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Lester Tourville clung to the arms of his command chair as RHNS Majestic staggered and bucked. No one sent damage reports to the flag bridge. Those were the concern of Captain Hughes on her own command deck, but Tourville could feel the big ship’s wounds as laser after laser crashed into her. Even her massive armor yielded to that savage pounding, and he knew Manticoran fire was smashing away sensors, energy weapons, missile tubes… and the human beings who crewed them.

He felt that wave of destruction in the back of his brain, but he made himself ignore it. If it was Hughes’ job to deal with Majestic’s wounds it was Tourville’s job to save what he could of Second Fleet.

It didn’t look as if he would be able to save very much of it.

Both the Manticoran and the Grayson fire had concentrated mercilessly upon his own SD(P)s and CLACs. Quite a few missiles—like the ones targeting Majestic—had lost track and gone after other victims, yet it was obvious that they amounted to little more than errant shots which had initially been intended for the newer types. He wondered, at first, how the Manties could have targeted them so accurately, picked them out of his formation so unerringly, when the Allies had no emissions signatures or targeting profiles on file for them. But then he realized how absurdly easy it actually was. They hadn’t picked the new ships out; they’d simply chosen not to fire at the ships they could positively identify as pre-pod designs. By process of elimination, that concentrated their fire on the newer, more dangerous designs.

They were tough, superdreadnoughts. The most massively armored and protected mobile structures ever built by man. They could soak up almost inconceivable amounts of punishment and survive. More than survive, continue to strike back from the heart of a holocaust which would have vaporized any lesser ship. But there were limits to all things, including the toughness of superdreadnoughts, and he watched the damage report sidebars flicker and change as incoming missiles sledgehammered his own SD(P)s again and again and again.

He felt a moment of bitter shame leavened by relief as he realized most of the Manties were virtually ignoring his own flagship. He’d chosen Majestic because she’d been designed as a command ship, with the best communications and battle management systems available. But she was a pre-pod design, and so, for all her damage, she was largely spared as that first, deadly exchange of fire completely gutted a third of Tourville’s SD(P)s. Two more were damaged almost as badly, and a seventh lost two alpha nodes. Only one of them escaped totally undamaged… and fresh Manticoran missiles were already howling in upon her in follow-on salvos.

· · • · ·

Honor watched the return Havenite fire rip into her own formation. Her wall of battle was too far from its enemies for shipboard sensors to resolve what was happening to Second Fleet in any detail, but the Ghost Rider sensor platforms she’d had deployed were another matter entirely. Not even Manticore had yet been able to find a way for the platforms to send targeting information directly to MDMs, and even an MDM was too small for BuWeaps to cram in an FTL receiver which would have allowed real-time targeting telemetry to be relayed through the ships who’d launched them. But she could at least evaluate what happened when those missiles reached their targets, and her eyes narrowed in respectful surprise at the sheer toughness of that multilayered, tightly coordinated defensive envelope.