That fire reached deep into her LACs' formation. Eighteen of them were destroyed outright. Seven more were crippled, five so badly that there wouldn't be any point in repairing them. Another eight took lighter damage.
But then it was the turn of the remaining seven hundred and sixty Cimeterres.
Commander Clapp's "triple ripple" roared outward. The magazines of two hundred of the Republican vessels fed that onrushing wave of missiles. The other five hundred and sixty held their fire, waiting.
Agnes de Groot watched the first wave of ferocious detonations sweeping away Manty EW drones like a broom of brimstone. Even from here, she could almost feel the despair enveloping the enemy as they realized what was happening, but it was far too late for them to do anything about it.
The second wave of explosions lashed at the Manties, hashing their sensors, crippling their onboard electronics ever so briefly. And then, exactly as Clapp had predicted, the third wave of missiles swept through the hopelessly disorganized Manticoran defensive envelope.
Thirty-three Manticoran LACs survived the triple ripple.
None of them survived the single massive salvo which followed it up.
De Groot's total losses were less than forty.
Chapter Fifty Six
"We're coming up on translation in five minutes, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Akimoto said.
"Thank you, Joyce." Admiral Wilson Kirkegard thanked his staff astrogator as gravely as if he hadn't been watching the translation clock for the last hour.
"You're welcome, Sir," Akimoto replied, and the grin she gave him told him that she knew perfectly well that her formal announcement had been superfluous, to say the very least.
Kirkegard smiled back, then turned to Captain Janina Auderska, his chief of staff.
"Any last-minute details waiting to bite us on the ass, Janina?" he asked quietly.
"Can't think of any, Sir," she said, wrinkling her nose in thought. "Of course, if I could think of them ahead of time, they wouldn't be waiting to bite us on the ass, I suppose."
"As profound an analysis as I've ever heard," Kirkegard approved, and she chuckled.
"Sorry. Bad habit of mine to indulge myself in the obvious when I'm nervous."
"Well, you're not alone in that," Kirkegard assured her, and turned his attention back to the maneuvering plot as his overstrength task group headed towards the alpha wall. He spared the visual display a brief glance, struck even now by the familiar, flickering beauty of his flagship's Warshawski sails. He could pick out the sails of at least another half-dozen of his starships, but he had other things on his mind and the maneuvering plot gave him a far more accurate idea of their positions.
He had less carrier support than some of the other attack forces set up by Operation Thunderbolt, but he shouldn't need it, either. Maastricht, according to NavInt, was picketed by a single reinforced division of pre-pod superdreadnoughts, supported by one CLAC and a battlecruiser squadron. Given the draw-down in Manticoran naval units, that was a fairly hefty picket for a single system which was far less important to the Manticoran Alliance than it was to the Republic of Haven. And by the standards of the earlier war years, it should have been able to give an excellent account of itself even against a task group as large as Kirkegard's.
But those standards no longer obtained . . . as Kirkegard was about to teach the Manties.
"Admiral Kirkegard should be hitting Maastricht just about now, Sir," Commander Francis Tibolt, chief of staff for Task Force Eleven observed, and Admiral Chong Chin-ri nodded.
"I'm sure Wilson has the situation well in hand," the tall, dark haired admiral agreed. "Do we?"
"Unless the Manties have run substantial reinforcements into Thetis on us at the last minute without NavInt catching them at it," Tibolt replied.
"I suppose there's nothing anyone can do about that possibility," Chong agreed. "Not that a proper chief of staff wouldn't be busy reassuring me that they couldn't possibly have done that."
"Believe me, Sir. If I'd observed any signs of pre-battle jitters, I'd be reassuring the hell out of you."
"They're there," Chong told him. "I'm just better at concealing them than most."
"That's one way to put it, I guess," Tibolt said with a smile, and Chong chuckled, then glanced at the date/time display.
"Well, we'll probably be finding out whether or not they're justified in about forty minutes," he said.
"That's funny."
"What?" Lieutenant Jack Vojonovic looked up from the solitaire game on his hand comp.
"Did I miss something important on the shipping schedule?" Ensign Eldridge Beale replied, turning his head to look at his training officer.
"What are you talking about?" Vojonovic set the hand comp aside and swiveled his chair to face his own display. "We don't have anything big on the ship sched until tomorrow, Eldridge. Why? Did you—"
Vojonovic's question chopped off, and his eyes widened as he stared at the preposterous icons on his display. One or two merchantmen or transports arriving unannounced would have been almost routine. No one ever managed to get everything onto the shipping schedules, however hard they tried. But this was no singleton turning up without warning. It wasn't even a convoy, and Vojonovic felt his stomach disappearing somewhere south of the soles of his shoes as he saw what had just come over the Grendelsbane alpha wall.
He couldn't get a count yet. The point sources were too jumbled together. But he didn't need a count to know there were a hell of a lot more of whoever they were than there was of Admiral Higgins' task force.
That thought was still racing through his brain as his thumb came down on the big red button.
"We're gonna get reamed," Lieutenant Stevens said flatly, watching the oncoming Peep task force on his tactical display as it swept steadily deeper into Maastricht.
"We're outnumbered, sure," Lieutenant Commander Jeffers replied in a distinctly reproving tone. The tac officer turned his head to look at HMS Starcrest's CO.
"Sorry, Skipper," he apologized. "It's just—"
He gestured at the display, and Jeffers nodded grudgingly, because he knew his tac officer had a point.
"It doesn't look good," he conceded quietly, leaning towards Stevens to keep their conversation as private as possible on the destroyer's relatively small bridge. "But at least we've got LACs and they don't."
"I know," Stevens said, still apologetically. "But Incubus' group is at least two squadrons understrength."
"That bad?" Jeffers knew he hadn't quite managed to keep the surprise out of his voice and went on quickly. "I mean, I knew they were short a few LACs, but two whole squadrons?"
"At least, Skipper," Stevens told him. "A buddy of mine is Incubus' assistant logistics officer. He says Captain Fulbright has been pestering the Admiralty for a couple of months, trying to get his group back up to strength. But—"
He shrugged, and Jeffers nodded unhappily. Maastricht had been at the back edge of nowhere as far as replacements and reinforcements were concerned for as long as Starcrest had been here. The rumor mill said the situation was tight everywhere, but Jeffers' ship wasn't "everywhere." She was right here, and he didn't much care what "everywhere" else had to put up with.
"Well," he said with perhaps a bit more confidence than he actually felt, "Admiral Maitland's good. And if Incubus is understrength, that's still better than no LACs at all."
"You're right," Stevens agreed, but his eyes drifted back to the display and the oncoming icons of eight superdreadnoughts. Assuming what the sensor platforms were seeing was what was really there, Rear Admiral Sir Ronald Maitland's short superdreadnought division was outnumbered by almost three-to-one. "I just wish we had an SD(P) or two to even things up."