"You're right, Your Grace," Cardones admitted.

"Should we commit our own LACs, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked.

"Not yet," Honor said. "Before we do that, I want to whittle down their shipboard defenses. I'm not going to throw away our LAC groups by committing them against an unshaken wall that knows they're coming."

"If we don't commit them soon, we may not have an opportunity to use them at all, Your Grace," Jaruwalski warned, gesturing at CIC's projection of the Peeps' new course. "If we hold them back more than another fifteen or twenty minutes, they won't have the accel to overcome the Peeps' base velocity advantage and overhaul short of the alpha wall."

"Granted," Honor conceded. "But I'm not prepared to accept massive casualties if we don't have to. Especially when we don't know for certain what the Andies will do if we take heavy losses against the Republic. If we can beat these people without getting our LACs chewed up, so much the better."

Jaruwalski nodded in understanding, if not total agreement, and Honor looked at Lieutenant Brantley.

"My compliments to Admiral McKeon and Admiral Yu, and instruct them to open fire."

"Missile separation!" Marston announced. "I have hostile launches—many hostile launches!"

"Return fire," Tourville said almost calmly.

"Aye, Sir! Returning fire—now."

Multidrive missiles howled out across the endless light-seconds of emptiness. No fleets in history had ever engaged one another at such a preposterous range. More than two full light-minutes lay between TF 34 and Second Fleet, and it would take almost seven minutes for even Manticore's missiles to cross that stupendous gulf of vacuum. Second Fleet's missiles, with their marginally lower accelerations, would take even longer to reach TF 34. But the Protector's Own was closer than that. The flight time for Alfredo Yu's missiles was little more than three minutes.

Both sides' starships had extra missile pods on tow, and both sides flushed them all in the initial salvo. Second Fleet had seventy-eight capital ships: forty-six superdreadnoughts, eight CLACs, and twenty-four battlecruisers, but its planned margin of superiority had been more than erased by the presence of Alfredo Yu's command. TF 34 and the Protector's Own between them had a hundred and six capital ships: forty-three superdreadnoughts, ten CLACs, eleven dreadnoughts, and forty-two battlecruisers. Still, eleven of Honor's ships of the wall were only dreadnoughts and forty-four percent of her other "capital ships" were mere battlecruisers, and although the Allies' weapon systems remained superior to those of the Republic, the margin of superiority was thinner than it had ever been before.

The Havenite missile pods contained fewer missiles because those missiles had to be thirty percent larger than Manticoran missiles to approximate the same performance. But since she'd had no choice but to build enormous missiles because of the mass requirements of their drive elements and power plants, anyway, Shannon Foraker had been able to give them larger payloads than their Manticoran counterparts, as well. She'd used some of that volume to increase the destructive power of their warheads, but most of it had gone into additional sensor capability. The result was a weapon with eighty-eight percent as much range, very nearly eighty percent as much accuracy, and greater hitting power than anything Manticore had.

But that accuracy still had to get through Manticore's superior ECM, and decoys and jammers went to work on both sides as the deadly tides of destruction swept down upon them. False targets offered themselves, singing to targeting systems, beckoning and seducing them away from the actual starships they sought to destroy. Jammers howled, threshing space with active interference to blind sensitive seeking systems, and as the range fell still further, counter missiles went screaming out to meet the incoming fire with kamikaze devotion.

The Manticoran systems were far more effective, especially with the remote Ghost Rider platforms to spread the EW envelope wider and deeper. Despite the increases in accuracy Foraker had managed to engineer into the Republic's MDMs, the Allies' targeting systems were at least fifty percent more effective simply because of the difference in the two sides' electronic warfare capabilities.

Active defenses engaged the weapons which slashed their way through the screen of electronic protection. The latest generation Manticoran counter missiles had increased their effective intercept range to just over two million kilometers, although the probability of a kill in excess of one and a half million was low. Shannon Foraker's best efforts, even with reverse-engineered Solarian technology, had a maximum intercept range of little more than one and a half million. That meant Honor's missile defenses had sufficient depth for two counter missile launches to engage each incoming missile before the attacking birds could reach effective laserhead range. Foraker could get off only a single launch at each incoming wave of Allied missiles, but she'd compensated by increasing the number of launchers by more than thirty percent. Her missiles were individually less effective, but there were many more of them per launch, and Second Fleet threw up a wall of them in the path of the incoming warheads.

Impeller wedge met impeller wedge, obliterating counter missile and MDM alike in blinding flashes as impeller nodes and capacitors vaporized one another. Both sides were using layered defenses, ripple-fired, multiple waves of counter missiles backed by point defense laser clusters in the innermost interception zones, and Foraker and Commander Clapp had integrated the Cimeterres into the Republican Navy's missile defense doctrine, as well. Even a LAC's laser clusters could kill an incoming missile if it could hit it, and very few of those missiles would deign to attack something as insignificant as a LAC.

Space was a blinding, roiling cauldron of energy around Second Fleet as counter missiles, shipboard lasers and grasers, and LACs poured fire into the phalanx of destruction sweeping down upon it. At least sixty percent of the Allies' fire was defeated by ECM or picked off by active defenses. But that meant that forty percent wasn't, and Lester Tourville's ships spun and twisted like dervishes, fighting to interpose wedges and sidewalls against the ravening fury of bomb-pumped lasers as the Manticoran warheads began to detonate.

At least half of those lasers wasted themselves harmlessly against the impenetrable stress bands of superdreadnought impeller wedges, or found themselves bent and twisted wide of their targets by sidewalls. But some of them got through.

Lester Tourville clung to the arms of his command chair as RHNS Majestic staggered and bucked. No one sent damage reports to the flag bridge. Those were the concern of Captain Hughes on her own command deck, but Tourville could feel the big ship's wounds as laser after laser crashed into her. Even her massive armor yielded to that savage pounding, and he knew Manticoran fire was smashing away sensors, energy weapons, missile tubes . . . and the human beings who crewed them.

He felt that wave of destruction in the back of his brain, but he made himself ignore it. If it was Hughes' job to deal with Majestic's wounds it was Tourville's job to save what he could of Second Fleet.

It didn't look as if he would be able to save very much of it.

Both the Manticoran and the Grayson fire had concentrated mercilessly upon his own SD(P)s and CLACs. Quite a few missiles—like the ones targeting Majestic —had lost track and gone after other victims, yet it was obvious that they amounted to little more than errant shots which had initially been intended for the newer types. He wondered, at first, how the Manties could have targeted them so accurately, picked them out of his formation so unerringly, when the Allies had no emissions signatures or targeting profiles on file for them. But then he realized how absurdly easy it actually was. They hadn't picked the new ships out; they'd simply chosen not to fire at the ships they could positively identify as pre-pod designs. By process of elimination, that concentrated their fire on the newer, more dangerous designs.