A Rising Thunder-ARC (29 page)

“When they sign on, they do have a tendency to stay signed, don’t they?” she said out loud, and Benjamin nodded.

“More than some star nations I could mention, anyway,” he said. “Speaking of which, how are the Andermani taking all of this?”

Elizabeth gave him a pained look.

“That wasn’t the most diplomatic segue in the history of statesmanship, Benjamin.”

“That’s the sort of thing I keep professionals like Uriah around for,” he replied. “And you’ll notice I’m asking you personally, not any members of the formal diplomatic corps.”

“Yes, I did notice.” She eyed him repressively for another second or two, then smiled crookedly. “Obviously I haven’t had time for a formal exchange of views with Gustav, but judging from his ambassador’s reaction and that of the Andermani officers still attached to Eighth Fleet, I think he’s a lot less likely to bolt the Alliance than he would have been before we told him about this killer nanotech. All our analyses of New Potsdam’s internal dynamic suggest Prince Huang and Herzog von Rabenstrange have been the closest thing the Andermani court has to Manticoran partisans. In Huang’s case it was always a more pragmatic and tactical stance than any great love for us, of course. In fact, I’m inclined to think it was more the intensity of his abolitionist leanings than his pro-Manticore tendencies that got him onto the Mesan hit list. Still, I doubt the notion that Mesa tried to kill him—and did manage to kill his younger son—is going to make him any
less
pro-Ballroom! And while Gustav’s never been as intensely opposed to genetic slavery as Huang, he’s not the sort to take kindly to the murder of his nephew, either.”

“None of which is to say our pragmatic friends are going to be eager to stand up to the Solarian juggernaut with us, no matter how pissed off they may be at Mesa,” Benjamin observed.

“No,” Elizabeth agreed, and smiled very coldly. “But if this Filareta gets hammered, someone like Gustav’s going to be thinking about the desirability of being on the winning side. Personally, I’ve never really had any imperial ambitions. In fact, I’d just as soon never have embarked on something that’s almost certain to change the entire character of the Old Star Kingdom the way this sudden expansion is going to. But I’m not a descendant of Gustav Anderman, either, and the Andermani
do
think in imperial terms.”

“I know,” Benjamin said soberly. “That’s why I have to wonder how Gustav’s going to feel about finding himself squeezed between the Star Empire’s lobes in Silesia and the Talbott Quadrant.”

“Hopefully, that’s not going to be an issue anytime soon. Not that it isn’t damned well going to become one
sometime
.” Elizabeth sighed. “I’d really like things to be simple and straightforward without automatically involving all sorts of future repercussions. Just once, at least.”

“Would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Benjamin grinned and shook his head. “Not going to happen, though. Trust me. You young whippersnapper monarchy-come-latelies have no idea! Four and a half centuries—ha!” He snapped his fingers. “Wait until you’ve been around for a
thousand
T-years, like us Mayhews. You’ll be
amazed
by all the chances you’ll have had to screw up by forgetting about those ‘future repercussions’ at inconvenient moments!”

Chapter Sixteen

“Incoming message from Admiral Truman, Your Grace!” Lieutenant Commander Harper Brantley announced.

“Throw it on Display Two,” Honor said without ever taking her eyes from the main plot.

Nimitz pressed his nose against her cheek with a confident, buzzing purr, but the icons on that plot were getting decidedly complicated. Her Ghost Rider platforms updated the data on the intruding Solarian fleet, and she frowned at the hurricane of MDMs which had erupted from Eighth Fleet’s missile pods eighteen seconds ago. The massive salvo streaked towards the glaring red codes of the enemy, and her frown deepened as Admiral Filareta’s ships spawned an answering cloud of tiny ruby chips.

“Yes, Alice?” she said as Truman’s larger-than-life, golden-haired image appeared on the display which had just opened in the plot’s upper quadrant.

“My advanced LACs and the recon platforms all confirm the bastards are towing
pods
, Honor,” she said without preamble, her expression somewhere between irritated, exasperated, and just plain pissed off.

“Yes, CIC just put them up on the plot.” Honor’s tone was considerably calmer than Truman’s. “And they just launched from them,” she continued. “Which I doubt they’d be doing at twenty million kilometers if they didn’t have the range for it.

