David Weber - At All Costs

Unlike Oliver Diamato's battlecruisers, Third Fleet couldn't dodge the pulser dart. Admiral Kuzak's command was too deep, pinned inside the RZ. Kuzak had intended to catch Second Fleet between her command and the Sphinx planetary defenses; now she was caught between the oncoming hammer of Genevieve Chin's MDMs and the battered anvil of Lester Tourville's surviving SD(P)s.

At least Third Fleet's base velocity was almost fourteen thousand kilometers per second higher than Fifth Fleet's, and almost directly away from it. Given that geometry, Chin's powered missile envelope was only fifty-one million kilometers. But the range was only 41,700,000 kilometers, and that meant Chin could keep Kuzak's ships under fire for eleven minutes before Third Fleet could run out of range.

Eleven minutes. It didn't sound like such a long time, but it was longer than Home Fleet had survived against Lester Tourville. And Home Fleet hadn't been running directly into the fire of one foe while the fire of a second came ripping into it from behind.

"Open fire!" Lester Tourville snapped.

"Aye, Sir!" Frazier Adamson acknowledged, and Tourville watched the icons of his missiles reaching out towards the Manties.

He'd almost left it too late, he thought. Chin's astrogation had been off by a good ten million kilometers, although it was hard to fault her for that. She'd had only a handful of minutes to adjust her position after MacArthur's arrival, thanks in no small part to how long Tourville had waited, and making that kind of delicate, short-ranged micro-translation was always infernally difficult.

Given that any error placing her alpha translation on the wrong side of the zone boundary would have resulted in the destruction of every ship under her command, it was inevitable-and proper-that she should err on the side of caution. Besides, it had never been part of the ops plan for her ships to move inside the resonance zone or hyper limit until she and Tourville were certain they'd dealt with the defenses. All the defenses.

Still, eleven minutes of concentrated fire from ninety-six SD(P)s should smash the hell out of the Manties' combat capability, even if it failed to destroy them outright. And in the meantime, he could do a little something to help Chin along.

The range for his missiles was only 32,955,000 kilometers, and unlike the range from Chin's ships, it was dropping by over a million kilometers per minute. Not to mention the fact that unlike Chin, his tactical officers had been tracking the Manties steadily, updating their firing solutions for the last thirty or forty minutes.

He checked the time display. Flight time for his missiles was just under six minutes, two minutes less than for Chin. Although she'd fired first, his missiles would reach their targets before hers.

"We are truly and royally screwed, Skipper," Chief Warrant Officer Sir Horace Harkness said quietly from HMLAC Dacoit's engineering station.

Scotty Tremain glanced at him, then looked back at the plot, and wished there were some way he could disagree.

"You have a message from Admiral Truman, Captain," Dacoit's com section AI said. "Personal to you."

"Accept, Cental," Tremain said. A moment later, Alice Truman appeared on his com display.

"Admiral," he said, watching the missile icons spreading like the tracks of pre-space wet-navy torpedoes.

"It looks like we're going to get hammered, Scotty," Truman told him bluntly. "I want you to detach your Katanas. Leave them behind to help thicken Admiral Kuzak's defenses. Then take all the rest of your birds and head for the in-system force now."

Tremain looked at her for just a moment. He knew what she had in mind. His Ferrets and Shrikes, especially the former, were preparing to help bolster Third Fleet's missile defenses, yet compared to his Katanas, their contribution would have been relatively minor. But by sending them against the survivors of the first Havenite attack force, she might compel it to divert its fire. It no longer had a screen, its attached LACS had taken severe losses, and it couldn't simply run away from him into hyper. It would have no choice but to stand and fight, and if it let him get into attack range without severe losses of his own....

"Understood, Dame Alice," he said. "We'll do our best to keep their heads down."

"Good, Scotty. Good hunting. Truman, clear."

"Crap," Molly DeLaney muttered, and Lester Tourville chuckled harshly.

"They're a little quicker off the mark with it than I expected," he said, watching the Manty LACs' arc away from Third Fleet. Missile flight times were long enough-and the Manty reaction fast enough-that their course change was already evident, even though Second Fleet's first salvo had yet to reach attack range.

"Still," he continued, "it was the logical move, once we lost the screen. Frazier."

"Yes, Admiral?" Commander Adamson replied.

"Send Smirnoff out to meet these people."

"Captain Smirnoff is dead, Sir," Adamson said. "Commander West is COLAC now."

Tourville winced internally. He hadn't known Alice Smirnoff well. Only met the woman twice, actually, and then only in passing. But somehow her death, unnoticed in the general carnage, suddenly seemed to symbolize the hundreds of thousands of his personnel who had perished in the last three hours.

"Very well," he said, an edge of harshness burring his otherwise level response, "send West out to meet them."

"Aye, Sir."

"Is that going to be enough, Boss?" DeLaney asked quietly, and Tourville shook his head.

"No. They aren't sending in as many, but these people are fresh, and Smirnoff-West-and his people burned too many missiles stopping the last attack. We're going to have to take them with MDMs."

"Do you want to shift targeting?"

"Not yet." Tourville shook his head. "That's what they want us to do, and I'm not taking any pressure off Kuzak until we have to. But it's going to limit the number of salvos we can give her."

He punched in a command, calling up the fleet status display. He studied it for several seconds, then looked at Adamson.

"Frazier, tell Admiral Moore and Admiral Jourdain to abort their engagement of Third Fleet. I want their squadrons to reserve their total remaining pods for use against the Manty LACs."

"Yes, Sir."

Tourville nodded and sat back in his command chair. Moore and Jourdain had taken the lightest losses of any of his battle squadrons. Between them, they still had fourteen SD(P)s, and much as he hated taking them out of the firing queue at this particular moment, he had a feeling he was going to need their missiles badly in another half-hour or so.

"Here it comes," Wraith Goodrick murmured, and Alice Truman nodded.

Counter-missiles tore into the oncoming MDMs, and at least this time they hadn't been able to deploy whatever had let them throw such monster salvos at Home Fleet. These were merely "normal" double-pattern broadsides from over a hundred SD(P)s.

Nothing to worry about, she told herself; only twelve thousand missiles or so. No more than a couple of hundred per ship. Just a walk in the park.

Except, of course, that they weren't spreading them over all of Third Fleet's ships.

Scotty Tremain's detached Katanas were tucked in close, hovering "above" Third Fleet, rather than going out to meet the incoming missiles as normal doctrine would have dictated. Normal doctrine, after all, hadn't anticipated a situation in which a fleet would screw up so badly it found itself squarely between two widely separated enemy fleets, each numerically superior to itself, and in range of both. The LACs couldn't place themselves between one threat and the rest of Third Fleet without leaving it uncovered against the other, and so they held their position, spitting Vipers against the wall of destruction crashing towards Theodosia Kuzak's command.