Moment of Honor
By Cold Fire
Inspired by the Honor Harrington series and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
These characters and the events that happen within the story are completely fictional, and any semblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This story does not represent the views of David Weber, Baen Books, Hasbro, or DHX Studios.
So, in other words, these aren't real people, it's not my intention to infringe on any copyrights, and this is all my idea.
Terms
Ship types(smallest to largest):
LAC - Light attack craft, has no hyper capability
FG - Frigate
DD - Destroyer
CL - Light cruiser
CA - Heavy (armored) cruiser
BC - Battlecruiser
BC(P) - Battlecruiser pod-layer
BB - Battleship
DN - Dreadnought
CLAC - LAC carrier
SD - Superdreadnought
SD(P) - Superdreadnought pod-layer
Navies:
SLN - Solarian League Navy
IAN - Imperial Andermani Navy
RMN - Royal Manticoran Navy
GSN - Grayson Space Navy
RHN - Republic of Haven Navy
MAN - Mesan Alignment Navy
Common terms:
Alpha node - Generates a Warshawski sail
Beta node - Generates an impeller wedge
Warshawski sail - Disc of gravity in front and back of ship, used in gravity waves to gain much higher rate of acceleration than an impeller wedge
Impeller wedge - Wedge of gravity on two sides of a ship, theoretically capable of instant acceleration to light speed, used in normal space and in between gravity waves
Inertial compensator - Device that uses the gravity bands generated by the alpha and beta nodes to dump inertia and allow very high rates of acceleration
Hyperspace - A higher dimension where all points of space are compressed together, allowing for faster travel
Gravity waves - Bands of concentrated gravity in hyperspace, used as interstellar highways
Ship of the wall - Any ship larger than a battlecruiser
Andies - Inhabitants of the Anderman Empire
Manties - Inhabitants of the Star Empire of Manticore
Peeps - Inhabitants of the Republic of Haven
Sollies - Inhabitants of the Solarian League
P.D. - Post Diaspora, or years after 2102 Common Era
A.D. - Ante Diaspora, or years before 2102 Common Era
T-Year - Classic Old Earth year
Prologue
There aren't many more things worse than the violence of war after a period of peace.
-Dastraya Lomwicki, 1209 P.D.
The massive superdreadnought spun on its tail, desperately trying to intercept the incoming missiles with its impeller wedge. This ship, along with three inert wrecks and four more expanding balls of plasma, were all that had stood in the way of the group of well over seventy battlecruisers that had crossed the hyper limit of Minotaur five hours ago. The superdreadnoughts had performed well, taking out almost half of the battlecruisers, but the impossible salvoes had kept screaming in.
No seventy old-style dreadnoughts could have put that many missiles into space, but that had changed along with the entire field of battle when the Royal Manticoran Navy had perfected its pod design. Now, instead of missile bays, the capital ships mounted cargo doors, each dropping a parasite pod every ten seconds. Each pod had ten missiles in single-shot "box launchers", designed to spend its shot and be recovered for overhaul. Each battlecruiser was capable of six pods per salvo, and they were double-salvoes as well, with half the speed but double the punch. That meant over a hundred missiles per ship, and the initial salvo had spread eight thousand missiles over two targets.
The superdreadnoughts had taken out half of those ships and crippled many more, but two thousand missiles had raced out with the final salvo, and those missiles reached attack range and maneuvered to get better shots at their prey. The countermissiles destroyed almost five hundred, the last-ditch lasers caught three hundred more, and six hundred missiles missed or got swept up in the invulnerable impeller wedge, but that still left 528 missiles that got at their target. They detonated almost as one, and suddenly the SLNS Marzipan ceased to exist.
The remaining twenty-six battlecruisers flipped over and began decelerating to pick up life pods and search the wrecks for survivors, and the K5 star behind them shone brightly.