From the modest strength of their wedges, it appeared the Sollies had probably grafted the impeller nodes of a standard recon drone onto them, which would explain CIC’s initial confusion over what they were. Packing in those nodes had to have cut deeply into the pods’ volume, and he doubted they could maintain their current acceleration level for an extended period out of onboard power. But if they were, indeed, the conceptual equivalent of Havenite “donkeys,” they were equipped only with tractors of their own and power and telemetry relays. The squeeze on their volume wouldn’t cost the Solly commander any missiles, since they’d never been intended to carry missiles in the first place, and their impellers would go quite some way towards reducing the SLN’s acceleration disadvantage vis-à-vis the Grand Alliance. Clas Fleming’s eighty-percent acceleration rate was 5.697 KPS2, sixty gravities higher than a Nevada could turn out with no safety margin at all. If both ships went to maximum military acceleration, Clas Fleming’s advantage would be over two hundred and forty gravities. Nothing was going to let a Nevada overhaul a Saganami-C from a standing start, but towing that many unpowered pods would have drastically reduced the Sollies’ already sluggish acceleration rates. With the built-in drives, the battlecruisers’ acceleration curves were only grossly inferior to his own, not hopelessly so.

  Jury-rigged or carefully thought through, though, they had to be a response to what the Grand Alliance’s missiles had done to the Sollies ever since New Tuscany. The SLN’s system-defense pods—system defense was the only role in which the prewar Sollies had ever considered employing missile pods—had neither needed nor possessed impellers of their own. So these things had to have been designed and put into production since the shooting started. In some ways, that was a small thing, scarcely likely to affect the balance of combat power in any significant way. As a harbinger of possible Solarian activity, though, it was…worrisome to see it so soon.

  And there were a lot of the whatever-the-hell-they-were out there.

  He didn’t like the implications of that at all. What it said about the number of missiles which might shortly be fired in his command’s direction was bad enough, although the Sollies’ hit probabilities at extended range would still suck wind. The speed with which this new system had appeared was a lot worse, though. It would seem the Darwinian process he’d worried about had begun, and at least as bad, a single task force this far from home had deployed just under five thousand of them, and they were towing a total of what appeared to be 30,000 unpowered missile pods. Assuming six to ten cells per pod, that would represent between 180,000 and 300,000 missiles, and given the presence of what looked suspiciously like ammunition ships tagging along behind the battlecruisers, he suspected that was only the tip of the iceberg. So in addition to evidence of Solarian adaptiveness, he was looking at proof of the League industrial infrastructure’s capacity to put a brand new system into production in staggering numbers very, very quickly.

  Not good, he thought. Not good at all.

  But those implications were for the future—and for the attention of better paid, more highly placed brains than his—he reminded himself. Best he focus his attention on whatever the Solly CO had in mind for TG 47.3.

  The Sollies had opened their formation as they closed, and the deployment they’d adopted wasn’t exactly standard. They’d split into three roughly equal-sized sub-formations—he suspected they represented the other side’s task group organization—advancing almost in a column formation, or perhaps like beads on a string, towards the terminus. CIC had designated them Alpha One through Alpha Three, and they were spaced almost nine hundred thousand kilometers apart which suggested the Solarian commander had something clever in mind. Lessem was pretty sure he’d figured out what the “something clever” was, but he had no intention of getting too tightly wedded to his own cleverness. It was entirely possible the Solly had come up with something completely different.

  “Current range, Palko?” he asked.

  “Thirty-six million klicks, Sir,” Commander Palko Nakada, TG 47.3’s astrogator replied. “Closing at one-six-two-seven-seven KPS.”

  “Thank you.”

  “They seem confident, Sir,” Thúri observed. “Of course, I expect Byng was pretty confident up until—”

  “Missile launch,” Commander Wozniak announced suddenly. “Multiple launches from Alpha One. Estimate six thousand—repeat, six-zero-zero-zero—inbound.”

  “First launch away, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Rosiak announced.

