Uncompromising honor, p.90
Uncompromising Honor, page 90
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
“Sir, there are over a billion people spread between the inner-system habitats!” Jennings protested.
“And how many million were spread between the Beowulf habitats?” Kingsford shook his head. “I think we’d better all pray they’re more concerned about avoiding collateral deaths than we were.”
Central Command
NSG Able-One
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
“Missile activation!” Lieutenant McGill sang out, shattering the intense silence. “Enemy missiles have reactivated! Range three-six-point-seven-five million kilometers! Time to attack range, one hundred eighty seconds!”
Right on schedule, Haeckle thought grimly. So at least ONI did finally get something right. Not that it’s going to do us any good.
He checked the seals on his skinsuit with his right hand as he stood beside Pataloeshti, helmet tucked in the crook of his left elbow. Part of him was tempted to go ahead and helmet up, but that wasn’t the sort of example an admiral was supposed to set. Besides, there wasn’t much point to it. While the big compartment was buried deep at the heart of NSG Able-One, Ganymede Station’s main platform, that was unlikely to be sufficient protection against laser heads as powerful as the Manties and their friends threw around. Putting on his helmet wouldn’t help a lot if Central Command took a direct hit of that magnitude. In the event that they took damage but were fortunate enough not to be hit directly—and despite its size, Central Command was a relatively small target, compared to the rest of the platform—there ought to be time to don his helmet before it depressurized completely.
It was amazing how long three minutes could be, he thought, watching the plot’s icons streak towards them. He felt himself tightening internally, his stomach clenching, his leg muscles trying to quiver with the ancient fight-or-flight reaction. But neither fight nor flight was an option, so he simply stood there, waiting.
Counter-missiles began to launch, and Naval Station Ganymede was no mere task force, or even a fleet. It had always been liberally provided with counter-missile launchers, and their numbers had been vastly increased as the SLN began—dimly—to recognize the nature of the threat it faced. Every one of the hundreds of warships in Ganymede orbit vomited counter fire, as well, and literally thousands of counter-missiles streaked to meet the Mark 23s.
But this was an old game for the Grand Alliance, and no other navy in the galaxy could match their missile crews’ expertise. Dazzlers flared all along that wavefront of missiles, and Dragon’s Teeth sprang to life, filling space with false targets while the real threats bored in behind the Dazzlers.
There were twenty-seven hundred missiles in Grand Fleet’s launch. Honor could have fired many times that many, but she’d elected to use only three hundred of her Mark 17 flatpack pods. She was, after all, making a point.
Three hundred of those missiles were Mark 23-Es, following behind their more lethal brethren with no warheads of their own. Of the other twenty-four hundred, Andrea Jaruwalski had dedicated a full quarter as EW and penaid platforms. So there were a total of “only” eighteen hundred actual shipkillers in that tide of death.
Naval Station Ganymede fired well over two hundred thousand counter-missiles at them, backed by more than four thousand point defense clusters, most far larger than any mobile structure mounted. They were more powerful, there were more of them, and their software had been continuously tweaked since the Battle of New Tuscany.
And they still weren’t good enough.
The defenders killed 811 Mark 23s, but 260 of them were penetration platforms. In the end, 1,249 of the most powerful laser heads ever deployed punched straight through the very best the Solarian League Navy could throw at them. They drove in on their targets and then, in one perfectly synchronized instant, they detonated.
HMS Imperator
Sol System
“Ghost Rider confirms detonation,” Andrea Jaruwalski announced. “It looks good, overall, Your Grace, but it’ll be a few minutes before the detailed evaluation comes in.”
“Good,” Honor said. “Time to attack for their birds?”
“Nineteen minutes, Your Grace.”
“Rafe,” Honor looked at the bulkhead screen tied into Imperator’s command deck, “set the translation clock for seventeen and a half minutes from now.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Central Command
NSG Able-One
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
He was still alive.
That was Maridors Haeckle’s first incredulous thought. He was alive.
He felt himself inhale, heard the same sounds of surprise sweeping through the rest of Central Command, and turned disbelievingly to his chief of staff.
Pataloeshti was still staring at the plot, trying to understand why they were alive, and Haeckle gave himself a shake.
“Status,” he heard someone else say, using his voice.
“We’re—” Captain Tsukatani began, then stopped. He bent over his own terminal, tapping keys, then straightened and turned to face Haeckle.
“Admiral,” he said very carefully, “the main platforms didn’t take a single hit. We lost two destroyers and a heavy cruiser, but I think that was a mistake in their targeting.”
“A mistake?” Pataloeshti repeated.
“Yes, Sir—a mistake. They didn’t hit any of our other active ships, and with all those battlecruisers and superdreadnoughts in orbit, I don’t see how they could have missed them all unless they’d tried really hard.”
“But, in that case, what—?”
“It looks like they took out at least ninety percent of the superdreadnoughts in Reserve One.”
“The Reserve?” This time it was Haeckle, and Tsukatani nodded.
