Ashes Of Victory

Adler, Mr. Gillingham,' Honor said grimly. 'I believe the Board of Inquiry's report is available to all of you in the Department data base. Tourville managed to take our picket commander at least as much by surprise as anything I managed at Cerberus, and pulling it off was a lot harder. Or should have been.'

Gillingham's face smoothed into nonexpression at the bite in her voice, and Honor made herself draw a deep breath.

'Not that it was the first time something like that happened to a picket force that ought to have been anticipating attack,' she went on. 'For example—' She considered the middies, then nodded at a dark-eyed blonde on the couch beside Theodore.

'Ms. Sanmicheli,' she said pleasantly. 'Since Mr. Gillingham is going to be busy looking into the Battle of Midway for us, I'd appreciate it if you would look up the Battle of Savo Island from the same war and compare and contrast what happened to the Western Allies in that battle to what happened to Commodore Yeargin at Adler. And you might also look up the Battle of the Farnham System and look for parallels — and differences — between Savo, Midway, Adler and what happened to Baoyuan Anderman when someone tried a `sneak attack' on him there.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' Sanmicheli acknowledged the order, and Honor smiled crookedly at her, then turned back to Gillingham.

'But to return to Cerberus. My method of approach was made possible only by certain very special circumstances no reasonable admiral can expect to encounter. First, I knew exactly where the enemy was likely to translate out of hyper, which let me predict his most likely approach vector for Hell — I mean, Hades. Second, using that information I was able to position my own fleet so that we had Cerberus-A at our backs. And third, Mr. Gillingham, was the fact that no sane fleet commander would even have considered such a maneuver for a moment, which helped immensely in surprising the Peep fleet commander, who, so far as I know, was quite sane. You will find, however,' she added dryly, 'that while acts of insanity have the advantage of unpredictability, that doesn't normally make them good ideas.'

'I realize conditions were unusual, Ma'am.' Markovic came to Gillingham's aid — courageously, Honor thought, given how thick and fast the extra assignments had been falling. 'But your plan didn't look `insane' to me. And it certainly worked!'

'Yes, it did. But have you looked past what went right to the appalling number of things that could easily have gone wrong?' Honor asked her reasonably.

'Wrong, Ma'am?'

'Very wrong,' Honor said, and glanced at Michelle Henke. The two of them had discussed the Cerberus action at some length, and she saw Mike's small smile as they both remembered her horrified reaction to Honor's battle plan. 'Captain Henke,' Honor said now, 'would you care to comment on the potential flaws in my battle plan?'

'Certainly, Your Grace. Respectfully, of course.' Amusement bubbled just under the surface of Henke's contralto, and Honor saw her more senior guests exchange smiles of their own. Most of the Navy knew about Honor's friendship with Henke, and Rear Admiral Kriangsak sat back and crossed his legs with a cheerful grin.

'The first and most glaring weakness of Her Grace's battle plan, Ms. Markovic,' Henke said calmly, 'was that it left no margin at all for error. She effectively drained her reactor mass to zero with a burn of that duration and power. If the enemy had detected her approach and maneuvered radically against her, she would have lacked the fuel for more than a few hours of maneuvers under impeller drive. Which means she could easily have found herself completely without power at the moment the enemy closed for the kill... and not one of her ships had the fuel reserves to reach another star system if they'd been forced to run for it.

'The next weakness was that her plan counted on the Peeps' sensor techs to be effectively blind. By using thrusters, she avoided the sensors which most tactical officers tend to rely upon — the Peeps' gravitics — but she was mother naked to everything else in their sensor suites. In fairness—' Henke's tone turned judicious, her expression serious, though her eyes twinkled at Honor '—it was reasonable enough to at least hope the Peeps, who don't usually maintain as close a sensor watch as we do, wouldn't think to look for her in the first place, but if they had looked, they would have found her.

