War Of Honor

it sounded very much as if they were doing what White Haven had said he would do in their place.

But MacDonnell couldn't be certain of that, and his brain raced as he considered possibilities and options. It seemed to him as if he stood there, staring at the plot, for at least a decade, but when he looked at the date/time display again, less than ninety seconds had passed.

'Alpha One, David,' he told his chief of staff calmly. Clairdon looked at him for just a moment, then nodded briskly.

'Alpha One. Aye, aye, Sir,' he said, and MacDonnell looked back at White Haven as Clairdon headed for the com section to pass the necessary movement orders.

'I think they're doing exactly what you said you'd do, My Lord,' MacDonnell told the Manticoran. Then he smiled mirthlessly. 'Of course, I suppose half of those ships could be EW drones and it could all be a huge ruse designed to draw the terminus picket force they didn't know was here out of position.'

'It does seem unlikely,' White Haven agreed with a slightly warmer smile of his own. 'And I doubt they'd be foolish enough to repeat their Basilisk pattern. They know this terminus' forts are completely online. They could still have it—the force they seem to be sending towards San Martin could take all of the forts without too much trouble. But I find it difficult to believe that even Thomas Theisman and Shannon Foraker between them could have given them enough ships to let them hit Trevor's Star with two task forces that size. Especially not if Duchess Harrington was right and they have sent an attack force all the way to Silesia. Or, at least, if they can attack Silesia and still hit Trevor's Star with a hundred and sixty ships of the wall, we'd better start working on our surrender terms now!'

* * *

Admiral Higgins stood like a statue of acid-etched iron on HMS Indomitable's flag bridge, waiting, as his task force's remaining units accelerated towards the Grendelsbane hyper limit. No one spoke to him. No one approached him. There was an invisible perimeter around him, a circle of pain and self-loathing none dared enter.

Intellectually, he knew as well as anyone else on that bridge that what had happened here wasn't his fault. No one with his assigned order of battle could possibly have stopped the force the Peeps had thrown at him. That didn't guarantee that he wouldn't be scapegoated for it, of course—especially not by the Janacek Admiralty—but at least he'd had the sanity and moral courage to refuse to throw away any more of the lives and ships under his command.

None of which was any comfort to him at all at this moment.

His eyes were on the visual display, not the tactical display or the maneuvering plot. He was staring at the huge naval yard, its individual structures long invisible as they fell away astern, and his eyes were cold and empty as space itself.

And then his mouth tightened and pain flickered in those empty eyes as the first small, intolerably bright sun flashed behind his ships. Then another. Another, and another, and yet another as a tidal wave of flame marched through the huge, sprawling naval base Manticore had spent almost two decades building up from literally nothing.

Those silent pinpricks looked tiny and harmless from this range, but Higgins' mind's eyes saw them perfectly, knew their reality. It watched the forest fire of old-fashioned nukes—his own missiles' warheads, not even the enemy's—consuming fabrication centers, orbital smelters, reclamation yards, stores stations, orbital magazines, the huge hydrogen farm, sensor platforms and relays, and System Control's ultra-modern command station. And the ships. The handful of ships in the repair yards. The ones who'd had the misfortune to choose this particular moment to be immobilized in yard hands because they required some minor repair, or to be undergoing refit. And worse—far worse—the magnificent new ships. Twenty-seven more Medusa —class SD(P)s, nineteen CLACs, and no less than forty-six of the new Invictus —class superdreadnoughts. Ninety- two capital ships—almost six hundred and seventy million tons of new construction. Not just a fleet, but an entire navy's worth of the most modern designs in space, helpless as they lay beside fitting-out stations or half-finished, cocooned in their building slips and dispersed yards. The fifty- three additional lighter types being built alongside them hardly mattered, but Higgins could no more spare them from the fiery sword of fusion than he could the superdreadnoughts.

The fireballs marched, hobnailed with fire, ripping the heart out of Grendelsbane Station. A tidal wave of flame and fury carrying disaster on its crest. And behind that wave were the personnel platforms and the yard personnel he hadn't been able to withdraw. Over forty thousand of them—the entire workforce for a complex the size Grendelsbane once had been, just as lost to the Star Kingdom as the ships they had come here to work upon.

In one catastrophic act of self-inflicted devastation, Allen Higgins had just destroyed more tonnage and far more fighting power than the Royal Manticoran Navy had ever lost in the entire four T-centuries of its previous existence, and the fact that he'd had no choice was no consolation at all.

* * *

'Sir,' Marius Gozzi said urgently, 'I'm sorry to interrupt, but we've just picked up a second task force.'

Giscard turned quickly to his chief of staff, raising one hand to stop his ops officer in mid-conversation.

'Where?' he asked.

'It looks like its coming in from the terminus,' Gozzi said. 'And we're very lucky that we saw it at all.'

'Coming from the terminus?' Giscard shook his head. 'It's not 'luck' we saw it, Marius. You were the one who insisted that we needed to scout it to cover our backs while we dealt with the inner system.'

The chief of staff shrugged. Giscard's statement was accurate enough, but Gozzi still suspected that the admiral had subtly prompted him to make the suggestion. Giscard had a tendency to build a staff's internal confidence by drawing contributions out of each of them . . . and then seeing to it that whoever finally offered the contribution he'd wanted all along got full credit for it.

'Even with the drones and the LACs, we were still dead lucky to pick them up, Sir. They're coming in heavily stealthed. But they're also pushing hard. One or two impeller signatures burned through the stealth, and once the drones got a sniff, the recon LACs knew where to look. The numbers are still tentative, but CIC is estimating it as between twenty and fifty ships of the wall. Possibly with carrier support.'

'That many?'

'CIC stresses that the numbers are extremely tentative,' Gozzi replied. 'And we're not getting the take directly from the drones.'

Giscard nodded in understanding. The recon LACs were heavily modified Cimeterres, with greatly reduced magazine space in order to free up the volume for the most capable LAC-sized sensor suite Shannon Foraker and her techies had been able to build. Their main function, however, if the truth be known, was to serve as drone tenders. Foraker and her wizards still hadn't figured out how to fit a grav pulse transmitter with any sort of bandwidth into something as small as a drone. But they could put a LAC in range for the drone to hit it with a whisker laser, and a LAC could carry an FTL com. They still couldn't real- time the raw drone data to Sovereign of Space, but they could get enough summarized information through to give Giscard a far better picture of what was happening than any previous Havenite fleet commander could have hoped for.

The question, he reflected wryly, was whether that was a good thing, or a bad one. There was such a thing as knowing too much and allowing yourself to double-think your way into ineffectualness.

He walked across to a smaller repeater plot and punched in a command. Moments later, CIC had displayed its best guess of the new force's composition and numbers. He frowned slightly. Apparently, CIC had managed to firm up its estimate at least a little while Marius was reporting to him. They were showing a minimum of thirty of the wall now, although some of the impeller signatures were still a bit tentative.

He folded his hands behind him and squared his shoulders while he considered the display.

It was always possible, perhaps even probable, that what looked like Third Fleet in the inner system was something else entirely. Or, for that matter, that it was actually only a portion of Third Fleet. In fact, that was the more likely probability. If Kuzak had been as completely surprised as Thunderbolt's planners had hoped, then she might very well have been caught with her fleet divided between the inner system and the wormhole terminus. In that case, she might be employing ECM to convince his sensors that she was actually fully concentrated near San Martin in an effort to keep them from noticing the second half of her force sneaking in to join her.