And because Clapp had been so ruthless in suppressing every single system which wasn’t absolutely essential to the Cimeterre’s mission as he visualized it, each LAC could cram a truly amazing number of missiles into its sophisticated rotary-magazine launchers.

Like the missiles which suddenly detonated long before any Manticoran would have expected them to. Missiles which contained absolutely no seeking systems, no penetration aides, no standoff laser heads—only the biggest, nastiest, dirtiest nuclear warheads Mitchell Clapp or anyone he could recruit had been able to design. Those warheads weren’t designed to destroy enemy LACs; they were designed to strip away the enemy’s EW advantages, and it was evident from the plot that they’d done just that.

The brutal wavefronts of plasma and radiation lashed out from the tsunami of missiles. No one had adopted such a brute force application to clearing away decoys and jammers in centuries. Even after the missile pod had reemerged, with its vulnerability to proximity “soft kills,” no one had ever attempted to apply the same technique to electronic warfare drones and remote platforms. But that was because of the ranges at which deep space engagements were fought, and the dispersal which warships with impeller wedges hundreds of kilometers across were forced to maintain. Neither of those factors applied to the overgrown pinnaces Clapp had designed. The Cimeterre, even more than its Manticoran counterparts, was designed to get in close. It was a knife-fighter, not a sniper, and it eschewed sophistication and finesse for up close and personal, bare-knuckle, eye-gouging combat.

The initial detonations ripped a thermonuclear hole straight through the electronic shield which had sheltered the Manticoran LACs, and a second echelon of the same massive salvo raced through the opening. Its birds detonated ten thousand kilometers closer to the Manties, ripping the hole even deeper and wider, and the next echelon exploited the opening the second had created. The third echelon closed to within as little as two or three thousand kilometers of the Manticoran LACs before it detonated in a final wavefront of blast, heat, and hard radiation.

The cumulative effect was devastating. The “triple ripple,” as Clapp had dubbed it, not only irradiated and seriously degraded the remote platforms (those it didn’t destroy outright), but also wreaked grievous carnage, however briefly, on the Manticorans’ onboard fire control systems and sensors. Like all warship sensors, they were hardened against EMP, but nothing had prepared them for the precisely synchronized and timed detonations of that many multi-megaton warheads in so small a volume of space and time. Indeed, it was unlikely that anything could have prepared them. It was as if they’d suddenly found themselves staring directly into the belly of a star, and for precious seconds they were dazzled and confused by the sheer, unimaginable ferocity of the event.

And while they were still dazzled, the Cimeterres’ second salvo came slashing in. Inferior as the seekers and penetration aids of that salvo’s missiles undoubtedly were, they were more than sufficiently effective against defensive systems which could barely even see them coming. They roared down on their targets, homing ruthlessly, following their intended victims through the last-minute, desperate evasion attempts which were all their half-blinded state allowed, and then they detonated at ranges as low as five thousand kilometers.