"My God," said Halabi. "It's a slaughter. The purest sort of slaughter."
"Aye, ma'am," said McTeale, her XO, as they sped back toward the relative safety of the English coast.
It was impossible to make any sense of the main display in the CIC. There were thousands of individual contacts throughout the battlespace. The ship's Combat Intelligence was still tracking and analyzing every return. Her human operators were still assigning targets to the defenders forces' as quickly as they could. But to have any chance of understanding what was happening on a human scale, you had to turn away from the electronic version of the battle-a vast, hypercomplex simulacrum of cascading data tags-and attend to the simple things.
The drone footage of a Heinkel breaking up in midair, punched apart by a four-inch shell.
The vision of a parachute half-deployed, trailing fire behind a plummeting body, spearing down into the pebbles and limestone scree at the base of the White Cliffs of Dover.
The distant bump and thump of floating corpses as they struck the carbon composite sheath armor of the Trident at 120 knots.
"Metal Storm at one-point-three percent, Captain."
"Thank you, Mr. McTeale. Advise the Admiralty that we shall be withdrawing toward Plymouth and will need extra air cover, I think."
"Fighter Command has already assigned three USAAF squadrons to cover us, ma'am. They'll relieve the Canadians in eight minutes."
"Very good, then. I think we're past the worst of it, don't you?"
Halabi and her executive officer stared at the main display. The red icons denoting German surface units were beginning to pile up in the southern half of the Channel. More and more blue triangles, marking Allied air units were streaming down from the northern airfields.
"For now, Captain," said McTeale. "For now."