' fire come as a complete surprise, but all of the Alliance's partners had taken losses when it hit. Of the ninety superdreadnoughts which had just been destroyed, twelve had been units of the Grayson Space Navy, and another twenty-six had been Andermani.