Uncompromising honor, p.17
Uncompromising Honor, page 17
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
Still, of the 6,000 missiles she’d launched, just over 3,800 got past both the counter-missiles and the electronic counter measures and came screaming in on the Manticoran starships.
“Forty-three seconds,” Commander Wozniak said flatly. “Stand by Point Defense.”
Task Force 1027’s missiles executed their programmed attack profiles, trying for “look down” shots through the Manticoran sidewalls as they passed “over” or “under” their targets, or seeking the even more deadly “down-the-throat” or “up-the-kilt” attack positions which were every tactician’s dream.
The attack birds were up to a closing velocity of 240,319 KPS—0.802 cee—as they howled down on their targets, and Isotalo smiled grimly. The SLN had stopped tweaking the software for its point defense clusters to deal with the higher closing rates of multistage missiles and completely replaced it instead, and TF 1027 had trained hard with the new systems, in both sims and live fire exercises against inert laserheads. The improvement was enormous…it just still wasn’t anything Jane Isotalo would have called adequate against targets coming in at the sorts of velocities Cataphracts could produce. She didn’t much like that. On the other hand, physics played no favorites. At those velocities, an awful lot of her missiles were going to get through even the Manties’ defenses, she thought vengefully, and—
“Point Defense engaging…now!” Wozniak snapped as the attack missiles swept through the squadron’s formation, and the laser clusters went to maximum-rate fire.
Rods of coherent energy stabbed out, matching the speed of cybernetic reflexes against the attackers’ incredible velocity as the Cataphracts cleared the shadow of their targets’ impeller wedges. Missiles, unlike starships, couldn’t generate sidewalls. That meant they could be taken down by laser fire even before they dropped their wedges, if the geometry was right.
The geometry was right for quite a few of the Solarian missiles, and the waiting lasers punched straight through them. Many of their fellows simply streaked across the vulnerable sides of the cruisers’ wedges without ever finding a target in the fleeting moments their preposterous velocity gave their sensors. Others were more fortunate in that regard, and missile wedges vanished and laserheads rolled on incredibly powerful thrusters as they fought to align their lasing rods with their targets.
But the point defense was waiting for them.
Jane Isotalo watched the display. At thirty-six million kilometers, the light-speed lag was just over two minutes. Impeller signatures were FTL, so Tracking could plot her missiles’ inbound positions in near real-time—there was still a 1.89 second delay—but her sensors would need the full two minutes to detect anything else, including nuclear detonations. Because of that, she couldn’t really “see” a thing once the missiles’ impellers went down, and she waited impatiently, along with everyone else on Foudroyant’s flag deck, for the telltale flare of detonating laserheads.
Manticore’s electronically steered laser clusters cycled much more rapidly than the SLN’s did. It was, Sir Martin Lessem reflected, a prime example of those Darwinian processes that worried him where the Sollies were concerned. The increasing deadliness of the missile environment in Manticore’s long war with the People’s Republic of Haven had given the Royal Manticoran Navy’s R&D people no choice but to improve cycle time. In fact, Clas Fleming’s cycle time was almost fifty percent more rapid than that of an earlier flight Saganami-C, and each of her clusters mounted not the eight emitters of an early flight ship but twelve, almost twice as many as a Nevada-class battlecruiser’s clusters.
Cycle time didn’t matter all that much this time. The window of engagement was so brief that not even a Manticoran emitter could have fired two shots in the available time. On the other hand, each of Clas Fleming’s broadsides mounted twenty-four point defense clusters with a dozen emitters each. That was 288 shots from each broadside—576, in total—with the same from each of his other three Saganami-Cs and an additional 288 from each of his six Saganami-Bs, with fewer emitters per cluster but more total clusters per ship. In all, including his destroyers, his squadron mounted over three thousand emitters…already coached into waiting positions by the Ghost Rider tracking reports.
