House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (21 page)

“But we can’t do it yet. We just can’t go public, not when I know
exactly
how Parliament and public opinion would react. We don’t have all the details even now, but it’s obvious what the Peeps wanted, and they got it. Admiral Big Sky told me this morning that the Peoples Navy will be moving against Trevor’s Star sometime within the next two weeks, and we’re not in a position to do anything about it. Worse, if I make public accusations against the PRH, if the Star Kingdom’s people find out who murdered their King, they won’t leave the government any choice. We’d find ourselves at war with the Peoples Republic tomorrow . . . and we’d have to fight without the advantages of a forward position in Trevor’s Star.

“I can’t do that.” Her eyes gleamed with tears over a core of frozen steel. “Much as I want to, much as everything inside me screams to accuse them, to rip out their black hearts for murdering my father, I
can’t
. I can’t commit my entire Star Kingdom to a war we’ll probably lose, no matter how much I want to. So they’re going to get away with it. They’ve
already
gotten away with it, and I can’t stop them.”

“Oh, Bethie,” he whispered, reaching out to fold her in his arms once more, and he felt the grief and pain—and the bitter, driving will—in that tall, slim body.

“I can’t stop them,” she repeated in his ear. “Not now. Not
yet
. But we
will
stop them, Uncle Jonas.”

She straightened once more, looking into his eyes.

“Dad told me about his plans for the Weapons Development Board, and nothing’s changed as far as I’m concerned, except for this one thing. I can’t openly accuse the Peeps of having murdered Dad, but when they take Trevor’s Star, they’re going to give me the card Dad didn’t have. There won’t be any more arguing, any more debate. Aunt Caitrin and I will use the threat of the fall of the Trevor’s Star Terminus—the conquest of San Martin, one of our oldest trading partners, a single warp bridge from the Junction—to ram through the biggest increase in military spending in the history of the Star Kingdom. We’re going to
double
our building rate, Uncle Jonas, and in the midst of all that budget, we’re going to find the funding for the WDB and to push Gram even harder than we ever have before. We’re going to do that—
you’re
going to do that for me—and when the time comes, the two of us—you and I, Uncle Jonas—we’re going to
destroy
the People’s Republic of Haven. As God is my witness, I will take that murderous excuse for a star nation apart brick by brick. I will find whoever ordered my father’s murder, and I will send that blackhearted bastard to hell with my own two hands.”

Her brown eyes looked deep, deep into his, and Jonas Adcock shivered at what he saw in their depths.

“Trust me,” she said very, very softly. “They think they’ve gotten away with it, but they’re wrong, Uncle Jonas. They can’t even
guess
how wrong they are about that.”

November 1914 PD

“STAND BY FOR TRANSLATION
. . .
now.
”

Captain (Junior Grade) Jonathan Yerensky announced the return to normal-space, and Hamish Alexander, Earl of White Haven, grimaced as the familiar discomfort and disorientation lashed through him. That was one nice thing about being a senior admiral, he thought. By the time you acquired as much rank as he had, you no longer had to worry about impressing uppity juniors with your stoicism. If crossing the alpha wall made you feel like throwing up, you could go ahead and admit it . . . and nobody dared laugh.

He grinned at the reflection, but his eyes were already on his repeater plot on
Benjamin the Great
’s flag deck, waiting for CIC’s updates while he listened to a murmured litany of background reports without really hearing them. His staff had been with him for over three T-years; after the next best thing to ten brutal T-years of war, they knew exactly what he needed to know immediately and what he expected them to handle on their own, and
he
knew he could rely on them to do just that.

Which freed White Haven to study his bland, uninformative plot and worry.

Well, uninformative from the
enemy’s
side, he amended, for quite a few Allied icons burned on the display. First, there were the seventy-three superdreadnoughts and eleven dreadnoughts of his wall of battle, thirty of them the radically new, hollow-cored
Harrington/Medusa
class with their massive loads of multidrive missiles. Then there were the traditional screening elements, already spreading out to assume missile defense positions. And last, there were the seventeen CLACs of Alice Truman’s task group and
their
escorts—battlecruisers and heavy cruisers, with four attached dreadnoughts to give them a little extra weight—astern of the main formation. A blizzard of diamond chips erupted from the CLACs as he watched, and he smiled grimly as the deadly swarm of light attack craft began to shake down into formation even as they accelerated ahead of the main body. CIC had a tight lock on them when they launched, but their EW was already on-line, and within minutes even
Benjamin the Great
’s sensors began to lose them.

