Uncompromising honor, p.22
Uncompromising Honor, page 22
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
“The problem”—he turned his head to meet Vasiliou’s eyes once more—“is that I feel like I’m a kid back home in Faraday, whistling in a graveyard at midnight.”
“I think it’s time,” Sir Martin Lessem said.
Commander Thúri glanced at him across the table in his dining cabin, and the commodore shrugged.
“The fact that nothing’s come back from Ajay suggests Commander Menendez and her people kicked their asses pretty conclusively.” He paused, one eyebrow arched, and Thúri nodded. “Well, I’d hoped whoever they left in command on this side would be foolish enough—or impatient enough—to bash on through, trying to find out what happened. Clearly, he’s too smart to do that. So if he’s not going to oblige us by sticking his head into the noose, I suppose it’s time for Descabello.”
Thúri pursed his lips in thought, then nodded. He wondered if Lessem realized just how completely he’d revealed the revulsion underlying his professionalism when he named his ops plans. The descabello was the deathblow—the second, spine-cutting deathblow if the first one was clumsy and unsuccessful—in the ancient bullfighting tradition which had been revived on some of the more decadent Core Worlds. Lessem had been dragged to one of them before the war, when he’d been assigned as the military attaché in the Sebastopol System, and “deeply disgusted” was a pale shadow of his response to it.
Which didn’t mean “Descabello” wasn’t a perfectly apt word for the ops plan to which he’d appended it.
Not that there’d been anything clumsy or unsuccessful about his actions so far.
“All right,” the commodore said now. “Go ahead and tell Tom to execute in—” he checked his chrono “—twenty minutes.”
“Yes, Sir,” the commander said quietly, sliding his chair back from the table. “With your permission, Sir, I’ll do that in person.”
“Fine.” Lessem nodded and Thúri came briefly to attention, then turned and left the dining cabin.
Lessem watched the hatch slide shut behind him, then picked up his wineglass and sipped again. The rich port seemed vinegary on his tongue, and he set the glass back down with a disgusted air.
I miss you, Sara Kate, he thought, looking at the light portrait on his bulkhead. I miss you for so many reasons, but right now, I need someone I can talk to who isn’t one of my officers. Somebody who lets me put my head in her lap and tell her I feel like a murderer.
He closed his eyes, remembering his elation when he and his people danced rings around what was obviously a smart, competent adversary. Remembering how clever he’d felt when he realized Menendez and her LACs must have evaded detection by the destroyers the Solly CO had sent through. He’d predicted exactly what the Sollies would do, and they’d done it because it was what competent people who lacked critical knowledge did…and the fact that none of them had come back yet meant none of them ever would.
What must it have been like aboard those ships, in the fleeting seconds they had to realize what they’d just sailed into? They’d done everything right…and they were just as dead, in just as staggering numbers, as if they’d been commanded by Josef Byng or Sandra Crandall or Massimo Filareta.
And whoever might have commanded the LAC executioners, he was the one who’d killed them. That was almost the worst part of it, but not quite.
No, the worst part of it—the part he needed Sara Kate to save him from—was the fear that in the months and the years ahead, he’d learn to forget the horror…and remember the pride.
The Shrikes and Katanas in Ajay weren’t the only LACs the SLN had failed to detect. Three of David K. Brown’s interchangeable modules had been configured as ammunition holds stuffed with pods of Mark 23s and Mark 16s, but the fourth had been configured to support three full squadrons of LACs, in addition to the eight LACs of her understrength organic squadron.
To be fair, there was an even better reason TG 1027.3 hadn’t spotted the deadly minnows here on the Prime side of the terminus. The FSV had dropped all forty-four of her brood over seventeen million kilometers from the terminus, on the side farthest away from Lessem’s heavy cruisers, on her way to the rendezvous point three light-days away in interstellar space. At that range, a superdreadnought would have been invisible with its wedge down, even without benefit of stealth, and Shrikes were far stealthier than any superdreadnought.