The tension on Clas Fleming’s bridge could have been chipped with a knife, because no one knew better than Manticorans that any ship could be killed, however good its defenses, however skilled its crew. But this was a deadly ballet the Royal Manticoran Navy had danced countless times in the last twenty T-years. Its officers and ratings knew its measures better than anyone else in the galaxy, and the space around Sir Martin Lessem’s squadron was suddenly a tornado of disintegrating Cataphracts as the defenses picked them off with viper speed and metronome precision. Shattered missile bodies tumbled onward into the endless dark, broken and inert. But even in the midst of their destruction, scores of surviving laserheads disappeared in bubbles of intolerable brilliance and bomb-pumped X-ray lasers stabbed out at CruRon 912.
They must have had even better tracks on the incoming fire than she’d thought from their counter-missiles, Isotalo realized as impeller signatures began vanishing too early for end-of-run detonations. Thanks to the light-speed delay, she had ample time to contemplate the implications of those…premature disappearances, and she didn’t like them one bit. Her salvo hadn’t melted like a sand castle, because there hadn’t been enough time for that. One heartbeat it had been streaking towards its target…the next the Manty point defense had ripped it to shreds. She’d never seen anything like it, never imagined mere cruisers could produce that volume of defensive fire.
Yet not even that fire could have stopped all of them. There literally weren’t enough places on ships that size to put enough laser clusters to take out that many threats. Dozens—scores—of them must have gotten through unscathed. Unfortunately, she knew, the defenders had concentrated on the ones that could have hurt them, and most of those surviving dozens and scores would have wasted themselves against their targets’ wedges and sidewalls. But the missiles crossing ahead of the Manties would be another matter. A ship simply couldn’t pack as many laser clusters into her fore and aft hammerheads, and it was obvious from the timing that a higher percentage of missiles attacking the throats of the Manticoran wedges had shut down their impellers rather than being picked off on the way in. By rights, most of the birds who’d reached shutdown positions should have gotten their lasers off before they could be destroyed, and the throat of a starship’s impeller wedge was far deeper than its sidewalls. That made it a much, much bigger target.
Seventy-three laserheads detonated directly ahead of HMS Clas Fleming, and seven hundred and thirty bomb-pumped lasers ripped down the throat of her wedge.
But unlike the Solarian Navy’s warships, the throats of current-generation Manticoran warships were no longer the traditional gaping chink in their armor. The bow-wall and its smaller cousin, the buckler, had finally provided the equivalent of a sidewall—and a very powerful sidewall—to cover that lethally vulnerable aspect of the wedge. That was one reason Sir Martin Lessem had waited motionless in space. He couldn’t accelerate with the full bow-wall up, and he didn’t trust the smaller buckler to provide sufficient cover. But he also hadn’t wanted to suddenly stop accelerating at the instant the wall went up lest the Sollies figure out that something was covering that aspect of Manticoran ships.
The laserheads detonating in front of Clas Fleming were never able to properly localize their target, because they simply couldn’t see it clearly enough through the bow-wall’s focused gravitic plane. All they could do was fire blindly, trying to saturate the entire volume in which the heavy cruiser might be located. That was an awfully wide volume for even seven hundred lasers to cover, and the bow-wall bent and degraded even those which had managed to find a target in the first place.
Admiral Isotalo reminded herself to breathe as she waited for the laggard photons to tell her how many of her missiles had survived to attack…and how well they’d fared. The human eye was notoriously unreliable at moments like this, but CIC’s uncaring, hyper-efficient computers’ count had already confirmed that the Manties had picked off at least seventy-five percent of her total launch before the surviving missiles dropped their wedges to attack.
