War Of Honor

Shrikes to execute a minimum-range attack on the core of any enemy force. Which would have been all well and good if their targets had been battlecruisers, or even battleships. Against superdreadnoughts with their sidewalls up and their weapons on-line, the Shrikes would be impossibly lucky to inflict damage that was more than merely cosmetic.

Still, she told herself grimly, the Peeps would at least know they'd been nudged. And she owed it to her own people not to let her own crushing sense of despair affect her own effectiveness. If they were going to die anyway, then it was her job to keep her own head clear and make their deaths mean at least something by expending them as effectively as possible. And, who knew, maybe—The plot changed suddenly, and Sarah Flanagan's heart seemed to stop.

Apparently the Peep commander wasn't quite the idiot she'd thought.

* * *

Agnes de Groot smiled like a hungry wolf as the master plot changed.

The incoming Manty strike was a confusing mass of red light dots. That was their infernally effective onboard ECM, coupled with the capability of their decoys and jammers. Still, as far as de Groot could tell, there were fewer EW birds covering them than had been projected, and CIC seemed to be getting a better count on the hostiles than she'd hoped for. It was always possible, of course, that they were being allowed to get 'a better count' by Manty electronics officers with their ECM in deception mode, but she didn't think so. It looked to her as if she had genuinely caught the Manties completely unprepared and with very little idea of how to respond to the unanticipated threat.

Which, she thought ferociously, had just become an even greater threat than they'd imagined.

The large green beads of three of her 'superdreadnoughts' were suddenly surrounded by clouds of smaller green fireflies, dashing away from them, as they launched full groups of Cimeterre —class LACs. NavInt's sources all confirmed that the Manties had stuck with their original, basically dreadnought-sized CLACs. Given the compensator advantages which the Manticoran Alliance had enjoyed for years, it gave them the best combination of LAC capacity and acceleration. But the Republican Navy had adopted a different philosophy. Its CLACs were visualized as primarily defensive platforms, mobile bases for the LACs intended to protect the wall of battle from long-range Manty LAC strikes. As such, there was no reason to make them any faster than the superdreadnoughts they would be protecting, and all of that lovely tonnage advantage could be put into additional LAC bays.

Which meant that whereas a Manty CLAC could pack approximately one hundred and twelve LACs into its bays, a Republican Aviary —class carried well over two hundred.

Now seven hundred-plus Cimeterres went charging outward to meet less than a third that many Manty LACs which were far too close at far too high a closing speed to even hope to evade them.

* * *

They were all dead . . . and for nothing.

The thought stabbed through Sarah Flanagan's mind with cold, unspeakable bitterness as she realized how utterly the Royal Navy had failed in its most basic responsibilities to its Queen and to its own people. It wasn't just al-Salil and Schumacher after all. It was the entire Navy, from ONI to Flanagan herself, and something deep inside her—the something which had sent her into her Queen's uniform in the first place—shriveled in shame.

The Peeps had CLACs . . . and no one had even suspected it. Or, even worse, if anyone had, they'd kept their suspicions to themselves. And this was the result. Disaster unmitigated.

Even as the huge cloud of LACs flashed towards her, some detached observer in her brain was visualizing all of the other system pickets. Most of them, unlike Tequila, had at least a division of capital ships, or a battlecruiser squadron, or a dozen cruisers or so, to back up the LACs expected to bear the brunt of system defense. But it wasn't going to matter. If the Peeps had committed three CLACs to Tequila, where they had to know the picket was so understrength, then they'd committed more to the systems where they expected something approaching respectable resistance. And no one in any of those systems knew what was headed for them any more than al-Salil and Schumacher had.

It would be like an avalanche. Not one of snow and tumbling boulders, but of laser heads and grasers. Waves of LACs and thundering broadsides. Of broken Manticoran starships and shattered light attack craft. And there was nothing at all that anyone could do to stop it. Not now.

She heard her own voice issuing orders, overriding the COLAC's targeting designations. Her own Shrikes' tac officers responded quickly, almost as if they didn't realize how complete the catastrophe was. She heard al-Salil frantically issuing commands of his own, but she paid them little heed. They were half incoherent to begin with, and even if they hadn't been, it was too late.

Her squadron launched even while al-Salil was still gibbering away. She launched on her own authority, with no orders, and at the oncoming enemy LACs rather than the starships whose defenses her Shrikes' light missile loads could never have penetrated.

Then she hunkered down in her command chair, braced her forearms on the armrests, and watched the holocaust come.

* * *

De Groot grimaced as a single Manty LAC squadron launched every bird it had. The rotary launchers which were the central feature of modern LAC design couldn't be 'flushed' in a single salvo the way the old-style box launchers could be. But they could come close, and that single squadron got every offensive missile away before her own squadrons reached launch range.

That fire reached deep into her LACs' formation. Eighteen of them were destroyed outright. Seven more were crippled, five so badly that there wouldn't be any point in repairing them. Another eight took lighter damage.

But then it was the turn of the remaining seven hundred and sixty Cimeterres.

Commander Clapp's 'triple ripple' roared outward. The magazines of two hundred of the Republican vessels fed that onrushing wave of missiles. The other five hundred and sixty held their fire, waiting.

Agnes de Groot watched the first wave of ferocious detonations sweeping away Manty EW drones like a broom of brimstone. Even from here, she could almost feel the despair enveloping the enemy as they realized what was happening, but it was far too late for them to do anything about it.

The second wave of explosions lashed at the Manties, hashing their sensors, crippling their onboard electronics ever so briefly. And then, exactly as Clapp had predicted, the third wave of missiles swept through the hopelessly disorganized Manticoran defensive envelope.

Thirty-three Manticoran LACs survived the triple ripple.

None of them survived the single massive salvo which followed it up.

De Groot's total losses were less than forty.

Chapter Fifty Six

'We're coming up on translation in five minutes, Sir,' Lieutenant Commander Akimoto said.

'Thank you, Joyce.' Admiral Wilson Kirkegard thanked his staff astrogator as gravely as if he hadn't been watching the translation clock for the last hour.

'You're welcome, Sir,' Akimoto replied, and the grin she gave him told him that she knew perfectly well that her formal announcement had been superfluous, to say the very least.

Kirkegard smiled back, then turned to Captain Janina Auderska, his chief of staff.

'Any last-minute details waiting to bite us on the ass, Janina?' he asked quietly.

'Can't think of any, Sir,' she said, wrinkling her nose in thought. 'Of course, if I could think of them ahead of time, they wouldn't be waiting to bite us on the ass, I suppose.'

'As profound an analysis as I've ever heard,' Kirkegard approved, and she chuckled.

'Sorry. Bad habit of mine to indulge myself in the obvious when I'm nervous.'

'Well, you're not alone in that,' Kirkegard assured her, and turned his attention back to the maneuvering