Back | Next
Contents

# Chapter Fifty-Eight

"How do you think we did back home, Sir?" Captain DeLaney asked quietly as she and Lester Tourville rode the lift car towards RHNS Majestic's flag briefing room.

"Well, that's the million-credit question, isn't it, Molly?" the admiral responded with a tight grin. His chief of staff gave a small grimace of agreement, and he chuckled. "I admit I've done the odd bit of speculating myself," he confessed. "And despite my irritating conclusion that there's absolutely no way to be certain, I also have to admit that I feel fairly confident. Assuming that the NavInt estimates in the sitrep Starlight brought out with her are as accurate as they've tended to be for the last couple of years, First Fleet should have pinned the Manties' ears back. Now," his expression sobered, "whether or not all of this was a good idea or a bad one is another question, of course."

DeLaney looked sideways at him, faintly surprised even after all these months by his pensive tone. It was easy for even Lester Tourville's own staff to sometimes confuse the always aggressive public persona with the reality, but she'd been with him for the better part of three T-years now, and she knew him better than most.

"Did we really have a choice, Sir?" she asked after a moment, and he shrugged.

"I don't know. I feel certain President Pritchart did her damnedest to find an alternative short of this one, and from Starlight's dispatches, it's obvious the diplomatic situation got even worse after we'd been sent out. And I feel as confident as I imagine anyone could that Operation Thunderbolt is going to—has already, I suppose I should say—succeed in its immediate objectives. And if we're going to be completely honest, I suppose I want revenge on the Manties as much as the next man.

"I'm a little more doubtful about our whole end of the operation," he admitted, not really to DeLaney's surprise, "but if our estimates of Sidemore's strength are accurate, we should be able to pull it off. And I have to agree that the potential advantages of doing that, from a political and a morale standard, as well as a purely military one, make it worth the risk. I can't quite avoid the suspicion that we're being just a little too cute, a little too clever, about it all, but as some ancient wet-navy type from Old Earth said a long time ago, it's a natural law that those who refuse to run risks can never win. On the other hand," he smiled again, tightly, "there's always the fact that we're talking about attacking Honor Harrington."

"I know she's good, Sir," DeLaney said with an ever so slightly pronounced air of patience, "but she's really not a reincarnated war goddess. She's good, granted, but I've never quite understood why the newsies—theirs, as well as ours—fixate on her the way they do. It's not as if she'd ever commanded in a real fleet engagement, even at Yeltsin's Star, after all. I mean, compare her actual battlefield accomplishments to what someone like White Haven has done to us, and he doesn't get anywhere near the press she does!"

"I never said the lady was a 'war goddess,' " Tourville replied, then chuckled out loud. "On the other hand, that might not actually be all that bad a description of her, now that I think about it. And I know she's not invincible, although the only time anyone on our side has ever actually beaten her, she was just a tad outnumbered, you know."

DeLaney nodded, and actually felt herself blush a bit at the reminder that Lester Tourville was, in fact, the only Havenite admiral ever to defeat Honor Harrington.

"The truth is, though," Tourville went on more seriously, "that she's very probably the best—or, at the very least, one of the two or three best—tacticians the Manty navy has. Nobody on our side has ever come close to taking her in an even fight. Just between the two of us, I think from some of the things Admiral Theisman has said that he probably could have beaten her at Yeltsin's Star after Operation Stalking Horse fell apart. But even if he'd destroyed her entire force, it still would have been a strategic victory for her. She hasn't had a chance yet to show what she can do in 'a real fleet engagement,' and, frankly, that's one reason I feel a little nervous about this whole thing. I don't want to be the one who lets her notch up her first win on that scale. As to why the newsies 'fixate' on her, I guess it has to do with her way of always beating the odds. The fact that she looks damned good doesn't hurt any, of course. But the truth is, I think even the newsies sense something about her. Something you have to meet her in person to really understand . . . as much as anyone can."

DeLaney looked a question at him, and he shrugged.

"She has the touch, Molly," he said simply.

"The touch, Sir?"

"The touch," Tourville repeated, then shrugged again. "Maybe I'm an incurable romantic, but it's always seemed to me that there are just some officers who have that little bit extra. Sometimes it's just charisma, but usually it's a combination of that and something else. Esther McQueen had it, in a way. Everyone always knew she was ambitious, and no one who wasn't on her side ever really trusted her, but I think every officer who ever served directly under her would have followed her anywhere . . . until her luck ran out, at least. McQueen could convince you that she could do anything, and that you wanted to help her do it. But Harrington . . . Harrington makes you believe you that you can do anything, because she believes it . . . and then dares you to do it with her. McQueen convinced people to follow her; Harrington just leads them, and they follow her on their own."

"You admire her, don't you, Sir?" DeLaney's question was really a statement, and Tourville nodded.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, if I'm going to be honest about it, I do. Probably of all of the officers on our side, Admiral Theisman comes closest to matching her ability to lead, and to draw the best possible performance out of her personnel. And I think he's probably as good a tactician as she is. But much as I respect and admire him, I think she still has that little bit more than he does. The touch. I can't think of anything else to call it.

"And the other thing she's had has been a positive gift for being in the right place at the right time—or the wrong place, at the wrong time, from our perspective. As you just observed, most of her actions have been on a fairly small scale, compared to something like White Haven's offensive just before the cease-fire. But they've had an impact all out of proportion to their size. Which undoubtedly accounts for a huge part of her reputation. If you want to put it that way, she's been lucky, although to some extent it's been a case of making her own luck. Which is one reason why I personally think that sending us out here was the right idea, despite any reservations I may feel."