That was yet another conclusion she didn’t much like, and she made a mental note to grab those over-optimistic idiots in the Office of Technical Analysis by their throats and choke some sense into them as soon as she got back to Sol. They had to start coming closer to realistic assessments, or the Manties were going to go right on kicking the Navy’s arse. She had the numbers to punch out a force this small, despite the…flawed enemy capability estimates with which she’d been sent out, but somebody else was going to run into a proper Manty task force, and when they did—
The thought broke off and her lips drew back in a snarl of satisfaction as the light-speed sensors finally updated the plot and hundreds of laserheads erupted in bubbles of nuclear fusion. Even as she snarled, she knew her most pessimistic estimate of how many had gotten through had been overly optimistic, but her targets were only cruisers, and at least fifty or sixty laserheads detonated directly ahead of four of them.
They sent the deadly stilettos of their bomb-pumped lasers straight down the wide-open throats of their victims’ wedges…and absolutely nothing happened.
“We took one hit forward, Sir,” Commander Wozniak told Lessem. “Graser One’s gone, and so is Point Defense Four. Seven casualties, nonfatal.” He looked back down at his display. “Robert L. Gartner reports one hit starboard, Frame Seven-Five. That one cost two counter-missile launchers, but Captain Reicher thinks he can get one of them back and reports no personnel casualties. Michael Cucchiarelli took two hits, but she was lucky. Captain Disall’s lost both of his secondary grav sensor arrays, but he reports no personnel casualties or weapon systems damage. Edward Dravecky took two hits; one down her throat and one portside, Frame Two Hundred. The hit forward knocked out a beta node and the power surge killed two ratings in her forward impeller room. The portside hit destroyed Graser Eight and Counter-missile Thirty-Seven. Nine casualties there, two fatal, I’m afraid.”
Lessem nodded heavily, his expression tight. Four hits and eighteen casualties, only four of them fatal, was a minuscule return for six thousand pod-launched missiles. He knew that, and knowing did absolutely nothing to make it hurt less, because those eighteen casualties were his people.
On the other hand, he thought grimly, I have to wonder how the other side’s reacting to this?
Isotalo heard Barthilu Rosiak inhale sharply, swallowing what probably would have been a curse, as the same shock lashed through the operations officer.
There should have been some sign of damage, she thought almost numbly. They’d just fired over eight hundred Cataphracts right down the Manties’ throats, each with the warhead of a Trebuchet capital missile, and CIC confirmed that at least a quarter of them—more probably a third—of the crossing shots had detonated before interception. Call it two hundred and thirty to split the difference, and that was still twenty-three hundred lasers against perfect targets.
Hit probabilities at that insane crossing speed against a target which couldn’t even be seen clearly until the attack missiles’ sensors cleared that target’s wedge and could look down its throat had to be tiny, despite the ideal geometry of any “crossing-the-T” attack. She and Rosiak had estimated no more than a one-percent hit ratio in such circumstances, rather than the thirty-eight percent ratio they would have expected at a pre-Cataphract crossing rate, but that was still twenty-three hits. That might not inflict crippling damage, scattered across ten ships the size of the Manty cruisers, but it damned well should have inflicted some, and the Manties’ emissions hadn’t even flickered.
“I see we’re going to need heavier salvos,” Admiral Jane Isotalo said coldly.
“What do you expect them to try next, Sir?” Commander Thúri asked quietly. Commodore Lessem glanced at him, then returned his gaze to the tactical plot. He stood that way for several moments, hands clasped behind him, whistling soundlessly.
“The one thing I don’t expect him to do is to try another long-range launch, unless he’s able to put a hell of a lot more missiles into it,” he said then. “We didn’t expect their new accelerations, and their projected accuracy was better than we expected at that range, too,” he acknowledged with a shrug. “But not enough better to offset our advantages in missile defense, and judging from their attack profile, they don’t know about the bow-wall, either. But unless they’re idiots—and, frankly, whoever this fellow is, he doesn’t strike me as another Crandall or Filareta—he’ll have figured out that something sure as hell knocked back the damage all those down-the-throat shots should’ve inflicted.”
He turned away from the plot, pacing slowly across the flag bridge to his command chair. He sank into the chair and turned it to face the astrogation plot while the chair’s displays deployed around him.
