turned

and his jaw clenched painfully.
He'd walked straight into it, and a third of the Squadron's ships had been destroyed because he had. It was all very well to remind himself no battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy. He even knew it was true. But it didn't make him feel one bit better about the dead and maimed who'd counted on him to get it right.
He drew a deep breath and turned his attention to Eroica Station and felt a stab of vengeful satisfaction. Those damned missile pods had savaged his squadron, killed his people, but their own fire had shattered the military components of the Station. The close-in drones made it obvious that at least eight of the nine battlecruisers in the military yard had been wrecked beyond any hope of repair even by a Solarian shipyard, far less Monica's facilities. The other one might be repairable, but it would take a fully equipped shipyard months, possibly T-years, to do the job. The two on the civilian side of the installation were still intact, but there wasn't much he could do about that, even using laser heads instead of conventional nukes, without killing hundreds of civilians. He didn't want to do that, and he wouldn't . . . if he had any choice at all. And at least Eroica Station itself had been thoroughly neutralized as a threat.
Which, unfortunately, wasn't true of the oncoming battlecruisers.

Janko Horster's face was white with mingled shock and fury. His sensors couldn't give him as clear a picture of what had happened to Eroica Station as Terekhov's could, but he didn't need details to know the Monican Navy had just been mangled. Most—probably all—of the other battlecruisers were gone, and the same was almost certainly true of the older units which had been laid up at Eroica to provide personnel for his own ships. First Division, by itself, probably had ten times the firepower of the entire Monican Navy before Levakonic had delivered the new ships, but it would be impossible to carry out the operational plan with what was left.
And that didn't include the casualties. The men he'd known and served and trained with for decades. The friends.
Yet the Manties had been hurt, too. Badly. And they must have fired every pod they had to inflict such damage on Eroica Station.
Their long-range missile