Now CruRon 912’s FTL com sent them the single codeword “Descabello.” It took over twenty-six minutes for even that message to reach them, but they knew what to do when it did.
“Coming up on the mark, Sir,” Commander Wozniak said quietly, sixty-one minutes after the transmission had been sent, and Sir Martin Lessem turned from the master plot and crossed to his command chair. He seated himself and methodically deployed his repeater displays. Then he nodded to Wozniak, and the operations officer looked at Ranald Kivlochan.
“Execute on the mark,” he said.
“Aye, aye, Sir. Executing on the mark.”
Everyone on Clas Fleming’s flag bridge knew that precise timing wasn’t vital this time around, but they were the Royal Manticoran Navy, and that—by God—meant they would do this by the numbers.
“Standing by,” Kivlochan replied formally.
“In ten,” Wozniak said, reading the time display as the maneuver already locked into the ship’s computers counted down. “Nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one…execute.”
Clas Fleming and her consorts disappeared into hyper.
“Status change!” a tracking rating sang out in SLNS Colossus’s CIC. He turned to the officer of the watch, his expression tight. “Ma’am, the Manties just translated out.”
“After sitting there all this time, now he suddenly decides to move,” Helmut Santini snarled. He’d been just about to step into the shower when the message from CIC reached them. Now he stood in his bathrobe, glowering at Vasiliou’s image on his sleeping cabin’s com display.
“I’m afraid so, Sir.” Vasiliou looked at something outside his own visual pickup’s field of view. “They translated out roughly three minutes ago, Sir.”
“And at an n-space accel of six hundred gravities?” Santini demanded. He and his staff had decided to assume that base acceleration for their calculations.
“Another eighteen minutes, Sir.”
“All right. Spin the generators up for translation ten seconds after that.” Santini smiled thinly. “I don’t think he’s going to want to bring cruisers into energy range of battlecruisers even if he can manage to hit his alpha translation that close. So, he’s going to come back out somewhere in missile range, but if he can get missiles into space and hit us with them in ten frigging seconds, we better draw up the articles of surrender now!”
The chief of staff’s expression showed he wasn’t delighted by his admiral’s turn of phrase, but he nodded.
“Yes, Sir. I’ll see to it.”
Sixteen minutes later, an immaculately skinsuited Vice Admiral Santini strode onto his flag bridge. Officers and ratings came to attention, but he waved them back to their consoles, crossed to his command chair, and seated himself.
“Status, Admiral Vasiliou?”
“Ready to hyper in…ninety-five seconds,” Vasiliou replied. “All ships closed up at Battle Stations.”
“Good.” Santini smiled thinly. “I’m looking forward to letting them waste some missiles this time!”
“Yes, Sir, and—”
“Hyper footprint!” Commodore O’Reilly called out from tactical. “Multiple hyper footprints at two-point-one million kilometers!”
“Already?” Santini looked down at the repeater deployed from his command chair and frowned. The Manties had botched their translation badly, if they’d been trying to get into range to hit him before he hypered out. In fact, they were well over a million kilometers short of his position. That was still deep inside their missiles’ range basket, but at that range, flight time would be over sixty-eight seconds, twelve seconds longer than his Nevadas required to translate out from Standby readiness.
“Abort translation, but stand by to reinitiate!” he said sharply.
“Aborting translation, yes, Sir,” O’Reilly acknowledged, and Santini gave Vasiliou a lopsided smile.
“It would appear even the vaunted Manties can screw up,” he observed. “Do you think they’ll go ahead and launch?”
“Don’t know, Sir,” the chief of staff replied with an answering smile. “Kind of embarrassing for them, I suppose.”
Santini chuckled, although neither of them really thought the situation was especially humorous. Yes, the Manties had screwed up, but that didn’t undo anything that had happened to Admiral Isotalo—whatever had happened to her. Still, at least it gave Santini’s task group an opportunity to get a little of their own back. It might be only a moral victory, but the proof to his own people that even Manties could make mistakes wasn’t anything to sneer at after what looked like being yet another debacle after all.
