The last Grayson destroyer skittered out of the way as the range fell to nine million kilometers, and then Battle Squadron One, Grayson Space Navy, fired its first broadside in anger.
"Jesus Christ!" Shannon Foraker gasped, and a small, numb corner of Citizen Commander Caslet's brain observed that she'd just spoken for him. One instant, the situation had been well in hand; five minutes later, fourteen hundred missiles erupted from the Allied "battle-cruisers." Havenite missiles answered almost instantly, but all twenty-four battleships between them could produce only seven hundred missiles in reply, and, unlike the Allies, they'd spread their first, preprogrammed broadside's fire over all twenty-five or the "battlecruisers" in the opposing task force. The Allies hadn't done that. They'd concentrated twice as much fire on just twelve battleships, less than half as many targets, and taken the Peep point defense crews totally by surprise, to boot.
At least, Caslet thought with that same numb detachment, they weren't wasting any of it on a mere light cruiser.
Honor peered into her plot. She'd let Yu time the actual attack because she was too fatigued to trust her own judgment, but the plan behind it was hers, and there would be no time for Yu or anyone else to fix anything she'd done wrong.
The two formations slid broadside towards one another at just under forty thousand kilometers per second while the missiles went out with an acceleration of eighty-five thousand gravities. At their closure rate, the two formations had only two hundred and twenty-six seconds before they interpenetrated. Not passed one another, but interpenetrated, for Honor had deliberately turned directly across TG 14.1's base course to give her energy weapons the best possible field of fire for the bare twelve seconds it would take the Peeps to shoot clear across their effective range envelope. So great was their closing speed that flight time was barely over a minute and a half, despite the range, and both sides had seeded their broadsides with EW missiles packed with penetration aids to make their birds still harder to track. Which meant most of those missiles would survive to attack their targets... and that, even more than usual, it was up to the passive defenses. Decoys and jammers and fire confusion systems fought to deny the enemy valid targets, because it was for damn sure they weren't going to stop many of the incoming birds with active defenses.
They were concentrating on the heart of his own wall Thurston's brain whirred with the precision of a fine chronometer, buffered against panic by the sheer shock of what had happened. He understood the reasoning behind the Manty admiral's targeting, and, despite his earlier thoughts, that had to be a Manty over there, after all. Standard PN doctrine put the task force commander at the center of his wall of battle, where light-speed communication lags were minimized and the wall's interlocking point defense was maximized. But in this sort of minimum-range shootout, point defense was largely irrelevant, and the Manties were going for Task Force Fourteens brain. Alexander Thurston's brain.
"Recompute firing pattern." He gave what he knew would be his final order almost calmly. "Ignore the battlecruisers. Go for the SDs."
BatRon One and its screen went to maximum rate fire with their very first broadsides. The superdreadnoughts retained their original Havenite launchers, with a cycle time of approximately twenty seconds; the lighter Grayson units carried the Mod 7b Manticoran launcher, and the GSN's battlecruisers mounted the Mod 19, both with a cycle time of only seventeen seconds.
But two hundred and twenty-six seconds would allow BatRon One's SDs only eleven broadsides and the lighter ships only thirteen, and there was no time to observe the results of one broadside before the next was fired. The initial fire plans had been locked into the computers, and human reflexes were hopelessly inadequate to modify them in the time they had.
BatRon One's first broadside went in with horrific effect. It was the heaviest and most concentrated one the engagement would see, and Honors fire control officers had calculated its targeting setup with exquisite care, then run constant updates the whole time the two fleets advanced to meet one another. Despite the short flight time, the Peeps' point defense crews managed to knock down almost thirty percent of the incoming fire. Decoys and jammers threw another ten percent off track, and desperate captains, abandoning Formation discipline in last-ditch efforts to save their ships, sprawled out of their wall of battle, frantically rolling in attempts to interpose the impenetrable roofs or floors of their impeller wedges against the incoming fire. Their reckless maneuvers brought PNS Theban Warrior and PNS Saracen too near one another, their wedges physically collided, and the collision blew alpha and beta nodes in a frenzy of wild energy that half-vaporized both battleships, but their sister ships managed to take yet another twenty-two percent of BatRon One's missiles against their wedges.
Yet for all their frantic maneuvers, thirty-eight percent of Honor's birds got through... spread between a mere twelve targets. Five hundred and thirty-two laser warheads, warheads of a size and power only ships of the wall, or RMN missile pods, could throw, detonated almost as one. Bomb-pumped lasers gouged and tore at the sidewalls covering the open flanks of their targets' wedges, and some of them, perhaps as many as twenty percent, detonated directly ahead or astern of their targets, where there were no sidewalls.
Battle steel was no match for that tsunami of X-ray lasers. Alloy blew apart in glowing splinters as energy bled into it. Atmosphere streamed from shattered hulls, drive nodes flared and died like prespace flashbulbs, weapons bays exploded in ruin, and the sun-bright boil of failing fusion bottles blossomed in the heart of the Peep formation like gaps in the ramparts of Hell.
No one could ever reconstruct exactly what happened. Not even the surviving Allied computers could sort it all out afterward, but five seconds after BatRon One's first laser head detonated, eleven Havenite battleships, including PNS Conquistador, no longer existed, and a twelfth was a broken, dying wreck tumbling uselessly through space.
But then, of course, it was the Peeps' turn. Thurston's retargeting order had cost his command a thirty-one second delay between its first and second broadsides, but even the ships who died in that first holocaust had had time to get off three broadsides before the Grayson missiles arrived.
The Peeps opening salvo was almost uniformly distributed among all twenty-five of the "battlecruisers" they'd been tracking. Had those targets, in fact, all been battlecruisers, it would have been an effective fire plan, for it also spread the Allies' defenses thin. Some, at least, of those missiles would have gotten through against every target, and successive broadsides would have finished the cripples. But Honors orders for her screen to scatter freed her real battlecruisers to maneuver independently against the fire directed at them, and the "confusion" the Peeps had seen in her formation had been nothing of the sort. She'd deliberately broken the screening units down into their own point defense nets, independent of her SDs and freed of any responsibility for covering her wall. Combined with their more effective decoys and jammers, that tremendously degraded the accuracy of the fire directed upon them.