"It was, Sir?" DeLaney looked at him again, and he snorted.

"Molly," he said, and it was his turn to sound patient, "I'm perfectly well aware that you think I've been a bit Cassandra-like about this entire operation. That, however, is known as the determined but sober attitude of a responsible military commander." The chief of staff's blush was considerably darker this time, and he smiled at her. "I'd be more than human—and an idiot, to boot—if I didn't have huge reservations about taking a fleet this size this far away from any of our bases or support structure to attack an officer with Harrington's reputation. Even assuming that we completely defeat her, which I happen to think we will, we're going to take losses and damage, and it's a hell of a long voyage home from here. Having said all of that, the very fact that Harrington enjoys the reputation and stature that she does makes her a sort of military objective in her own right. Defeating her, hopefully decisively, at the same time Thunderbolt is crunching up the Manties' frontier systems, will be a body blow to the Manty public's confidence and willingness to fight. And depriving the Manties of her services if they don't decide to start negotiating with us in good faith wouldn't be anything to sneeze at, either. Although at least this time, if we manage to capture her again, I can damned well guarantee there won't be any trumped up charges or plans for executions!"

DeLaney started to reply, but the lift car reached its destination before she could, and she stood aside to allow her admiral to precede her into the flag deck passage.

The rest of the staff was waiting, along with Captain Caroline Hughes, Majestic's CO, and Commander Pablo Blanchard, her exec. Second Fleet's task force and squadron commanders attended the meeting electronically, their faces floating in the quadrants of a holo display above the briefing room conference table. DeLaney knew that Tourville would really have preferred to have them aboard Majestic in the flesh for this final meeting, but that hadn't been practical. The fleet was squarely in the heart of a grav wave, bearing down on Sidemore, which made it impossible for any impeller-drive small craft to transport personnel back and forth between its units. For her own part, DeLaney was perfectly satisfied with the electronic substitute for an old-fashioned face-to-face meeting, but her boss was more of a traditionalist in that respect.

Those physically present stood as Tourville entered the compartment, then seated themselves once again after he'd settled into the chair at the head of the table. He tipped that chair back while he slowly and carefully prepared a cigar, stuck it into his mouth, lit it, and produced a cloud of fragrant smoke. He grinned through the fog bank of his own making, like a mischievous little boy, as the overhead air return sucked it away, and DeLaney hid a smile of her own. He was back on stage again, once more the hard-charging complete naval officer, ready, as the old cliché put it, to kick ass and take names.

"All right," he said briskly. "In about five hours, we're going to be dropping in on Sidemore without calling ahead for reservations." Several people chuckled, and his mischievous grin grew fierce. "When we do, there are going to be some people who won't be especially happy to see us. Which is going to be unfortunate . . . for them." A louder chuckle responded, and he nodded at his operations officer. "And now," he said, "Commander Marston is going to answer any last-minute questions you may have about exactly how we're going to make sure that it's unfortunate for them. Jeff?"

"Thank you, Sir," Commander Marston replied, and turned to face both the others present in the briefing room and the camera which connected the compartment to the holographic faces above the conference table. "I know all of you are familiar with our basic operational plan," he began. "Several of you, however, have expressed some concerns, particularly about the points covered in Annex Seventeen, so I thought, with your permission, Admiral, that we might start there."

He glanced at Tourville, who waved his cigar in an airy gesture of approval.

"Very well, then. First, Admiral Zrubek has raised a very interesting point in regard to the proper employment of our long-range recon platforms." He nodded respectfully to the holo quadrant filled by the recently promoted commander of Battle Squadron Twenty-One, which included eight of Second Fleet's twelve SD(P)s. "I've discussed the same point with Captain deCastries and Commander Hindemith," Marston continued, "and we've come to the conclusion that . . ."

Lester Tourville leaned back comfortably in his chair, listening with both ears, and half of his attention, to Marston's brisk, competent exposition. He would have paid more attention to the actual explanation if he'd had less confidence in the ops officer's ability and thoroughness. As it was, he was free to spend his time doing what, as far as he was concerned, was the true purpose of this meeting—taking the pulse of his command team's state of mind.

What he saw pleased him. One or two of them were obviously a bit on the anxious side, but he didn't blame them for that. Indeed, a certain edge of nervousness was probably a good thing, and there were enough others—like Zrubek and DeLaney—whose supreme confidence in the ops plan and, he supposed, in his own leadership, more than offset it. Yet however anxious or however confident any one of them might be, there was no hesitation. These people were as ready as anyone could possibly be for the task before them.

* * *

"Talk to me, Andrea," Honor said briskly but calmly as she arrived on Werewolf's flag bridge. Nimitz rode in her arms, once more in his own, custom-designed skinsuit, and she paused to park him on the back of her command chair. She gave his tufted ears a caress, then turned back to face her operations officer while the 'cat's nimble true-hands fastened the harness straps between his skinsuit and the chair.

"We still don't have positive confirmation, Your Grace," Captain Jaruwalski replied, "but I don't think there's much question. It's the Peeps."

"I tend to agree with Andrea, Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham put in from her own console, "but at the same time, I don't think we should positively rule out the possibility that this could be the Andies, instead." Honor looked at her, and the chief of staff shrugged. "I'm not saying that I believe it's the Andies, Ma'am. But until we know for certain, one way or the other, I think we'd better keep an open mind on the subject."