“Enemy launch at one-point-three light-minutes!” Captain Andrea Jaruwalski, Honor’s operations officer, reported crisply, as if to confirm Honor’s statement. Jaruwalski was looking at her own displays. “Acceleration approximately forty-eight thousand KPS, Your Grace. Assuming constant acceleration, time of flight is five-point-two minutes. CIC makes their closing velocity at the inner defense perimeter approximately point-four-niner cee!”

That was actually a bit better—about 2,000 KPS better, in fact—than the RMN’s own Mark 23 could do, Honor reflected. Obviously, the same thought had occurred to Truman, as well.

“Damn it, that’s ridiculous!” the other admiral snapped.

“Which doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” Honor pointed out.

“But—” Truman stopped herself, then gave her head a shake.

“Point taken,” she conceded more calmly.

Honor smiled, but it was a thin smile, and her eyes had already moved back to the plot. Five minutes wasn’t much time to be making changes, yet if the Sollies’ missile acceleration exceeded projections by this much, there was no telling how much better their targeting systems and penaids might be, as well.

I think “a lot” is probably a pretty fair estimate
, she thought tartly.
Which suggests
—

“It looks like we’re going to have leakers, Andrea. Get the Loreleis deployed. It seems we’re going to find out how well they work, after all.”

“Deploying Lorelei, aye, Your Grace!”

“As soon as you’ve done that, go to Tango-Two.”

“Tango-Two, aye,” Jaruwalski acknowledged, and Honor turned back to Truman.

“Alice, push your perimeter squadrons out on the threat axis.”

“How far out do you want them?”

“As far as you can get them.” Honor smiled crookedly. “One way or the other, this isn’t going to last long, so you’re not going to get them as far out as either of us would like. Choose your own deployment package.”

“Consider it done.”

Truman disappeared from the display, and Honor turned to Commodore Mercedes Brigham.

“Alice’s LACs will give the defense zone a little depth, but there’s a pretty good chance we’re still going to get hammered. Get on the horn. Request release of the system-defense pods.” She showed her teeth. “We may just need a bigger hammer of our own.”

“Yes, Your Grace!” her chief of staff acknowledged, and Honor turned to the display tied permanently to HMS
Imperator
’s command deck.

“I assume you heard all that, Rafe?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Captain Rafael Cardones replied.

“We can hope the Loreleis will take at least some of the sting out, but I’m afraid your damage control parties are about to get busy.” Cardones nodded quickly, and she shrugged. “Fight your ship, Rafe.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Honor returned her attention to the master plot.

At such ranges, even MDMs seemed to crawl, but the Solarian fire swept remorselessly towards Eighth Fleet, and there was a
lot
of it—at least three times ONI’s estimate of Filareta’s firepower. The LACs assigned to the fleet’s perimeter accelerated to meet that incoming tide, adjusting their own formation as they went, and the Grayson-designed
Katanas
, with their potent missile armaments and heavy loads of Viper missiles, led.

Manticoran doctrine had hardened in favor of using LACs as the wall of battle’s primary screen. They were strictly sublight, but that wasn’t a significant factor inside a star’s hyper limit, and very few engagements took place
outside
a hyper limit. And while even a Manticoran LAC had far less long-range offensive firepower than, say, a
Roland
, the
Katanas
, especially, had nearly as much anti-missile capability. They couldn’t take as much damage, but the laser heads carried by multidrive missiles made that pretty much a moot point. Destroyers couldn’t survive more than a hit or two from weapons that powerful, either, and they were far easier to hit in the first place than something as agile as a LAC.

While Truman’s bantamweights headed out, the rest of Eighth Fleet turned away and began to shift into Formation Tango-Two. No one on Honor’s staff had really anticipated Solarian MDMs or such a heavy weight of fire, but the RMN believed in being prepared. That was why she and her task force and task group commanders had brainstormed situations very like this one in their planning sessions. And, after analyzing the tactical data from every engagement against the Republic of Haven and interpolating the data from Michelle Henke’s engagements in the Talbott Quadrant, Honor and her staff had evolved a new defensive doctrine.

