Uncompromising Honor, page 36
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
And because they had, their projections were deeply flawed.
Fifteen Dazzlers came up all across the salvo’s front, perfectly timed to ten seconds behind the counter-missile launch. The huge spikes of jamming blasted the Solarian sensor picture into threshed ruin, and missile defense officers swore in shocked disbelief as the entire wave of Manticoran missiles simply disappeared behind that rolling wall of interference.
The counter-missiles lost lock as their onboard sensors were blinded. Perhaps a third of them wandered off on courses to nowhere, trying—and failing—to find new targets to acquire, but the remainder continued straight ahead. Some of them, still under shipboard control, steered towards the center of the missile swarm’s last known position. Others followed their onboard protocols, spreading a bit wider, orienting to keep their seekers targeted on the zone where their computers told them—correctly—the missiles they’d lost track of had to be.
But then the jamming went down, and Daphne Koopman slammed her fist furiously against her console.
There’d been three hundred and sixty missiles on her plot before the jamming; after the jamming, there were seven hundred.
No SLN analyst had yet heard a single word about the RMN’s Dragon’s Teeth. And because they hadn’t, Hajdu’s missile defense officers were totally unprepared for an EW platform which could generate ten totally convincing false missile signatures. Nor had they realized that Markéta Ilkova had dedicated a full fifteen percent of her initial launch to penetration aids.
Three hundred and eleven attack missiles, covered and protected by their electronic siblings, streaked towards their targets, separating onto individual, evasive approach profiles at last, and TF 1030’s missile defenses tried frantically to reacquire them as they came.
“Projected targets Ontario, Enterprise, Edinorg, Marengo, and Re Umberto,” Koopman said flatly. “Tracking’s confidence is not—repeat, not—high.”
Hajdu’s jaw tightened. If those projections were correct—and, looking at the hashed nightmare of the plot he understood exactly why Tracking’s confidence in them was so low—all nine of the Manties had concentrated their fire on only five of his ninety-eight battlecruisers. That would produce a density of almost seventy missiles per target, assuming an even distribution, and that promised disastrous consequences. Seventy Solarian missiles would have been enough to wreck any battlecruiser, assuming they could get through its defenses. Looking at that plot, it was obvious a lot of them were going to get through, and one thing all OpAn’s projections agreed upon was that Manticoran warheads were far more destructive on a bird-for-bird basis.
He’s not even trying to target all of us, the vice admiral realized. He’s going to go for a handful of targets in each salvo, concentrate his fire to pound through their defenses, and rip them to frigging bits.
Hajdu Győző’s brain went through the remorseless math. There were fifteen salvos in space now. His Cataphracts were actually faster than the missiles coming at him—their time-of-flight was seventy-one seconds shorter than the initial Manticoran salvo’s—but by the time they reached their target, the Manties would have fired a total of nineteen. If each of those salvos concentrated on five of his ships and even a third of them got through, they could reduce every single one of his battlecruisers to wreckage.
Despite their confusion, the Solarian counter-missiles intercepted almost seventy of the incoming targets. Unfortunately, fifty-one of them were electronic ghosts generated by the Dragon’s Teeth. Another fifteen were Dazzlers. Of Markéta Ilkova’s three hundred and eleven shipkillers, two hundred and ninety survived to streak across the point defense envelope at thirty-eight percent of the speed of light.
SLNS Enterprise’s point defense clusters had time for one shot each before the missile storm was upon her. Under the circumstances, they did remarkably well, plucking nineteen shipkillers out of the chaos of her fire control, and “only” forty-five got through to attack her.
All of them were Mark 14-ERs, not Mark 16s. The inability of the Saganami-Bs to launch the Mark 16 had forced Commander Ilkova to step down Phantom’s Mark 16s’ acceleration in order to maintain concentration. That density paid a major dividend when it came to penetrating the Solarian defenses, but the Mark 14 wasn’t fitted with the Mark 16-G’s improved laserhead. The Mark 16-G could kill superdreadnoughts; the Mark 14 couldn’t.
