a

only."
"Fire Plan Sierra, aye, aye, Sir," she said, and entered a command sequence.
* * *
"Missile launch! I have multiple hostile launches! Estimate thirty-plus inbound!"
"Goddamn it!"
Isidor Hegedusic smashed his fist down on his own knee. Missile Defense was tracking the incoming missiles—or trying to, at least—and there didn't seem to be many of them. No more than thirty or forty. But the Station's anti-missile defenses hadn't been upgraded. There hadn't been time to do everything, and he and Levakonic had concentrated on giving Eroica Station sharper eyes and longer teeth. Nor had they counted on the fiendishly effective EW platforms scattered among the attack missiles to assist them in penetrating Hegedusic's defenses.
He hesitated, but only for a single heartbeat.
If they take out the battlecruisers, there's no tomorrow, anyway, he thought grimly, and looked at the tactical officer on his screen.
"Engage the enemy, Commander!"

The missile pods provided by Technodyne were very stealthy platforms. In fact, they had even smaller sensor signatures than the RMN's pods did. In virtually every other respect, however, they were inferior to Manticore's weapons. Their single-drive missiles had lower accelerations, less sensitive seekers, poorer EW, and much, much shorter powered attack ranges. But inferior as they might have been in all of those categories, they were far better than anything the SLN had ever had before. They were better than ONI's worst-case estimates. And they were already inside the attack range their improved drives made possible.
To reach their targets with enough time left on their drives for the necessary terminal attack maneuvers, the missiles would have to restrict themselves to half-power, "only" 43,000 gravities and a terminal velocity of "only" .32 c. They were big—larger even than a standard capital missile, more like something a ground-based system would have fired—and the designers had been able to squeeze only eight of them into each out-sized pod. But Hegedusic and Levakonic had deployed one hundred and twenty of those pods. Deployed them amid the concealing clutter of Eroica Station's platforms and in the protective radar shadows of handy asteroids.

"Incoming fire! Estimate nine hundred-plus!"
"Point defense free! Case Romeo!" Terekhov snapped.
"Case Romeo, aye, aye, Sir!" Helen Zilwicki responded instantly.
"Fire Plan Omega!"
"Fire Plan Omega!" Abigail responded.
She had assigned