Uncompromising honor, p.89
Uncompromising Honor, page 89
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
“No,” Haeckle agreed softly. “No, I suppose not.”
HMS Imperator
Sol System
“Ghost Rider’s giving us good numbers, Your Grace.”
Andrea Jaruwalski crossed to stand beside Honor as she gazed into the master plot. A steady stream of additional icons appeared in it as she watched.
“CIC makes it a total of sixty-two superdreadnoughts and two hundred and six battlecruisers in Ganymede orbit,” the ops officer continued, consulting her memo board. “Sixty-one cruisers, one hundred and seventeen destroyers and other light craft, and at least fifty-two tankers, colliers, and major service craft—a million tons or more each—of one sort or another. Might be a couple more of those on the far side of Ganymede, and we don’t have a hard count on deployed missile pods yet. We won’t have one until the platforms get a lot closer, but we’ve already confirmed over four thousand.”
“I see.”
Honor heard the distant note in her own voice and tasted the burning concern in Jaruwalski’s mind-glow. She knew what caused it. She could taste the same worry in Mercedes Brigham, in George Reynolds, in Harper Brantley and Theophile Kgari. She didn’t have to taste Rafe Cardones’s mind-glow to know it would have been the same.
They were afraid of her, especially after the near destruction of Bethany Ning-ju’s squadron. They were frightened of what she’d become. Even worse, they were frightened for her, and that was the truly terrible thing. Because she wasn’t frightened of who and what she was…and a part of her knew she should be.
Too bad Scotty’s not here, a voice said in the back of her brain, remembering another day on a moon called Blackbird. But then she brushed that memory aside. This was a different time and a different place, and she wanted no reminder of that day staying her hand when the moment came.
She turned her head to look at her communications officer.
“How long till the Hermes buoy is in position, Harper?” that distant soprano asked.
“Another twenty-nine minutes, Your Grace,” Commander Brantley replied. He paused a moment, then added, “They’re trying to contact us by com laser, Ma’am.”
“Are they?” Honor smiled thinly. “I think we’ll just wait till we’ve delivered our other message and don’t have any irritating delays. Besides,” that smile turned even thinner and colder, “it won’t hurt a thing to let them sweat a little before we talk to them, now will it?”
“No, Your Grace. Not one bit,” Brantley said, and an edge of satisfaction glittered in his mind-glow, clear and sharp enough to cut even through his concern for her.
Central Command
NSG Able-One
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
“Still nothing, Ermolai?” Admiral Haeckle asked quietly, and Captain Volodimerov shook his head.
“No, Sir.” Volodimerov had been the Communications watch officer when the intruders translated into n-space. “Lieutenant Watson’s initial challenge went out five minutes after they completed their alpha translations. That’s—” he checked the time “—forty-one minutes. So they could have contacted us twenty-seven minutes ago, and by now they’ve known we’re trying to talk to them for at least twenty-two minutes. Either way, they’ve had time to reply to us if they wanted to.”
Haeckle nodded.
The strangers—they had to be Manties, although they had yet to activate any transponders or identify themselves—were almost exactly nineteen light-minutes from NSG. That was twice the Improved Cataphract’s maximum powered range, and he doubted that that spacing was a coincidence. The Manties must have acquired enough Cataphracts to have an excellent grasp of their maximum accelerations and burn times by now. For that matter, they had to be aware that Cataphract accuracy at that sort of distance ranged all the way up from “not-a-chance-in-hell” to simply “really-piss-poor,” which made it an ideal range from which to open some sort of conversation with no one getting shot on either side.
But if they’d wanted to talk to him, they could have been doing that for almost half an hour now. Of course, there’d be a nineteen-minute transmission delay built into any conversation, but sooner or later they had to say something.
He wished he was going to be happy when they did.
Once upon a time—and not so very long ago, actually—he would have been confident of Naval Station Ganymede’s ability to stand off any attack. Enough superdreadnoughts could undoubtedly have taken or destroyed the station and all its platforms even then, but no one—except the Solarian League Navy—had possessed that many superdreadnoughts. And so, in those innocent days of yore, he would have been much more confident of a happy outcome. Under current circumstances…
He glanced at the time display again. His initial report to Old Earth had gone out even before Volodimerov had challenged the Manties, and System Watch Command’s sensor reports and analyses were automatically relayed to both Naval Station Mars and Old Terra. But, Old Chicago was just over forty-six light-minutes distant at the moment, so Admiral Kingsford would only now be finding out the capital system had been invaded. It would be at least three quarters of an hour before any response from him could get back to Haeckle, and he wondered what that response would be.
Or if there’d be anyone here to receive it.
“What’s our readiness state now, Captain Tsukatani?” he asked.
“We’re closed up at battle stations, Sir,” Franklin Tsukatani, the Central Command duty officer, replied. “All mobile units report Readiness One on weapons and defenses, and most of the destroyers and cruisers have their impellers online and wedges and sidewalls engaged. The superdreadnoughts will be a while yet, on that. All platforms’ Missile Defense is also at Readiness One, and all missile pods have been prepped and brought online.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “We’re as ready as we’re going to be, Sir.”
