Uncompromising Honor, page 82
part #19 of Honor Harrington Series
“And that we weren’t going to lose so many to the bastards’ initial launch, assuming they launch against the inner system at all,” Caddell-Markham agreed grimly. “If the clever buggers have set something up as a follow on strike…”
“The best we can do is the best we can do, Sir. And with your permission, I’ll go see about doing it.”
Planetary Director’s Office
City of Columbia
Beowulf
“Should we try to evacuate, Gabe?” Planetary Director Benton-Ramirez asked, his expression agonized.
“No real point, Chyang,” Caddell-Markham replied from his com screen. “They haven’t launched yet, even assuming Hamish isn’t just being constructively paranoid and the real threat is to the inner system instead of Cassandra. And if they do launch now, there wouldn’t be enough time to evacuate enough people to make any real difference. All we’d do would be to create a panic, and probably get quite a few people trampled to death even if there isn’t a real threat.”
The defense director shrugged. Neither of them commented on the fact that the conference attendees on Beowulf Alpha with him were at the very heart of the massive platform. Anything capable of housing that many million people was enormous, and it had been built in layers, like a vast onion. Despite the best planning possible, that put…kinks into its internal transit systems where lift tubes were truncated at transfer stations. Normally, those kinks were little more than excuses for irritated profanity as traffic stacked up during rush hours, but they could have more serious repercussions. It would have required at least forty-five minutes for anyone in the George Benton Center just to reach the station’s outer hab zones, for example. Nor was it remotely practical to build emergency escape pods that could reach that deep; the necessary access trunking made it simply impossible.
Of course, prior to Hypatia, no one would have expected them to be necessary even if they’d been practical. The sort of accident that could take out something Beowulf Alpha’s size was about as likely as the unannounced arrival of a dinosaur killer, and until the Yawata Strike—and Hypatia—the Eridani Edict had meant no one had worried about sneak attacks on civilian targets like it.
“I don’t like it, and, frankly, I think Hamish probably is being a bit overly paranoid,” Caddell-Markham continued, “but it is what it is. I think Corey’s done just about everything we can do, really.” He bared his teeth briefly. “And whatever happens in the inner system, things are going to get a bit lively in the outer system in about—” he consulted his chrono “—another three minutes.”
SLNS Québec
Task Force 790
Beowulf System
Lyang-tau Rutgers sensed Angelica Helland hovering behind him, but it was only a vague awareness. His attention was centered on the tactical information pouring in from the thick shell of recon platforms he’d deployed. The shells—plural—actually. One hemisphere of drones raced towards Cassandra, sweeping the volume ahead of TF 790, while another sped towards the inner system from TF 790’s original n-space emergence point. Transmission lag had become an issue on the inner-system flight, but the truth was that any data from them was only icing on the cake. Their true function had very little to do with the gathering of tactical information and a great deal to do with misdirection. In fact, the entire Fabius operational plan relied on misdirection, and it seemed to be working well.
Aside from those mysterious grasers. He’d reworked the numbers a dozen times, and Schlegel was right. Rutgers couldn’t prove someone—someone besides the SLN—had been taking out control stations, but the locations were right, and he didn’t like the implications of that at all.
He checked the time again. TF 790 had been in Beowulf space for almost three quarters of an hour. Under the original ops plan, they’d have altered course in another nineteen minutes. Given Admiral Capriotti’s revision, they’d change course in only fourteen, and Rutgers was entirely in favor of the revision. In fact, he’d just—
“Status change!” one of his tracking ratings announced suddenly. “Missile launch—multiple missile launches! Range at launch two-zero-five-point-two million kilometers. Acceleration four-five-one-point-zero-seven-six KPS squared.”
Rutgers’s eyes darted to the tactical plot, and he swallowed hard as CIC’s uncaring computers updated it. Hundreds—thousands—of missile icons raced outward from a launch point one light-minute outside Beowulf’s orbit.
“Sir, they’ve just fired approximately six thousand missiles at us,” he heard his own voice reporting.
“Time-of-flight?” Capriotti asked sharply.
“Sir, this is the longest range we’ve ever seen them launch at. We do know—now—that their birds can incorporate a ballistic phase, just like the Cataphract, but that was from what we think are their cruiser-range missiles. And we still don’t know what the maximum endurance on their missile drives is, even for their cruiser missiles. We don’t have any idea what it might be for their capital missiles, and if this is a system-defense variant we haven’t seen before—”
The ops officer shrugged.
“Assuming they could make the entire run at their present acceleration—and I don’t see how anybody this side of God could pull that off—we’d be looking at sixteen minutes from time of launch. As it is—”
He shrugged again, helplessly, and Capriotti tried not to glare at him. It was scarcely Rutgers’s fault, but that did nothing about the icy fist closing around the admiral’s heart. He sat back in his command chair, looking down at the tactical plot deployed from its base, and his mind raced.
