It was obvious that the Republic recognized the technical inferiority of its defensive systems. But Shannon Foraker’s touch was equally obvious in the way in which those individually inferior systems had been carefully coordinated. The same approach would have been redundantly wasteful of capabilities given Manticoran system efficiencies. Given Republican hardware, it represented a brilliant adaptation of existing capabilities. An answer in mass to the individual superiority of Allied weapons.

And it worked.

Like Tourville, Honor had chosen her flagship for the effectiveness of its command systems more than its ship-to-ship offensive power. And even more than Second Fleet’s commander, she found that flagship virtually ignored by the incoming Republican missiles. It made sense, she supposed, although she hadn’t really considered it when she made her choice. After all, a carrier which had already launched its LACs automatically had a lower priority than superdreadnoughts which were busy launching missiles of their own or providing fire control to pods laid by another SD(P).

Werewolf was miraculously and completely untouched in that first, crushing exchange of fire. Other ships were less fortunate. Alistair McKeon’s Troubadour was a priority target. Almost a dozen missiles broke through every electronic and active defense, and the SD(P)’s icon flashed and flickered on Honor’s plot as she took damage. Her sistership Hancock was hit equally hard, and Trevor’s Star took at least ten hits from individual lasers. The pre-pod ships Horatius, Romulus, and Yawata took their share of the punishment, as well, and the battlecruiser Retaliation strayed into the path of a full broadside intended for the dreadnought King Michael. All of the ships of the wall survived; Retaliation didn’t.

Honor watched the battlecruiser’s data code disappear from her plot and wondered how many hundreds—or thousands—of her people were wounded or dying aboard the other ships of her task force. She felt those fresh deaths pressing upon her, joining their weight to all the rest of her dead, but even as the toll mounted among her own ships, she knew the enemy was being hammered even harder.

· · • · ·

Lester Tourville watched the mounting tide of destruction swelling up in the plot’s sidebars and fought to keep his despair out of his expression and voice.

Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs’ long flight times, the Manties’ deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos… and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21’s flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge… and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters’ fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.