And you’re no more confident we’re “ready” enough than I am, Haeckle thought. Not that either of them could say any such thing.
“Someone get me a cup of coffee, please,” he said instead, and forced a smile that looked almost—almost—natural. “Looks like we may be waiting for a while.”
HMS Imperator
Sol System
“The Hermes buoy’s in position, Your Grace,” Andrea Jaruwalski said, and Honor glanced at the operations officer.
She’d often wondered what Hamish—a stab of exquisite pain went through her with that name—had felt during his attack on DuQuesne Base in Operation Buttercup. This wasn’t the same, of course, and in more than one way. She doubted he’d ever truly hated even the Peeps—or any other enemy of the Star Kingdom, for that matter. Not with a deep, visceral, ravening need to wreak death and destruction that burned like liquid oxygen. Not him.
But she wasn’t him.
“Launch,” she said softly, and turned back to the plot.
Central Command
NSG Able-One
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
“Missile launch! Multiple missile launches!” Lieutenant Enwright McGill announced sharply.
Commodore Benjamin Schalken turned quickly toward the announcement. He and his System Watch Command personnel had been watching the Manties for over an hour now. The tension of that long wait had been more excruciating than anything he’d ever endured. The passing seconds had become a long, drawn out water torture that he’d known had to be the worst thing that could ever happen to him.
Now, as he crossed to McGill’s shoulder, looked down at the lieutenant’s display, he discovered he’d been wrong.
“Two thousand-plus incoming!” McGill announced. “Initial velocity twelve hundred KPS, accelerating at four-five-one KPS squared!”
Schalken put a hand on his shoulder and watched the vectors reach out across the display for Ganymede.
“Return fire, Sir?” Captain Tsukatani asked, and Haeckle nodded.
“You may engage, Captain,” he said formally. “Fire Plan Agincourt.”
Tsukatani looked at him for a moment. Then his mouth tightened and he nodded.
“Yes, Sir. Fire Plan Agincourt.”
He turned away, giving orders, and fifteen seconds later 120,000 Improved Cataphract pods belched 720,000 missiles at the Manties.
Haeckle watched their icons streak across the plot and looked at Pataloeshti.
The chief of staff looked back, then gave him a small shrug.
Most of their fire plans had envisioned using their pods in much smaller numbers, in carefully planned and metered salvos. Agincourt did not. Agincourt was an all-or-nothing throw of the dice designed to put the maximum possible weight of fire—all the Cataphracts Ganymede possessed—into space in a single enormous wave. They couldn’t possibly manage all the birds of an Agincourt launch, even with all of NSG’s enormous telemetry capability, and he wasn’t surprised Tsukatani wasn’t happy to burn them all in a single spasm. But the Cataphracts were all they had, and they had to get them off before the incoming fire ripped them to pieces still in their pods.
Seven hundred and twenty thousand missiles—the next best thing to three-quarters of a million of them, over seven thousand per target—represented a terrifying weight of metal. Yet the truth was that neither he nor Pataloeshti truly expected them to accomplish much. Targeting would have been…questionable at nineteen light-minutes under any circumstances, the range was far too great for any control link, and given the reported efficacy of Manty EW and missile-defense systems, “questionable” was probably about to become “futile.” Which didn’t even consider the fact that the Manties were outside even Jupiter’s hyper-limit.
But it wasn’t like he had a choice. Their own launch had made that much abundantly clear. And so did the com link’s total, icy silence.
They didn’t even try to talk to us, he thought bleakly. Not a word. They just came in, blew Ning-ju’s squadron to bits, and then sat there for a damned hour, letting us sweat. And the whole time, they were planning on this.
Maridors Haeckle was one of the Solarian officers who’d never bought the official line about the Mesa Atrocity. He’d met several Manticoran officers, including Admiral James Webster, the assassinated Manticoran ambassador to the League, and none of them had been homicidal maniacs. He didn’t know what had happened in Mesa, but he’d been certain he knew what hadn’t happened, because it had been impossible to imagine those officers deliberately slaughtering millions of civilians.
Now he found himself wondering if he’d been wrong…and what was about to happen to the star system of mankind’s birth if he had.
The Mark 23s raced away from Grand Fleet, accelerating at a steady 46,000 gravities. Six minutes later, still more than 312,000,000 kilometers short of Naval Station Ganymede, their impellers shut down and they drove ballistically onward at fifty-five percent of light-speed.
“If ONI’s current estimate of Manty missile performance is accurate—and it would be nice if it finally was, given the price Admiral Capriotti paid to get us the numbers—they should light off again in about twenty-eight minutes, Sir,” Captain Tsukatani said quietly, and Haeckle nodded.
Their own Cataphracts would take longer. Assuming, as Tsukatani said, that ONI’s numbers were finally accurate, the Manties’ total time-of-flight at nineteen light-minutes would be on the order of thirty-seven minutes. The Cataphracts’ first-stage impellers would burn out sooner and at a lower velocity, which meant their ballistic phase would be 56,000,000 kilometers longer than the incoming birds and that they’d require almost twice as long to cover it: fifty-five minutes as opposed to the Manties’ twenty-eight.