  “Thank you, Bart,” Jane Isotalo said as courteously as if she hadn’t already seen the outgoing missile tracks from Vice Admiral Elvis Tsukahara’s TG 1027.2. It was Rosiak’s job to tell her that, after all.

  That familiar observation ran under the surface of her thoughts as she watched that first wave of improved Cataphracts streak towards the Manties.

  Whatever the war might mean for the Solarian League in general, its timing had proved…fortuitous for Technodyne of Yildun. The huge transstellar had faced enough criminal charges to make survival doubtful, even for a mega corporation its size. Over thirty members of its senior management had been sentenced to actual prison terms in light of certain embarrassing revelations—like the minor fact that the Republic of Monica had come into possession of a number of fully functional SLN battlecruisers, with all classified tech systems intact and operational—which had been previously scrapped by Technodyne. In Isotalo’s opinion, that “minor fact” had been a principal contributor—probably the principal contributor, come to that—to the unholy mess in which the League currently found itself, but any additional penalties against Technodyne had evaporated in the face of the “Grand Alliance’s” demonstrably superior war-fighting technology.

  They hadn’t evaporated because all was forgiven, but rather because Technodyne was one of the Navy’s more important suppliers—one might more accurately have said the most important supplier—and its R&D staff had hit the ground running in the face of the Manties’ superiority. Indeed, Isotalo suspected Technodyne had been paying closer attention than the Office of Naval Intelligence to reports out of the Haven Sector for quite some time, given how speedily the first Cataphract multi-stage missiles had emerged from its workshops. The Cataphract was both outsized and crude compared to current-generation Manty technology—it was effectively no more than a standard missile with a laserhead-armed “counter-missile” glued to its nose—but at least it provided the Navy with a weapon which could actually reach the enemy.

  Obviously, Technodyne hadn’t managed to duplicate the Manties’ targeting and fire control systems, which meant long-range accuracy remained pathetic, but a sufficiently dense salvo would still generate hits. And in order to provide that density, Technodyne had come up with what it had dubbed the “Dispersed Weapons Module, Mod 2” (which, interestingly, suggested there’d been a previous “Mod 1” which it hadn’t mentioned to anyone), christened the “Husky” by the Navy’s tac officers.

  Each Husky was a specialized towing drone equipped with a small impeller drive, a power receptor antenna, a telemetry relay, and eight tractor beams, each capable of towing one of Technodyne’s missile pods. The Husky’s onboard power was sufficient only for limited—very limited—independent maneuvering, but it could always be towed by a mothership’s tractors. As long as it could be hit by beamed power from that mothership, its endurance was effectively unlimited, however. And it had been designed so that each Husky could “mother” eight additional Huskies. In theory, they could be daisy-chained four-deep, with the actual missile pods forming the fifth tier of an enormous stack. That meant—again, in theory—that a single tractor aboard a single warship could tow 1,024 missile pods. The latest, tweaked version of the Cataphract was somewhat bigger than the model Filareta had taken to Manticore, and the new pods were individually smaller, able to carry only six of Technodyne’s latest mark. So in theory—in theory—that single shipboard tractor could have put 6,144 missiles into space. The power requirement would have far exceeded that of anything short of a superdreadnought, however—in fact, Isotalo doubted even a superdreadnought could have handled that many pods—and the best her battlecruisers could manage was just under a hundred Huskies and “only” 768 pods apiece, which meant the battlecruisers of the lightest of her task groups had almost twelve thousand missiles in its deployed pods.

  Without the Huskies’ impellers, their acceleration would have been that of an arthritic tortoise…at best. With the Huskies’ impellers, the effect of all that mass outside the battlecruisers’ impeller wedges was negligible. And, all told, that would let her bring over 36,000 missiles to the fight.

  Which didn’t even count the reserve aboard her colliers. They were packed with an additional 90,000 pods, even after deploying the Huskies in her first salvo. It seemed…unlikely…that a dozen Manty cruisers could stand up to over half a million Cataphracts.

  On the other hand, the Manties had demonstrated a perverse propensity for doing “unlikely” things to the Solarian League Navy.