If he’d been in command on the other side, those missiles would have been targeted solely on his battlecruisers, ignoring everything else on his sensors, but would he have concentrated on only some of those battlecruisers, or spread his fire among them all? Spread evenly, that would work out to right on fifteen birds per ship, which wouldn’t have been enough—for most people’s missiles, at any rate—to saturate the individual ships’ missile defense. On the other hand, the SLN had discovered the hard way that no battlecruiser was likely to be combat-capable after more than three or four—at most five—hits from Manticoran capital missiles, so they might not feel the need to completely overpower his missile defense. On the other other hand, even the Manties had to have some doubts about the accuracy of their fire at this range. So at what point did their faith in their systems and their recognition of Murphy’s impartiality intersect? Had they fired this hurricane of missiles at less than all of his battlecruisers in order to get enough concentration for decisive results? Or had they spread their fire evenly? And was this all they had, or had they retained a reserve for follow-up salvos? He certainly wouldn’t have used everything he had in the first launch!
But there was no sign of a second launch—yet, at least. Of course there wasn’t, he thought after an instant. Without FTL control platforms closer to him, they couldn’t coordinate a second salvo tightly in terms of time. Even with FTL sensor platforms right on top of TF 790, any evaluation of the first strike would take over ten minutes to get back to the first strike’s launch point, and without forward-deployed FTL control platforms, it would take several more minutes for any targeting corrections based on that evaluation to catch up with missiles streaking towards him.
Even in a worst-case scenario which assumed they really could maintain this monster acceleration all the way to TF 790, he had sixteen minutes—fourteen, now, he noted almost absently—before the first salvo could reach him. If they were going to fire a second one, they’d probably want to have at least ten or fifteen minutes after that for the first strike evaluation to get back to them and any adjustments to their follow-on missiles’ targeting orders to catch up before they entered attack range. So if they did launch a second wave, the timing on it would probably provide a window on when the first one was likely to arrive.
Which was all very interesting but didn’t solve his immediate problem.
“Execute Breakaway now,” he said.
“Executing Breakaway, aye, Sir!” Rutgers acknowledged, and Capriotti looked up from the tactical plot to find Helland standing beside him.
“Still sixteen minutes to second stage launch, Sir,” she said quietly.
“Understood. But as far as we can tell, they’re busy shooting at us, not anything closer in. And, frankly, by this point, there’s not that much they could do to stop the second stages. In which case, I’m a little more concerned about surviving, and those twelve minutes might just help that happen, don’t you think?”
System Defense HQ
City of Columbia
Beowulf
Beowulf System
“Sir, they’ve altered course!” Dunstan-Meyers announced sharply. “They’re breaking off their run on Cassandra and they’ve increased acceleration to four hundred and sixty-eight gravities!”
“I see it, Cheryl.”
McAvoy crossed the huge, dimly lit chamber to stand beside the ops officer, watching vectors shift and flow as Ghost Rider reported the Sollies’ changing heading, and he frowned as he wondered what the hell they were up to now.
Their initial velocity of six hundred KPS towards Cassandra had increased to 12,236 KPS since their arrival. That meant that, at their initial acceleration, it would have taken them forty-eight minutes just to decelerate to zero and start back the way they’d come. But that wasn’t what they were doing. They’d turned directly out-system, instead, at right angles to their current vector, and they’d started their run from so far out that they were still barely six million kilometers inside the limit. With that acceleration, bending their vector that sharply, they could be back across the wall in barely twenty-seven minutes.
And if all they’re really doing is running the hell away, that’s fine, he thought. Maybe this is a panic reaction. Maybe they didn’t expect to see Apollo coming at them at all and now that it has they’re headed for the high timber. But it’s hard to imagine they could’ve been that stupid; they had to realize we’d deploy MDMs to cover our critical star systems! The acceleration change does suggest they’ve just cut loose whatever pods they were towing, though, and they haven’t launched a damn thing back at us, which sure looks like a panic reaction, plain and simple. If I were them—and if I didn’t care any more about civilian casualties than whatever bastard came up with Buccaneer and Parthian Shot—I’d’ve launched everything I had before I turned away on the theory that even inaccurate birds had to be more effective than birds that were never launched at all! But they didn’t do that. Or at least it sure looks like they just jettisoned their pods without even trying to launch. Does that mean they’ve decided Parthian Shot was a bad idea? That could make sense after what happened in Mesa, if they want to try to convince people they hold the moral high ground. But it also suggests they really thought they could get close enough to Cassandra to target their fire accurately. So does that mean Hamish was right? Were they as surprised as we were by what happened to Mycroft? Or were they really dumb enough to not anticipate system-defense MDMs at all? Or did they—?
He shook himself. There was no way in hell he could answer any of those questions. All he could do now was wait and hope the POWs could answer them for him later.
SLNS Québec
Task Force 790
Beowulf System
“We have a second launch, Sir,” Lyang-tau Rutgers said quietly, and Vincent Capriotti looked across at him, then checked the time.
