War Of Honor

superdreadnought or a LAC carrier, and they'd accounted for every single ship Harrington had.

Or, his mind told him coldly, for every ship NavInt said she had, anyway.

For just an instant, Lester Tourville was five years in the past, when no admiral had been able to trust the intelligence appreciations produced by Oscar Saint-Just's StateSec analysts. A dreadful sense of betrayal flashed through him at the thought that Thomas Theisman's NavInt had just proven itself equally unreliable. But then he shook himself. Whatever had happened here, NavInt had proven its fundamental reliability too often over the last four T-years. There had to be an explanation, but what?

'We have hard IDs on the new bogeys' types,' Marston said flatly. 'CIC makes it twelve Medusa —class SD(P)s, six Covington —class CLACs, and six battlecruisers. CIC isn't positive, but it thinks the battlecruisers are probably Courvoisier —class ships.'

'Covingtons? Courvoisiers?' DeLaney shook her head. 'Those are Grayson types!' She turned to face Tourville. 'What are Graysons doing out here in the middle of Silesia?' she demanded almost plaintively.

Tourville stared back at her for perhaps four seconds, then muttered a short, pungent obscenity.

'It's the Protector's Own,' he said flatly. 'Damn! NavInt told us they were off on some long-ranged deployment training mission. Why didn't it even occur to us that that sneaky bastard Benjamin might have sent them here?'

'But why here?' DeLaney protested.

'I don't know,' Tourville replied, but his mind continued to race even as he spoke, and he grimaced. 'Best guess? Benjamin and Harrington discussed it before she ever came out here. Damn! I'll guarantee you that's what happened. She knew High Ridge wasn't going to give her what she needed to do her job, so she borrowed it from her other navy without even telling anyone she was doing it!'

He shook his head in brief, heartfelt admiration. Obviously, he thought, NavInt needed to update its estimate of Harrington as a brilliant military technician to include a degree of political sophistication no one had expected from her. But then he brushed the thought aside. There was no time for it—not when his entire fleet had just been mousetrapped with consummate professionalism.

He pushed himself up out of his chair and crossed to the main plot, staring into it as data sidebars updated and acceleration vectors established themselves. The numbers flashed and danced, then settled, and Admiral Lester Tourville felt a ball of ice congeal in his belly.

'The Graysons are launching LACs,' Marston reported. 'Tracking reports over six hundred impeller signatures already.'

Tourville only grunted. Of course they were launching their LACs, but that wasn't what was going to do most of their killing. Not today. Both Harrington and the Protector's Own were well within MDM range of Second Fleet, and his own twelve SD(P)s, which had been supposed to give him a two-to-one advantage over Harrington's Medusas were suddenly outnumbered by two-to-one, instead. And if NavInt was right about the Graysons new Courvoisier II battlecruisers, Harrington had an additional six pod-launcher types. Given the Manticoran and Grayson advantages in electronic warfare and missile defense, that gave them a devastating edge in the pounding match about to begin. And Harrington had timed things perfectly. Second Fleet was too far inside the hyper limit, sandwiched between two forces, both of which had higher fleet acceleration rates than it did.

'Alter course one-two-zero to starboard,' he said. 'Maximum military power for the SDs. Shift formation to Mike-Delta-Three and prepare to launch LACs.'

Acknowledgments came back to him, and he could almost taste the sense of relief that flooded through his staff as they heard a trusted voice giving crisp, clear orders. It was, he thought bitterly, a reaction that was going to be repeated over and over again on the ships of his fleet. Repeated because he had taught his people that they could trust him. Because they had faith in him.

But this time, that faith was going to be disappointed. Even on his new course, his units were going to continue to slide into the arms of Harrington's Manticoran units. His new vector would start generating lateral separation quickly, and it was the fastest possible course back to the system's hyper limit. But it wouldn't kill velocity quickly enough to prevent the range between him and the Manties from closing by at least another thirty light-seconds. And by the time he could kill an appreciable fraction of his closing velocity, the Graysons would be on a direct course for the point at which he would hit the hyper limit out-bound. If he could maintain his present acceleration, they wouldn't—quite—catch him from their much lower base velocity, but they'd sure as hell overrun any cripples who fell behind. And the entire time he was trying to run away, they were going to be pounding him with a hurricane of missile fire precisely to produce as many cripples as they possible could. Not to mention LAC strikes.

Which meant that his fleet, and his people, were about to be destroyed.

* * *

'So, they do have CLACs,' Honor said quietly as the display blossomed with hundreds upon hundreds of fresh impeller signatures.

'Yes, Ma'am,' Jaruwalski confirmed. The ops officer stood beside Lieutenant Commander Reynolds where they'd been studying the latest reports from the system surveillance platforms. Now she turned to face Honor and gestured at the LAC drives blazing in the plot.

'It looks like at least eight of their 'superdreadnoughts' are actually CLACs, Your Grace,' she said. 'That makes them a hell of a lot bigger than anything we have, and it looks like each of their groups is at least a third again the size of a Covington's. CIC estimates that they have right on two thousand of them.'

'Then they're screwed,' Rafe Cardones said confidently from Honor's com screen. 'Two thousand gives them less than two hundred more than we have,' he went on, lumping the Manticoran and Grayson LAC groups together. 'I can't believe they could possibly have managed to improve their tech enough to keep us from tearing them apart when we're that close to parity with them numerically.'

'You're probably right,' Honor replied. 'But let's not get overconfident. ONI never even guessed they had CLACs, so we don't have any meter stick at all for evaluating their LAC effectiveness.'

'You're right, Your Grace,' Cardones admitted.

'Should we commit our own LACs, Your Grace?' Jaruwalski asked.

'Not yet,' Honor said. 'Before we do that, I want to whittle down their shipboard defenses. I'm not going to throw away our LAC groups by committing them against an unshaken wall that knows they're coming.'

'If we don't commit them soon, we may not have an opportunity to use them at all, Your Grace,' Jaruwalski warned, gesturing at CIC's projection of the Peeps' new course. 'If we hold them back more than another fifteen or twenty minutes, they won't have the accel to overcome the Peeps' base velocity advantage and overhaul short of the alpha wall.'

'Granted,' Honor conceded. 'But I'm not prepared to accept massive casualties if we don't have to. Especially when we don't know for certain what the Andies will do if we take heavy losses against the Republic. If we can beat these people without getting our LACs chewed up, so much the better.'

Jaruwalski nodded in understanding, if not total agreement, and Honor looked at Lieutenant Brantley.

'My compliments to Admiral McKeon and Admiral Yu, and instruct them to open fire.'

* * *

'Missile separation!' Marston announced. 'I have hostile launches—many hostile launches!'

'Return fire,' Tourville said almost calmly.

'Aye, Sir! Returning fire—now.'

* * *

Multidrive missiles howled out across the endless light-seconds of emptiness. No fleets in history had ever engaged one another at such a preposterous range. More than two full light-minutes lay between TF 34 and Second Fleet, and it would take almost seven minutes for even Manticore's missiles to cross that stupendous gulf of vacuum. Second Fleet's missiles, with their marginally lower accelerations, would take even longer to reach TF 34. But the Protector's Own was closer than that. The flight time for Alfredo Yu's missiles was little more than three minutes.