"That's a valid point," Honor acknowledged. "But whoever it is," she turned to consider the huge holo sphere of the master plot, "they look like they mean business."

"They certainly do that," Brigham agreed, and stood to join Honor beside the plot.

The unknown units were headed in-system on a course which would bring them to a zero-zero intercept with Marsh in just over six hours, assuming that they made turnover in three. And there were quite a few of them. In fact, it looked very much as if her "official" order of battle would have been outnumbered by at least fifty percent.

"We're getting light-speed emissions signatures now, Your Grace," George Reynolds reported. Honor turned towards them, and the intelligence officer looked up to meet her gaze. "They're not Andies," he said quietly. "We don't recognize some of them, but we've positively IDed at least eight Havenite battlecruisers."

Something like a not quite audible sigh seemed to run around the flag bridge, and Honor smiled thinly. She couldn't say she was glad to have her worst fears confirmed, but at least the uncertainty was over. She closed her mind resolutely to speculation about what might have happened closer to home, and nodded as serenely as she could.

"Thank you, George," she said, and glanced at Jaruwalski.

"CIC is trying to break them down by type, Your Grace," the ops officer said. "It's a bit difficult without better intelligence on whatever new types they've been building, especially since, as George just said, we don't recognize some of them at all. At the moment though, it looks as though they've brought along fifty or sixty superdreadnoughts, with twenty or thirty battlecruisers in support."

"Time of response to our sublight challenge, Harper?" Honor asked her com officer.

"If they respond to it immediately, we should be hearing something from them in another four or five minutes, Your Grace," Lieutenant Brantley told her.

"Thank you." Honor frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then returned her attention to Jaruwalski. "Any indications of CLACs?"

"No, Your Grace," the ops officer replied. "Which doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any."

"Your Grace, we're getting IDs on at least some of their superdreadnoughts from the remote platforms," Reynolds put in. "They're confirmed Peeps. We've got nine of them so far. All pre-pod designs ONI has good recorded emissions signatures on."

"That's about twenty percent of their total SDs," Brigham observed.

"True," Jaruwalski agreed. "On the other hand, it still leaves over fifty which could be SD(P)s."

Honor nodded once more, accepting Jaruwalski's caveat, then gave the plot another glance and reached her decision.

"It doesn't look like we're going to get a better chance for Suriago," she said, and looked at the com screen connecting her to Werewolf's command deck. "Get us underway, Rafe."

"Aye, aye, Your Grace," Captain Rafe Cardones replied crisply, and began passing orders.

* * *

"They're not trying to be very stealthy about it, are they, Sir?" Molly DeLaney remarked.

"No, they're not," Tourville agreed. He sat in his command chair, legs crossed, expression calm, while his right hand's fingers drummed very slowly and gently on its armrest. His eyes were equally calm but intent as he studied the repeater plot deployed from his chair.

The defending Manticoran task force was headed to meet him. The range remained too long for real-time reports from light-speed sensors, but impeller signatures were FTL, and they blazed clear and strong in the plot, confirming what the first wave of recon drones had already reported. Thirty-one Manty superdreadnoughts, eleven dreadnoughts, four LAC carriers, and sixteen battlecruisers, covered by two destroyer flotillas and at least three cruiser squadrons accelerated steadily on almost a direct reciprocal of his own course. A cloud of LACs spread out to cover the axis of their advance and its flanks. It was much more difficult to get a drive count on units that small, but NavInt had reported that somewhere around four hundred and fifty LACs had been permanently based on Sidemore. It looked like Harrington had brought all of them with her, since CIC estimated her main combatants were accompanied by somewhere around eight hundred of them. Taking NavInt's highest figure and combining it with the six CLACs she was supposed to have gave her a maximum LAC strength of right on a thousand. She might have left a couple of hundred of them to cover the inner system against the possibility that the main attack was actually a feint to pull her out of position around Marsh, especially if she believed the Republican Navy still lacked any CLACs of its own.

And she was continuing to transmit her sublight challenges and demands that he identify himself as she came.

DeLaney's comment on Harrington's lack of stealth was a definite understatement, he reflected. And that made him a little nervous. One thing no one had ever accused Honor Harrington of was tactical obviousness. She had demonstrated repeatedly her willingness and ability to use the traditional Manticoran advantage in electronic warfare to deadly effect. Yet in the face of CIC's definite identification of her units, it seemed that this time, at least, she had disdained such tactics. She wasn't hiding or concealing a thing . . . which was the reason for his nervousness. "The Salamander" was at her most dangerous when an opponent was most certain he knew what she had in mind.

Let's not double-think ourselves into a panic, there, Lester, he told himself dryly. Yeah, she's sneaky. And smart. But she doesn't really have a lot of options here. And besides . . .

"It may just be that she's still hoping to get out of this without anyone shooting at anybody," he murmured aloud, and DeLaney's eyebrows rose.

"That seems . . . unlikely, Sir," she said, and Tourville grinned at her tone of massive restraint.

"I didn't say it was likely, Molly. I said it was possible. And it is, you know. She has to have IDed at least some of our emissions signatures by now, so she knows we're Republican. And she'd have to be a hell of a lot stupider than I know she is if she didn't suspect exactly why we're here. But at the same time, she can't know what's going on back home—not yet. So there's probably at least an edge of caution in her thinking right now. She's not going to shirk her responsibilities, but she's not going to want to start a war out here that could spill over on the Star Kingdom's own territory unless she absolutely has to, either. I'd guess that's why they're continuing to challenge us despite the fact that we haven't answered them."