Fourteen minutes had passed since the defenders’ first launch, and he smiled in ironic amusement. The first launch had gone ballistic six minutes and 65,766,900 kilometers after launch. That sounded a hell of a lot like two separate drives with pretty close to standard endurance, which confirmed quite a bit of speculation back home. No one had any notion—yet—how it might be done, but it certainly sounded like the Manties had managed to graft separate sets of impeller nodes into the same missile body without their eating each other before they were successively brought on-line. Assuming that was what was actually happening, and if the missiles packed in a third stage with identical performance, they should resume their acceleration in roughly three more minutes…and arrive three minutes after that, just over nineteen minutes after launch.
At least now I know now how big an interval they figure their FTL systems can handle without the dispersed platforms, he thought almost whimsically. If they could’ve closed that interval any, they damned well would’ve done it.
“CIC makes it another five thousand, Sir.”
“Very impressive,” Capriotti replied. “On the other hand, we’ll be across the limit and gone by the time they can reach us. I’m sure they can figure that out for themselves, so this is probably intended to encourage us to keep moving right along. And to pick off any cripples, I suppose. But in the meantime—”
He looked at another display.
Beowulf System
19,913,317 Kilometers from Beowulf Orbit
The Hastas had been launched fifty-seven minutes earlier.
They’d started their journey at an acceleration of a mere 15,000 KPS2, barely a crawl compared to the 46,000 KPS2 a Mark 23 turned out at even its lowest acceleration bracket. On the other hand, they were far, far stealthier than any MDM ever built. In fact, they were no more than the mating of a slightly modified Explorator recon drone with a Cataphracht-C’s second stage. They retained all of the Explorator’s original stealthiness, and their acceleration rates had been stepped down a bit further to make them even harder to detect. The result was something that was almost impossible to detect, even under acceleration, at ranges lower than seventy to eighty light-seconds. Once it went ballistic, it was effectively invisible even to active sensors at anything above 500,000 kilometers, and Operation Fabius had taken steps to make them even harder to spot by sending a host of regular reconnaissance drones ahead of them, with an acceleration rate thirty percent higher than theirs, programmed to spread out and chatter back and forth.
No one on the other side had noticed that the talkative recon drones’ stealth systems were working at no more than eighty percent of normal efficiency, and no one had suspected that their sole purpose was to attract any sensor systems to their impeller wedges rather than the weaker, stealthier ones coming along behind. Nor had anyone on the other side realized Vincent Capriotti’s battlecruisers hadn’t been towing Cataphracts when they crossed the hyper-limit. All their towing capacity had been devoted to the Hastas, and their relatively low acceleration rate after the Hastas launched had been designed solely to convince the system’s defenders they were towing heavy Cataphract loads for the attack on Cassandra they had absolutely no intention of making. The last thing TF 790 had wanted Sky Watch or System Defense HQ to realize was that it had never intended to penetrate more than 4,500,000 kilometers inside the limit before turning and breaking for the safety of the Alpha bands at ninety percent of maximum power.
Vincent Capriotti had nourished his private doubts about the elaborate deception plan, but it had worked almost perfectly. It wouldn’t have been enough to save TF 790 from Mycroft without the unexpected assistance of Silver Bullet. For that matter, it might turn out that it still wasn’t enough. The ops plan had worked to get all the bits and pieces to where they needed to be at the critical moments, however, and there was a certain irony in that. If the Mesan Alignment had realized that would happen, they wouldn’t have needed to reveal Silver Bullet’s existence…or suggest their direct involvement in Fabius. Unfortunately, Benjamin Detweiler and his planners hadn’t known how the original Fabius plans would be modified once Winston Kingsford realized what Hasta could do, and so they’d expected the attackers to require all the help they could get on their run in to the target. And the knowledge that there’d been no way to hide their involvement, whatever happened—at least from the Grand Alliance—had made it even easier for Benjamin and his brothers to decide to…tweak the original operations plan.
The impeller endurance of the interference-running recon drones was measured in hours, even in days if it was husbanded properly. A Hasta’s endurance was barely ten minutes. At the end of that brief interval, its impellers went down forever and it sliced onward through the void at a constant velocity of 88,260 KPS, as invisible as the vacuum about it.
But now AIs aboard that shoal of invisible assassins noted that the time had almost come. They checked their targeting criteria and instructions against the take from their own sensors—not nearly so good as a regular recon drone’s, but far better than any previous generation of Solarian missile, even the improved Cataphracts, had ever mounted. A few corrections were necessary, and they made them.
Then they began the prep cycle.
System Defense HQ
City of Columbia
Beowulf
Beowulf System
“Third stage activation in approximately sixty seconds, Sir,” Cheryl Dunstan-Meyers said quietly, and Corey McAvoy nodded without looking away from his com connection to Gabriel Caddell-Markham.
What could reasonably be described as “a host” of staggeringly senior spectators had gathered behind the defense director, watching the huge display in the enormous conference room deep within Beowulf Alpha which fifteen minutes or so of frenzied tech improvisation had turned into a repeater for the master plot in System Defense HQ.
“At least they broke off without throwing anything in-system,” Caddell-Markham said, watching vectors bend and change. “That’s something.” He grinned suddenly. “And I am so going to give Hamish hell for the heart attack he gave me with that little scenario!”
