Which meant that "only" six of her nineteen battle-cruisers, and fifteen thousand of her people, died in the first broadside.
She stared at her plot, her face a mask of stone, as the fireballs claimed her people, and the fact that it was a miraculously low loss rate didn't matter at all. Her hands were white-knuckled on her command chair armrests, and then Terrible shuddered and lurched as Peep lasers blasted through her own sidewalls and into her armor. Flag Bridge wasn't tied directly into Damage Central, and it was very quiet despite the carnage raging about and within the huge ship's hull. Honor couldn't hear the howl of alarms, the battle chatter, the screams of hurt and dying people, but she'd heard those sounds before. She knew what other people were hearing and seeing and feeling, and there was nothing at all she could do but wait and pray.
In direct contravention of most battles, the first broadsides were the most effective ones for both sides. Normally, fire got more effective, not less, as tactical officers adjusted for their enemies' ECM and concentrated succeeding broadsides on more vulnerable targets. This time, there was simply too little time between salvos to adjust fire; half of each side's follow-up broadsides were already in space before the first ones even struck home. Over a third of the birds in BatRon One's second and third salvos wasted themselves on targets which were already destroyed, but the ones that didn't tore in on the surviving Peep BBs, and the Peeps had wasted thirty-one seconds retargeting their fire.
Yet they had retargeted, and their new patterns ignored Honors battlecruisers and heavy cruisers. Every surviving Peep ship poured fire into her SDs, and not even a superdreadnought could shake off that hurricane of fire. Terrible faltered as three of her after beta nodes were blasted away. More lasers ripped into her port broadside and blew a quarter of thier close-grouped missile tubes into wreckage. Simultaneous hits on Gravitic Array Three and Graser Nine sent a power surge through her systems which not even her circuit breakers could handle, and Fusion Two, hidden away at the very heart of her enormous, massively armored hull, went into emergency shutdown barely in time. The huge ship staggered as her power levels fluctuated, but her other plants took the load, and she shook off the damage, holding her place in the wall as the distance to her enemies fell below missile range to energy range.
GNS Glorious was less fortunate. She and Manticore's Gift, her division mate, were the center of Honor's unorthodox wall, and just as she had targeted the center of the Peeps' wall, the Peeps had targeted hers. She had no idea how many laser heads had battered Glorious, but one moment she was eight million tons of starship, thundering broadsides at her foes; the next she and six thousand more human beings were an expanding cloud of gas and plasma.
Honor clung to her command chair, eyes on her display, watching the computers execute the plan she'd locked into them, and the holocaust of those three-point-seven minutes was simply beyond comprehension. Formalism had become the rule for fleet engagements over the centuries, and ships of the wall had not engaged in such point-blank mutual slaughter in over seventy T-years. The losing side in a battle knew when to cut and run, when to break off, and admirals never closed on a course which wouldn't let them break off at need. But Alexander Thurston had believed there were no ships of the wall to face him, and Honor had had no choice but to come to meet him. And now, as the last missile salvos roared out, her five surviving SDs completed their final turn and brought their energy batteries to bear.
Only seven Peep battleships remained, all but one of them damaged, and their crews knew as well as Honor that they could never survive an energy-range engagement with superdreadnoughts. Yet there was no way they could avoid it, either. Their own wall had completely disintegrated as the units which composed it died, and they maneuvered independently, twisting in desperate, despairing efforts to interpose their wedges. But this was the moment for which Honor had stacked her line vertically rather than horizontally. The sharp angle in its middle meant at least one of her SDs would have a shot at each battleships sidewalls, however it might twist or turn. There was no time for a neat, formal distribution of fire from the flagship, but Honor had known there wouldn't be. Each superdreadnought's computers had been assigned targeting criteria, and it was all up to them to find and kill their targets in the instant the Peeps' velocity carried them helplessly through Honor's wall.
Five superdreadnoughts of the Grayson Navy fired almost as one, their massive energy batteries blazing away like God's own fury at ranges as low as three thousand kilometers, and five more Peep battleships and two battlecruisers blew apart under their pounding. A sixth battleship coasted out of the carnage, her drives dead, half her hull blown to wreckage while small craft and life pods spilled from her splintered flanks and desperate parties of courageous men and women fought to pull trapped and wounded comrades out of her broken compartments while there was still time.
PNS Vindicator, the seventh, and last, battleship of TG 14.1, actually broke past BatRon One completely undamaged and streaked away at forty thousand KPS. A few missiles raced after her, but now she was running away from them rather than into them, and BatRon One had not emerged unscathed from that crushing, short-range slaughter. Glorious had already died, now Manticore's Gift fell out of formation with her entire forward impeller ring, and both sidewalls forward of frame eight-fifty, shot away.
Damage and casualty reports began to flood in, and Honor's heart twisted within her. One of her super-dreadnoughts and six battlecruisers, over thirteen million tons of shipping, had been totally destroyed. Manticore's Gift was a wreck, and Walter Brentworth's flagship, Magnificent, was little better, though at least she still had most of her drive. Admiral Trailman had been killed by a direct hit on Manticore's Gift's flag bridge, Brentworth's communications were practically nonexistent after the pounding Magnificent had taken, and Furious had lost over half her weapons. Of Battle Squadron One's original six ships, only Judah Yanakov's Courageous and her own Terrible remained truly combat effective, and even they would require months of yard time to make good their damages.
Yet five of her six ships had survived, a testimonial, she thought with infinite bitterness, to the engineers who'd designed and built them, not to the fool who'd led them to the slaughter. But they'd done the job, she told herself. She'd lost thirteen million tons of shipping and twenty thousand people; the Peeps had lost over a hundred million tons, and their butchers bill didn't even bear thinking on. She'd just destroyed an entire peacetime navy in less than five minutes of actual combat. The remnants of Force Alpha were fleeing for their lives, and Force Zulu was already headed for the hyper limit. No doubt both of them would go right on running, licking their wounds and mourning their dead. The Fourth Battle of Yeltsin, she already knew, would go down, in the words of an ancient poem she'd read many, many years ago, as "a great and famous victory"... so why did she feel like a cold-blooded murderer instead of a victorious hero?
She felt Nimitz on the back of her chair. The bright glitter of adrenaline and the aftershock of the combat-lashed emotional tornado which had whipped at him from Terrible's crew still flickered and danced in their link, yet his fierce denial of her cruel self-condemnation came to her clearly. And she knew, in the part of her brain that could still think, that he was right. That, in time, she would come to remember the courage of her crews, the way they'd risen above their rough edges and how magnificently they'd performed for her. In time, she would actually come to remember this ghastly, blood-soaked day with pride... and the knowledge that she would, however much her people deserved to be remembered with pride, sickened her.