“Should we commit our own LACs, Your Grace?” Jaruwalski asked.

“Not yet,” Honor said. “Before we do that, I want to whittle down their shipboard defenses. I’m not going to throw away our LAC groups by committing them against an unshaken wall that knows they’re coming.”

“If we don’t commit them soon, we may not have an opportunity to use them at all, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski warned, gesturing at CIC’s projection of the Peeps’ new course. “If we hold them back more than another fifteen or twenty minutes, they won’t have the accel to overcome the Peeps’ base velocity advantage and overhaul short of the alpha wall.”

“Granted,” Honor conceded. “But I’m not prepared to accept massive casualties if we don’t have to. Especially when we don’t know for certain what the Andies will do if we take heavy losses against the Republic. If we can beat these people without getting our LACs chewed up, so much the better.”

Jaruwalski nodded in understanding, if not total agreement, and Honor looked at Lieutenant Brantley.

“My compliments to Admiral McKeon and Admiral Yu, and instruct them to open fire.”

· · • · ·

“Missile separation!” Marston announced. “I have hostile launches-many hostile launches!”

“Return fire,” Tourville said almost calmly.

“Aye, Sir! Returning fire-now.”

· · • · ·

Multidrive missiles howled out across the endless light-seconds of emptiness. No fleets in history had ever engaged one another at such a preposterous range. More than two full light-minutes lay between TF 34 and Second Fleet, and it would take almost seven minutes for even Manticore’s missiles to cross that stupendous gulf of vacuum. Second Fleet’s missiles, with their marginally lower accelerations, would take even longer to reach TF 34. But the Protector’s Own was closer than that. The flight time for Alfredo Yu’s missiles was little more than three minutes.

Both sides’ starships had extra missile pods on tow, and both sides flushed them all in the initial salvo. Second Fleet had seventy-eight capital ships: forty-six superdreadnoughts, eight CLACs, and twenty-four battlecruisers, but its planned margin of superiority had been more than erased by the presence of Alfredo Yu’s command. TF 34 and the Protector’s Own between them had a hundred and six capital ships: forty-three superdreadnoughts, ten CLACs, eleven dreadnoughts, and forty-two battlecruisers. Still, eleven of Honor’s ships of the wall were only dreadnoughts and forty-four percent of her other “capital ships” were mere battlecruisers, and although the Allies’ weapon systems remained superior to those of the Republic, the margin of superiority was thinner than it had ever been before.

The Havenite missile pods contained fewer missiles because those missiles had to be thirty percent larger than Manticoran missiles to approximate the same performance. But since she’d had no choice but to build enormous missiles because of the mass requirements of their drive elements and power plants, anyway, Shannon Foraker had been able to give them larger payloads than their Manticoran counterparts, as well. She’d used some of that volume to increase the destructive power of their warheads, but most of it had gone into additional sensor capability. The result was a weapon with eighty-eight percent as much range, very nearly eighty percent as much accuracy, and greater hitting power than anything Manticore had.