“Well, keep an eye on them,” Santini told O’Reilly. “The instant they launch a missile or translate out again, start the generator clock.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“In the meantime, I think—”
SLNS Kilkis blew up with all hands.
David K. Brown’s LACs came out of the dark like demons.
They’d begun accelerating at a leisurely—for Shrikes—317.75 gravities the moment they received the codeword. At that rate, less than half their maximum accel, and given their stealth systems, they’d been effectively undetectable at any range much above a million kilometers, but they’d shut their wedges back down after only forty-five minutes. By that time, they’d attained a velocity of 8,143 KPS and traveled 11,358,050 kilometers, to a point almost exactly six million kilometers from Santini’s battlecruisers. It had taken them twelve more minutes to enter attack range, and every bit of TG 1027.3’s attention had been riveted to the maneuvers of the Manticoran heavy cruisers. No one had been looking in exactly the opposite direction for ships they didn’t know existed and couldn’t have seen if they had been looking.
There were only forty-four of them, but they streaked in on the non-evading targets they’d tracked continuously from the moment Brownie deployed them, thanks to the Ghost Rider platforms still monitoring the terminus. They knew exactly where their targets were, and they went for the kill without a shred of mercy.
Sir Martin Lessem watched the FTL plot as his piranhas swarmed their far more massive foes in a feeding frenzy of destruction. The tonnage imbalance was preposterous: 891,000 tons of LACs against 17.3 million tons of Solarian warships, not to mention another thirty million tons of support ships. But tonnage didn’t matter. What mattered was surprise, ferocity, and firepower, and the imbalance in those qualities did not favor the Solarian Navy this bloody day.
Eight thousand kilometers per second was not an enormous closing velocity by the standards of deep-space combat, but it was enough for the LACs to pass completely through their energy weapons envelope in under two minutes. They opened fire at five hundred thousand kilometers; sixty-one seconds later they passed directly through the heart of what had been Helmut Santini’s formation, and those sixty-one seconds were a minute of unmitigated butchery.
In the end, seven of TG 1027.3 and TG 127.4’s fifty starships—all destroyers—managed to cycle their hyper generators and escape before the LACs got around to such insignificant fare. A handful of their less fortunate consorts actually survived, albeit with brutal damage, but only because the LAC skippers had been tasked to immobilize rather than destroy as many Solarians as they could. They tried hard and did their job well, those skippers, but grasers with that kind of power were not precision weapons. Or, rather, they were precision weapons, but it was the precision of a chainsaw, not a scalpel, and their targets were only battlecruisers.
A certain amount of…breakage was unavoidable.
Commodore Lessem watched the carnage, watched the half-dozen Solarian escapees disappear into hyper-space, and heard his flag bridge’s cheers. They rang in his ears, and he made himself smile in acknowledgment, but it was hard.
“Descabello,” he’d called it, and he’d been right.
It was the perfect battle, from his perspective, actually. Not a single Manticoran loss—on this side of the terminus, at least—in return for total victory.
So why did he feel so much more like a butcher than a Queen’s officer?
Maybe Sara Kate could help him answer that question…someday. But someday wasn’t this day, and he raised his voice.
“All right, Randy. That was a beautiful micro-jump, but if it’s all the same to you, I think we’ll just mosey over to the terminus through n-space.” He showed his teeth and chuckled. “I believe we have a few POWs to collect.”
Office of the Director of Research
Gregor Mendel Tower
City of Leonard
Darius System
“Sir, Mr. Chernyshev is here,” the office AI announced.
“Good, Socrates! Send him in,” Daniel Detweiler responded.