It was, however—unfortunately for Enterprise—quite capable of killing battlecruisers.
The Nevada-class ship heaved as bomb-pumped lasers punched through her sidewalls, ripped deep into her flanks. Men and women died, weapons disappeared. Her core hull was breached in at least seven places, belching atmosphere as it decompressed explosively. But bad as that was, the six laserheads which detonated directly ahead of her were far worse. Unlike Rear Admiral Kotouč’s ships, Enterprise had no bow-wall. There was nothing to protect her forward hammerhead, aside from its armor and her particle screening, and neither of those was remotely enough.
X-ray lasers punched effortlessly through that armor. Three of her forward impeller nodes exploded, and two graser mounts, three counter-missile tubes, and two laser clusters went with them. A fraction of a second later, power bleed and ruptured plasma conduits turned her entire forward impeller room into a crematorium for its crew. The nine hundred thousand-ton ship staggered, yawing drunkenly as half her wedge went down, and two more of those hellish lasers ripped almost directly down her central axis, tearing deep into her essential systems.
She reeled under the savage assault and her after impeller ring went down, as well, proof of the chaos raging through her brutally wounded control systems. Acceleration gone, she coasted onward, out of the fireballs of the attacking missiles.
Fourteen seconds later, she disappeared in the glare of a failing fusion bottle.
Her sister Marengo and the Indefatigable-class Edinorg were more fortunate; they survived. But they survived as hopeless wrecks. Edinorg still had her wedge, although she’d lost half a dozen nodes, and she turned brokenly away, seeking cover behind her intact consorts’ interposed wedges, while Marengo coasted onward, shedding life pods and small craft. Ontario’s back broke and her shattered hull tumbled wildly, and Re Umberto simply blew up under the pounding.
“Good hits, Sir!” Captain Clarke reported as the numbers came up on his display. Commander Ilkova was too busy for reports at the moment. “Looks like we took out all five alpha targets!”
“Good!” Kotouč acknowledged, but his eyes were on Ilkova and the master plot. That massive Solarian salvo was only ninety seconds out, and he had few illusions about what was going to happen when it arrived.
Nor was he alone in that. He could see it in the tight shoulders, the masklike faces of his flag bridge personnel. Even Clarke’s, despite his obvious satisfaction.
Only Ilkova seemed oblivious to it as her hands flew across her console. The range was forty light-seconds, but the Ghost Rider platforms reduced that to less than one. She’d already cut the control links to the next three salvos in the firing queue, but there was still time for her to refine the penetration ECM and targeting of the salvos behind that. She was totally focused on just that, her blue-green eyes fiery, and Kotouč glanced at Paul Albamonte.
The EWO was just as focused as Ilkova, but not on offense. The ops officer had assumed direct control of the attack birds’ penetration EW so that Lieutenant Albamonte could concentrate on the squadron’s defensive ECM. Just as the Ghost Rider platforms near the planet gave Ilkova a direct, real-time view of her targets, those between the task group and the Sollies had given Albamonte a real-time view of the incoming missiles. There was less he could do with it, but he wasn’t sitting on his hands.
He hit a macro on his console and the missile control which had passed to him launched Dazzlers from every tube the task group had. They didn’t travel far, and then they erupted squarely in the path of the incoming Cataphracts. There weren’t enough of them and the shell wasn’t dense enough to block all of the Solly missiles’ sensors, but it was close enough to the task group and broad enough to block the vast majority of them, and Solarian missiles didn’t talk to each other the way Apollo birds did. With Apollo, everything any missile in a salvo could see was available to all missiles in that salvo, but Solly missiles at this range would be on their own. Each of them knew where its target was supposed to be, but it had to be sure that target was really there before it attacked. That meant reacquiring if it lost lock for any reason, and if there happened to be anything to confuse its sensors at that moment…
Kotouč checked a secondary plot and smiled viciously as the Loreleis came to life upon it.