"Do you think she'll actually let us into range because she doesn't want to fire the first shot, Sir?"

"I doubt very much that she's going to be that obliging," Tourville said dryly. "We are in violation of the territorial space of a Manticoran ally at the moment, you know. That means she's in a very strong position under interstellar law if she decides to shoot some dumb son-of-a-bitch who's too much of an idiot to even reply to her communications attempts!"

He flashed his teeth in a white smile under his bristling mustache, and DeLaney heard someone chuckle.

"On the other hand, if NavInt is right and the Manties still haven't confirmed that we have MDMs of our own, she may let us get in a lot closer before she gets around to opening fire. She knows we have SD(P)s, but she also knows by now that at least some of the SDs we brought with us are pre-pod designs. On top of that, she has to suspect from our acceleration rates that our older ships are towing heavy pod loads. She, on the other hand, isn't, even though NavInt says that she has only six SD(P)s of her own. She may have some pods tractored inside her other superdreadnoughts' wedges, but she can't have as many of them there as we're towing. Combined with how openly she's coming to meet us, that suggests to me that she still believes she has a decisive range advantage. That she can open fire at a range of her own choosing, from outside our effective reach, and hold it there."

"Do you think she knows about the new compensators, Sir?"

"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she's figured out that we've improved our performance, whatever her ONI reports might be telling her," Tourville said. "She's certainly smart enough to realize that we must have made overcoming their acceleration advantage a very high priority. Unfortunately, for all their improvements, our compensators still aren't anywhere near as efficient as theirs are . . . and she's smart enough she's probably figured that out, too. So if she thinks she has the range advantage, she'll expect to be able to prevent us from closing with her."

"So you think she's basically hoping to bluff us into breaking off," DeLaney said.

"I suppose you might put it that way," Tourville conceded. "I wouldn't express it quite that strongly, myself. I think she intends to continue to give us the opportunity to decide this was a bad idea, break off, and go home right up to the last minute. It's not a 'bluff,' Molly, because I don't think she actually expects us to break off for a moment. But knowing Harrington, she figures that it's her responsibility to give us the option, and she's determined to do it. Which," he added almost regretfully, "probably also means that she'll hold her fire until the range drops to what she believes is just outside the maximum at which we could engage her effectively."

* * *

"The range is down to three light-minutes, Your Grace," Mercedes Brigham said in the tone of voice of someone politely reminding someone else of something she might have forgotten.

"So I see," Honor replied with a slight smile, despite the tension coiling inside her. At fifty-four million kilometers, they were well inside her own maximum powered-attack missile range.

"Still no response to our challenges, either, Ma'am," Brigham pointed out, and Honor nodded.

"How good is your targeting information now, Andrea?" she asked.

"It's still not anything I'd call satisfactory, Your Grace," Jaruwalski responded promptly in a slightly sour tone. "Whatever else they may have managed, they've improved their ECM significantly. It's still not as good as ours is—or, for that matter, quite as good as what we've seen out of the Andies over the last few months. But it's a lot better than it was during Operation Buttercup. I'd estimate that we should expect at least a fifty or sixty percent degradation in accuracy at this range. Possibly a little bit more."

"And even without worrying about ECM, accuracy against a target under power isn't anything to write home about at this range," Brigham observed.

"No, but theirs is probably worse," Honor said, and Brigham nodded in unhappy agreement.

Honor knew that Mercedes still thought that her own insistence that they operate on the assumption that the Republic's new SD(P)s' missiles could match the full range of their own MDMs was unduly pessimistic. On the other hand, Honor would far rather find out that she had, in fact, been overly pessimistic than suddenly find herself under fire at a range which she had assumed would give her ships immunity from attack.

"And whatever their base accuracy might be, Your Grace," Jaruwalski put in, "from everything I've seen so far, our ECM is going to degrade their accuracy a lot more than theirs is going to do to us. That's even assuming that they've managed to improve their missile seekers as much as they have their EW capabilities."

"Well, given that it looks like they have at least twice as many SD(P)s as Admiral McKeon does, that's probably a good thing," Honor replied with another smile, and Jaruwalski chuckled in appreciation as Honor turned to Lieutenant Kgari.

"How far are they from Suriago's point of no return, Theophile?" she asked.

"They've been inbound for about two and a half hours at two hundred and seventy gravities, Your Grace. Their base velocity is up to two-six-point-seven thousand KPS. Assuming they maintain heading and acceleration, they'll hit no return in another eleven-point-five minutes, Your Grace," her staff astrogator told her.

"Then I suppose it's about time," Honor said almost regretfully. "Harper, pass the word to Borderer to stand by to execute Paul Revere in twelve minutes."

"Aye, aye, Your Grace."

* * *

Twelve more minutes passed. Second Fleet's base velocity rose to just over 28,530 KPS and Task Force 34's velocity reached 19,600 KPS. The range continued to fall, gnawed away by a closing velocity of almost sixteen percent of light-speed. It dropped from fifty-three million kilometers to barely thirty-seven and a half million, and then HMS Werewolf transmitted a brief FTL message to HMS Borderer. The destroyer, almost ten full light-minutes outside the system hyper limit received the transmission, acknowledged receipt, and translated up into hyper . . . where it sent a second transmission.

