David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

Two hundred more missiles perished, and "only" two hundred and ninety-three kept coming.

They hit the the perimeter of the final defensive zone, too close for counter-missiles to acquire and intercept in time. Tethered decoys called to them, seducing them away from their assigned targets. Huge bursts of jamming tried to blind them. Laser clusters swiveled and spat, cycling bolts of coherent light in lethal streams, their prediction programs pitted against the best evasion patterns the Solarian League's premier naval shipbuilder could provide. The inner zone was a holocaust of shattering missiles and wreckage, and a hundred and ninety-six more were torn apart in the second and a half it took them to cross it.

It was a phenomenal performance. Ninety percent of that lethal tide was stopped short of attack range. Ninety percent, by only ten warships, none heavier than a heavy cruiser.

But ninety-seven got through.

The Squadron twisted and danced, each captain maneuvering individually, desperately seeking to interpose the shield of his impeller wedge between his crew and the incoming laser heads. But their base velocity was low, and the missiles had plenty of time on their drives. Less than a third of them could be evaded that way. Last-ditch decoys sucked a few of the rest off, and four more strayed too close together and destroyed one other in fratricidal bursts of impeller interference. Two more simply failed to detonate; the rest of them did not.

Hexapuma heaved madly as bomb-pumped lasers designed to shatter the armor of superdreadnoughts slammed into her. Sidewalls did their best, clawing at the beams, bending them. Armor resisted briefly, but the savage bars of X-ray lasers smashed through it. Impeller nodes blew, superconductor capacitors exploded, hull plating shattered. Graser One, Three, and Seven were wiped away as if they had never existed, and despite Hexapuma 's manpower-reducing automation, nineteen men and women died with their weapons. Missile tubes were wrecked, ripped and twisted. Frame members shattered. Three sidewall generators went down, and a quarter of her starboard counter-missile tubes and almost half her point defense clusters went with them. Gravitic Array One and Lidar One disintegrated, and a power surge blew into the superconductor ring for Spinal Five, the starboard graser in her after chase armament, like a tornado. The ring exploded, deep inside the ship, like a bomb, and the blast blew back into Auxiliary Control.

Ansten FitzGerald, Naomi Kaplan, and eleven other men and women were caught in the path of the explosion. FitzGerald and Kaplan both survived; most of the others were less fortunate.

Isidor Hegedusic felt a moment of incredible triumph as the missile pods fired.

That tsunami of destruction surpassed anything he'd ever dreamed of commanding, and only ten cruisers and destroyers stood in its path. Whatever happened to Eroica Station, those ships were doomed.

Yet even as he thought that, before the first counter-missile had intercepted the first missile, the Manticoran pods fired. He'd sent nine hundred and sixty missiles to crush the Manties; Abigail Hearns sent seventeen hundred back into his teeth, and his defenses were nowhere near as good.

Damage reports flooded into the bridge, and Helen cringed.

Javelin, Rondeau , and Gallant were gone . Audacious was -savagely damaged and lamed, with less than a quarter of her weapons left. Vigilant was little more than a hulk, and Warlock was severely damaged. Hexapuma 's more modern point defense-and an inordinate share of pure luck-had let her escape with far less damage than her older sisters, but all things were relative. Her maximum acceleration, even without pods, was no better than four hundred gravities. She was down to thirty-five tubes, and a quarter of her broadside grasers-sixty percent of her starboard energy broadside-and one of her after chasers were gone. Thirty-seven of her people were confirmed dead, with at least another seventeen wounded… including Surgeon Commander Orban. His sick berth attendants were doing their best, but none of them were fully trained physicians.

It was her fault. She knew that was insane, yet a small, cruel voice deep down inside whispered that she'd been in charge of the missile defenses. She was the one who was supposed to stop this from happening.

She stared at the com screen still connected to the badly damaged AuxCon and saw Aikawa working frantically with two uninjured ratings as they applied first-aid to the wounded. But no matter how hard she stared, there was no sign of Paulo.

Aivars Terekhov surveyed the damage, and his jaw clenched painfully.

He'd walked straight into it, and a third of the Squadron's ships had been destroyed because he had. It was all very well to remind himself no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy. He even knew it was true. But it didn't make him feel one bit better about the dead and maimed who'd counted on him to get it right.

He drew a deep breath and turned his attention to Eroica Station and felt a stab of vengeful satisfaction. Those damned missile pods had savaged his squadron, killed his people, but their own fire had shattered the military components of the Station. The close-in drones made it obvious that at least eight of the nine battlecruisers in the military yard had been wrecked beyond any hope of repair even by a Solarian shipyard, far less Monica's facilities. The other one might be repairable, but it would take a fully equipped shipyard months, possibly T-years, to do the job. The two on the civilian side of the installation were still intact, but there wasn't much he could do about that, even using laser heads instead of conventional nukes, without killing hundreds of civilians. He didn't want to do that, and he wouldn't… if he had any choice at all. And at least Eroica Station itself had been thoroughly neutralized as a threat.

Which, unfortunately, wasn't true of the oncoming battlecruisers.

Janko Horster's face was white with mingled shock and fury. His sensors couldn't give him as clear a picture of what had happened to Eroica Station as Terekhov's could, but he didn't need details to know the Monican Navy had just been mangled. Most-probably all-of the other battlecruisers were gone, and the same was almost certainly true of the older units which had been laid up at Eroica to provide personnel for his own ships. First Division, by itself, probably had ten times the firepower of the entire Monican Navy before Levakonic had delivered the new ships, but it would be impossible to carry out the operational plan with what was left.

And that didn't include the casualties. The men he'd known and served and trained with for decades. The friends.

Yet the Manties had been hurt, too. Badly. And they must have fired every pod they had to inflict such damage on Eroica Station.

Their long-range missile advantage was gone, and the bastards who'd raped his Navy couldn't get away from him now.

"Get me Vigilant ," Terekhov grated.

"Aye, aye, Sir," Nagchaudhuri acknowledged, and fifteen seconds later, he found himself facing a lieutenant he'd never seen before.

"Commander Diamond?" he asked.

"Dead, Sir," the lieutenant said hoarsely. "We took a direct hit on the bridge. No survivors, I'm afraid." He coughed on the thin haze of smoke swirling about him, and Terekhov realized he was connected to Damage Control Central.

"Who's in command, Lieutenant?" he asked as gently as he could.

"I guess I am, Sir. Gainsworthy, third engineer. I think I'm the senior officer left."

Dear God, Terekhov thought. Their casualties must be almost as bad as Defiant's were.

"What's your maximum acceleration, Lieutenant Gainsworthy?"