This time, they were standoff weapons, and the crimson icons of the Manticoran “super-LACs” which had mangled one Havenite fleet after another during Eighth Fleet’s offensive, began to vanish with dreadful speed.

“Eighty-two percent kills, by God!” Commander Lampert announced exultantly as the numbers came in. “Eighty-two percent!”

“Eighty-two percent so far,” Foraker corrected quietly, and Lampert nodded in acknowledgment as the Cimeterres continued to charge down upon the broken and harrowed ranks of their Manticoran opponents.

The massive energy mounts of the Manticoran Shrike-class LACs came into their own, even with targeting systems that remained partially degraded, and Republican LACs disappeared from the plot as the powerful grasers harvested them. But there weren’t very many of the Shrikes left, and those which remained found themselves targeted by storms of individually less capable but numerically overwhelming short-range missiles. The first four, or five, or six missiles might be evaded or picked off by active defenses, but the seventh, or eighth, or ninth got through. The Cimeterres lost perhaps ten percent of their total number, but in return, they destroyed every single one of the Manticoran LACs. The absolute tonnage loss was less one-sided, but even that was hugely in the Republic’s favor, and Commander Clapp staggered as Captain Anders pounded him on the back in jubilation.

“Simulation concluded,” a voice announced, but it was almost drowned out by the babble of excited exultation surging through Sovereign of Space’s CIC.

“It’s only a simulation!” Clapp pointed out as coherently as he could through the background racket and Anders’ pounding.

“But it’s the best simulation we’ve been able to build,” Foraker responded. “And we used the most pessimistic assumptions we could about our relative capabilities when we modeled it in the first place.” She shook her head, grinning almost as broadly as Anders. “If anything, this understates the probable outcome, Mitchell!”

“But only for the initial engagements,” Clapp countered, and gestured at her chief of staff. “As Captain Anders pointed out, once we’ve done this to them a time or two, they’re going to begin adapting their tactics. If nothing else, they’ll accept a greater degree of dispersal and use sequenced waves of EW drones to make it harder for us to kill them before we close.”

“Of course they will,” she agreed. “And,” she went on more somberly, “you’re quite right—our relative losses will go up steeply when that happens. But the entire point of your operational concept is that since we can’t match their ability to kill starships with LACs, the best we can hope to do is to impose attritional losses on them. To neutralize their anti-shipping strike capability because we don’t have the tech base to create a matching capability of our own. And that, Mitchell, is precisely what you’ve accomplished here. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t elegant, but it is something more important than either of those things—it works.” She shook her head. “To be honest, I hope we never get the opportunity to validate your creation, but if we do, I think it’s going to do exactly what you set out to do.”