“More precisely, Your Grace, according to Ellis—and George’s first run at the data agrees with him—those are half missile pods. It looks like they sawed a conventional pod in half lengthwise and bolted the resulting abortion onto the ship right at the upper turn of the hull.”

“My God.” Honor looked back at the imagery and did a quick mental estimate. Assuming that the spacing of the handful of undersized pods she could see was maintained uniformly for the length of the ship between its hammerheads, then the cruiser floating before her had to have mounted at least thirty-five or forty of them. “What about the lower turn?” she asked.

“We don’t know, Your Grace. Let’s face it, Royalist was dead lucky to get as much as she did. If I had to guess, though, I’d guess they probably mounted them top and bottom both. If it were me, that’s certainly what I would have done, and I think we have to assume the Andies are at least as smart as I am.” She smiled with absolutely no humor. “Assuming they are top and bottom, George and I estimate they probably have between sixty and eighty of them in each broadside. That gives them a maximum salvo throw weight of between three hundred and four hundred birds.”

Honor’s lips pursed in a silent whistle of dismay. No non-pod ship in her order of battle could even come close to that heavy a broadside. And mounting the pods directly onto the hull of the ship also put them inside the cruiser’s impeller wedge and sidewalls, protecting them from the proximity “soft kills” which threatened pods deployed behind ships on tractors. Which meant the ship would be much freer of the “use them or lose them” constraints which normally affected pods deployed by light and medium combatants.

“Unless they’ve upgraded their fire control suites massively,” she thought out loud, “no ship this size could manage a salvo that heavy.”

“No, Your Grace,” Brigham agreed. “They wouldn’t have the telemetry links, even if they could see past the wedge interference of that many missiles to guide them in the first place. But if they use them right, they can probably fire broadsides of up to fifty, maybe even sixty, missiles each. Assuming that there’s some way for them to see around the pods themselves, that it is.”

“I see your point.” Honor rubbed the tip of her nose in thought. The long row of pods was mounted well clear of the cruiser’s standard weapon decks. As Mercedes had observed, they were carried at the turn of the hull, where the central spindle of a warship curled over into the relatively flat top and bottom of her hull. Those areas, protected by the impenetrable roof and floor of her wedge, were effectively unarmored. And they were also where most warships mounted additional active sensor arrays for their missile defenses and offensive fire control. The main arrays would be clear, but not the supporting ones used to manage individual missile telemetry links or for dedicated laser cluster fire control. Which meant that the Andie’s pods almost certainly had to be interfering with her ability to see her targets… not to mention incoming fire.