worse for me personally if I do what she's suggesting. And, in case you've forgotten, there are over six thousand people aboard these two obsolete, piece-of-crap battleships, alone. I'm not sure I'd take a lot of consolation from the knowledge that I got them killed for absolutely no return. In fact, what I most regret right now, is that I didn't simply order them all to turn tail and run from the outset.'
'You couldn't do that, Sir.'
'I could have, and I damned well should have! Not that it would've done much good, given her approach vectors, although at least the LACs might have been able to stay away from her,' Milligan said with quiet, intense bitterness. Then he inhaled deeply.
'Inform Captain Beauchamp that he's to coordinate the missile pod engagement from dirt-side,' he said flatly. 'Then instruct the LAC crews to return immediately to their launch platforms. They're to abandon and evacuate to the planetary surface, and the platform skippers are to set their demolition charges and accompany them.'
Tucker was staring at him in something like shock, but Milligan continued steadily.
'In the meantime, I'll contact Admiral Harrington. I'll accept her offer on behalf of our mobile units, and we'll abandon ship.'
'Sir!'
'God damn it, George!' Milligan grated. 'I am not going to get thousands of people killed for nothing! I won't do it. We'll take our best shot with the missile pods, but those ships-' he jabbed his finger at the hostile icons '-can kill anything we have from outside any range where we can even shoot back. Our 'main combatants' don't have MDMs, and our LACs are Cimeterres, not frigging Shrikes. They'd never live to reach their own range of superdreadnoughts without MDM support to cover their approach. We're fucked, and nothing we can do can change that. Do you understand me?'
'Yes, Sir,' Tucker said finally, slowly, and turned away.
'Communications,' Milligan said heavily, 'raise Admiral Harrington for me.'
'There they go, Your Grace,' Andrea Jaruwalski said, and Honor nodded. Her remote sensor arrays were close enough to see the drive signatures of the Havenite warships' small craft. Individual life pods were much harder to detect, even at that range and even with Manticoran sensors, but their beacons showed as a fine green haze of diamond dust glittering around the warship icons, and the ships themselves had struck their wedges five minutes earlier.
'That isn't a happy man over there,' Mercedes Brigham murmured, and Honor looked at her.
'I've been in his shoes, Mercedes. When I ordered Alistair to surrender his ship. It isn't easy, however hopeless the situation might be. Milligan showed a lot of moral courage when he accepted my offer, although I doubt most of his critics will see it that way.'
'From his tone, I think he agrees with you, Ma'am.
Honor snorted softly at Brigham's understatement. Milligan had actually thanked her for offering an out which would spare his people's lives, but he'd looked-and sounded-like a man chewing ground glass.
'I noticed he didn't say anything about any missile pods, Your Grace,' Jaruwalski observed quietly.
'No, he didn't, did he?' Honor looked at her opns officer. Jaruwalski was as professionally focused as ever, but Honor tasted something very like frustration under the younger woman's surface. That wasn't exactly the right word for the emotion, but it came close. Andrea Jaruwalski was no more enamored of killing people just to kill them than Honor was, but the tactician in her couldn't help... regretting the lost opportunity to carry through with their neatly planned mousetrap and finish off the enemy ships herself.
'I didn't ask him to stand down the pods, either, Andrea,' Honor continued. 'Mostly because I knew he'd refuse, just as you or I would have in his position. If I'd made the stand down of all of his defenses a precondition for my offer, he would have rejected it.'
'It might have been worth a try, anyway, Your Grace.' Jaruwalski's tone was mostly humorous, but she grimaced and gestured at one of the secondary plots. 'We're beginning to pick up active targeting emissions. A lot of them.'
'As expected.' Honor examined the indicated plot. 'Actually,' she said after a moment, 'there aren't as many as I'd expected. I wonder if that means they're as light on pods as they were on ships?'
'We can hope, Ma'am,' Brigham said. 'Of course-'
'There go the scuttling charges, Commodore Jaruwalski!'
Honor and both her staffers turned towards the main plot once more. The range was still long enough that in the visual display, the brief, bright stars which once had been warships of the Republic of Haven were little more than short-lived, brilliant pinpricks. The presentation in the plot was even less dramatic than that. Seven crimson icons simply blinked once, and disappeared.
The bright ruby light chips representing the Herrick System's LACs were still there, but they continued to accelerate steadily away from Honor's ships, obviously bound-as Commodore Milligan had promised-for their base platforms.
'You think they'll turn around if their missile pods get lucky, Ma'am? Brigham asked softly, gazing at the retiring light attack craft.
'That's hard to say.' Honor considered the question for a few seconds, then shrugged. 'Their pods would have to get awfully lucky to make any difference. If those were Shrikes or Ferrets, it might be different, but they aren't.'
'Missile launch!' a Plotting rating announced suddenly. 'Multiple missile launches! Time to impact four-point- six minutes!'
'Captain Beauchamp has launched, Commodore!'
Tom Milligan looked up at the announcement. He'd been staring moodily and silently out the pinnace's viewport, gazing out into the endless emptiness which had swallowed up the dispersing plasma of his command. Now he shoved himself out of his seat and stepped quickly to the cramped command deck's hatch.
A pinnace's sensor capability wasn't particularly good at the best of times, and the display was far too small to show much detail, but he could see the wavefront of Beauchamp's outgoing missiles. He'd been surprised when Harrington hadn't tried to insist that he agree to stand them down, as well. In her place, he certainly would have at least made the attempt. Unless, of course, her scouting destroyers had managed to tell her just how threadbare all of Hera's defenses were.
'Estimate eleven hundred-I say again, one-one-zero- zero-inbound,' Plotting reported. 'Target is Second Division.'
'Makes sense,' Brigham said quietly. 'We're closer to most of their platforms, and two superdreadnoughts have to have less missile defense than four of them.'
Honor didn't respond. In fact, she was almost certain her chief of staff didn't even realize she'd spoken aloud.
The tornado of multidrive missiles howled towards them, and whoever had programmed their launch times and accelerations had done her job well. Despite how widely separated many of the launching pods were, their coordination was flawless. All of those missiles would arrive on target simultaneously as a single, tightly focused hammer blow.
The quiet murmur of voices behind her grew louder, more clipped and intense, as Jaruwalski's plotting parties and tactical crews concentrated on their tasks. Not that there was a great deal for them to actually do at this moment. Everything an admiral's staff could do for a situation like this had to happen earlier, in the planning and training stages, when the crews of the individual ships of the admiral's command were learning what was expected of them, and how to perform it.
As Imperator, Intolerant, and their screening heavy cruisers were performing it now.
As little as five or six T-years earlier, that many missiles, fired at a mere pair of superdreadnoughts, would have been both enormous and deadly. Today, it was different. In an era of pod-laying ships of the wall, missile densities like that had become something defense planners had to take into the routine calculations.
Doctrine and hardware had required major modifications, and the modifying process was an ongoing one. The Mark 31 counter-missiles Honor's ships were firing represented significant improvements even over the Mark 30 counter-missiles her command had used as recently as the Battle of Sidemore, only months before. Their insanely powerful wedges were capable of sustaining accelerations of up to 130,000 for as much as seventy-five seconds, which gave them a powered range from rest of almost 3.6 million kilometers.
Kill numbers at such extreme ranges were problematical, to say the least, and the incoming Havenite missiles were equipped with the very best penetration aids and EW systems Shannon Foraker could build into them. That made them much, much better than anything the People's Navy had possessed during the First Havenite War, but
