Toll of Honor, page 44
part #15 of Honor Harrington Series
And just to fill Thomas Caparelli’s cup to overflowing, entirely too much of the home system’s skilled labor force was tied down in a massive expansion of the Navy’s shipyards and repair facilities. Once those new yards were online—and the training programs had spun up—they’d solve virtually all of his current problems. Unfortunately, bringing them online could only make his current problems vastly worse in the short term. And, of course, he could count on the Peeps to do everything they could to increase their building programs, as well. None of their yards were as efficient as Manticore’s. Best estimate was that the Star Kingdom had at least a twenty-percent edge in building speeds, and probably more. But the People’s Republic had almost twice as many yards, and no one knew how rapidly—or how far—they could expand them. So it was highly probable their production rates would stay ahead of Manticore’s even after the new crop of yards were completed.
All of which made White Haven’s conclusions about these “people’s commissioners” the Committee of Public Safety had introduced even more worrisome.
“We already knew Pierre was ruthless as hell,” he said out loud. “That being the case, I guess we really shouldn’t be too surprised by this new wrinkle.”
“In retrospect, it was inevitable,” Givens agreed. “Whatever they may say about ‘the people’s will’ or any ‘Legislaturalist coup attempts,’ their Committee of Public Safety’s a product of revolution and murder, not any sort of constitutional or representative political process. It has to be short on legitimacy, even in the eyes of some of its supporters, and who’s most likely to do something about—likely to be able to do something about—restoring the ‘legitimate’ regime?”
She paused rhetorically, then shrugged.
“The military, that’s who,” she said, answering her own question. “And if what we think happened behind the scenes really happened, the military—and especially the People’s Navy—were the ones most likely to figure out Parnell and the Octagon didn’t have a damned thing to do with what happened to Harris and his Cabinet. So the senior officers, the ones most likely to want to restore the previous system, had to go. And that meant bringing up inexperienced, junior officers, a lot of whom were going to be in over their heads . . . and know they were. So how to encourage them to do their jobs or die trying while simultaneously discouraging any thoughts about regime change? Answer—first, create this new ‘State Security’ abortion to smash any potential recidivist collusion between the old intelligence and security organs, and then, second, recruit ‘commissioners’ to ride herd on their brand-new commodores and admirals. And because the commissioners will inevitably be so outnumbered by the military types they’re supposed to keep an eye on, you give them a great big spiked club. You give them this . . . doctrine of ‘collective responsibility.’”
Givens’ hazel eyes showed her sick loathing for the concept, and she grimaced. But then she inhaled deeply and sat back in her own chair.
“It’s sick, and it’s disgusting, and I hate the very thought of it,” she said flatly, “but that doesn’t mean it won’t work. At least in the short term. Who in her right mind will risk disobeying orders, even if following them is almost certainly going to get her killed, when her husband, her parents—her children—are all hostages at the mercy of something like this State Security? They may not be experienced, and there’s no way they could be up to our people’s level of training, but they’re damned well going to fight. And they’re going to fight hard.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, too,” Caparelli said heavily. “And if you see that, and I see that, and a smart pain-in-the-ass like White Haven sees that, I doubt we’re all wrong.” He shook his head, his expression disgusted. “You and I have both beaten the same dead horse hard enough, but—God, I wish we could’ve hit these people even six months earlier!”
“It wasn’t our idea, Sir. Doesn’t make it feel any better or hurt any less, but it’s not like we didn’t tell anyone who’d listen what was coming.”
“You ever hear the story of a lady named Cassandra?” Caparelli asked dryly, and Givens barked a laugh.
“All right.” Caparelli let his chair come fully upright and planted his forearms on his desk. “White Haven’s also right that we’ve got to get the Peep wall-of-battle to come out and fight before they finish training up all these new officers of theirs. In fact, I think he’s also right that the reason they aren’t coming out—yet, at least—is that someone back in Nouveau Paris has figured out how badly they need as much training time as they can get before they have to face us. They’re working on that—hard—and that’s the very reason we need to prune them back and keep them pruned back. Every additional month we give them will only cost us more dead and wounded in the end.”
