War Of Honor

to give him pause. He'd also have to rethink any ops plan he'd already drawn up on the assumption that you wouldn't be. And if we can win that jackass Janacek just another four or five months, the ships he's finally resumed construction on will begin to come into commission in something like genuinely useful numbers. Especially the ones in the Grendelsbane shadow yards. They were further along in construction when they were suspended, and the first of them will be ready for acceptance trials in just a couple of weeks.'

'From your lips to the Tester's ears,' MacDonnell said fervently.

* * *

'It's confirmed, Sir. All of them.'

Admiral of the Red Allen Higgins was a man of only middling height, with a round, almost chubby face that was usually a faithful mirror of his affable nature. At the moment, that face was the color of old oatmeal and the eyes were haunted.

He stared down at the pitiless display and felt like a fly in the path of Juggernaut as the Peep attack force rumbled down upon him. Thirty-two superdreadnoughts, an unknown number of them SD(P)s. There were also at least some CLACs in that oncoming freight train of destruction. There had to be, because the four hundred-strong LAC strike he'd sent out to meet them had been ripped apart by an even stronger LAC counterattack.

And to oppose it, once his LACs had been effectively destroyed, he'd had seven SD(P)s, sixteen pre-pod SDs, four CLACs with less than thirty LACs between them, and nineteen battlecruisers and cruisers. He'd thought he might still be able to accomplish something, given his outnumbered SD(P)s' range advantage. But he'd been wrong. As the Peeps had just demonstrated by destroying all seven of them from a range in excess of forty million kilometers.

His remaining twenty capital ships were hopelessly outclassed. The incredible missile storm which had wiped away his SD(P)s was proof enough of that. Thank God that at least he'd held them back when he sent in the SD(P)s! Thousands of RMN personnel were still alive because of that simple decision on his part. A decision he'd tossed off almost casually at the time.

But that was the only mercy which had been vouchsafed to him.

'We can't stop them,' he said softly and looked up to meet his chief of staff's equally shocked eyes at last. 'Anything we send out to meet them will only end up giving them extra target practice,' he grated. 'And the same thing is true of the shipyards. Hell, we always depended on the mobile force for the system's real security. Why bother to upgrade the forts to fire MDMs? That's what the frigging Fleet was for! Goddamn that bastard Janacek.'

'Sir, how—I mean, what do we do now?' the chief of staff asked almost desperately.

'There's only one thing we can do,' Higgins ground out. 'I am not going to be another Elvis Santino, or even another Silas Markham. No more of my people are going to be killed in a battle we can't win anyway.'

'But, Sir, if you just abandon the yards, the Admiralty will—'

'Fuck the Admiralty!' Higgins snarled. 'If they want to court-martial me, so much the better. I'd love to have an opportunity to discuss their excuse for a naval policy in front of a formal court! But right now what matters is saving everyone and everything we can . . . and we can't save the yards.'

The chief of staff swallowed hard, but he couldn't disagree.

'We don't have time to set scuttling charges,' Higgins went on in a harsh, flat voice. 'Get every work crew back to the main facility. I want all secure data wiped now. Once you've done that, set the charges and blow the entire computer core, as well. I don't want the bastards getting squat from our records. We've got about a ninety- minute window to evacuate anyone we're going to get out, and we wouldn't have the personnel lift to take more than twenty percent of the total base personnel even if we had time to embark them all. Grab the priority list and find everyone on it that you can. We're not going to be able to get all of them to a pickup point in time, but I want to pull out every tech with critical knowledge that we can.'

'Yes, Sir!' The chief of staff turned away and started barking orders, obviously grateful for something— anything—to do, and Higgins rounded on his ops officer.

'While Chet handles that, I've got another job for you, Juliet.' His corpse-like smile held no humor at all. 'We may not have enough missiles with the legs to take those bastards on,' he said, waving a hand at the tactical display. 'But there's one target we can reach.'

'Sir?' The ops officer looked as confused as her voice sounded, and Higgins barked a travesty of a laugh.

'We don't have time to set demolition charges, Juliet. So I want you to lay in a fire plan. As we pull out, I want an old-fashioned nuke on top of every building slip, every immobile ship, every fabrication center. Everything. The only thing you don't hit are the personnel platforms. You understand me?'

'Aye, aye, Sir,' she got out, her expression aghast at the thought of the trillions upon trillions of dollars of irreplaceable hardware and half-completed hulls she was about to destroy.

'Then do it,' he grated, and turned back to the pitiless display once more.

* * *

Javier Giscard checked the time again. It was odd. Nothing could be calmer or more orderly than Sovereign of Space's flag bridge. There were no raised voices, no excitement. No one rushed from console to console or conferred in urgent, anxious tones.

And yet for all of the order and serenity, the tension was palpable. Task Force Ten had yet to fire a shot, but the war had already begun. Or resumed. Or whatever future historians would agree it had done.

The exact verb didn't matter all that much to the men and women who would do the killing and the dying, and as he sat in his command chair and listened to the quiet, efficient murmur of his staff, he felt the cold wind of all that mortality blowing through the chinks in his soul. He was about to do something he'd already done once before, in a star system named Basilisk. He'd had no choice then, and he had even less of one now, but that didn't mean he looked forward to it.

He checked the time again.

Fifteen minutes.

* * *

'Perimeter Security has bogeys, Admiral!'

Niall MacDonnell turned quickly from his conversation with Earl White Haven at his ops officer's announcement.

'They just made their alpha translations,' Commander William Tatnall continued. 'We're still getting a preliminary count on their transit signatures, but there are a lot of them.'

MacDonnell felt White Haven standing behind him and sensed how difficult it was for the earl to keep his mouth shut. But White Haven had assured him before they ever departed from Yeltsin's Star that despite any questions of relative seniority, he had no intention of backseat driving. This was MacDonnell's command, not his, he'd said, and he was as good as his word now.

'Locus and vector?' MacDonnell asked.

'They made translation right on the hyper limit for a least-time course to San Martin,' Commander David Clairdon, his chief of staff, amplified quickly.

'Any sign of anything headed for the terminus?' the admiral pressed.

'Not at this time, Sir,' Clairdon replied carefully, and MacDonnell smiled thinly at the unspoken 'yet' everyone on the flag bridge heard in Clairdon's tone.

The admiral turned back to the main plot as the glittering light codes of the bogeys' hyper footprints appeared upon it. Clairdon was certainly right about their position and course. And Tatnall was right, too—there were 'a lot of them.'

'CIC makes it over eighty of the wall, Sir,' Tatnall announced a moment later, as if he couldn't quite believe the numbers himself. 'Uh, they say that's a minimal estimate,' he added.

'Sweet Tester,' MacDonnell heard someone mutter. Which, he decided, reflected his own reaction quite well.

There was no way to tell how many of those ships were SD(P)s and how many were pre-pod designs. If he were Thomas Theisman, there'd be as many of the former and as few of the latter as he could possibly arrange. Either way, it sounded as if the Peeps had sent a force twice as powerful as the one they had expected to face. And