"Missile launch!" Lieutenant Womack's report interrupted Rozsak's side conversation with Edie Habib. "CIC estimates four hundred missiles inbound, Sir!"
Rozsak's eyes whipped to the main plot, and for just a moment, he could only stare at the icons in disbelief. As he saw the missile vectors stretching out from the battlecruisers he'd pursued deeper and deeper into the Torch System for the last forty-seven minutes, they seemed just as pointless—just as foolish—as they seemed to every one of his junior officers. But then his face hardened into granite. Much as a part of his mind wanted to regard this as a panic reaction, an act of desperation as the enemy saw Alpha Two closing upon him, he knew it wasn't. His mind raced through exactly the same analysis Laura Raycraft had just considered, and for just a moment, even his formidable control wavered.
But it was only for a moment, and his voice didn't even quaver as he turned back to Kamstra's com image.
"Open fire," he said flatly.
Unlike the Solarian League Navy, the Mesan Alignment had no reservations at all about the missile ranges being reported by observers of the renewed conflict between Manticore and the Republic of Haven. They'd not only realized those reports were accurate, but figured out what the Manticorans and Havenites must have done to produce them.
Unfortunately, deducing what someone else had done wasn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it for oneself. Downsizing missile drive components without reducing their already limited lifetimes still further was a significant technological challenge—one the Alignment was working hard to overcome, but hadn't managed to pull off yet.
So they'd taken another approach as an intermediate step. The Cataphract was a rather basic concept, actually—they'd simply grafted what amounted to an entire counter-missile drive unit onto the end of a standard shipkiller. Coming up with an arrangement which let them cram that much impeller power and a worthwhile laser head into something they could fit onto the end of a standard missile had demanded quite a bit of ingenuity (and not a few basic compromises), but it had been a far easier task than duplicating a full scale multidrive missile would have been.
There were drawbacks, of course; there always were, and especially so in what had to be a compromise solution.
The weapon carried only half as many lasing rods as a standard laser head. Worse, the Cataphract was twenty percent longer than a standard missile of any given weight, which meant it would no longer fit into launch tubes which had been designed to handle the single-drive missile upon which it was based. The Cataphract-C, built around the SLN's Trebuchet capital missile could be fired only out of one of the missile pods the MAN hadn't seen fit to offer Citizen Commodore Luff. The Cataphract-B, based on the Javelin missile intended for the League's battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, could be fired from a standard superdreadnought missile tube, but not by an Indefatigable or a Warlord-C. But Luff's battlecruisers could fire the Cataphract-A, based on the Spatha, the SLN's new-model destroyer and light cruiser shipkiller. His Mars-Cs could have, as well, but only the battlecruisers had been supplied with the new weapon, and even they carried only enough of them for a dozen full broadsides.
Compared to standard missiles of their size, their warheads were light, and the onboard seekers, ECM, and penetration aids which could be stuffed into such a size-restricted terminal bus were limited. But the weapon had a powered range from rest of almost 16.6 million kilometers, nobody had ever even imagined that it might exist . . . and Luff's fourteen battlecruisers mounted over eight hundred broadside missile tubes.
Luiz Rozsak cursed himself with silent passion as he watched four hundred and two missiles hurtle towards his command. By the standards of the recent, ferocious confrontations between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, it was a puny effort, and he knew it. But the Manties and the Havenits clashed with entire fleets of superdreadnoughts; he had only six cruisers and eight destroyers with which to face it.
You were so damned confident you had the fucking range advantage, weren't you? a cold, hating voice demanded harshly. You were so frigging brilliant—so goddamned, stupidly overconfident—that it never even occurred to you that someone else could be just as frigging smart as you are!
It was vicious, that voice, filled with bitter awareness of the price his people were about to pay—the price Torch might be about to pay—for his overconfidence. But it was also buried deep, pushed down below the surface to clear his brain as he faced the cataclysm to come.
The flight time for Luff's missile salvo was two hundred and twelve seconds. That meant it would be over three and a half minutes before the first PNE laser head reached attack range, and Luiz Rozsak's brain whirred steadily.
"Defense plan X-Ray-Charlie-Three," he heard his voice saying. "Fire plan Delta-Zulu-Niner. Warlords are primaries."
"Defense X-Ray-Charlie-Three, aye," Robert Womack acknowledged. "Fire plan Delta-Zulu-Niner, aye. Warlords are alpha-priority targets!"
Hammer Force's formation began to shift. There wouldn't be time for it to make a great deal of difference before that first enormous salvo arrived, but defensive fire plans and responsibilities shifted far more rapidly—and radically—as X-Ray-Charlie-Three went into effect. And, at the same moment, Hammer Force's two arsenal ships started spitting rings of missile pods into space in massive, twelve-second spasms.
Rozsak would have preferred to launch them even more rapidly—to get all of them out of their suddenly imperiled pod bays. They would have fallen steadily astern at Hammer Force's still mounting velocity, and they would have been vulnerable to proximity kills, but that would still have been better than what his tightly knotted stomach muscles knew was about to happen.
Unfortunately, they didn't have the endurance. They were still the original, lightweight pods, and they had to launch their missiles almost instantly. He couldn't hold them back, and twelve seconds was about the tightest window for effective fire control he could manage, especially since his cruisers were going to have to take the missiles under control in successive waves.
The good news—such as there was and what there was of it—was that the minimum cycle time on a Flight VII Indefatigable-class battlecruiser's SL-13 shipboard launchers was thirty-five seconds. The earlier Indefatigables, with the older SL-11-b had the same theoretical cycle rate, but their feed queues were infamous for breaking down if they were pushed much above one launch every forty-five seconds. And as he watched the seconds ticking down, he realized at least some of those ex-Solarian ships had to be Flight V or Flight VI. Thirty-five seconds came and went, and still no second salvo had launched. It had to come any time now, though, and—
There! The second salvo had finally launched, but three of Rozsak's missile waves were already slicing downrange, and more were punching steadily out of Masquerade and Kabuki.
Adrian Luff's lips skinned back from his teeth as his first salvo went slamming back at his pursuers. He had no illusions about what multidrive missiles with their enormous laser heads would do to his battlecruisers, but he'd gotten at least several seconds' headstart on the bastards, and they'd been coming straight up his wake for the better part of an hour. There'd been plenty of time for Stravinsky and the tactical officers aboard each of the PNE's battlecruisers to mark their targets, track them, run constantly updated firing solutions on them.