“They have to have done it on purpose, Sir. Not only that, they punched their birds right through our defensive envelope to reach them, and they didn’t have to do that. They brought them into range of our CMs and every one of our platforms’ point defense clusters, and with their laserheads’ standoff range against targets without even sidewalls, they could’ve stayed entirely out of our counter-missile envelope, far less laser range, if they’d wanted to.”
“A message,” Haeckle said softly. “They were sending a message.”
His brain raced. He hadn’t even thought about the thousands of obsolescent superdreadnoughts parked in the twenty-four, equidistantly spaced clusters riding Jupiter orbit with Ganymede. Why should he have? If the Manties had proved one thing, it was that those pre-pod fossils were deathtraps waiting to happen. They knew that even better than the SLN, so why in God’s name should they have even considered wasting missile fire on ships which were already inevitably destined for the breakers?
Because it let them prove that they could have killed all of our active ships just as easily. The realization went through him like a dagger of ice. It was a demonstration of just how defenseless we are. And proof that they can snuff out NSG anytime they damned well feel like it.
He stood there, staring at Tsukatani, then sucked in a sudden breath.
“Abort the attack!” he snapped.
Tsukatani blinked, then darted a look at the tactical board.
“We can’t, Sir,” he said. “We’re seventeen and a half minutes from attack range.”
Haeckle swallowed hard. It would have taken nineteen minutes for the self-destruct command to catch up with the Cataphracts. And that meant the Manties were going to think he’d missed their message.
He turned sickly back to the plot, watching the icons.
HMS Imperator
Sol System
“One hundred seconds to attack range, Your Grace.”
Captain Jaruwalski seemed remarkably calm about it.
“Translation in seventy-five seconds,” Rafe Cardones announced from his command deck, and Honor reached up to caress Nimitz’s ears.
Central Command
NSG Able-One
Naval Station Ganymede
Sol System
Solarian League
“Sir, the Manties have translated out!” Tsukatani said sharply, and Haeckle felt himself sag around his bones.
He supposed a true naval officer shouldn’t feel such profound relief when his enemies escaped unscathed. Particularly when they did it so tauntingly, waiting until the last minute to disappear into hyper. It was the equivalent of thumbing their noses in his face, yet he’d never been happier to see something in his entire life.
“Let’s get a transmission off to Admiral Kingsford,” he said. “Append our detailed sensor records.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Haeckle nodded, then crossed to the command chair he’d ignored for the last couple of hours. Pataloeshti followed him, and he racked his helmet on the side of the chair, then leaned back with a sigh.
“I’d just as soon not do that again, Sir,” Pataloeshti said quietly, standing beside him, and Haeckle chuckled harshly.
“It beats hell out of what we might’ve been doing instead,” he pointed out.
“What do you think their next move is, Sir?”
“I suppose that depends on where they jumped to,” Haeckle said. “If they did what I think they did, it won’t be long.”
He smiled thinly and sat back, legs crossed, and waited.
“Hyper footprint!” Lieutenant McGill said sharply. “Many hyper footprints, range approximately seven light-minutes.”
Alarms sounded—quite unnecessarily, after McGill’s announcement—and Haeckle straightened in his chair.
“A little closer than I’d expected, really,” he said as he watched the last of the invaders come over the alpha wall and back into phase with the rest of reality almost exactly twenty-two and a half minutes after they’d left it.
It was a dazzling display of astrogation, he thought—a perfectly aligned micro-jump barely seventeen light-minutes long—that left the attackers still almost three light-minutes outside Jupiter’s hyper-limit. Of course, it would take fifteen or sixteen minutes for their wallers’ generators to cycle and allow them to translate out again, and that meant—in theory—that the Cataphracts still in his warships’ magazines could have reached them well before they could escape again.
Except that he was reasonably confident “escape” was the last thing on their mind.
The icons on the plot changed abruptly as every one of those ships strobed its transponder, and his mouth tightened at the fresh—no doubt intentional—display of contempt for the best the SLN could do. Those transponders would have been homing beacons for any missile he decided to fire at them, but they obviously didn’t care. In fact, it was more than simply not caring. They wanted him to know exactly what they’d brought to the dance, and something with thousands of tiny feet crawled up and down his spine as the hundreds of transponder codes identifying superdreadnoughts of at least four different star nations spangled the plot.
“Sir, we have a com request,” Captain Volodimerov said carefully. “It, ah, seems to be coming from a relay less than ten thousand klicks out.”
“Put it on my display.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Volodimerov nodded to one of his techs. A moment later, Haeckle’s com display came alive with the face of a dark-haired woman in the skinsuit of a Royal Manticoran Navy admiral. He’d never met her, but he would have recognized her from the intelligence files’ imagery even without the cream-and-gray creature glaring into the com from the back of her command chair.
“Good afternoon, Admiral Harrington,” he said.
“You recognize me,” she replied, less than seven seconds later, despite the vast gulf which still lay between them. “Good. That will save some time.”
She had not, he noticed, asked who he was. He wondered if that meant she already knew…or that she simply didn’t care.
