Uncompromising honor, p.37
Uncompromising Honor, page 37
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
Yet two more Manticoran salvos had slammed into TF 1030 while he waited for that confirmation. Those salvos had killed nine more of his own ships, and even as he glared triumphantly at his vanquished foes, eleven more were still inbound.
He looked at the damage sidebar, and his nostrils flared. SLNS Friedland, Charles Martel, Potemkin, Dingyuan, Iéna, Barfleur, Custoza…forty-six of his battlecruisers had been totally destroyed or hulked. Belliqueuse, Ne Tron Menia, and Novgorod had joined Edinorg, Impero, Espana, and Libertad, limping away from the carnage while all but essential damage control personnel evacuated the ships, and six more of their consorts showed varying degrees of damage.
He’d gone into battle with ninety-eight battlecruisers; he was down to forty-four, and the dying wasn’t done yet.
“Finish them off,” he heard himself say flatly, eyes hard and hating on the crippled, broken wrecks of his foes.
A sudden silence enveloped Camperdown’s flag bridge, even deeper and stiller somehow against the staccato background of combat chatter, and Commodore Brigman looked at the vice admiral, his face expressionless.
“Excuse me, Sir?” he said.
“Finish those bastards off,” Hajdu grated. “Now, Commodore Koopman!”
“Yes, Sir!” If there’d been hesitation in Brigman’s voice, there was none in Koopman’s. Her hands raced across her panel, and she jabbed a final button. “Launching now, Sir.”
“Oh my God,” someone said softly, and Megan Petersen’s head snapped up from the visual display where she’d been trying desperately to determine which of Jan Kotouč’s heavy cruisers hadn’t been totally destroyed.
“Skipper,” Lieutenant Berden said, “they’ve just launched again. Estimate sixteen hundred inbound. These are slower—I think they’re the same Cataphracts Filareta had—but the range’s down to five-point-four-four million klicks. I make it one hundred twenty-four seconds.”
Megan inhaled sharply and her eyes darted back to the icons of the Solarian task force. They clung to its winnowed ranks, and shock flared in their depths as she realized Berden was right. The Sollies had fired again. Fired upon ships unable to move or maneuver in any way. Ships fighting frantically to evacuate survivors from shattered compartments and broken hulls. Ships specifically protected by the Deneb Accords…yet another interstellar protocol guaranteed by the Solarian League.
It’s a war crime, she thought. No, it’s another war crime.
The shock in her eyes turned into something else—something cold and deadly—as the missile icons speared out at those helpless targets. Even with Ghost Rider, it was impossible to see life pod transponders or small craft at this range, and even if anyone had gotten off alive, the collateral damage from that many missiles was bound to kill a lot of them.
Oh, Jayson, she thought. Oh, Jayson.
“Make sure we get every bit of this, Guns,” she heard herself say, never looking away from the damaged ships with two more minutes to live. “We’ll need the evidence at the trial.”
Rear Admiral Kotouč opened his eyes and shook his head.
It was a mistake.
Agony lanced through him, focused somewhere below his shoulders but radiating all the way up his spine to the top of his skull. It wasn’t a dull, throbbing agony. This was sharp, brutal, stabbing at him in ragged spasms. His left hand fumbled, trying to find the med panel on the right sleeve of his skinsuit, but his arms didn’t seem to be cooperating.
He blinked, fighting to focus through the waves of pain, and realized he was staring up at the overhead outside Flag Bridge. And he was moving. But how could he be moving? He couldn’t even feel his legs.
Panic bubbled as he realized that was true. Despite that, his brain was starting to function once more, and he blinked again. If he couldn’t walk but he was moving anyway, that could only mean—
He moved his head, craning around to look up past his shoulder. The HUD on the inside of his helmet glared with angry red medical warnings, but he looked past them, ignoring their import, and his eyes narrowed.
Commander Ilkova’s left hand was locked on his skinsuit’s shoulder-mounted purchase point. Her right arm hung at her side, and that entire side of her own skinsuit was seared and blackened as if by fire and splashed with blood. There was a lot of that, but not hers, judging from her movements.
