“Dead meat,” she heard someone mutter behind her, and nodded.

“Let the range drop a little more,” Santino said quietly. “I want the best lock-up fire control can give us. And when we launch, I want all our fire concentrated on their two lead SDs.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” Captain Tasco said, and Santino smiled nastily. Even after detaching a full squadron of heavy cruisers for the evacuation, he had fifty-four pods. Adding his ships’ internal launchers, he could put almost nine hundred missiles into space, and his lip curled as he contemplated what that would do to ships with Peep missile defense systems.

I’ll blow those two fuckers right out of space, he told himself. And, really, everything else in the system combined is hardly worth two of the wall. Oh, it might be worth something to the Peeps, but this junk is hardly worth our time. Everyone will understand that. Nobody’ll be able to say I didn’t make the bastards pay cash to take over my command area, and—

“Enemy launch!” someone shouted. “Multiple enemy launches! Multi— My God!”

“Launch!” Citizen Vice Admiral Shalus snapped, and three hundred and twenty-eight missile pods belched fire. The People’s Navy’s missiles were less individually capable than the RMN’s, with slightly shorter range, but to make up for it, each of their pods had sixteen launchers to the Manticorans’ ten. Now all of them vomited their birds, and TF 12.1’s internal launchers sent another fifteen hundred along with them. All together, over six thousand seven hundred missiles went screaming towards the outnumbered Manticoran task force.

Elvis Santino clung to his command chair arms with white knuckles, his eyes pits of horror as he saw the solid wall of missile icons streaking towards him. It wasn’t possible. He knew it wasn’t. But it was happening, and he heard orders crackling over the com link to Hadrian’s command deck as Captain Tasco fought frantically to save his ship.

Lieutenant Commander Uller, Santino’s acting ops officer after Jaruwalski’s eviction, barked the command to flush their own pods without Santino’s orders, but the Manticoran response seemed feeble in the face of the Peep tsunami, and Santino closed his eyes, as if he could somehow evade his hideous responsibility by shutting the sight away.

ONI had warned him, and so had Jaruwalski, but he hadn’t believed it. Oh, he’d heard the reports, nodded at the warnings, but he hadn’t believed. He’d seen the Manticoran missile storm loosed upon the Peeps, but he had never seen an answering storm front, and somewhere deep down inside him, he’d believed he never would. Now he knew he’d been wrong.

Yet he’d been almost right, after all; he would only see it once.

Heinrich Gaines and Andrea Jaruwalski huddled together as if for warmth, their sick eyes locked to the display. Cantrip was safely beyond the Peeps’ reach, with a velocity advantage which would take her across the hyper limit and to safety long before any Havenite ship could even think about interfering with her. But none of the Peeps were thinking about anything as unimportant as a fleeing heavy cruiser. Their attention was on more important prey, and Gaines groaned as he read the data codes beside the icons.