Suck on that one, Hajdu, he thought vindictively as his four ships suddenly became twenty-five…then thirty-nine.
Then the Dazzlers went down once more, clearing the task group’s defensive sensor range, and Phantom quivered with the sawtooth vibration of counter-missile launchers in maximum-rate fire. They spat out thirty-two CMs every ten seconds, and his jaw tightened as the incoming salvo entered the outer intercept envelope. They’d be finding out shortly how many of those Cataphracts had been diverted to other targets.
He didn’t expect it to be enough.
“Missile impact in sixty seconds,” Albamonte announced as the squadron’s defensive fire began tearing into that stupendous cloud of death. Dozens of Cataphracts—scores of them—disappeared, but there were thousands of them, and Jan Kotouč faced a far larger salvo with far less missile defense than Commodore Lessem had faced in Prime.
They’re getting through, he told himself. Accept it, Jan.
Maybe so, but in the meantime…
“God damn it!” Hajdu Győző snapped. “Can’t we stop those fucking things?”
Fred Brigman looked at his admiral from the corner of one eye but said nothing. It was obviously a rhetorical question…and the first time he’d ever heard such furious frustration from the unflappable Hajdu.
It was very unlike him, but it was also hard to blame him, Brigman thought grimly. Five of those hell-spawned salvos had smashed into TF 1030, and twenty-seven—twenty-seven—of Hajdu’s battlecruisers had been blown apart or turned into crippled wrecks that would never move again under their own power. SLNS Espana, Impero, and Libertad, like Edinorg, retained enough nodes to limp away from the carnage, but none of them were effective units any longer. Of Hajdu’s original ninety-eight battlecruisers, only sixty-seven remained in action.
A sense of shocked desperation enveloped the task force as those merciless salvos hammered home again and again, killing or crippling their battlecruisers five or six at a time, with mechanical precision. They seemed unstoppable, and whoever was behind them, he was using his electronic warfare advantages with merciless skill. The jamming patterns shifted and danced, there were more decoys in some waves, fewer in others, driving Tracking into near futility. They were knocking down more of the shipkillers in the inner counter-missile zone, and the laser clusters were claiming more kills as updated profiles on the attack missiles’ terminal maneuvers and emission signatures were relayed throughout the task force, but they were actually getting even fewer kills in the outer and middle zones. It was as if the Manties had real-time data on their own tracking and EW shifts. As if they were programming adjustments into their missiles penetration profiles right up to the instant they actually hit the Solarian defenses.
And now this, Brigman thought, glaring at the display on which the false targets had suddenly appeared. They had to be decoys—although God only knew what sort of decoys could do what these were doing!—and they were going to play hell with the blind-fired Cataphracts’ ability to find the real targets.
Well, maybe so, the chief of staff told himself grimly. But there’s only so much decoys can do against a salvo that size, and they only get one more of their own in before it’s our turn to hammer them!
“Impact in five seconds,” Daphne Koopman announced hoarsely.
“Three more hard kills,” Clarke announced. “Looks like at least one additional mission-kill, too.”
That makes…at least thirty-four, Kotouč thought, doing the math. Over a third of them. These bastards frigging well know they’ve been kissed!
No doubt they did, and by any objective standard, TG 110.2 had already achieved an overwhelming victory. At least twenty-seven Solarian battlecruisers, most of them Nevadas, had been destroyed outright. That was 24.6 million tons of warships, nine times TG 110.2’s total tonnage, with 78,000 men and women aboard. TG 110.2’s total personnel amounted to only 1,900, barely two percent as many, and the Sollies were going to lose still more ships. Ilkova had already updated the next four salvos in her firing queue and cut her links to them. That meant at least another sixteen dead Solarian battlecruisers, whatever else happened.
It was a pity so few of his own people would be around to see that happen.