“Others?” he got out.
“We’re it, Sir,” the ops officer replied, and his eyes closed again in a pain not of the flesh.
“What are—?”
“Flag Bridge’s life pods are gone,” she panted, dragging him down the passage in starbursts of excruciating pain. “So’s the lift.”
He frowned, trying to think through the sea of anguish. If the flag bridge’s pods were crippled and the lift was out, then she must be…
“CIC?”
“Yes, Sir.”
He shook his head. The Combat Information Center was as deeply buried as Flag Bridge. In fact, it was one deck farther down. It was also the only other compartment Ilkova could hope to reach that was fitted with the armored shafts through which a life pod could be launched. But getting there through this—the passage was clearly open to vacuum, judging by the thin haze of smoke racing along the overhead towards the hungry rents in Phantom’s hull, and God only knew what other damage there might be—would have been hard enough for someone who wasn’t encumbered and didn’t have a broken arm. Trying to drag him that far with only one working arm…
“Leave me,” he got out through the ragged bursts of pain.
“No, Sir,” she said flatly.
“Leave me!” he repeated. “Go see if…there’s anyone left…in CIC. If there is…you can…send back…a rescue party.”
“No, Sir.” Her voice was even flatter.
“I—”
“Attention all hands!”
Another voice drowned his out, blaring from the all-hands circuit. He recognized Tonová and felt a stir of surprise that Phantom’s captain was still alive. But the surprise vanished into something else an instant later.
“They’ve launched again,” Tonová said harshly. “We’ve got two minutes. Abandon ship. Everyone who can, abandon now!”
Those bastards. Oh, those bastards! We’re done, can’t they see that?
Of course they could, he realized. They just didn’t give a damn.
“Leave me!” he snapped again. “You heard…Captain Tonová! Get…out now!”
“No, Sir,” Ilkova grated through clenched teeth, yanking harder, hauling him along the air-bleeding passage at a faster rate.
“God damn it…that’s…an order!” He twisted his shoulders, despite the agony in his damaged spine, trying to wrench out of her grasp.
“All due respect,” she panted, “no.”
“Let me go!”
“Not going to happen.” Her voice was hammered iron. “Now stop squirming, damn it! You’re slowing us down.”
“But—”
“Sir, will you just shut the hell up?”
Hajdu Győző watched Daphne Koopman’s missiles race outward, then turned his attention to the next incoming salvo, grimly satisfied by what was about to happen to the bastards who’d murdered his task force. And when they were gone, he’d deal with the rest of the traitors in this damnable star system! If they’d thought—
“Incoming!” someone screamed.
Thirteen seconds later, Hajdu Győző and SLNS Camperdown ceased to exist.
And eighty-five seconds after that, so did HMS Phantom and HMS Cinqueda.
SLNS Lepanto
Hypatia System
It was very quiet on SLNS Lepanto’s flag bridge. The quiet of shock and stunned, absolute disbelief, Commodore Sandra Haskell thought within the cocoon of her own numbed incomprehension. As chief of staff for Battle Cruiser Squadron 4012, she’d had the best possible perspective, and she still couldn’t understand, couldn’t even start to process, what had just happened.
The entire engagement had lasted less than eight minutes. How could that be possible? How could TF 1030 have begun it with ninety-eight battlecruisers, forty cruisers, and thirty-two destroyers and have only ninety-three warships left—total—less than eight minutes later?
Yet it had happened…and the task force’s current effective strength was even lower than that: twenty-nine destroyers, thirty-six cruisers…and eleven battlecruisers. She was pretty sure the four cruisers and three destroyers they’d lost had been accidents. The Manties’ concentration on the battlecruisers had been obvious, crushing, and lethal. All of the combat effective survivors—aside from SLNS Hamidieh and Lepanto herself—had taken at least some damage. Technically, there were another seventeen whose hulks might have been repairable, if there’d been some way to get them home. There wasn’t. Which meant they were effectively as dead as Troubadour, Stevedore, and Merchant Mart.
And as Vice Admiral Hajdu Győző.