Twenty-six seconds later, the Protector's Own, Grayson Space Navy, made its alpha translation out of hyper, directly behind Second Fleet, and began accelerating furiously in-system in its wake.

* * *

"Hyper footprint!" Commander Marston announced. "Multiple hyper footprints, bearing one-eight-zero, zero-two-niner, range approximately one light-minute!"

Lester Tourville snapped upright in his chair and spun to face the ops officer. Marston stared at his readouts for a few more seconds, then looked up to meet his admiral's eyes.

"They're more Manties, Sir," he said in a tone of disbelief. "Either that . . . or Graysons."

"They can't be," DeLaney protested almost automatically and waved one hand at the plot. "We've got positive IDs on all of Harrington's ships. They can't have fooled the RDs at such close range—not even with their EW!"

Tourville's mind fought to grapple with Marston's impossible announcement. DeLaney was right. The range to Harrington's ships was less than two light-minutes. It might have been possible for Manticoran electronic warfare systems to fool shipboard sensors even at that short a range, but Second Fleet's recon drones had closed to within less than three light-seconds. At that range, they could make visual identification on a superdreadnought or a LAC carrier, and they'd accounted for every single ship Harrington had.

Or, his mind told him coldly, for every ship NavInt said she had, anyway.

For just an instant, Lester Tourville was five years in the past, when no admiral had been able to trust the intelligence appreciations produced by Oscar Saint-Just's StateSec analysts. A dreadful sense of betrayal flashed through him at the thought that Thomas Theisman's NavInt had just proven itself equally unreliable. But then he shook himself. Whatever had happened here, NavInt had proven its fundamental reliability too often over the last four T-years. There had to be an explanation, but what?

"We have hard IDs on the new bogeys' types," Marston said flatly. "CIC makes it twelve Medusa-class SD(P)s, six Covington-class CLACs, and six battlecruisers. CIC isn't positive, but it thinks the battlecruisers are probably Courvoisier-class ships."

"Covingtons? Courvoisiers?" DeLaney shook her head. "Those are Grayson types!" She turned to face Tourville. "What are Graysons doing out here in the middle of Silesia?" she demanded almost plaintively.

Tourville stared back at her for perhaps four seconds, then muttered a short, pungent obscenity.

"It's the Protector's Own," he said flatly. "Damn! NavInt told us they were off on some long-ranged deployment training mission. Why didn't it even occur to us that that sneaky bastard Benjamin might have sent them here?"

"But why here?" DeLaney protested.

"I don't know," Tourville replied, but his mind continued to race even as he spoke, and he grimaced. "Best guess? Benjamin and Harrington discussed it before she ever came out here. Damn! I'll guarantee you that's what happened. She knew High Ridge wasn't going to give her what she needed to do her job, so she borrowed it from her other navy without even telling anyone she was doing it!"

He shook his head in brief, heartfelt admiration. Obviously, he thought, NavInt needed to update its estimate of Harrington as a brilliant military technician to include a degree of political sophistication no one had expected from her. But then he brushed the thought aside. There was no time for it—not when his entire fleet had just been mousetrapped with consummate professionalism.

He pushed himself up out of his chair and crossed to the main plot, staring into it as data sidebars updated and acceleration vectors established themselves. The numbers flashed and danced, then settled, and Admiral Lester Tourville felt a ball of ice congeal in his belly.

"The Graysons are launching LACs," Marston reported. "Tracking reports over six hundred impeller signatures already."

Tourville only grunted. Of course they were launching their LACs, but that wasn't what was going to do most of their killing. Not today. Both Harrington and the Protector's Own were well within MDM range of Second Fleet, and his own twelve SD(P)s, which had been supposed to give him a two-to-one advantage over Harrington's Medusas were suddenly outnumbered by two-to-one, instead. And if NavInt was right about the Graysons new Courvoisier II battlecruisers, Harrington had an additional six pod-launcher types. Given the Manticoran and Grayson advantages in electronic warfare and missile defense, that gave them a devastating edge in the pounding match about to begin. And Harrington had timed things perfectly. Second Fleet was too far inside the hyper limit, sandwiched between two forces, both of which had higher fleet acceleration rates than it did.

"Alter course one-two-zero to starboard," he said. "Maximum military power for the SDs. Shift formation to Mike-Delta-Three and prepare to launch LACs."

Acknowledgments came back to him, and he could almost taste the sense of relief that flooded through his staff as they heard a trusted voice giving crisp, clear orders. It was, he thought bitterly, a reaction that was going to be repeated over and over again on the ships of his fleet. Repeated because he had taught his people that they could trust him. Because they had faith in him.

But this time, that faith was going to be disappointed. Even on his new course, his units were going to continue to slide into the arms of Harrington's Manticoran units. His new vector would start generating lateral separation quickly, and it was the fastest possible course back to the system's hyper limit. But it wouldn't kill velocity quickly enough to prevent the range between him and the Manties from closing by at least another thirty light-seconds. And by the time he could kill an appreciable fraction of his closing velocity, the Graysons would be on a direct course for the point at which he would hit the hyper limit out-bound. If he could maintain his present acceleration, they wouldn't—quite—catch him from their much lower base velocity, but they'd sure as hell overrun any cripples who fell behind. And the entire time he was trying to run away, they were going to be pounding him with a hurricane of missile fire precisely to produce as many cripples as they possible could. Not to mention LAC strikes.

Which meant that his fleet, and his people, were about to be destroyed.

* * *

"So, they do have CLACs," Honor said quietly as the display blossomed with hundreds upon hundreds of fresh impeller signatures.