  In addition to producing the Husky, the arms maker had tweaked its original Cataphract, increasing its first-stage acceleration by twenty percent, which upped its maximum powered envelope from rest from 13,650,172 kilometers to 19,370,400. Technodyne hadn’t been able to do anything about light-speed fire control limitations, however, and the additional acceleration wasn’t a factor, at least for this launch. Rosiak had been forced to incorporate a ballistic phase into the attack, since even with the tweaks and her closing velocity at launch, her maximum powered envelope remained less than thirty-two million kilometers. Direct hits, especially against Manticoran missile defenses, would have been few and far between even at twenty million kilometers; at thirty-six million, they were unlikely as hell, but that wasn’t really what she was after.

  Show me what you’ve got, she thought silently, leaning back in her command chair as the missiles tore towards their targets. I don’t care how good your missile defense systems are; you can’t have a hell of a lot of them on that few platforms. So show me what they can do.

  “Missile defense Reno,” Commodore Lessem said calmly as he, too, watched the tidal bore of missiles sweep towards him, then glanced at the plot’s vector analyses. Based on the performance of Massimo Filareta’s missiles, CIC was projecting a total flight time of 406 seconds, including a 151-second ballistic phase, and he pursed his lips as he watched the time display tick downward. There was time—if not a lot of it—to consider his options, and his brain whirred behind his thoughtful eyes.

  “Missile defense Reno, aye, Sir,” Wozniak replied. “Missile Defense has good tracking data from the Ghost Riders, and bow walls are active…now.” He looked over his shoulder and smiled at the commodore. “I think these people are in for a surprise, Sir.”

  “We can always hope.” Lessem glanced at Commander Thúri. “I wonder what percentage of their total birds that represents?”

  “CIC makes it about twenty percent, Sir.” From the promptitude of his response, Thúri had been thinking the same sort of things his commodore had. “I’m inclined to think it was probably exactly twenty percent,” he continued, “but Brent’s not prepared to be quite that definite.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Lessem chuckled, never taking his eyes from the tactical plot.

  Commander Brent Krösche, Clas Fleming’s tactical officer, was very good at his job. Joanne O’Reilly, Clas Fleming’s CO, thought the world of him, and Lessem was inclined to agree. But Krösche was a precise sort. If he wasn’t certain of his numbers to at least the tenth decimal point, the best he would give was a “probable.” And a very occasional “highly probable” if he was confident to the ninth decimal point.

  “Well, if this many birds are only eight percent of what they could’ve thrown, they probably don’t expect—”

  “Sir, there’s something strange about their launch profile,” Commander Wozniak said suddenly. Lessem turned from Thúri to look at him, and the ops officer frowned unhappily. “Sir, they’re showing a lot more accel than they should. The missiles we analyzed from Eleventh Fleet maxed at seven-zero-one KPS squared; these birds are coming in at over eight hundred and forty.”

  Lessem inhaled sharply, remembering his earlier thoughts about Solarian innovation and productivity.

  “Assuming the drive endurance on both stages is the same as on Filareta’s, that gives them a powered envelope of almost thirty-two million klicks,” Wozniak continued. “That drops their ballistic phase to barely four million klicks and roughly twenty-four seconds, which makes their total flight time only two-seven-niner seconds.”

  “I see.” Lessem’s voice was level, but his brain raced. His decision loop had just become 134 seconds shorter than he’d assumed it was, and he’d already lost ten of them finding that out.

  His ships’ hyper generators were at Readiness, which meant they could pop into the alpha bands on less than a minute’s notice. Well, all of them except David K. Brown, that was. The FSV had military-grade impellers, inertial compensator, and hyper generator, but she also massed over seven times as much as Clas Fleming, and size was a factor in hyper generator cycle times, as well as acceleration rates. A Saganami-C like Clas Fleming could translate into hyper from Readiness in 44.6 seconds whereas one of the larger Solarian Nevada-class battlecruisers would need 55.7. A three million-ton FSV, however, required 118.8, and would have needed better than three minutes, if she’d mounted a civilian-grade generator. Which posed at least one interesting question, since the three transports or freighters in company with the Solly battlecruisers massed more than twice that much and they appeared to have civilian-grade impellers. If they mounted civilian generators, as well, their minimum cycle time would be almost three and half times as long as “Brownie’s.”