That thought took Haskell’s eyes away from the tactical display to the tall, powerfully built man in the command chair at the center of the flag bridge. Rear Admiral Martin Gogunov, CO, BatCruRon 4012. Aside from Lepanto, only two of Gogunov’s original eight units survived: SLNS Queen and SLNS Revanche.
And despite its sixty percent loss rate, Gogunov’s squadron had the most survivors of any of TF 1030’s original thirteen battlecruiser squadrons.
Nine ships, Haskell thought, looking at the man who had just inherited what remained of Vice Admiral Hajdu’s task force. They did it to us with nine ships.
She gave herself a mental shake. Yes, the Manties had done it with only nine ships, but those deadly eight minutes had been time enough for them to put nineteen salvos into space before TF 1030’s enormous launch took them off the board. Seventy-five hundred missiles was barely six percent of the fire the Manties had taken, which made the loss ratio even more grotesquely unbalanced, but Haskell had come up as a tactical officer. As she’d watched those missiles, watched their ECM, those massive jammers and incredible decoy penaids, watched their attack profiles shift and adjust, she’d realized there truly had to be an FTL component to the Manties’ fire control. It was the only way they could have adapted that quickly or maintained their telemetry links so long, and if she’d needed any proof, there was what had happened to the final incoming salvos. There’d been no one left to provide them with additional updates, and their accuracy and—especially—target selection had dropped markedly, despite the fact that TF 1030’s missile-defense net had been torn to shreds by the earlier launches.
So when you come down to it, it’s not really surprising somebody with that kind of range, that kind of EW advantage, and FTL telemetry links kicked the living shit out of us. Especially not when you add complete and total surprise into the equation.
Despite her shock, despite her chill awareness of what the technology revealed here portended, despite even the loss of at least a hundred and fifty thousand more SLN lives, she felt an unwilling admiration for those Manties. She hated what Vice Admiral Hajdu had done to any survivors aboard their ships, and she regretted it even more deeply as she contemplated the sheer courage it must have taken for just nine ships, however great their tactical advantage, to take on a hundred and seventy.
They couldn’t have known how badly they’d hurt us, not really. They probably expected our losses to be heavy, but they couldn’t have expected them to be this heavy. And whatever they thought they might do to us, they damned well knew they weren’t going home.
And it wasn’t even their star system.
She didn’t like to contemplate what that might mean for the future, either. Nor did she care for the “Grand Alliance’s” inevitable reaction to TF 1030’s violation of the Deneb Accords. The Accords were pretty damn specific about not targeting obviously disabled ships while they evacuated their crews. It happened sometimes, of course. Often, it simply wasn’t possible to abort an attack on a ship, however disabled it might have been, especially with missiles. But that wasn’t what had happened here. The salvo which had finished off the Manty cripples had been launched only after it was obvious they’d been totally incapacitated.
There’ll be hell to pay when the Manties and their friends find out about this one, she reflected grimly. And there should be. There damned well should be. There’s a reason the Deneb Accords were written in the first place, and—
“I want updated ammunition totals soonest.” Gogunov’s voice was hard, flat, and his eyes were bleak. “I know most of our survivors’ve taken damage. Now that we’ve lost the pods, I need to know who’s got what when we reassign the targets.”
Haskell twitched inside. Surely he didn’t mean—?
“We’re going to proceed with Buccaneer, Sir?” she asked.
“Of course we are!” Gogunov’s surprise was obvious, and he glared at her. “It’s why we came! Vice Admiral Hajdu may be gone, but that doesn’t change the mission!”
“Oh, of course not, Sir!” Haskell said quickly. “We’ll get those numbers for you immediately.” She nodded at Commander Gregory Ham, Gogunov’s operations officer, and Ham begin punching queries into his panel.
“Good.” Gogunov’s expression relaxed…some, and he turned to Captain Alexis Choi, his communications officer. “While Greg’s getting the numbers, raise Rear Admiral Yountz. Inform him he’s now the Task Force second in command. Tell him I’m assigning him operational control of our cruisers and destroyers and that I want him to take personal command of search-and-rescue.”