“He’ll want to get closer,” he said then, his eyes narrowing. “If we can take all those down-the-throat shots without showing more damage than we did, he needs every scrap of accuracy he can get. That means getting into effective telemetry range—his effective telemetry range. And out here, he just might pull that off.”
The chief of staff nodded, his expression thoughtful, then smiled.
“In that case, Sir, it’s probably a good thing that you’re—and I say this with the utmost respect—a sneaky bastard.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, Commander,” Sir Martin Lessem replied with an answering smile.
“—so Technodyne’s accuracy estimates at extended range were almost on the money,” Rear Admiral Rosiak said, using the hand unit to highlight a column of numbers on the briefing room’s bulkhead smart wall. “We can’t be positive, but the hot wash analysis suggests Technodyne’s estimate was accurate to within five or six percent. Which—” he looked around the unhappy faces of Admiral Isotalo’s staff “—was higher than the estimate Maleen and I plugged into our pre-battle planning. Unfortunately, ONI’s estimate of the Manty missile defense’s capabilities was nowhere near accurate, so even with the better-than-expected accuracy, the actual hit ratio still sucked vacuum.”
“In fairness to ONI, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Lamizana put in, “nobody who’s gone toe-to-toe with the Manties has gotten home again to tell us how good their defenses really are. The best anyone’s been able to do is extrapolate from the loss ratios, using our own capabilities as a baseline.” She shrugged ever so slightly. “It seems pretty clear that baseline was too optimistic, but it was the only one they had.”
Jane Isotalo’s jaw tightened at that unpalatable reminder, but it was exactly the sort of reminder Lamizana was supposed to give her, and she nodded in recognition.
“So your recommendation is what, Bart?” she asked after a second.
“We have two options, Ma’am, either of which has pros and cons,” Rosiak replied. “One is to simply fire the biggest damned missile salvo the galaxy’s ever seen. I don’t care how good their defenses are on a ship-for-ship basis. Hit them with enough birds to completely saturate their counter-missiles and point defense, and something’s getting through. Assuming we’re right about the blind fire hit probabilities, my people estimate that a thirty thousand-missile launch should produce a minimum of four hundred hits, despite their defensive capabilities.”
“Assuming they’ve actually shown us all of those capabilities yet,” Lamizana added in a carefully neutral tone.
“Assuming that,” Rosiak acknowledged, nodding at the intelligence officer. “I think Maleen’s right that we have to assume they may not have, although I also have to say I find it a little difficult to believe anyone could see six thousand missiles coming at him and not pull out all the stops against them, however good he thought his defenses were. Having said that, I don’t have any desire at all to get caught with our arses hanging out the way certain other people have.”
Two or three people, Isotalo among them, surprised themselves with smiles at his last sentence. Although it wasn’t really funny, given how many of their fellows—officers and enlisted—those “other people” had gotten killed.
And Bart can say that when Ramaalas or Maleen couldn’t, she reflected, because he’s Battle Fleet, just like Crandall and Filareta.
And he does have a point.
“I realize we have deep pockets where missile pods are concerned,” she said then. “I’d really prefer not to use them up at the rate of five or six thousand per heavy cruiser, though,” she added in a desert-dry tone, “so let’s hear option two, Bart. Should I assume you’re thinking in terms of Two-Step?”
“Yes, Ma’am, I am.”
Rosiak waved at the smart wall without looking away from Isotalo.
“On top of their active defenses and EW, Foudroyant’s CIC agrees with my own people’s conclusion that the Manties have to have found some way to protect against down-the-throat shots. Nobody’s prepared to go out on a limb over exactly how they’re doing that, but my own feeling is that they have to’ve found some way to create a sidewall to cover the ahead and astern aspects of a wedge.”
“Not to dispute Bart’s conclusion, Ma’am,” Rear Admiral Ramaalas said, “but if they’ve managed that, they have to be playing even faster and looser with physics than our worst-case assumptions.”