"Yes, Ma'am," Jaruwalski confirmed. The ops officer stood beside Lieutenant Commander Reynolds where they'd been studying the latest reports from the system surveillance platforms. Now she turned to face Honor and gestured at the LAC drives blazing in the plot.

"It looks like at least eight of their 'superdreadnoughts' are actually CLACs, Your Grace," she said. "That makes them a hell of a lot bigger than anything we have, and it looks like each of their groups is at least a third again the size of a Covington's. CIC estimates that they have right on two thousand of them."

"Then they're screwed," Rafe Cardones said confidently from Honor's com screen. "Two thousand gives them less than two hundred more than we have," he went on, lumping the Manticoran and Grayson LAC groups together. "I can't believe they could possibly have managed to improve their tech enough to keep us from tearing them apart when we're that close to parity with them numerically."

"You're probably right," Honor replied. "But let's not get overconfident. ONI never even guessed they had CLACs, so we don't have any meter stick at all for evaluating their LAC effectiveness."

"You're right, Your Grace," Cardones admitted.

"Should we commit our own LACs, Your Grace?" Jaruwalski asked.

"Not yet," Honor said. "Before we do that, I want to whittle down their shipboard defenses. I'm not going to throw away our LAC groups by committing them against an unshaken wall that knows they're coming."

"If we don't commit them soon, we may not have an opportunity to use them at all, Your Grace," Jaruwalski warned, gesturing at CIC's projection of the Peeps' new course. "If we hold them back more than another fifteen or twenty minutes, they won't have the accel to overcome the Peeps' base velocity advantage and overhaul short of the alpha wall."

"Granted," Honor conceded. "But I'm not prepared to accept massive casualties if we don't have to. Especially when we don't know for certain what the Andies will do if we take heavy losses against the Republic. If we can beat these people without getting our LACs chewed up, so much the better."

Jaruwalski nodded in understanding, if not total agreement, and Honor looked at Lieutenant Brantley.

"My compliments to Admiral McKeon and Admiral Yu, and instruct them to open fire."

* * *

"Missile separation!" Marston announced. "I have hostile launches—many hostile launches!"

"Return fire," Tourville said almost calmly.

"Aye, Sir! Returning fire—now."

* * *

Multidrive missiles howled out across the endless light-seconds of emptiness. No fleets in history had ever engaged one another at such a preposterous range. More than two full light-minutes lay between TF 34 and Second Fleet, and it would take almost seven minutes for even Manticore's missiles to cross that stupendous gulf of vacuum. Second Fleet's missiles, with their marginally lower accelerations, would take even longer to reach TF 34. But the Protector's Own was closer than that. The flight time for Alfredo Yu's missiles was little more than three minutes.

Both sides' starships had extra missile pods on tow, and both sides flushed them all in the initial salvo. Second Fleet had seventy-eight capital ships: forty-six superdreadnoughts, eight CLACs, and twenty-four battlecruisers, but its planned margin of superiority had been more than erased by the presence of Alfredo Yu's command. TF 34 and the Protector's Own between them had a hundred and six capital ships: forty-three superdreadnoughts, ten CLACs, eleven dreadnoughts, and forty-two battlecruisers. Still, eleven of Honor's ships of the wall were only dreadnoughts and forty-four percent of her other "capital ships" were mere battlecruisers, and although the Allies' weapon systems remained superior to those of the Republic, the margin of superiority was thinner than it had ever been before.

The Havenite missile pods contained fewer missiles because those missiles had to be thirty percent larger than Manticoran missiles to approximate the same performance. But since she'd had no choice but to build enormous missiles because of the mass requirements of their drive elements and power plants, anyway, Shannon Foraker had been able to give them larger payloads than their Manticoran counterparts, as well. She'd used some of that volume to increase the destructive power of their warheads, but most of it had gone into additional sensor capability. The result was a weapon with eighty-eight percent as much range, very nearly eighty percent as much accuracy, and greater hitting power than anything Manticore had.

But that accuracy still had to get through Manticore's superior ECM, and decoys and jammers went to work on both sides as the deadly tides of destruction swept down upon them. False targets offered themselves, singing to targeting systems, beckoning and seducing them away from the actual starships they sought to destroy. Jammers howled, threshing space with active interference to blind sensitive seeking systems, and as the range fell still further, counter missiles went screaming out to meet the incoming fire with kamikaze devotion.

The Manticoran systems were far more effective, especially with the remote Ghost Rider platforms to spread the EW envelope wider and deeper. Despite the increases in accuracy Foraker had managed to engineer into the Republic's MDMs, the Allies' targeting systems were at least fifty percent more effective simply because of the difference in the two sides' electronic warfare capabilities.

Active defenses engaged the weapons which slashed their way through the screen of electronic protection. The latest generation Manticoran counter missiles had increased their effective intercept range to just over two million kilometers, although the probability of a kill in excess of one and a half million was low. Shannon Foraker's best efforts, even with reverse-engineered Solarian technology, had a maximum intercept range of little more than one and a half million. That meant Honor's missile defenses had sufficient depth for two counter missile launches to engage each incoming missile before the attacking birds could reach effective laserhead range. Foraker could get off only a single launch at each incoming wave of Allied missiles, but she'd compensated by increasing the number of launchers by more than thirty percent. Her missiles were individually less effective, but there were many more of them per launch, and Second Fleet threw up a wall of them in the path of the incoming warheads.

