There were almost as many missiles in the Solarian launch as there’d been in Eighth Fleet’s, and their closing velocity was actually a bit higher. Yet there was no comparison between the outcomes of the two attacks.

Alice Truman’s perimeter LACs met the incoming salvo first. The Katanas’ rotary launchers punched out Viper missiles at maximum-rate fire, and the Vipers (with exactly the same drive and oversized wedge as the Mark 31) ripped holes in the wave of Solarian shipkillers.

Some of those shipkillers locked onto LACs (or tried to, at any rate) when the LACs’ impeller signatures blocked their lines of sight to their original targets. At their enormous velocity, their new victims had only seconds to defend themselves, and point defense clusters spat coherent light with frantic speed. Fortunately for the Katanas and Shrikes, current-generation Manticoran and Grayson LACs were extraordinarily difficult targets, and “only” sixty-three were destroyed. Their surviving consorts spun, yawing through a hundred and eighty degrees to bring their laser clusters and the Shrikes’ energy armaments to bear. Anti-ship missiles’ terminal attack maneuvers were designed to use their wedges to protect them from their targets’ energy weapons as they scorched in on their final attack runs. The SLN had given virtually no thought to evading fire coming from astern, however, and in the handful of seconds before they swept out of the LACs’ range, another thousand shipkillers were blown out of space.

The survivors burst past the light attack craft, roaring down on the ships-of-the-wall they’d come to kill, but the majority had lost sight—briefly, at least—of Eighth Fleet’s wallers. They still knew where to look to reacquire their targets, of course. Unfortunately, when they did, there were far too many of those targets.

Conceptually, Lorelei was light-years beyond Halo. Powered with the same onboard fusion technology the RMN had developed for Ghost Rider, the Mark 23, and the Mark 16, the Lorelei platforms had independent energy budgets beyond the dreams of any Solarian designer. They needed no line of sight for broadcast power to drive their powerful EW systems, and their onboard AI was even better than the Mark 23-E’s.

Halo provided false targets to confuse an incoming missile, but those lures had to be relatively close to the missile’s actual target, and even with broadcast power available, Halo’s false targets were significantly weaker—dimmer—than a ship-of-the-wall’s actual emissions.