David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"Captain, we've got a third possible contact."

He looked up as a third strobing icon appeared in formation with the other two. Helen, a corner of his brain noted, still sounded crisp and professional, but not quite as calm as she'd been with the first two.

And I can't blame her for that! That's three we know about; God only knows how many we haven't found yet . He studied projected vectors, and his mouth tightened. At their closing velocity, his squadron's vector intersected almost exactly head-on with the three bogeys' vector in less than twenty-four minutes. There's no way we can avoid them now, but there's still the units waiting to be refitted. So what do I do? I can hardly even see these probable Sollies. I certainly can't justify wasting missiles on them at this range, not with the miserable hit probabilities we'd have! But if I hold my fire until the range drops and then go for an engagement with them, I could lose everything I've got and leave eleven untouched battlecruisers behind me .

His jaw tightened.

"Ms. Hearns."

"Yes, Sir."

It was remarkable, he thought, how that soft Grayson accent actually got more musical as the stress mounted.

"We can't leave the battlecruisers in the yard behind us. I want to hold the pods-we may need them against these newcomers. Do you have a good firing solution on the Station?"

"Yes, Sir," she said steadily.

"Very well," he said. "Execute Fire Plan Sierra, broadside launchers only."

"Fire Plan Sierra, aye, aye, Sir," she said, and entered a command sequence.

"Missile launch! I have multiple hostile launches! Estimate thirty-plus inbound!"

"God damn it!"

Isidor Hegedusic smashed his fist down on his own knee. Missile Defense was tracking the incoming missiles-or trying to, at least-and there didn't seem to be many of them. No more than thirty or forty. But the Station's anti-missile defenses hadn't been upgraded. There hadn't been time to do everything, and he and Levakonic had concentrated on giving Eroica Station sharper eyes and longer teeth. Nor had they counted on the fiendishly effective EW platforms scattered among the attack missiles to assist them in penetrating Hegedusic's defenses.

He hesitated, but only for a single heartbeat.

If they take out the battlecruisers, there's no tomorrow, anyway, he thought grimly, and looked at the tactical officer on his screen.

"Engage the enemy, Commander!"

The missile pods provided by Technodyne were very stealthy platforms. In fact, they had even smaller sensor signatures than the RMN's pods did. In virtually every other respect, however, they were inferior to Manticore's weapons. Their single-drive missiles had lower accelerations, less sensitive seekers, poorer EW, and much, much shorter powered attack ranges. But inferior as they might have been in all of those categories, they were far better than anything the SLN had ever had before. They were better than ONI's worst-case estimates. And they were already inside the attack range their improved drives made possible.

To reach their targets with enough time left on their drives for the necessary terminal attack maneuvers, the missiles would have to restrict themselves to half-power, "only" 43,000 gravities and a terminal velocity of "only".32 c . They were big-larger even than a standard capital missile, more like something a ground-based system would have fired-and the designers had been able to squeeze only eight of them into each out-sized pod. But Hegedusic and Levakonic had deployed one hundred and twenty of those pods. Deployed them amid the concealing clutter of Eroica Station's platforms and in the protective radar shadows of handy asteroids.

"Incoming fire! Estimate nine hundred-plus!"

"Point defense free! Case Romeo!" Terekhov snapped.

"Case Romeo, aye, aye, Sir!" Helen Zilwicki responded instantly.

"Fire Plan Omega!"

"Fire Plan Omega!" Abigail responded.

She had assigned Helen responsibility for missile defense while she concentrated on Fire Plan Sierra, targeting her missiles as carefully as possible on the helpless battlecruisers. Now she made the snap decision to leave the midshipwoman in charge. Missile flight times were going to be under a hundred and sixty seconds. This was no time to confuse the situation by interfering. Besides, she had her own priorities.

She'd never really expected Fire Plan Omega to be required. It was the "use-them-or-lose-them" option common to any naval force employing towed pods. Their vulnerability to proximity "soft kills" meant they had to be gotten off before that hurricane of incoming fire arrived, but no one had really expected the Monicans would be able to range on them. Yet the Captain had insisted on planning for even that unlikely eventuality. There was a different, less precise targeting sequence to meet it, one which spared only the two battlecruisers in among the civilians, and Abigail Hearns ignored the missiles screaming in to kill her. She had less than three minutes to completely revise her firing plan and get her birds off before they were destroyed. And so she shut the incoming fire out of her mind, trusting her survival and her ship's to a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise while she called up Fire Plan Omega's targeting hierarchy, handed it to the computers, allocated her pods, and fired.

It never even occurred to Helen that Abigail might have shunted her aside. She was too locked into the job at hand to think about such things, and her fingers flew across her keypads. Her heart seemed to be hammering against the backs of her teeth, yet there was a sort of surrealistic calm to it. A sense almost of floating. If she'd had time to think about it, she would have realized it was almost like the Zen-like state Master Tye had trained into her back on Old Earth, but there was more to it than that. It combined that discipline with the endless hours of drills and simulations. Her hands seemed to know what to do without ever consulting her brain, and yet her brain was whirring with a flashing speed that made even her flying fingers seem slow.

Case Romeo activated the squadron-wide layered defense system Naomi Kaplan had set up on the voyage from Point Midway. Hexapuma and Aegis , with their superior sensor suites, faster-firing counter-missile tubes, and additional control links, were responsible for the outer counter-missile zone. Warlock, Valiant , and Gallant had the intermediate zone, and Audacious and the destroyers had the close-in counter-missile zone.

It was a good plan, and Terekhov's insistence on deploying his full EW assets helped. But there were nine hundred and sixty missiles in that incredible wave. Nine hundred and sixty missiles with penetration aids far superior to anything the Monicans were supposed to have in service, with better seekers and heavier warheads.

Hexapuma and Aegis , with their own counter-missiles and enough from the other ships to fill all their redundant control links, destroyed two hundred and nineteen missiles in the outer zone, ripping them apart with precisely directed counter-missile kamikazes.

Seven hundred and forty-one missiles, each fit to blast through a superdreadnought's sidewalls and armor, broke through the outer zone and screamed into the squadron's teeth. Hexapuma and Aegis continued firing, joined by Warlock , Valiant , and Gallant as the older ships' less acute sensors locked onto the incoming tide of death. Holes appeared, ripped through the solid-looking tide of incoming warheads, and another two hundred and forty-eight of them died.

But there were still almost four hundred left, and they came howling into the inner counter-missile zone. All the Manticoran ships could see them now, but there was no time for follow-up shots on missiles which evaded the first counter-missiles targeted upon them. The maelstrom of swarming targets and outgoing counter-missiles, the sensor-blinding interference of hundreds of missile impeller wedges, and the jamming, sensor-twisting strobes of the Solarian-built missiles' sophisticated ECM created a whirling confusion no human brain could have sorted out. It was all in the hands of the computers, and Hexapuma quivered with the saw-edged vibration of counter-missile tubes in constant, maximum-rate fire.