Impeller wedge met impeller wedge, obliterating counter missile and MDM alike in blinding flashes as impeller nodes and capacitors vaporized one another. Both sides were using layered defenses, ripple-fired, multiple waves of counter missiles backed by point defense laser clusters in the innermost interception zones, and Foraker and Commander Clapp had integrated the Cimeterres into the Republican Navy's missile defense doctrine, as well. Even a LAC's laser clusters could kill an incoming missile if it could hit it, and very few of those missiles would deign to attack something as insignificant as a LAC.

Space was a blinding, roiling cauldron of energy around Second Fleet as counter missiles, shipboard lasers and grasers, and LACs poured fire into the phalanx of destruction sweeping down upon it. At least sixty percent of the Allies' fire was defeated by ECM or picked off by active defenses. But that meant that forty percent wasn't, and Lester Tourville's ships spun and twisted like dervishes, fighting to interpose wedges and sidewalls against the ravening fury of bomb-pumped lasers as the Manticoran warheads began to detonate.

At least half of those lasers wasted themselves harmlessly against the impenetrable stress bands of superdreadnought impeller wedges, or found themselves bent and twisted wide of their targets by sidewalls. But some of them got through.

* * *

Lester Tourville clung to the arms of his command chair as RHNS Majestic staggered and bucked. No one sent damage reports to the flag bridge. Those were the concern of Captain Hughes on her own command deck, but Tourville could feel the big ship's wounds as laser after laser crashed into her. Even her massive armor yielded to that savage pounding, and he knew Manticoran fire was smashing away sensors, energy weapons, missile tubes . . . and the human beings who crewed them.

He felt that wave of destruction in the back of his brain, but he made himself ignore it. If it was Hughes' job to deal with Majestic's wounds it was Tourville's job to save what he could of Second Fleet.

It didn't look as if he would be able to save very much of it.

Both the Manticoran and the Grayson fire had concentrated mercilessly upon his own SD(P)s and CLACs. Quite a few missiles—like the ones targeting Majestic—had lost track and gone after other victims, yet it was obvious that they amounted to little more than errant shots which had initially been intended for the newer types. He wondered, at first, how the Manties could have targeted them so accurately, picked them out of his formation so unerringly, when the Allies had no emissions signatures or targeting profiles on file for them. But then he realized how absurdly easy it actually was. They hadn't picked the new ships out; they'd simply chosen not to fire at the ships they could positively identify as pre-pod designs. By process of elimination, that concentrated their fire on the newer, more dangerous designs.

They were tough, superdreadnoughts. The most massively armored and protected mobile structures ever built by man. They could soak up almost inconceivable amounts of punishment and survive. More than survive, continue to strike back from the heart of a holocaust which would have vaporized any lesser ship. But there were limits to all things, including the toughness of superdreadnoughts, and he watched the damage report sidebars flicker and change as incoming missiles sledgehammered his own SD(P)s again and again and again.

He felt a moment of bitter shame leavened by relief as he realized most of the Manties were virtually ignoring his own flagship. He'd chosen Majestic because she'd been designed as a command ship, with the best communications and battle management systems available. But she was a pre-pod design, and so, for all her damage, she was largely spared as that first, deadly exchange of fire completely gutted a third of Tourville's SD(P)s. Two more were damaged almost as badly, and a seventh lost two alpha nodes. Only one of them escaped totally undamaged . . . and fresh Manticoran missiles were already howling in upon her in follow-on salvos.

* * *

Honor watched the return Havenite fire rip into her own formation. Her wall of battle was too far from its enemies for shipboard sensors to resolve what was happening to Second Fleet in any detail, but the Ghost Rider sensor platforms she'd had deployed were another matter entirely. Not even Manticore had yet been able to find a way for the platforms to send targeting information directly to MDMs, and even an MDM was too small for BuWeaps to cram in an FTL receiver which would have allowed real-time targeting telemetry to be relayed through the ships who'd launched them. But she could at least evaluate what happened when those missiles reached their targets, and her eyes narrowed in respectful surprise at the sheer toughness of that multilayered, tightly coordinated defensive envelope.

It was obvious that the Republic recognized the technical inferiority of its defensive systems. But Shannon Foraker's touch was equally obvious in the way in which those individually inferior systems had been carefully coordinated. The same approach would have been redundantly wasteful of capabilities given Manticoran system efficiencies. Given Republican hardware, it represented a brilliant adaptation of existing capabilities. An answer in mass to the individual superiority of Allied weapons.

And it worked.

Like Tourville, Honor had chosen her flagship for the effectiveness of its command systems more than its ship-to-ship offensive power. And even more than Second Fleet's commander, she found that flagship virtually ignored by the incoming Republican missiles. It made sense, she supposed, although she hadn't really considered it when she made her choice. After all, a carrier which had already launched its LACs automatically had a lower priority than superdreadnoughts which were busy launching missiles of their own or providing fire control to pods laid by another SD(P).

Werewolf was miraculously and completely untouched in that first, crushing exchange of fire. Other ships were less fortunate. Alistair McKeon's Troubadour was a priority target. Almost a dozen missiles broke through every electronic and active defense, and the SD(P)'s icon flashed and flickered on Honor's plot as she took damage. Her sistership Hancock was hit equally hard, and Trevor's Star took at least ten hits from individual lasers. The pre-pod ships Horatius, Romulus, and Yawata took their share of the punishment, as well, and the battlecruiser Retaliation strayed into the path of a full broadside intended for the dreadnought King Michael. All of the ships of the wall survived; Retaliation didn't.