Givens nodded somberly, although even with Manticore’s tech advantages, taking the war to someone who outnumbered the RMN so heavily was not a thought to induce a night of sound sleep.
“I think Sixth Fleet has to remain our main hammer,” Caparelli continued. “White Haven’s right that if we keep grinding away, keep eroding their prewar base structure, sooner or later they’ll have to come out and fight. They can’t just let us keep picking them off, if only because of how catastrophic that’ll be for their people’s morale, commissioners or no commissioners. So he’s got the ball for now, and we have to trust him to take it downfield. But we’ve got to keep the center and fullbacks off of him while he does it. That means we need to reinforce Kuzak, and we probably need to pry another battle squadron or so loose for Hemphill down on the southern lobe, too. But all of that means coming up with the ships somewhere, and I only see one place.”
“Sir, we have too many pickets of our own spread around to—”
“I know.” Caparelli waved a hand. “I know! But we’ve got some of the same constraints the Peeps do. They can’t afford to let us keep shooting bases out from under them—not indefinitely—but we can’t afford to let them get in with a raiding squadron somewhere like Alazon. Not only would it be politically disastrous, but we have a moral responsibility to look out for our allies. So much as you and I would both love to reverse the ‘penny-packet’ tendency, we can’t. And with so many of our lighter wallers tied down doing system security duty, there’s only one other place to look for reinforcements.”
“Admiral Webster will scream bloody murder, Sir.”
“Probably.” Caparelli nodded. “On the other hand, he used to be First Space Lord himself, so he’ll understand when I explain. I’m more worried about the civilians’ reaction to any notion of reducing Home Fleet, actually.”
“Better you than me, Sir!”
“Your selflessness overwhelms me.” Caparelli’s tone was even drier than before. Then he drew a deep breath. “I think that’s everything you and I needed to cover today. But do me a favor and shoot me an annotated copy of White Haven’s report. Include O’Hanlon’s analysis of their officer corps. Better include everything we’ve got on this State Security monstrosity—you may want to make that a separate briefing paper—and see if you can confirm whether or not they really are staffing it with ex-terrorists. I want the most detailed breakdown I can get in hand when I sit down with Baroness Morncreek, and I’ll probably—or, since it’s an intelligence matter, you’ll probably—end up having to brief the Cabinet on it, too.”
“The Cabinet?” Givens seemed less than enthralled by the notion, and he grinned sourly.
“To paraphrase something I heard someone say not so very long ago, ‘better you than me,’ Pat.”
HMS Prince Adrian
Nightingale System
March 3, 1907 PD
“coming up on the firing point, Skipper,” Brian Chen said.
Alistair McKeon nodded and turned his command chair to watch the master plot as Sixth Fleet’s wall-of-battle drove steadily deeper into the Nightingale System. Admiral White Haven’s flagship had crossed the hyper limit almost two hours earlier and, assuming acceleration and deceleration had remained constant, could have entered orbit around Petrel, the system’s inhabited planet, in another three and a half hours. But it hadn’t worked out that way, because this time the defenders hadn’t waited supinely for his attack.
They’d obviously been better prepared than any of Sixth Fleet’s previous targets. In fact, they’d pulled their defending starships out of Petrel orbit sometime between the RMN’s last recon and today’s attack. From the look of things, they must have placed their defending force just over halfway between Petrel and the 21.12 LM Nightingale hyper limit, instead, to buy themselves extra reaction and maneuvering time.
It was clear they’d intended to stay between their base and any attacker, but their positioning had been off. It was easy enough to determine an attacker’s most likely vector, since he’d cross the hyper limit as close to his objective as he could possibly get, yet they’d been out of position for a perfect intercept on a least-time course to Petrel. In one way, that had helped them, though; they’d been outside the cone White Haven’s recon drones had swept, and their stealth systems had been good enough to hide their impeller signatures from Sixth Fleet’s shipboard sensors at extended ranges if they accelerated slowly.