A second blizzard, almost as dense, sped outward at accelerations even a LAC could never hope to match, and White Haven tipped back his command chair as the FTL-capable recon drones darted in-system.

I actually feel almost as calm as I’m trying to look,
he reflected with some surprise.
Of course, that’s because I can be reasonably confident the Peeps don’t have a clue as to what’s coming at them. Whether or not that will be true—and whether or not it will matter if it isn’t—the next time around are two different questions, of course.

He watched the drones speeding steadily inward, and he smiled.

Citizen Admiral Alec Dimitri and Citizen Commissioner Sandra Connors were in DuQuesne Base’s war room for a routine briefing when an alarm buzzed. The tall, stocky citizen admiral turned quickly, trained eyes seeking the status board, and Citizen Commissioner Connors turned almost as quickly. Neither she nor Dimitri had ever expected in their worst nightmares that they would suddenly find themselves responsible for the Barnett System, the biggest and most powerful naval base the People’s Republic had ever built, but they’d served as understudies to Thomas Theisman and Denis LePic for the better part of four T-years. Both were serious about their duty, and even if they hadn’t been, Theisman and LePic would have made damned sure the two of them were intimately familiar with the system and its defenses. As a result, Connors’ eyes were only fractionally slower than Dimitri’s in finding the fresh datum, and her frown mirrored his own.

“Twenty-two light-minutes from the primary?” she murmured, and Dimitri turned his head to give her a tight smile.

“It does seem a bit . . . overly cautious of them. Especially on that broad a bearing from Enki,” he agreed, and wondered what the hell the Manties thought they were up to. Barnett was only a G9 star, with a hyper limit of just a hair over eighteen light-minutes, so why were they turning up a full four light-minutes farther out than they had to? And on a bearing from the primary which added yet four more unnecessary light-minutes to their distance from their only possible objective?

The citizen admiral clamped his hands behind him and took a slow, deliberate turn around the command balcony above the enormous war room. His outermost sensor shell was seventeen light-minutes from the primary, far enough from the gravitational center of Barnett to give the enormous passive arrays a reach of almost two and a half light-weeks, over which they could expect to pick up the hyper transit of anything much bigger than a courier boat. That range put them nine light-minutes outside the planet Enki, and the actual range to the platform closest to the Manties was about thirteen light-minutes. Which meant it would be another—he checked the time—ten minutes and twenty-six seconds before he got a light-speed report from the sensors with the best look at whatever was coming at him. On the other hand, the inner-system arrays had more than enough reach to at least detect such a massive hyper translation. They’d picked up the faster-than-light ripple along the alpha wall as the Manties made transit, and they were picking up a confused clutch of impeller drive signatures now. But they were much too far away to see anything else, which meant Tracking’s reports were going to be maddeningly vague until the Manties were a lot deeper in-system. Unfortunately, Tracking had already picked up enough for Dimitri to feel certain the enemy would be coming
in
a lot deeper. The estimate blinking on the main board said there were over seventy of the wall headed for Enki, and that was no raiding force.

“It’s White Haven,” he rasped. “It has to be their Eighth Fleet. Maybe with their Third Fleet along to side it, judging from the preliminary numbers. Which means we’re probably screwed, Citizen Commissioner.”

Connors’ expression turned disapproving, but only briefly. And the disapproval wasn’t really directed at Dimitri. She didn’t like defeatism, but that didn’t change what was going to happen, and she knew the citizen admiral was correct. Their own strength had been reduced to only twenty-two of the wall. Even with the new mines and missile pod deployment Theisman had devised, plus the forts and the LACs, that was highly unlikely to stop seventy or eighty Manty superdreadnoughts and dreadnoughts. And, she reminded herself, initial estimates at this sort of range were almost always low. On the other hand . . .

