Schaumberg was firing as desperately as anyone else. Diamato’s hands flew over his console, his entire universe focused on his responsibility to somehow break through the Manties’ EW and find them for his own weapons, yet he felt the ship shudder and buck as the first bomb-pumped lasers tore at her. Citizen Captain Hall’s orders to bring Diamato’s ECM up on her own initiative made the flagship a much harder target than the other battleships, but with so many missiles flying some of them simply had to get through, and alarms wailed as she jerked again.

“Graser Three down! Direct hit on Lidar One, switching to backup! Citizen Captain, we’re taking hits forward! Beta Thirteen and Fourteen are out of the ring! Heavy casualties in Point Defense Five!”

Diamato cringed as the litany of damage reports rolled through the bridge, yet even as he cringed, he knew it could have been far, far worse—would have been worse, if not for Citizen Captain Hall. But that was cold comfort as—

“Direct hit on Auxiliary Control!” someone shouted, and despite himself, Diamato looked up from his own displays at the damage schematic. Auxiliary Control turned bright, blazing crimson as he watched, and he darted a look at the citizen captain. Hall’s face was a mask etched from stone, her presence an eye of calm as she forced her bridge crew to hold together by sheer willpower, yet he saw the pain—the loss—in her eyes as she realized Ira Hamer was dead.

“Find me those LACs, Oliver!” she commanded, her voice very nearly as even as it had been before the Manties launched, and he wheeled back to his display.

Reaction thrusters flared, pushing LAC Wing One’s bows sideways with old-fashioned brute power. It was slow and ponderous compared to maneuvering on impellers, but it let them maintain their powerful bow sidewalls as they simultaneously turned and rolled to present the bellies of their wedges to the enemy.

Jacquelyn Harmon watched the maneuver with fierce elation. That asshole Holderman might have hung them up out here for months while he tried to sabotage Operation Anzio, but at least his machinations had given her people plenty of time to train. They were reacting like veterans, bringing themselves far enough around to deny the Peeps down-the-throat shots so they could go in pursuit, and she felt herself leaning forward against her shock frame as if to physically urge Harpy on.

But then something caught her eye, and she blinked, lips pursing in surprise, as HMS Minotaur’s first nine missiles came shrieking in from astern. They’d taken one hundred and forty-three seconds to overhaul their targets, and their overtake velocity was over a hundred and twenty-six thousand kilometers per second. No other missile in space could have done that; simply to get the burn time would have required a thirty-five-percent reduction in maximum acceleration, which would have put it three million kilometers behind these birds with a velocity almost twenty thousand KPS lower. More to the point, any other missiles would have been ballistic and unable to maneuver by the time they overhauled their prey, whereas these birds would still have close to forty seconds on their drives.