Honor was one of the tacticians who suspected that was the case. She had cautiously optimistic hopes for the new Lorelei platforms, which represented an entirely new generation of highly capable decoys, and she’d strongly supported the decision to massively upgrade the Keyhole platforms’ defensive armament. Despite that, she’d been forced to the conclusion that the Navy owed its survival to date at least as much to the inherent inaccuracy of extremely long-range missile fire as to any improvements in its defenses. Worse, it had never been anything more than a matter of time before someone as inventive as the Republic of Haven’s navy had become under Thomas Theisman and Shannon Foraker managed to duplicate—or at least approximate—Apollo’s long-range accuracy. At which point, things were going to get ugly.

Ultimately, if ships of the wall weren’t going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleet’s active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million-kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LACS further out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic capability for the wallers to extend their own intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking at the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she’d like to have, which was why Eighth Fleet’s formation wasn’t quite what The Book envisioned.

Given the nature of the threat and the expansion of each ship’s defensive field of fire courtesy of Keyhole, she’d decided to loosen Eighth Fleet’s formation rather than seeking to tighten it still further. Since her Keyhole-equipped units had more “reach” than they’d ever had before, she’d reasoned, they could target threats across a greater volume, provide mutual support without maintaining such close, rigid station on one another. There were trade-offs, of course—there always were—and the greater distance between subunits inevitably decreased the accuracy of the support they could offer one another. But what they lost in pinpoint precision they got back (hopefully) by broadening and deepening the total defensive basket. Each defensive shot had an individually lower probability of a kill, but there were more of them, and allowing squadrons to maneuver more independently also permitted their individual units to interpose their impeller wedges against incoming fire most effectively and with far less risk of the accidental wedge-on-wedge fratricide that would destroy the most powerful superdreadnought.