Which meant that even though they’d fired within twenty seconds of one another, the Manties’ laser heads would reach Ganymede almost twenty-one minutes before his Cataphracts could reach attack range of them.
Central Command Center
Admiralty Building
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
“What do you make of all this, Sir?”
Willis Jennings spoke softly, pitching his voice too low to be overheard even in the Central Command Center buried eighty floors beneath the Admiralty Building. CCC was dimly lit, as always, and had the hush associated in Jennings’s experience only with churches and military command centers in the midst of crisis.
“If you’d asked me that three days ago, I might not have been as worried as I am now,” Winston Kingsford responded equally softly to his chief of staff’s question. “I might’ve been surprised, even after Fabius, given how hard they’ve tried to convince everyone we’re the aggressors, and I probably would’ve figured they intended to trash Ganymede as a reprisal for what we tried to do to Ivaldi. Of course, one reason I would’ve been surprised if they’d tried anything more ambitious is that I would’ve believed that bastard Gweon’s estimate on how ‘short of ammunition’ they were.”
Jennings grunted. Kingsford and Gaddis had come up with a crude but simple technique for testing loyalties. The CNO had called Jennings in, and Gaddis and Okiku had “arrested him,” exactly as they’d “arrested Gweon.” Instead of dropping dead, Jennings had been coldly furious at having been accused of treason, at which point Kingsford had explained what was actually happening. He’d made no effort to hide how glad he’d been to confirm his chief of staff’s loyalty—not simply to the League, but to him—and they’d set out to clear as many other senior officers as they could. Finding excuses to get them into Kingsford’s office—or somewhere else where they could be “arrested” without any witnesses—wasn’t easy, and they’d just about run out of pretexts.
But at least they’d managed to test twenty-six of them, so far…and five of them had reacted exactly the way Gweon had.
That was a frightening percentage, but as Colonel Okiku had pointed out, they were beginning with officers in the positions which would have been most valuable to the Other Guys. Under the circumstances, it was only to be expected that the other side would have concentrated its efforts on putting its own people into them, which undoubtedly explained why the percentage had been so high.
Kingsford didn’t want to think about how the Other Guys would react when they noticed their people inside the Admiralty’s upper echelons were disappearing, and if he was honest, he’d also been more than a little shaken by how efficiently Gaddis and Lieutenant Colonel Weng had made the bodies in question do that disappearing. It made him wonder where—and why—they’d learned to conceal corpses so proficiently.
Not even they could keep someone on the other side from noticing the sudden, unprecedented rate of absenteeism eventually, however. They could, however, hope that each of the recently deceased had been assigned to his or her own unique controller as a security measure. That was the way Kingsford would have done it, anyway, especially for moles in such critical positions, assuming he’d had enough controls to make it work. And if they had, that might mean no one on the other side was in a position to realize how many of their agents had just gone missing. Each control would realize his mole had gone dark; he just wouldn’t realize so many others had done the same thing, which would mean they probably had more time in hand than he was afraid they did. Relying on that could have unfortunate consequences, however.
Still, if Weng Zhing-hwan and Lupe Blanton were correct, they should have at least a brief bubble before the Other Guys could change strategies in response even if they’d already noticed their vanishing moles. As Blanton had pointed out, decision-making and communication loops were the Achilles’ heel of any interstellar conspiracy. So, logically, it should take the other side’s leadership quite some time—presumably, several weeks, at least—to find out they’d lost track of Gweon and his fellows and do something about it.
Unfortunately, Kingsford rather thought Gaddis and Daud al-Fanudahi had made a lot of sense when they’d pointed out in reply that whoever the Other Guys were, they’d been running their interstellar conspiracy for a long time. It was entirely possible they’d learned from experience that successful dinosaurs needed secondary brains at frequent intervals and built in contingency plans at the local level. Whether or not those plans had ever visualized the possibility of having their network rolled up from the top down was another question. No doubt it would have been an entertaining one to debate over a good bottle of whiskey, had it been a purely theoretical possibility.
Under the circumstances, he’d been anything but entertained by the possibility.
And now this.
“If al-Fanudahi and Teague’s worst-case scenario for what happened in Beowulf after we left applies, though,” he continued, “I don’t think they’re likely to settle for hitting Ganymede.”
“Maybe not, Sir. But Ganymede’s not exactly naked, you know. And if they want more than Ganymede, they’ll have to come inside the limit. When they do, their options decrease. They won’t be able to hyper out of harm’s way, and we’ve got a hell of a lot more Cataphracts covering the inner system than Haeckle has out at NSG.”
“Do they really have to come inside?” Kingsford asked softly.
Jennings raised his eyebrows, and the CNO snorted.
“Capriotti didn’t need to cross the limit in Fabius,” he pointed out. “He only did it to divert their attention from the Hastas, and everything we’ve seen suggests their fire control is even better than Hasta’s. Not as stealthy, no, but considerably more capable when it comes to actually hitting things. So what if they’re perfectly prepared to sit outside the limit and just blaze away at the inner system?”
