The Solarian missile defense officers had been tracking the incoming tide of destruction, allocating their counter-missiles, refining their tracking data, for the better part of four full minutes. At their velocity, the MDMs would cross the entire counter-missile engagement zone in barely twelve seconds, which meant there would be no time for a second wave of CMs. Aware that one launch was all they were going to get, the SLN officers were totally focused on making it as effective as possible.

Then the Dazzler platforms suddenly activated, radiating huge, blinding spikes of jamming. Tracking systems shuddered in electronic shock under the brutal assault, and the humans and computers behind those tracking systems were just as shocked. They did their best, but they had only sixty seconds in which to react, and at the same moment, the Dragon’s Teeth came online, as well, radiating hundreds—thousands—of false targets.

Given more time, the defenders might have differentiated between the true threats and the counterfeits. Or if their targeting systems hadn’t been driven back in confusion by the Dazzlers, they might have been able to keep track of the genuine shipkillers they’d already identified, ignore the masqueraders. But they had no more time, and their targeting systems had been driven back in confusion.

A defense which would have been grossly inadequate under the best of circumstances had just become irrelevant, instead.

Eighth Fleet’s MDMs ripped through the pathetic scatter of counter-missiles and smashed into the final, desperate inner perimeter of laser clusters at forty-nine percent of the speed of light, and those laser clusters’ fire control was just as confused, just as befuddled, as the CMs had been. The Solarians managed to stop perhaps two percent of the incoming fire; all the rest of the shipkillers reached attack range, under the direction of Mark 23-Es’ AIs with complete updates from the ships which had launched them which were barely five seconds old.

The crimson icons didn’t vanish from Honor’s plot with anything so gentle as “metronome precision.” No, they disappeared—completely blotted away as the ships they represented were ripped to pieces, or transformed into the purple icons of broken, technically still intact wrecks—in one cataclysmic instant. Their killers were upon them, then through them, in less time than it would have taken to cough twice. The Ghost Rider recon platforms brought the hideous wash of detonating laser heads, the seemingly solid carpet of nuclear fire, to HMS Imperator’s visual displays with dreadful clarity and at faster than light speeds, but no merely human brain could possibly have sorted out the details.

Honor had almost ten seconds to absorb the destruction of the Solarian fleet…and then those slaughtered superdreadnoughts’ fire crashed into her own command.