It was also obvious they’d detected Sixth Fleet’s approach earlier than Samson or Mathias had, as well, since their velocity had been well over 10,000 KPS by the time Sixth Fleet detected them, despite an acceleration which couldn’t have been much over sixty or seventy gravities. But they’d also been far enough off the least-time vector Lieutenant Saldaña had plotted that they’d been forced to increase acceleration to something their stealth field could no longer conceal if they wanted to intercept White Haven short of the planet. In fact, the reason they’d finally been detected at all was that they’d gone to three hundred gravities on a heading which would have crossed Sixth Fleet’s track six light-minutes from the hyper limit, and roughly four light-minutes short of the planet.
That hadn’t happened, however, because White Haven had reduced his wall’s acceleration once he’d detected the Peeps’ impeller signatures. He’d also turned away from a least-time course, sheering away from both the planet and the defending starships while he studied the situation.
And some studying had been in order, since they’d encountered not the two superdreadnought squadrons they’d anticipated, but four of them.
It was possible the additional battle squadrons had been there all along and Commodore Breton’s drones had simply missed them when he’d reconned the system, but that was unlikely. Far more probably, White Haven’s suspicion that they’d intended to reinforce Nightingale had been accurate and the newcomers had arrived between Breton’s visit and Sixth Fleet’s attack.
However they’d gotten there, Sixth Fleet suddenly found itself outnumbered four-to-three instead of outnumbering the defenders by three-to-two. Worse, all of the Peeps were superdreadnoughts, whereas sixteen of Sixth Fleet’s twenty-four wallers were dreadnoughts. Admittedly, combat experience indicated Manticoran dreadnoughts were tactically more than equal to a Peep superdreadnought, but it was hard to know how much of that was inherent to the designs and hardware and how much was the result of unequal crew quality.
It looked like Sixth Fleet was about to answer that question, because rather than keep their distance, the Peep defenders—now labeled as Bogey One on Prince Adrian’s plot—seemed intent on forcing an engagement. Rather than taking the opportunity to see if Sixth Fleet’s course change meant White Haven had decided to withdraw, Bogey One had actually increased acceleration. Its units were up to 330 G at this point, right on the eighty percent of military power which represented the People’s Navy’s normal maximum acceleration rate.
Since it was evident the Peeps wanted a fight this time, Sixth Fleet was prepared to give it one, and the missile pods on tow behind its ships offset much of Admiral White Haven’s tonnage disadvantage. He was also outside Bogey One, closer to the hyper limit. Their vectors were converging, but once he fired his initial salvo, jettisoned the empty pods, and was able to resume his own maximum acceleration, he’d be well placed to hold the range open or even break clear back across the hyper limit.
Just at the moment, Alistair McKeon was happy the earl had ordered his screen to stay well clear of the scrum. His wall-of-battle was 29,801,000 kilometers, roughly a light-minute and a half, inside the hyper limit now, and its course change had turned it far enough away from Petrel to cut a chord across the hyper sphere. He’d further reduced acceleration to allow the Peeps to close, but his wall’s velocity relative to the system primary was up to 26,829 KPS. Bogey One’s present velocity was just over 18,000 KPS relative to Petrel, and the range between them had fallen to 14,275,500 kilometers.
If everyone involved maintained course, they would enter powered missile range—well over 10,000,000 kilometers, given their launch geometry—in about thirty seconds. Assuming they went right on maintaining course, their vectors would actually cross, with Sixth Fleet roughly 6,500,000 kilometers ahead of Bogey One, in approximately eleven minutes. Actually, 11.4 minutes at current acceleration rates, but once Sixth Fleet had emptied its pods, its current acceleration rate would climb by almost thirty-five percent.
At the moment, CruRon 33 and the rest of Sixth Fleet’s screen was 7,000,000 kilometers on Sixth Fleet’s starboard quarter, which placed Earl White Haven’s wall almost directly between it and Bogey One. From that position, the screen would be unable to bolster Sixth Fleet’s missile defenses against Bogey One, but these were wallers, not mere battleships. Their missiles were bigger, longer ranged, and carried far heavier laserheads than anything a battleship could cram into its magazines, and cruisers and battlecruisers had no business going toe-to-toe with that weight of metal if they could possibly avoid it. That was what their own navies’ ships-of-the-wall were for, so White Haven had opted to clear the range and get the lighter units safely out of harm’s way.
