ordered into his mike. “Pitch wedge to the incoming fire.”
“I can handle it,” von Belling's voice came from the speaker.
“I said pitch wedge,” Gensonne snapped.
“Aye, aye, Sir,” von Belling said with thinly disguised disgust. “Pitching wedge.”
On the tactical, Copperhead changed from its yaw turn to a vertical pitch, dropping its bow to present its roof to the incoming missiles. Gensonne watched, splitting his attention between the cruiser and the incoming missiles. If von Belling's momentary bitching had left the maneuver too late, the admiral promised himself darkly, he'd better hope the Manticoran missiles got to him before Gensonne himself did.
Fortunately, it wasn't going to come to that. Copperhead turned in plenty of time, and as Odin's autocannon roared into action Gensonne watched the incoming salvo split into two groups, one set of four targeting each of the cruisers. The ones aimed at Copperhead disintegrated harmlessly against its roof, while Adder's countermissiles and autocannon made equally quick work of the other group. “Stand by for acceleration,” Gensonne ordered. Copperhead was starting its reverse pivot again, and as soon as it was back in position the Volsungs could resume their full-acceleration pursuit of the Manticorans.
Meanwhile, there was no reason Gensonne had to wait until for acceleration before he took the battle back to Heissman. “Missiles ready?” he called.
“Missiles ready,” Imbar confirmed.
“Six at the light cruiser,” Gensonne said. “Fire.”
“Acknowledged,” Heissman said. “Alfred? What have we learned?”
“Their point-defense seems comparable to ours,” Woodburn said, peering closely at the computer analysis. “Countermissiles on the cruisers, autocannon on everyone else. Looks like pretty high quality of both. Their ECM is also good—looks like they got a soft kill on at least one of the missiles, possibly two. They also don't seem shy about spending ammo.”
“Or missiles, either,” Rusk said tightly. “Missile trace, two: thirty-five hundred gees, estimated impact time one hundred fifty-three seconds. Make that four missiles, same impact projection . . . make it six. Missile trace, six, impact one hundred forty-eight seconds.”
Travis winced. Six missiles, with all four of the Manticoran ships at only eighty percent of point-defense capacity.
Woodburn was clearly thinking along the same lines. “Commodore, I don't think we're ready to take on that many birds.”
“Agreed,” Heissman said. “But we also need to pull some data on their capabilities.”
“So we're going to take them on?” Belokas asked.
“We're going to split the difference,” Heissman corrected. “Start a portside yaw turn—not a big or fast one, just a few degrees. I want to cut the starboard sidewall across the missile formation, letting just one or two of them past the leading edge and trusting the countermissiles to take those out. That way we get a closer look at the missiles and their yield without risking having too many of them coming in for us to block.”
Travis stole a glance at Woodburn, waiting for the tac officer to point out the obvious risk: that if the incoming missiles' sidewall penetrators functioned like they were supposed to, taking four or five on Casey's sidewalls could be a quick path to disaster. Most of the time that kind of maneuver was a decent enough gamble, given the notorious unreliability of such weapons. But anytime you had that many threats things could get tricky.
Especially if Tamerlane's ships were carrying more advanced sidewall penetrators that weren't so finicky.
But Woodburn remained silent. As Travis had known he would. The commodore had already agreed that Casey's mission was to gather information that would be crucial in helping Locatelli defeat this inexplicable invasion.
The missiles crept closer. Travis watched the tac display as Belokas fine-tuned Casey's position, a vague idea starting to form at the back of his mind. If he'd seen what he thought he'd seen during the first Janus salvo . . .
He swiveled around to his plotter and ran the numbers and geometry. It would work, he decided. It would be tricky and require some fancy timing, but it might just work.
There was a throbbing hum from the launchers' capacitors as Casey sent a salvo of countermissiles blazing out into space . . . and it occurred to him that if Heissman's trick didn't work, there was a good chance he would never know it. At the speed the missiles were traveling, they would reach the edge of the countermissiles' range barely two tenths of a second before reaching Casey itself. If the defenses failed to stop the attack, or the sidewall was breached—