“We can still give them a fight, Citizen Admiral,” she said, and he nodded.

“Oh, we can certainly do that, Ma’am, and I intend to make
them
aware of that fact, too. I just wish I knew why they made translation so far out . . . and why they’re coming in so slowly. I don’t object to an enemy who gives me time to assemble all my forces to meet him, but I do have to wonder why he’s being so obliging.”

“I had the same thought,” Connors murmured, and the two of them turned as one to look out at the huge holo tank’s light sculpture replica of the Barnett System.

The angry red pockmarks of a hostile fleet hung in that display, twenty-six-point-three light-minutes from Enki and headed for it at an unhurried six thousand KPS with an acceleration of only three hundred gravities. Preliminary intercept solutions were already coming up on a sidebar display, providing Dimitri with his entire menu of choices. Not that he intended to use any of the ones that involved sending his mobile units out to meet that incoming hammer. His outnumbered units would undoubtedly score a few kills if he was stupid enough to do that, but none would survive, and his fixed fortifications and LACs would be easy meat for an unshaken, intact wall of battle. Nor did he intend to waste his long-ranged mines. Those would wait until he could coordinate their attacks with those of his mobile units’ missiles. Which narrowed the only numbers he really needed to think about to the ones which showed what the Manties could do to
him
.

Assuming they maintained their current acceleration all the way in and went for a passing engagement with Enki’s close-in defenses, they could be on top of him in just under five hours. But they’d go ripping right on past him at over fifty-three thousand KPS, and he doubted they’d go for that option. It would get them to him a bit sooner, but that obviously wasn’t a factor in their thinking, or they’d have made their translation farther in and be coming in under a higher acceleration. Besides, there was no point in their opting for a passing engagement. The fighting would be all over, one way or the other, by the time they reached Enki’s orbital position, and if they overshot, they’d simply have to decelerate to come back and occupy the ruins.

No, the way they were coming in, they meant to go for a leisurely but traditional zero/zero intercept. Which meant, assuming they stuck with their ridiculously low accel, that they would come to rest relative to Enki (and ready to land their Marines) in six and a half hours . . . by which time, all of his units would be so much drifting wreckage.

But that wreckage was going to have a lot of Manty company, he thought grimly. That was all he could really hope for, and if he could take a big enough chunk out of those slow-moving, overconfident bastards, they might just find themselves fatally weakened when Operation Bagration went in, took Grendelsbane away from them, and started rolling them up from the southeast.

He glanced at another display and grunted in approval. This one showed his mobile units, racing from their scattered patrol positions to form up with the forts. Another one showed the readiness states on his LACs, with squadron after squadron blinking from the amber of stand-by to the green of readiness, and he nodded sharply. He’d have plenty of time to assemble and prepare his forces, and the bastards didn’t know about the new mines and pod arrangements he had to demonstrate for them.

His upper lip curled, showing just a flash of white teeth, and he turned back to the main board, waiting patiently for solid enemy unit IDs to appear.

“Here comes the first info, My Lord.”

Admiral White Haven looked up from a quiet conversation with his chief of staff, Captain Lady Alyson Granston-Henley, as the new data blinked onto his plot.

“I see it, Trev.”

White Haven and Granston-Henley moved over beside Commander Trevor Haggerston, Eighth Fleet’s dark-haired, heavy-set ops officer, and watched with him as the FTL drones began reporting in.

There were only a spattering of additional icons at first, but the initial spray grew quickly into a wider, deeper, brighter blur, and White Haven pursed his lips as CIC began evaluating the data. Unless the Peeps were trying to be sneakier than usual, they had considerably fewer ships of the wall than he’d anticipated. That probably indicated Caparelli’s diversionary efforts down around Grendelsbane had worked, White Haven thought, with a mental nod of respect for the First Space Lord’s efforts.

Of course, there was a downside to Caparelli’s success. Under normal circumstances, fewer ships meant fewer opponents, which would have been a good thing. In
this
instance, however, fewer ships simply meant fewer
targets
.