Most of his brothers—Everett was the exception—preferred a human receptionist. Partly that was because a human staffer was a prestige symbol, even on Mesa, but Daniel was willing to admit it wasn’t just social snobbishness on their part. Like their father, Albrecht, they valued the intuitive and emotional feedback of a human interface while interacting with the other humans with whom they dealt on a day-to-day basis. Even the best AI wasn’t as good a…focusing lens as a highly intelligent, trained, experienced, genuinely self-aware human being. The “highly intelligent” bit was the most important, of course, and Daniel had to agree that it worked for them. But he strongly suspected that the real reason it did was that most of them liked people. They were comfortable dealing with them. In fact, they actually enjoyed it. But he and Everett were the technology wonks of the family team, and neither of them was as good with human interrelationships as their siblings.
Daniel often thought that was a bit odd, since he and his brothers—and Albrecht, for that matter—shared exactly the same genes. Despite that, they’d developed different character traits—often strikingly different—as a gift from their parents. Albrecht and Evelina had taken pains to differentiate them from one another as children, and while Daniel hadn’t exactly been groomed from the outset for his present duties, his interests in that direction had been encouraged from a very early age.
He’d personally designed the “brilliant software” which allowed Socrates, his office AI, to simulate self-awareness almost seamlessly. He might have been able to come even closer if he’d been a little better at inter-human interaction himself, but it was still an impressive accomplishment. It was that “almost” bit which dissuaded people like Collin and Benjamin, who had to work so intimately with their human colleagues, from ordering a Socrates of their own, however. Collin had toyed with the notion, since his role as the Mesan Alignment’s chief of intelligence meant he had even more secrets to keep than his other brothers. The notion of telling his “staff” to forget something and knowing it was actually erased from memory was attractive to Collin. By the same token, though, Collin was the Detweiler who most needed to be aware of the human frailties of his subordinates.
The office door opened, and he stood, banishing the familiar train of thought and holding out his hand as Rufino Chernyshev, who had inherited Isabella Bardasano’s duties as Collin’s director of operations walked through it.
“Good morning, Rufino,” he said.
“Good morning, Daniel,” Chernyshev replied. The higher echelons of the Mesan Alignment didn’t go in for a lot of formality. Not that there was any question of who stood where in the hierarchy. In fact, Daniel rather thought it was the clarity with which that was understood which allowed the informality to work so well. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“You indicated a certain urgency,” Daniel responded, pointing at the chairs in one corner of his spacious, high-ceilinged office.
Chernyshev obeyed the silent invitation, and the two of them settled into the almost sinfully comfortable chairs. The entire outer wall of Daniel’s suite was one-way crystoplast, and the view out over the city of Leonard and its ten million inhabitants was breathtaking on a brilliant spring morning.
“Coffee?”
“Please.” Chernyshev nodded. “Black, one sugar.”
“You heard, Socrates?”
“Yes, Sir. It will arrive in one hundred twenty-three seconds.”
“Thank you,” Daniel said. Then arched an eyebrow at Chernyshev as the agent chuckled. “What?”
“Just thinking that your cybernetic friend might have just a bit too much precisionist in his code.”
“Trust me, there’s no such thing as ‘too much precisionist’ in my line of work. I imagine that, like Collin, you need a bit more…looseness. A little more freedom to encourage the synergistic association of thought processes I suppose. Brainstorming’s important for R and D, too, but I think it’s even more essential on that side that information be communicated as precisely and with as little ambiguity as possible.”
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it exactly that way,” Chernyshev said. “Clarity’s important in my line of work, too, but you’re right in at least one sense. Too much clarity means the people I’m talking to or whose reports I’m reading are trying to force the data into a neat—or at least clearly and concisely explainable—model, even if they don’t consciously realize it themselves. And when that happens, the entire data set’s contaminated.”
“That’s because you’re dealing with human beings, and human beings are a naturally chaotic system,” Daniel pointed out. “If you try to control for the chaos, you’re automatically discarding data bits, and the ones you’re discarding may be the ones you most need in the end.”