'In line with the second weakness,' the captain continued, 'was the fact that even though a reaction thruster approach allowed her to avoid the enemy's gravitics, the plume of ejecta it produced must have been quite spectacular... and energetic, and Peep stealth fields, which were what Her Grace had to work with herself, you will recall, aren't as good as ours. Again, Her Grace had taken the precaution of placing herself with the local star at her back. Had she not possessed `inside information' on Peep movement patterns at Cerberus, she would have been unable to do that, of course. In this case, as she mentioned, she knew her enemy's probable approach vector well in advance, which let her give herself the advantage of attacking `out of the sun,' as it were. If the enemy had failed to appear where she anticipated him, the entire maneuver would have been out of the question, and I'm certain she had a more, ah, conventional fallback plan for that situation. As it was, however, Cerberus-A's emissions were sufficiently powerful to greatly reduce the effectiveness of any sensor looking directly at it, and by the time Her Grace's vector had moved her clear of the star, she'd shut down her thrusters and other active emissions. Nonetheless, the circumstances only made it difficult for the Peeps to have picked up her approach; they didn't make it impossible, and an alert sensor crew could have given the enemy warning in plenty of time.

'Finally, while I could continue to point out other potential weaknesses, I'll simply add that if the admiral in command of the Peep task force had picked up Her Grace's units, the smart thing to do would have been to pretend he hadn't. Once he'd spotted her, he could have run a track on her with passives alone, and she was coming in without any wedges at all. If he'd timed it right, he could have fired full broadsides of missiles into her, with flight times just too short for her to have gotten her units' wedges up, when all she would have had would have been her countermissiles and laser clusters. Those defenses alone, without sidewalls or wedges for passive interdiction, would never have prevented the destruction of her entire fleet.'

Henke paused for a moment, then cocked her head at Honor before she looked back at Gillingham.

'All things considered,' the captain told the midshipman judiciously, 'Her Grace's plan may not have been the single rashest, most foolhardy, do-or-die, all-or-nothing throw of the dice in the history of the Royal Manticoran — or Grayson — Navy. If it wasn't, however, I have so far failed to find the plan that was.'

Gillingham and Markovic looked at one another, then blinked and turned their gazes half-fearfully to Honor. But there was no thunder in Honor's expression. In fact, she smiled at the captain before she returned her own attention to Gillingham.

'Captain Henke may have employed just a little hyperbole in her analysis, Mr. Gillingham,' she said pleasantly. 'But not very much. In fact, I adopted that plan because it was a `do-or-die, all-or-nothing' situation. I couldn't disengage and run without abandoning over a hundred thousand people on He — Hades. At the same time, my forces were badly outnumbered, I had only skeleton crews, almost all my personnel were extremely rusty, and we'd had no more than a few days to shake down our captured vessels and begin smoothing off our roughest edges. Any conventional battle plan would inevitably have resulted in the destruction of my own forces in return for light enemy casualties. It was possible I might have been able to trap them between my mobile units and the planet's fixed defenses, but that seemed most unlikely, since I estimated, correctly, as it transpired, that they'd come expressly because they feared the prisoners had managed to take Camp Charon. If that was true, there was no way they would allow themselves to come into effective range of the orbital defenses, which meant I could scarcely hope to `catch them between' those defenses and my ships. So I used a tactic which was a one-time-only, high-risk-high-return proposition. If it worked — as it did — I should have been able to win the battle quickly and at relatively low cost. If, however, it had failed, then, as Captain Henke has so admirably pointed out, the inevitable result would have been the destruction of my entire command. Only the fact that, in my judgment, my entire force would have been destroyed anyway if I failed to win quickly and decisively inspired me to adopt such a risky plan. Or could possibly have justified me in doing so.'

There was silence for several moments while she tasted the middies absorbing the starkness of the alternatives she'd just described, and then Markovic cleared her throat.

'I don't suppose we ought to use your Cerberus tactics as a pattern for our own then after all, Ma'am,' she