Traditional missile defense wove every platform into a single, tightknit pattern designed to bring every defensive system to bear on the threat axis. In order to focus that concentration of defensive fire, the units of a task force or fleet maintained a close, unflinching formation with every squadron meticulously slotted into the most advantageous position. That sort of precision maneuvering even in the heart of furious combat required highly experienced, steel-nerved personnel, and it had been a hallmark of the Royal Manticoran Navy for generations.

But the massive weight of pod-launched MDM salvos placed unprecedented strains on that doctrine. When the threat was measured in tens of thousands of laser heads, instead of scores or hundreds, not even the most precise stationkeeping was enough to stave off disaster. As the threat grew progressively worse, Manticore had countered by increasing the density, power, and accuracy of its anti-missile armaments, yet many of the RMN’s tacticians had come to the conclusion that, absent some significant improvement in the available defensive systems, simply packing in more point defense clusters and counter-missile tubes had reached a point of diminishing returns.

Honor was one of the tacticians who suspected that was the case. She had cautiously optimistic hopes for the new Lorelei platforms, which represented an entirely new generation of highly capable decoys, and she’d strongly supported the decision to massively upgrade the Keyhole platforms’ defensive armament. Despite that, she’d been forced to the conclusion that the Navy owed its survival to date at least as much to the inherent inaccuracy of extremely long-range missile fire as to any improvements in its defenses. Worse, it had never been anything more than a matter of time before someone as inventive as the Republic of Haven’s navy had become under Thomas Theisman and Shannon Foraker managed to duplicate—or at least approximate—Apollo’s long-range accuracy. At which point, things were going to get ugly.

Ultimately, if ships of the wall weren’t going to become simply very expensive target drones, they needed to begin intercepting missiles farther out, expand the fleet’s active interception envelope beyond the roughly 3.6 million-kilometer reach of the current Mark 31 counter-missile. The problem was how to accomplish that. Pushing the perimeter LACS further out, getting those screening platforms deeper into the threat zone was one approach, but what Honor really wanted was an organic capability for the wallers to extend their
own
intercept range. She and her staff had a few thoughts on how that might be accomplished, and she knew Sonja Hemphill was looking at the question as well, but for now, she had to fight with what she had, not what she’d
like
to have, which was why Eighth Fleet’s formation wasn’t quite what The Book envisioned.

Given the nature of the threat and the expansion of each ship’s defensive field of fire courtesy of Keyhole, she’d decided to
loosen
Eighth Fleet’s formation rather than seeking to tighten it still further. Since her Keyhole-equipped units had more “reach” than they’d ever had before, she’d reasoned, they could target threats across a greater volume, provide mutual support without maintaining such close, rigid station on one another. There were trade-offs, of course—there always were—and the greater distance between subunits inevitably decreased the accuracy of the support they could offer one another. But what they lost in pinpoint precision they got back (hopefully) by broadening and deepening the total defensive basket. Each defensive shot had an individually lower probability of a kill, but there were more
of
them, and allowing squadrons to maneuver more independently also permitted their individual units to interpose their impeller wedges against incoming fire most effectively and with far less risk of the accidental wedge-on-wedge fratricide that would destroy the most powerful superdreadnought.

Andrea Jaruwalski and the rest of Eighth Fleet’s operations and tactical officers had spent hours tweaking both software and doctrine to put it all together. Honor was delighted by how well they’d run with her concepts, and they’d come up with a few wrinkles all their own. At Jaruwalski’s suggestion, for example, they’d detached half of Eighth Fleet’s total LAC strength from the perimeter force and tasked the reassigned groups to operate not between the wall and the threat but
inside
the wall, maneuvering in close coordination with individually assigned squadrons of capital ships to cover the expanded gaps between those squadrons.

Well, that’s the
theory
, anyway
, Honor thought now, reaching up to stroke Nimitz’s ears while she watched the plot.

“Lorelei platforms active, Your Grace,” Jaruwalski reported.

“Thank you,” Honor replied as scores of small blue starbursts suddenly spangled the plot. Lorelei was the latest addition to the Ghost Rider stable…the last one the R&D staff on HMSS
Weyland
had produced before the space station’s destruction. Given how recently it had gone into production (and how quickly destruction of the production lines had followed), the RMN had a lot fewer of the new platforms than anyone would have liked, and she hated the thought of expending so many of them.