At such ranges, even MDMs seemed to crawl, but the Solarian fire swept remorselessly towards Eighth Fleet, and there was a lot of it—at least three times ONI’s estimate of Filareta’s firepower. The LACs assigned to the fleet’s perimeter accelerated to meet that incoming tide, adjusting their own formation as they went, and the Grayson-designed Katanas, with their potent missile armaments and heavy loads of Viper missiles, led.

Manticoran doctrine had hardened in favor of using LACs as the wall of battle’s primary screen. They were strictly sublight, but that wasn’t a significant factor inside a star’s hyper limit, and very few engagements took place outside a hyper limit. And while even a Manticoran LAC had far less long-range offensive firepower than, say, a Roland, the Katanas, especially, had nearly as much anti-missile capability. They couldn’t take as much damage, but the laser heads carried by multidrive missiles made that pretty much a moot point. Destroyers couldn’t survive more than a hit or two from weapons that powerful, either, and they were far easier to hit in the first place than something as agile as a LAC.

While Truman’s bantamweights headed out, the rest of Eighth Fleet turned away and began to shift into Formation Tango-Two. No one on Honor’s staff had really anticipated Solarian MDMs or such a heavy weight of fire, but the RMN believed in being prepared. That was why she and her task force and task group commanders had brainstormed situations very like this one in their planning sessions. And, after analyzing the tactical data from every engagement against the Republic of Haven and interpolating the data from Michelle Henke’s engagements in the Talbott Quadrant, Honor and her staff had evolved a new defensive doctrine.

Traditional missile defense wove every platform into a single, tightknit pattern designed to bring every defensive system to bear on the threat axis. In order to focus that concentration of defensive fire, the units of a task force or fleet maintained a close, unflinching formation with every squadron meticulously slotted into the most advantageous position. That sort of precision maneuvering even in the heart of furious combat required highly experienced, steel-nerved personnel, and it had been a hallmark of the Royal Manticoran Navy for generations.

But the massive weight of pod-launched MDM salvos placed unprecedented strains on that doctrine. When the threat was measured in tens of thousands of laser heads, instead of scores or hundreds, not even the most precise stationkeeping was enough to stave off disaster. As the threat grew progressively worse, Manticore had countered by increasing the density, power, and accuracy of its anti-missile armaments, yet many of the RMN’s tacticians had come to the conclusion that, absent some significant improvement in the available defensive systems, simply packing in more point defense clusters and counter-missile tubes had reached a point of diminishing returns.