David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Accepting EW download now. The birds are receipting. Ready to launch in another… twenty-seven seconds."

Helen nodded. It took a little longer to set up for a double broadside, using the off-bore launch capability the RMN had developed, but it would permit her to put almost forty missiles on the destroyer. That would undoubtedly be overkill, assuming Aikawa's EW suggestion worked half as well as she expected it to. Still, it was better to finish the target off-or at least cripple it thoroughly-in a single exchange so she could get back to the rest of the Peep attack force.

Hexapuma was individually bigger and more powerful than any of the attackers, and she'd also taken delivery of the new Mark 16 MDM. Nothing smaller (or older) than a Saganami-C -class ship would ever be able to handle them, but the Saganami-C s had been designed around the new, larger Mark 9-c tubes. Even with the massive reduction in manpower represented by Hexapuma 's smaller crew, BuShips had been able to cram only twenty of them into each broadside, but the Mark 16 carried twin drives. That gave Hexapuma a powered missile envelope from rest of almost thirty million kilometers, which her present opponents couldn't possibly match.

But if she outclassed any of them enormously on a one-for-one basis, she was also outnumbered by five-to-one, and the op force commander had timed her ambush well. She'd been lying doggo in the poor long-range sensor conditions which were typical in hyper, with her ships' impeller wedges down, and caught Hexapuma and her convoy in hyper-space, transitioning between grav waves under impeller. And she'd waited until the last possible moment before bringing her nodes up, which had put her almost into her own missile range of Hexapuma before the Manticoran ship even saw her. If she'd been able to wait even fifteen minutes longer, Hexapuma would have been well inside that range, and probably dead meat, before she knew the enemy was there. Unfortunately for the Peep, the geometry hadn't been quite perfect. She'd had to power up when she did, or the convoy's vector would have prevented her from intercepting at all.

Still, she'd almost pulled it off. In fact, it was sheer good luck that the simulation's computers had decided Hexapuma 's initial broadside had gotten a critical piece of her heavy cruiser flagship's impeller drive. The damaged ship-one of the obsolete Sword -class ships, from her emissions signature-was still boring in, but slowly. The fluctuating impeller wedge d'Arezzo had spotted earlier was like an old wet-navy oil slick, trailing like blood as proof of the cruiser's laming wound. That left only the four destroyers, which were about to become three destroyers.

Helen's new heading turned Hexapuma almost directly away from the damaged Havenite flagship as she maneuvered against the overeager destroyer trying to swing around her. Apparently whoever was in command over there hadn't read the latest briefing on Manticoran missile ranges. The destroyer's bid to stay out of Hexapuma 's envelope was going to come up short-way short, like over twelve million kilometers short. In fact, it would have come up a couple of million klicks short even against the Mark 13 missiles of one of the RMN's older heavy cruisers. That was still far enough out to degrade Hexapuma 's accuracy-fire control was still trying to catch up with the extended ranges of the new missiles-but not badly enough to keep a forty-missile double broadside from blowing her out of space. Best of all, nothing on the Peeps' side had the range to engage Hexapuma in reply. The Peeps had multi-drive missiles of their own, but they hadn't managed to engineer that capability down into something a heavy cruiser mounted. Their capital ships and battlecruisers could match or exceed anything even Hexapuma 's new birds could do, but their cruisers still had barely a quarter of her extended reach.

Hexapuma completed her turn and raced towards the destroyer.

"Dazzler launch… now, " d'Arezzo announced, and red lights flickered to green on his panel as the jammers streaked away. D'Arezzo watched a time display ticking downward on his panel for several seconds, then said, "Second Dazzler launch in five…four… three… two… one… now! Attack broadside launching in fifteen seconds."

Helen flipped her repeater plot back to a smaller scale, one that let her observe all the enemy units, including the crippled flagship. The tiny color-coded icons representing the staggered flights of Dazzlers moved slowly, even at their incredible acceleration, on such a tiny display, and she glanced at the flagship again. Once she'd dealt with the leading destroyer, she'd swing back to take the other three still coming in from the other side. And once all four of them had been swatted, she could deal with the Sword -class at her leisure.

All neat and tidy, she told herself. Even that snoot-in-the-air prick d'Arezzo's done a bang-up job this time.

Even as she thought the last sentence, she scolded herself for it. D'Arezzo obviously continued to prefer his own company to that of anyone else, but he seemed to possess enough ability and competence to offset it.

"Attack broadside launch now !" d'Arezzo announced, and the repeater plot was suddenly speckled with dozens of outgoing missile icons. Helen watched them with satisfaction. In another couple of minutes-

"Missile launch!" d'Arezzo barked abruptly. " Multiple hostile launches! Captain, Bogey One's launched at us!"

Helen's eyes darted away from the missiles she'd sent roaring towards the enemy destroyer. D'Arezzo was right. The enemy flagship had launched missiles at them, and not just a few birds. There were at least thirty in that incoming salvo, and even as she watched, the "fluctuating" impeller wedge firmed back up. Its acceleration shot upward, peaking at over four hundred and eighty gravities, and it spun on its axis. Nineteen seconds after that, a second massive salvo erupted from it as the spin brought its other broadside to bear.

And the second salvo had been fired with an even higher initial acceleration. It was already overtaking the first launch, and Helen knew exactly what was about to happen.

Suckered, goddamn it! she thought. That's no heavy cruiser-it's a frigging battlecruiser pretending to be a heavy cruiser! Just like it was pretending to be damaged so I'd ignore it while I concentrated on swatting destroyers. And those are MDMs. MDMs launched with enough oomph on their first-stage drives to bring them all in as one, huge, time-on-target salvo.

"Helm, hard skew port! Electronics, I want two November-Charlie decoys-deploy them to starboard and high! Tactical, redesignate Bogey One as primary target!"

She heard her voice snapping the orders. They came sharp and clear, almost instantly, despite the consternation and self-reproach boiling through her. But even as she issued them, she knew it was too late.

At the range at which the enemy had fired, Hexapuma had a hundred and fifty seconds to respond before the incoming laser heads reached attack range and detonated. If she'd had another two minutes, maybe even one, the decoys Helen had ordered deployed- too damned late, damn it to hell! -might have had time to suck some of the fire away from their mother ship. As it was, they didn't.

Helen watched her plot and swore as the two Peep broadsides merged… and their combined acceleration suddenly leapt upward. That TO over there knew her job, damn it. She had more than enough range to reach her target, so she'd set her birds' first-stage drives to terminate and their second-stage drives to kick in as soon as her separate broadsides had matched base vectors. They would burn out much more rapidly, but the new settings would get them to Hexapuma even more quickly than d'Arezzo-and Helen-had estimated. They'd be coming in faster, as well. And even if she burned out the second stage completely, she'd still have the third. There'd be plenty of time left on their clocks for terminal attack maneuvers.