  Hyper cycle times meant very little under normal battle conditions, since no one could enter or leave hyper inside a star’s hyper-limit, anyway. They meant quite a lot this far outside a limit, however, as Genevieve Chin had discovered when she encountered Duchess Harrington’s Apollo-armed superdreadnoughts outside Manticore-A’s limit.

  The People’s Republic’s analysts had radically underestimated Apollo’s effective range, and all of Chin’s intelligence briefings had told her she was well outside it when Eighth Fleet launched against her. The 44,000,000-kilometer ballistic phase Duchess Harrington had been forced to incorporate into her launch just to reach Chin’s ships had confirmed that she was outside effective shipboard fire control range, and so she had been. But not very far outside it. Eighth Fleet had been close enough to update the Apollo control platforms in near real-time just before it released them to autonomous control, and that autonomous control had been enormously better than anyone in the PRH had believed it could be. Even with that update, the Mark 23s had been far less accurate than they would have been at three light-minutes, as opposed to the four light-minutes at which they’d been launched. They’d simply been far more accurate than the Peeps had anticipated.

  To Chin’s credit, her own tactical instincts had overridden her ONI briefing when Duchess Harrington’s MDMs shut down and went ballistic. But it had taken a few seconds for the shutdown to be reported to her. Then it had taken fifteen or twenty more seconds for her instincts to overrule her briefing. That was really a remarkably quick response, all things considered, but the clock had been ticking, and it had taken several more seconds for her flagship to transmit the order to hyper out. Then it had taken several more seconds for her captains to receive it, and a handful more for their astrogators to respond and Engineering to begin the cycle.

  She’d run out of seconds. The cycle time on her superdreadnoughts’ hyper generators, the minimum time required to translate even from full Readiness, had been over four and a half minutes, and total flight time for Eighth Fleet’s missiles from the moment their second stage drives shut down had been only 5.2 minutes.

  A difference of less than forty seconds didn’t sound like all that much, but its consequences for her command had been catastrophic.

  The cycle times for Lessem’s ships, even David K. Brown, were far shorter than that, and he’d thought he could wait over five minutes from the moment the Solarians launched and still get the FSV into hyper to avoid the incoming fire. For that matter, his lighter ships would have had over six minutes to play with.

  Now, though…

  “No need to panic just yet, I think,” he said, crossing to stand behind Wozniak and rest one hand on his shoulder as he gazed past the ops officer to his displays. “Not until they’re willing to show us more missiles in a single launch. Makes you wonder what other surprises they may have for us, though, doesn’t it?”

  Task Group 47.3 sat motionless in space between the Prime Terminus and Jane Isotalo’s battlecruisers, and evasion maneuvers from a base velocity of zero would be limited. Even with a Saganami-C’s maximum acceleration of 726.2 gravities, Clas Fleming could have changed her position by no more than 587,000 kilometers and attained a velocity of only 2,890 KPS in the 6.8 minutes Lessem had expected Task Force 1027’s missiles to reach her. In the time he actually had, the best she could have managed was 277,000 kilometers and 1,980 KPS. That was less than one light-second, which was negligible against missiles coming in at eighty percent of light-speed. On the other hand, Lessem couldn’t have generated a much greater base velocity and stayed between Isotalo and the terminus.

  Nor did he really need to.

  Yet, at least.

  The Cataphracts were much too far downrange for Rear Admiral Rosiak to control effectively. For over sixty T-years, since the introduction of the laserhead, effective missile engagements had been managed via the missiles’ telemetry links. In theory, it ought to have been simple for any missile to find something as glaringly obvious as an impeller-drive starship under power. In practice, things were a bit more complicated. It wasn’t that missiles operating in autonomous mode couldn’t find targets; it was just that they had a great deal of trouble finding—and hitting—the right targets.