“Listen to me carefully,” she continued in a voice which could have been carved from Ganymede’s ice, “because I’m only going to say this once. I am prepared to allow you and your personnel to surrender to the Grand Alliance upon the following terms.
“First, you will immediately evacuate all personnel from all active warships and scuttle them. There will be no exceptions. You may transfer as many of those personnel as you desire and have the capacity for to the transports and support vessels also in Jupiter orbit, and I will permit any such vessels to depart unhindered for the inner system at such time as the last of your warships has been destroyed.
“Second, you will stand ready to be boarded by my Marines, and be aware that any resistance of any type to any of my personnel will be met immediately by the use of lethal force. Under the circumstances, the lives and safety of my personnel are my sole concern; preserving the lives of people stupid enough to threaten those lives and that safety isn’t even on my to-do list. Be certain all of your people understand that, because no warnings will be given.”
Haeckle’s blood ran cold as he suddenly recognized the ferocious hunger in that icy soprano. He didn’t know where it had come from, and it was wildly at odds with the mental picture of her he’d built reading between the lines of media reports and ONI’s analyses. But she meant it, he thought. Her Marines would shoot without warning.
“Third, your personnel will cooperate in transferring control of your platforms’ power, environmental, and engineering systems to my engineering personnel,” she continued. “Fourth, you will surrender to my control—intact and undamaged—every computer and computer file in your possession. And, fifth, your Systems Development Command—and Technodyne Industries—will surrender every prototype and every system under development, undamaged, with complete documentation.”
He swallowed hard. If he gave her what she was demanding, the Manties and their Allies would know everything there was to know about the Solarian League Navy. Everything, from secure communications protocols to the very latest R&D. The consequences of that would be—
“You don’t have to meet my conditions,” she told him. “That decision is up to you. But be advised that if you have not accepted my terms within the next ten minutes, I will open fire upon you and no further offer of surrender will be accepted.”
The blood ran from his face. She couldn’t mean that! She was talking about a massacre!
“And be further advised,” she told him very, very softly, “that if you accept my terms and then violate them in any way whatsoever, I will withdraw my personnel from your platforms and destroy every…single…one…of…them.”
The creature on her shoulder bared needle-sharp fangs at him, but, somehow, her smile was far more terrifying.
“I will await your decision…for ten minutes,” she said, and his com display went blank.
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
“And Kingsford says he couldn’t do anything about it?” Malachai Abruzzi demanded. “Not one frigging thing?”
“Haeckle had accepted Harrington’s terms before Kingsford even knew what they were,” Innokentiy Kolokoltsov said flatly. He sat back in his chair, smelling the panic in the palatial conference room, and his expression was grim. “For that matter, he says that even if he’d known and been able to order Haeckle to reject them, he wouldn’t have. Not after her…demonstration.”
And not, he acknowledged to himself, after seeing the record of Harrington’s icy delivery of those terms. Kingsford hadn’t commented directly on that part of his reasoning, but Kolokoltsov had viewed the recording himself, and the way she’d spoken, the look in those almond eyes, had frozen him to the marrow. He’d always thought Abruzzi’s efforts to demonize Honor Alexander-Harrington were ludicrous. His propagandists had picked up on every allegation the People’s Republic of Haven had ever made against her—from Basilisk Station on—to portray her as some out-of-control murderess in their bid to undermine the woman’s towering reputation.
Now he wasn’t so certain they’d been lying, after all. The woman in that com message had wanted Haeckle to reject her terms. To fight.
To give her an excuse.
And that’s who’s just taken out the biggest, most powerful naval base in the entire Solarian League.
Without us so much as scratching her paint.
The thought was terrifying, because at that moment, the woman who’d done that was only fifteen light-minutes from where he and his colleagues sat, and if anything in the galaxy was sure, it was that she’d soon be much closer.
“Well, why isn’t he doing something to kick her arse back out of the system?” Abruzzi said, as if he’d been listening to Kolokoltsov’s thoughts. “Maybe he couldn’t stop the gutless bastard from rolling over for her out at Ganymede, but why the hell is he just sitting on his own arse now?”
“Because going after her on her terms would be a frigging disaster.”
Kolokoltsov’s eyebrows rose in surprise and all eyes turned to Nathan MacArtney as he answered Abruzzi’s question. The permanent senior undersecretary of the interior glared at his usual ally and shook his head with an obvious disgust whose strength, Kolokoltsov was privately confident, owed quite a bit to his own sense of panic.
“Why?” Abruzzi shot back, chin jutting aggressively.
“Because she left less than ten percent of her fleet to hold Ganymede.” MacArtney’s tone was flat. “The other ninety percent—and probably ninety-nine percent of her firepower—is parked two light-minutes outside the hyper-limit. That means she can pop into hyper anytime she wants to—like any time she sees him coming at her. All she has to do is sit there, wait for him to head her direction, and then rip his arse off with those fucking long-range missiles of hers. And he can’t even touch her, because she can translate out before anything he fires at her gets there.”