Honor watched the battlecruiser's data code disappear from her plot and wondered how many hundreds—or thousands—of her people were wounded or dying aboard the other ships of her task force. She felt those fresh deaths pressing upon her, joining their weight to all the rest of her dead, but even as the toll mounted among her own ships, she knew the enemy was being hammered even harder.

* * *

Lester Tourville watched the mounting tide of destruction swelling up in the plot's sidebars and fought to keep his despair out of his expression and voice.

Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs' long flight times, the Manties' deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos . . . and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21's flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge . . . and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters' fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.

Nor had the SD(P)s been his only fatalities. Five more superdreadnoughts had been destroyed or so badly damaged that he'd had no option but to leave them behind while his survivors continued to run. At least one more had taken critical impeller damage; like the lamed SD(P)s, he'd be forced to leave her behind when he made translation into hyper if she couldn't get the missing alpha node back. One of his CLACs had also been destroyed, and two more were little more than air-bleeding wrecks, which meant that at least seven hundred of his two thousand LACs were going to have to be written off, whatever happened to the rest of his fleet.

He checked the maneuvering plot again, and his face clenched with pain. He was still two hours from the hyper limit, and if Harrington's task force had begun losing ground as the geometry of his vector change crabbed away from her, the Graysons were closing in steadily. Not that it mattered. He might be slowly, painfully opening the range from her launchers, but he was still over two light-minutes inside their reach.

At least some of Harrington's ships had been sufficiently battered to fall astern in the chase, he thought grimly. Some of them, judging from the recon drone's' reports, had taken serious damage. Two of her battlecruisers had been completely destroyed, as had at least three destroyers or light cruisers. CIC wasn't certain which at this range—especially when they hadn't been targeted in the first place. But MDMs were proving as indiscriminate in their targeting at long-range as Shannon had predicted. Most of them went after their programmed victims; a significant percentage wound up going after whatever targets they could see at the ends of their runs.

Even as he watched his fleet being pounded towards destruction, he felt a fresh flicker of admiration for Shannon and her staff. Second Fleet could not have found itself in a more disastrous tactical situation than trapped between two separate enemy forces with more long-range firepower than it could muster. No tactical doctrine could have nullified those disadvantages, but although Second Fleet's offensive firepower had been all but destroyed, he was astonished by how many of its ships still survived. They could no longer realistically hope to damage the enemy, but as long as they held together, they could continue to defend one another against the storm of destruction beating upon them. And if his single remaining SD(P) was running low on ammunition, then surely Harrington's SD(P)s had to be doing the same thing. Maybe he could outlast her firepower after all.

* * *

"Our magazines are down to twenty percent," Alistair McKeon told Honor from her com screen. His face was grim, and Honor knew from the sidebars in her plot that Troubadour had taken serious damage and heavy casualties. But McKeon's flagship was still in action, still rolling pods, and whatever had happened to Honor's command, what had happened to the Havenites was worse.

"The older SDs are in better shape on a percentage basis," he went on, "but they can't pump the kinds of broadsides the SD(P)s can. We've got maybe another fifteen minutes. After that, we'll be down to salvos too light to penetrate that damned defense of theirs from this range."

"Alistair's right, Honor," Alice Truman said from her own screen. "And my LACs can't catch them from here. Not before they make it across the limit. Alfredo's could intercept, but we can't support them."

Honor nodded—not in agreement, but in acknowledgment of unpalatable reality. She'd sprung her trap perfectly and savaged the Havenites brutally. Her own losses were painful, but only a fraction of what she'd done to them, and she knew it. But even so, almost half of the enemy fleet was going to escape. They'd held together with too much discipline, and their missile defense doctrine had proven too hard a nut to crack without more MDM firepower then she had. And even if her LACs had been able to intercept, she knew what would happen if she committed them against the close-in defenses which had so badly blunted her missile attack.

Which was the reason she couldn't possibly commit Alfredo's LACs to an unsupported attack.

"You're right—both of you," she said after a moment. She looked back at her plot, where only a handful of missiles continued to launch from the shattered ranks of the Havenite fleet. The enemy was decisively routed and broken, but even though every bone in her body longed to run the survivors down and complete their destruction, she knew she couldn't do it.

"We'll continue the pursuit." Her soprano was calm, giving no more hint of her intense frustration than it did of the pain of her own losses. "Alistair, I want you to reprioritize our missile fire. We're not going to be able to hammer our way through those defenses by saturating them, so I want you to slow your rate of fire and pick your targets carefully. Use delayed activation launches to thicken your broadsides while the pods last and try to concentrate on SDs with undamaged impellers. If we can slow some more of them down, our older ships of the wall can take them out as we overhaul, or else we can commit Alice's LACs to deal with them as we go by."

"Yes, Ma'am," McKeon acknowledged.

"Alice, I know you're frustrated by not getting your LACs into this yet," Honor went on, "but at least half a dozen of those Havenite ships are going to be too slow and too beat up to get away from you. When you're free to commit to go in after them, I want you to be sure to offer them the chance to surrender first. They're a long way from home and badly hurt, and I don't want to kill anyone who wants to give up."

"Of course," Truman agreed.

"Very well then." Honor sat back in her command chair and nodded to both of her senior subordinates. "Harper will pass similar instructions to Alfredo. In the meantime, we have a battle to finish up. So let's be about it, People."

Back | Next
Contents
Framed