wave_

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Kaplan had set up on the voyage from Point Midway. Hexapuma and Aegis, with their superior sensor suites, faster-firing counter-missile tubes, and additional control links, were responsible for the outer counter-missile zone. Warlock, Valiant, and Gallant had the intermediate zone, and Audacious and the destroyers had the close-in counter-missile zone.
It was a good plan, and Terekhov's insistence on deploying his full EW assets helped. But there were nine hundred and sixty missiles in that incredible wave. Nine hundred and sixty missiles with penetration aids far superior to anything the Monicans were supposed to have in service, with better seekers and heavier warheads.
Hexapuma and Aegis, with their own counter-missiles and enough from the other ships to fill all their redundant control links, destroyed two hundred and nineteen missiles in the outer zone, ripping them apart with precisely directed counter-missile kamikazes.
Seven hundred and forty-one missiles, each fit to blast through a superdreadnought's sidewalls and armor, broke through the outer zone and screamed into the squadron's teeth. Hexapuma and Aegis continued firing, joined by Warlock, Valiant, and Gallant as the older ships' less acute sensors locked onto the incoming tide of death. Holes appeared, ripped through the solid-looking tide of incoming warheads, and another two hundred and forty-eight of them died.
But there were still almost four hundred left, and they came howling into the inner counter-missile zone. All the Manticoran ships could see them now, but there was no time for follow-up shots on missiles which evaded the first counter-missiles targeted upon them. The maelstrom of swarming targets and outgoing counter-missiles, the sensor-blinding interference of hundreds of missile impeller wedges, and the jamming, sensor-twisting strobes of the Solarian-built missiles' sophisticated ECM created a whirling confusion no human brain could have sorted out. It was

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