The two forces continued to close, but at a much lower rate, and as the range fell below six and a half million kilometers, both opened fire almost simultaneously. Rear Admiral Tennard's missiles slashed out, driving for the solid core of Tourville's battleships. But unlike Alice Truman, he had none of Ghost Rider's experimental missiles. Those he possessed had marginally greater range and marginally greater acceleration than the People's Navy's, coupled with superior penaids and seekers, but not enough to make up the difference in numbers. Even with his internal tubes to thicken the launch, he could put only twelve hundred missiles into space; Lester Tourville and Shannon Foraker replied with almost six thousand.

The two salvos interpenetrated and passed one another, and both admirals turned their walls of battle broadside-on to one another, swinging the most vulnerable aspects of their wedges away from the incoming fire... and also clearing their broadside tubes to pour maximum-rate fire into one another.

The displays in CIC showed the holocaust reaching out for both of them, showed the fury hurtling through space, and yet there was something unreal, almost dreamy about it. There were only the light dots of hostile missiles, not the reality—not yet. For now, for a few seconds still, there was only the professional tension, the slivered edges of what they had thought was fear only to feel the reality of that emotion trying to break loose within them, and wrapped about it all the quiet hum of ventilators, the beep and murmur of background chatter, and the flat half-chants of tracking officers.

They seemed to last forever, those last few seconds, and then the illusion shattered with the silence as counter-missiles began to launch and the reality of megatons of death howling towards rendezvous burst in upon them.

Incoming fire began to vanish from the plot as counter-missiles blotted it away, tearing great holes in the shoals of destruction. And then laser clusters began to fire, and broadside energy mounts, and both sides ripped great swathes through the other side's fire. But it was not the sort of battle the Royal Manticoran Navy had become accustomed to fighting. TF 12.2's point defense was far better than the People's Navy's had been, its Solarian enhanced ECM was more effective... and there were far fewer missiles coming at it. The counter-missiles killed almost half of them, and the laser clusters killed a third of those that remained. Scarcely four hundred broke through to actually attack, and half of those were spoofed and confused by decoys and false targets far superior to anything the people who'd launched them had expected.

Two hundred missiles plummeted inward, targeted on thirty-three battleships, but those battleships turned as one, in the exquisitely choreographed maneuver Shannon Foraker had conceived and Lester Tourville had ruthlessly drilled them upon all the way here. The maneuver which turned the entire wall up on its side, showing only the bellies of its wedges to the missiles.

There were chinks in that wall of wedges—huge ones, for battleships required wide safety perimeters for their wedges—but it was far tighter than anything a Havenite fleet had assembled in over eight T-years. It was a Manticoran-style defense, one only a superbly drilled formation could attain, and the chinks in it were fewer, and smaller, and further apart than they ought to have been. Missile after missile wasted its fury on the unyielding defenses of the wedges of which it was built, and Lester Tourville smiled savagely as he watched it.

He lost ships anyway, of course. He'd known he would. Manticoran missiles were too good, their warheads too powerful, for it to have been any other way. But as he had told Everard Honeker three T-weeks before, Esther McQueen and Javier Giscard—and Lester Tourville, for that matter—had allowed for that. They had expected to lose ships... and to keep coming anyway.

Two battleships were destroyed outright, with two more driven out of the wall in a debris-shedding slither, but that left twenty, and they rolled back down to pour fire into what remained of their opponents.

Not that there was much left to shoot at. TF 12.2's fire had been five times as heavy as Rear Admiral Tennard's, and every missile had been concentrated solely upon his superdreadnoughts. Nine hundred and sixty missiles roared in upon each of them, and Tennard's ships were too far apart to duplicate Tourville's maneuver and build a wall in space with their wedges. The Manticoran admiral had never anticipated such a weight of fire. Against what he'd thought he faced, it had made sense to maintain unit separation, give each ship room to maneuver independently within the envelope of the task group's combined point defense. There had been no time to close up his formation when he realized what he actually confronted... and even if there had been, the galling truth was that his force was insufficiently drilled for it. This time, at least, it was the despised Peeps who possessed the superior training, the superior weight of fire... and the superior command team.

Michael Tennard knew that. He admitted it to himself, draining the bitter cup of his own assumptions as he watched a corona of fire envelop his lead superdreadnought. It flashed back along his formation, reaching for his flagship like some monstrous dragon from Old Earth's legends, and then there was only the terrible, unending, world-shattering succession of blows as laser after laser blasted into his flagship. He clung to the master plot, fighting to stay on his feet, watching the lights flicker, the dust filter from the overhead, and then there was a final, smashing concussion and a brilliant flash of light... and darkness.

"My God," Yuri Bogdanovich muttered. "It's like Adler all over again!"

"Not quite, Yuri," Tourville said grimly, looking at the icons of his dead and wounded ships. Three of the twenty battleships he'd taken into the final exchange had suffered severe damage. All told, the enemy had put twenty-nine percent of his wall out of action... but they'd completely ignored his battlecruisers to do it. Now those ships joined their fire with that of the remaining seventeen battleships, battering the Manty battlecruisers into wreckage one by one with merciless concentration. Here and there a Manticoran missile still got through to wreak more damage, but there weren't enough of them... and there were still fewer in each successive salvo as Shannon Foraker's precise fire demolished the enemy launch platforms in ruthless succession.

Nausea stirred in Tourville's belly as he looked out at the spreading patterns of wreckage, the life pods and unidentifiable debris which had once been megaton ships of the wall, each with a crew of over five thousand, and wondered how many of them had survived.

Not many, he thought. No, not many at all. And what the hell am I thinking of? Would I rather it was my people who'd died out there in such numbers? Hell, I have lost eight or nine thousand of my own! I should be glad the bastards who killed them are dead.

But he wasn't. Proud of his own people, yes, and grimly determined to carry through with the job for which so many had paid so much. But no one could look at that display and count all those dead and be glad. Or not anyone Lester Tourville ever wanted to know, at any rate.

He shook himself as the last Manticoran battlecruiser blew apart. The surviving cruisers and destroyers and LACs kept boring in, trying to get to energy range with utter gallantry and total despair, and he turned away, unable to watch their dying.

"Put us on course for Zanzibar again, Karen," he told his astrogator quietly, and looked at Shannon Foraker.

"Start calculating your fire patterns, Shannon," he said. "I hope to God they're smart enough to surrender, and if they are, I'll give them up to twelve hours to evacuate their orbital installations before we take them out. But I don't intend to spend much time discussing it with them." He produced a wintry smile. "If this can't convince them to accept sanity, then nothing I can say will, now will it?"