Now McKeon watched the final seconds tick away.
“Launching . . . now,” Chen announced as thousands upon thousands of missile impeller signatures spawned malignant fireflies across the plot.
Despite the numerical disparity, Sixth Fleet’s three-thousand-plus salvo was almost three times heavier than the Peeps’ opening fire. That much, McKeon had expected. But—
“Skipper!” Chen said. “The Peeps—”
“I see it,” McKeon growled. “Looks like somebody over there’s been studying the tac manual. Can we tell who the lucky prizewinner is?”
“Looks like BatRon Twenty-One,” Chen said, and McKeon nodded unhappily.
Of course it was.
He watched the missiles streak across the display. More salvos followed—one every twenty seconds from the Peeps; one every eleven seconds from Sixth Fleet—and the Peep fire was far more effectively concentrated than anything they’d yet seen.
No, he told himself, not “concentrated;” the word he wanted was “directed.” The doomed Peep battleships in Mathias had concentrated all their fire upon a handful of Sixth Fleet’s ships, pouring in everything they could in the time they had. But this wasn’t the desperate, despairing fire of those outnumbered and outweighed battleships. For the first time, Sixth Fleet faced the concentrated salvos of an even larger wall-of-battle, and as he watched, every bit of it rumbled down upon the superdreadnoughts of Battle Squadron 21—and completely ignored the dreadnoughts of White Haven’s other two battle squadrons. Clearly, they recognized the most valuable prizes.
Sixth Fleet’s initial, enormous salvo went in first. Counter-missiles raced to intercept the incoming birds. Decoys—not as good as their Manticoran counterparts, but still capable systems in properly trained hands—sang their siren songs, seeking to lure the laserheads astray. And as the surviving missiles steadied down on final approach, point-defense lasers stabbed out from the massive superdreadnoughts’ flanks, ripping into them, shredding the wavefront of destruction.
White Haven had spread his fire over the three leading Peep squadrons, yet his salvo was so much larger—over three times the size of Bogey One’s—that he’d actually put more birds on each of his targets. Despite everything Bogey One’s defenses could do, scores of them broke through, ripping and tearing. Energy signatures fluctuated as impeller nodes and active fire control arrays were torn apart. Battle steel hulls shattered, and McKeon knew those bomb-pumped lasers were shattering men and women, as well.
But then it was Bogey One’s turn. Even as Sixth Fleet pounded its enemies, the survivors of the first Havenite salvo broke past its own counter-missiles. It was Sixth Fleet’s laser clusters’ turn to spit coherent light, but the Peeps had chosen their target with malice aforethought. Battle Squadron 8 was too far astern, its point-defense lasers too short-ranged, to engage the incoming missiles. It was all up to BatRon 21 and BatRon 17, and they simply had too few clusters to stop that many missiles. Sheer weight of numbers swamped them, and the green lights of friendly ships flashed the spiteful sparkle of battle damage in Prince Adrian’s plot.
At 7,000,000 kilometers, it took twenty-three seconds for those damage codes to reach McKeon’s display. Twenty-three seconds in which the second Havenite salvo came roaring in upon the same targets.
Of course, the next two Manticoran salvos had gone home in that same interval, he reminded himself, and damage codes sparked and flared about the crimson icons of hostile starships, as well. Those codes represented only the Combat Information Center’s best estimate, which meant they lacked the certainty of the data coming to Prince Adrian directly from Sixth Fleet’s wounded ships. Yet they were based on the data from recon drones barely two thousand kilometers clear of the Peep wall, and the plot was clear enough. Half a dozen of Sixth Fleet’s wallers had been damaged, but most of that damage was relatively light, whereas three times that many Peeps had taken hits. At least two of them were badly damaged, indeed, judging from the way their salvos dwindled as launchers were ripped away, and McKeon waited for them to roll ship and turn away.
