Tourville and his chief of staff looked at one another, and this time their smiles were hard. It was entirely possible RHNS Guerriere would be among the "heavy losses" the admiral had just predicted his fleet was going to suffer. But at this moment, an even exchange rate was actually heavily in the Republic's favor in the merciless mathematics of war... and those losses were also part of the bait in the trap Thomas Theisman and his Octagon planning staff had crafted.

"Kuzak's more of a free-thinker than D'Orville," Tourville continued. "I'm sure what she's doing right now has their Admiralty's approval, but even if it didn't, she'd do it anyway, on her own initiative. She knows exactly what's going to happen to D'Orville, and to us, and she knows she can't possibly get here in time to affect that outcome. So she's not going to split up her forces and send them in where we could chop them up in detail. Yes, she could've sent a couple of battle squadrons ahead, micro-jumped out to the side and then come back in directly behind us, assuming their astrogation was good enough. But unless she's got those new missiles, any small force she sent after us would get torn apart by the weight of fire we could send back at it.

"So, she's going to wait until she gets everything she's got through the Junction. Then she's going to do her micro-jumping and come in behind us-or more likely on our flank, especially, if we're driven back from Sphinx by our losses-as quickly as she can. She'll be too far behind to overhaul us, even with her acceleration advantage, if she has to come in astern, but she'll figure to put enough time pressure on us to limit the amount of damage we can do. At least, she'll figure, she can keep us from moving on from Sphinx to Manticore, and that would save about seventy percent of the system's total industry.

"The fact that she's waiting is the conclusive proof that she doesn't have any-or not very many, at least-of the new missiles, either. If she had a couple of battle squadrons equipped with them, then it would have made enormous sense to send them in, even in isolation. Their accuracy advantage would have been crushing enough to let them do heavy damage to us before we ever met D'Orville. Probably not enough to stop us, but maybe enough to even the odds between us and Home Fleet."

"And what about Harrington, Boss?" DeLaney asked quietly, when he paused.

"Harrington's probably the most dangerous of the lot," Tourville said, "and not just because we know Eighth Fleet's reequipped with at least some of the new missiles. She's got more actual combat experience than D'Orville or Kuzak, and she's sneaky as hell.

"But what's happening out at the Junction is tempting me to hope we filled an inside straight on the draw. If Eighth Fleet had been in position to intervene, Kuzak wouldn't be coming through the Junction; Harrington would, and we'd have had two or three of her battle squadrons ripping our ass off already. Assuming of course that Admiral Chin didn't have a little to say about it. So it's beginning to look as if Eighth Fleet really may be off on an operation of its own. I'm not planning on counting on that just yet-there could be any number of other explanations-but that's not going to keep me from hoping."

"I think I agree with you, Boss," DeLaney said, then chuckled. "I know Beatrice Bravo was specifically planned to mousetrap Eighth Fleet, and I guess I ought to be disappointed if we're not going to get it, too. But having seen what the lady can do, I'll be just delighted if 'the Salamander' is somewhere else while we're taking on the Manty home system's defenses!"

"I'm tempted to concur," Tourville agreed. "Taking out Eighth Fleet on top of everything else would certainly be a deathblow, but even with Eighth Fleet intact and Harrington to run it, the Manties are done if we take out this system's shipyards and both of the fleets they have defending them."

"We're coming down on sixty-five and a half million kilometers, Sir," Commander Adamson said.

"Thank you, Frazier."

Lester Tourville drew a deep breath. Eight minutes had passed since Adamson first informed him that they were into MDM range of the Manties. Second Fleet was still nineteen minutes short of its projected turnover point, but the range couldn't keep dropping forever without the Manties firing. The range between the two fleets had already fallen to 65,767,000 kilometers. Second Fleet's velocity was up to 20,866 kilometers per second; Home Fleet's was 19,923 KPS, and they'd closed the range between them by almost seventy-seven million kilometers. Tourville was still better than 98,835,000 kilometers from Sphinx, but from his current base velocity, his MDMs' range against the planet was almost 72,030,000 kilometers. The Manties weren't going to let him get much closer unchallenged.

"Open fire, Frazier," he said.

The first missile impeller signatures began to speckle the plot, and Sebastian D'Orville drew a deep breath as the first, massive salvo streaked towards his command. Obviously, they had had a lot of pods on tow, he thought as he contemplated its numbers. More than he'd thought they had tractors for, actually. But their first salvo would be the least accurate against his EW, he reminded himself. And in the meantime, he had a few missile pods of his own.

"Engage as specified, Captain Gwynett," he said formally and watched his own missile's icons streaking outward across the plot.

That was when the enemy launched his second impossibly dense salvo.

Sebastian D'Orville's forty-eight pre-pod superdreadnoughts carried 27,840 pods externally, and theoretically, they could have deployed all of them in a single massive wave. In fact, Home Fleet carried a total of almost forty-nine thousand pods, with well over half a million missiles. Lester Tourville's slightly larger superdreadnoughts carried fewer pods, and each of those pods carried fewer missiles, because of the size penalty their bulkier MDMs imposed. So although he had two and a half times as many ships, he had barely twice as many pods, and each of those pods carried seventeen percent fewer missiles. He actually had "only" sixty-four percent more total missiles than Home Fleet.

But Lester Tourville also had Shannon Foraker's "donkey," and that meant every one of Sebastian D'Orville assumptions about the number and size of the salvos he could throw was fatally flawed. And what else he had was far more control channels for the missiles he carried. Not all of the forty-two Manticoran, Grayson, and Andermani SD(P)s confronting him were Keyhole-capable. Still, the majority of them were, and the pod-layers as a group could simultaneously control an average of four hundred missiles each. But the older, pre-pod ships could control only a hundred apiece, whereas each of Tourville's ships had control links for three hundred and fifty missiles, and by using Shannon Foraker's rotating control technique, they could increase that number by approximately sixty percent. So whereas Home Fleet could effectively control a total of just under twenty-two thousand missiles per salvo, Second Fleet could control eighty-four thousand without rotating control links. Worse, it could have increased that total to almost a hundred and thirty-five thousand, if it was prepared to accept somewhat lower hit probabilities, and the "donkey" meant Tourville could actually have deployed the pods to fire that many.

Manticoran fire control was better, Manticoran electronic warfare capabilities and penetration aids were better, and Manticoran MDM's were both faster and more agile. Sebastian D'Orville could confidently expect to score a significantly higher percentage of hits, but that couldn't offset the fact that Second Fleet could control over six times as many missiles. Even if Tourville's hit probabilities had been only half as good as his, the Republic would have scored three times as many hits.