“Yes, Sir,” Choi said quickly. She glanced at Haskell from the corner of one eye and began entering the code for SLNS Yashima, Rear Admiral Thomas Yountz’s heavy cruiser flagship.
Haskell knew why Choi had darted that glance in her direction. If Gogunov was handing off responsibility for SAR with that many Solarian life pods and that many wrecked Solarian battlecruisers on his hands, it could only be because he expected to be too busy with something else to oversee it himself. And that meant—
“Sir,” Commodore Ham reported, “the numbers are preliminary, but it looks like about two thousand birds aboard the battlecruisers. You were right about the damage. We’ve lost at least one magazine each aboard five of the ships that are still combat effective. I’ll need at least five or six minutes to sort out a new queue for Buccaneer.”
“Well, two thousand should be enough to do the job,” Gogunov said. “Go ahead and start setting it up now.”
“Sir,” Haskell asked in a careful tone, “what timing do you want on the launch?”
“What timing do you think I want?” Gogunov snapped. “The one Admiral Hajdu gave them!”
Haskell swallowed hard. She hadn’t liked it when Hajdu Győző refused to extend his final time limit for the Hypatians by one additional second. She didn’t care what their mission orders said; as far as she was concerned, an Eridani Edict violation was an Eridani Edict violation, whoever committed it and no matter who authorized it.
And she’d just discovered she liked Hajdu’s decision even less now that its execution had fallen on BatCruRon 4012 and its staff.
On Sandra Haskell.
“Sir, I think we might want to consider—”
“Admiral Hajdu and Ms. Yang-O’Grady—both of whom, I remind you, are now dead, Commodore—did all the considering we’re going to do,” Gogunov said flatly, his eyes harder than ever. “The fact that those Manty bastards just ambushed us to try to stop us only makes it more important to prove they didn’t. That they couldn’t.”
Haskell sat very still while her mind raced like a hamster in an exercise wheel trying to find some way, some argument, that might change his mind.
The problem was, she didn’t think one existed.
She’d never met a flag officer she respected more than Martin Gogunov. She’d been his chief of staff for almost five T-years, and his ops officer for two T-years before that, and she’d learned a lot from him over that time. But she also knew the Martin Gogunov she’d served for so long had become a driven man even before what had just happened to the task force.
His was a family with a proud naval tradition, and he, his sister, and all three of his brothers had graduated from the Academy and gone straight to service with the Fleet. Commodore Marguerite Gogunov, his sister, and Captain Allen Gogunov, his next-youngest brother, were both Frontier Fleet. His older brother, Vice Admiral Marshall Gogunov had gone into Battle Fleet…and died with Sandra Crandall in the Battle of Spindle. And she knew Gogunov had received confirmation just before they translated out for Hypatia that Captain Scott Gogunov, the baby of the family and another Battle Fleet officer, had been killed under Massimo Filareta at Manticore.
A lot of Solarian League Navy officers had lost family and close friends at Spindle and Manticore. Total casualties might be less than a statistical blip compared to the incredible total number of Solarian citizens, but for all its enormous size, the SLN was one of the smallest military organizations in history as a percentage of the population of the polity it served. Its peacetime strength was barely 155,000,000, and that included its entire uniformed dirtside establishment. In theory, that strength would more than triple on a wartime footing when the Reserve was fully mobilized, but no one was talking about mobilizing all those superdreadnoughts now, given their total obsolescence. The Navy’s pre-Spindle peacetime shipboard strength—the men and women actually fighting this war so far—had been only 27,400,000, and losses to date in KIA, WIA, and POWs, not counting today’s debacle, were already over five million. That was almost twenty percent of its total space-going strength, and despite its size, it was a tight-knit community, with many families like the Gogunovs—and the Haskells, for that matter—who’d served in the Navy for T-centuries. So, yes, a lot of Solarian officers were hurting, but few of them had been hit as hard as Martin Gogunov.
And even fewer were in a position to act upon their grief and hatred.
“Sir, I have a com request from President Vangelis.” Captain Choi’s tone was even more carefully expressionless than Haskell’s had been.
