“Had to get them off before our birds got close enough for proximity kills,” Kirkegard agreed, watching the sidebars of his plot as CIC assigned threat values to the incoming warheads. “More of them than I expected, too,” he acknowledged.

“Yes, Sir. We’re going to get hurt,” Auderska said.

“Price of doing business,” Kirkegard replied with a shrug. “And at this range, not even Manty targeting systems are going to be able to score a very high percentage of hits. Neither are ours, of course, but—” his smile was thin and hungry “—we can fire heavy follow-on salvos… and they can’t.”

· · • · ·

“Tracking reports that their missile ECM is much better than it’s supposed to be, Sir,” Maitland’s chief of staff said very quietly into his ear. Sir Ronald looked at him, and he grimaced unhappily. “They’re estimating that our point defense is going to be at least twenty-five percent less effective than we’d projected. At least.”

Maitland grunted and turned his gaze back to the master plot while his brain raced. It was obvious from the weight of fire coming at him that the Peep superdreadnoughts on that plot were a pod design. But the situation wasn’t completely hopeless, he told himself. Everything the LACs’ sensors had reported so far indicated that the Peeps’ EW capabilities, while substantially better than anticipated—as CIC’s new estimate of their missile ECM confirmed—were still far below Manticoran standards. That would give Maitland an enormous advantage in a long-range missile duel like this. Or it would have, if he’d been able to shoot back at all.

He gritted his teeth as bitter memory replayed his repeated requests for at least one SD(P). But the Admiralty had not seen fit to assign such scarce, valuable units to a secondary system like Maastricht. At least the launchers aboard two of the three older ships he did have had been refitted to handle multi-drive missiles. Which meant that once his pods were exhausted, he wouldn’t be completely unable to return fire. It only meant that he could respond with less than twenty percent of the Peeps’ weight of fire until he somehow managed to close to within six million klicks of them.

Which none of his starships could possibly survive long enough to do.

“Are those new acceleration figures for their superdreadnoughts confirmed?” he asked his ops officer.

“Yes, Sir,” the commander confirmed unhappily. “They’re still lower than ours, but the difference is almost thirty percent less than ONI’s estimates.”

“That figures,” Sir Ronald half-snarled before he could stop himself. Then he closed his mouth, drew a deep breath, and looked back at the chief of staff.

“Transmit an immediate message to Commodore Rontved,” he said. “Instruct her to activate Case Omega immediately.”

“Yes, Sir.” The complete absence of surprise in the chief of staff’s voice showed that he’d already reached the same conclusion Maitland had. Rontved commanded the small, three-unit squadron of maintenance and support ships the Admiralty had deployed to support Maitland’s picket. They were effectively unarmed, aside from a strictly limited point defense capability, and under Case Omega their job was simply to be sure that as much as possible of the infrastructure which had been built up to support the system picket was destroyed before they themselves ran for it.