Phantom, Cinqueda, Talwar, and Shikomizue had rolled ship thirty seconds ago. They could do that, because Phantom’s Keyhole platforms gave Ilkova and Albamonte uninterrupted sensor coverage, light-speed telemetry to the attack birds, and FTL links to the Ghost Rider drones, and it was going to make Kotouč’s ships far harder targets than any Solly had ever dreamed of attacking. It just wasn’t going to make them hard enough.
The CM zones were a holocaust. Counter-missiles sought out Solarian shipkillers, blotting them from existence in suicidal eruptions of wedge fratricide. Some of those strikes took out more than one attack missile at a time, but not even Manticoran missile defense computers could run meaningful threat analyses on that many missiles. The Solarian tactical officers had simply pointed them in the right direction. After that, aside from the thousands of EW platforms threaded throughout the missile swarm, every one of those birds was on its own.
The penetration aids had been better than projected, knocking back kill numbers by another fifteen or twenty percent. The Loreleis offset some of that by sucking the fire aside—not as much as he’d hoped they would, but more than he’d actually anticipated. Or it looked that way, in the fleeting moments he had to absorb the display. But there simply weren’t enough of them, because the true killer was the sheer number of threats. There was no way to parse the incoming fire, no way to predict which missiles would go for the decoys, which would lose lock and go wide, and which were likely to acquire good firing solutions. The defenders had been driven to take whatever shots they could get, not the ones they would have cherry-picked with better tracking data, and it was a mathematical certainty that many of the successful intercepts had been wasted on attackers that never would have found a firing angle, anyway.
“Impact in five seconds,” Commander Ilkova announced, looking up from her targeting displays at last. Her voice was surprisingly calm, Kotouč thought. Or perhaps the word he wanted was exhausted, because she was soaked with sweat. The sweat of concentration and determination, he thought, not fear.
“Helmets!” the quartermaster of the watch barked, and the admiral twitched. He’d forgotten his own standing orders, and his hands unhooked the helmet from his seat arm, lowered it over his head, and sealed it to his skinsuit’s locking ring.
The possibility of its making much difference was remote.
Megan Petersen’s hands were claws on her command chair armrests as that mammoth wave of missiles roared down on Rear Admiral Kotouč’s defiant handful. Arngrim was tied into the same recon drones as Phantom. The destroyer’s tactical display showed the same information Jan Kotouč and his staff could see. But unlike the flagship—unlike Jayson—Megan was safe, her ship un-threatened.
She’d never realized what a curse safety could be, a distant corner of her mind thought.
The squadron’s point defense lashed out as the incoming missiles streaked “above” and “below” those interposed impeller wedges. She knew hundreds of incoming missiles had just disappeared, ripped to pieces by those strobing laser clusters. But she couldn’t see it; the globe of nuclear explosions completely enveloping TG 110.2 made it impossible.
She tasted blood from her bitten lip as that incredible, glaring ball of plasma erupted. Tens of thousands of warheads exploded, spawning their own bomb-pumped lasers, ripping at sidewalls, bow-walls, battle steel armor…and human flesh and bone. It seemed to take forever, although at a terminal velocity almost half the speed of light the actual attack was over in a heartbeat. In less than a second.
Jayson…
She never knew if she’d whispered that name aloud. She only knew her heart seemed to stop as the brimstone glare faded from the plot and she saw what was left.
“Got the fuckers!” Daphne Koopman shouted.
It was scarcely a proper report, but Hajdu Győző wasn’t going to call her on the carpet for it. Not when the light-speed sensors confirmed what the gravitics had already reported. The Manties’ impeller wedges had disappeared from the FTL gravitic plot; now, forty seconds later, the light-speed data from the recon drones speeding outward in the shipkillers’ wake showed him why they had.
Seven of their targets—seven of them!—were simply gone, vanished, probably the victims of their own failing fusion plants. The enormous “battlecruiser”—two and a half times Camperdown’s size—had survived, but only as a shattered wreck, and she was accompanied by what looked like half of a heavy cruiser. It was hard to be sure about that, given the ship-fragment’s splintered state.
