War Of Honor

Werewolf was miraculously and completely untouched in that first, crushing exchange of fire. Other ships were less fortunate. Alistair McKeon's Troubadour was a priority target. Almost a dozen missiles broke through every electronic and active defense, and the SD(P)'s icon flashed and flickered on Honor's plot as she took damage. Her sistership Hancock was hit equally hard, and Trevor's Star took at least ten hits from individual lasers. The pre-pod ships Horatius,Romulus, and Yawata took their share of the punishment, as well, and the battlecruiser Retaliation strayed into the path of a full broadside intended for the dreadnought King Michael. All of the ships of the wall survived; Retaliation didn't.

Honor watched the battlecruiser's data code disappear from her plot and wondered how many hundreds— or thousands—of her people were wounded or dying aboard the other ships of her task force. She felt those fresh deaths pressing upon her, joining their weight to all the rest of her dead, but even as the toll mounted among her own ships, she knew the enemy was being hammered even harder.

* * *

Lester Tourville watched the mounting tide of destruction swelling up in the plot's sidebars and fought to keep his despair out of his expression and voice.

Despite the incredible range, despite the MDMs' long flight times, the Manties' deadly concentration on his SD(P)s had crippled his offensive firepower in the first two salvos . . . and, for all intents and purposes, destroyed it completely in less than thirty minutes. Only one of his long-range missile ships, Battle Squadron 21's flagship, RHNS Hero, remained in action. Two of her sisters had been totally destroyed, four had been abandoned, with scuttling charges set, three more would have to be abandoned very quickly if their nodes could not be brought back online, and if she herself was still in action, she was also heavily damaged. Her fire control had been gutted by the same missile salvo which had destroyed her flag bridge . . . and killed Rear Admiral Zrubek instantly. She was effectively blind and deaf, yet she continued to roll pods at her maximum possible rate, turning them over to her older sisters' fire control. It let Second Fleet continue to spit defiance at the Manties, but Hero was the only ship he had which could still deploy pods at all, and she had only a finite number of them.

Nor had the SD(P)s been his only fatalities. Five more superdreadnoughts had been destroyed or so badly damaged that he'd had no option but to leave them behind while his survivors continued to run. At least one more had taken critical impeller damage; like the lamed SD(P)s, he'd be forced to leave her behind when he made translation into hyper if she couldn't get the missing alpha node back. One of his CLACs had also been destroyed, and two more were little more than air-bleeding wrecks, which meant that at least seven hundred of his two thousand LACs were going to have to be written off, whatever happened to the rest of his fleet.

He checked the maneuvering plot again, and his face clenched with pain. He was still two hours from the hyper limit, and if Harrington's task force had begun losing ground as the geometry of his vector change crabbed away from her, the Graysons were closing in steadily. Not that it mattered. He might be slowly, painfully opening the range from her launchers, but he was still over two light-minutes inside their reach.

At least some of Harrington's ships had been sufficiently battered to fall astern in the chase, he thought grimly. Some of them, judging from the recon drone's' reports, had taken serious damage. Two of her battlecruisers had been completely destroyed, as had at least three destroyers or light cruisers. CIC wasn't certain which at this range—especially when they hadn't been targeted in the first place. But MDMs were proving as indiscriminate in their targeting at long-range as Shannon had predicted. Most of them went after their programmed victims; a significant percentage wound up going after whatever targets they could see at the ends of their runs.

Even as he watched his fleet being pounded towards destruction, he felt a fresh flicker of admiration for Shannon and her staff. Second Fleet could not have found itself in a more disastrous tactical situation than trapped between two separate enemy forces with more long-range firepower than it could muster. No tactical doctrine could have nullified those disadvantages, but although Second Fleet's offensive firepower had been all but destroyed, he was astonished by how many of its ships still survived. They could no longer realistically hope to damage the enemy, but as long as they held together, they could continue to defend one another against the storm of destruction beating upon them. And if his single remaining SD(P) was running low on ammunition, then surely Harrington's SD(P)s had to be doing the same thing. Maybe he could outlast her firepower after all.

* * *

'Our magazines are down to twenty percent,' Alistair McKeon told Honor from her com screen. His face was grim, and Honor knew from the sidebars in her plot that Troubadour had taken serious damage and heavy casualties. But McKeon's flagship was still in action, still rolling pods, and whatever had happened to Honor's command, what had happened to the Havenites was worse.

'The older SDs are in better shape on a percentage basis,' he went on, 'but they can't pump the kinds of broadsides the SD(P)s can. We've got maybe another fifteen minutes. After that, we'll be down to salvos too light to penetrate that damned defense of theirs from this range.'

'Alistair's right, Honor,' Alice Truman said from her own screen. 'And my LACs can't catch them from here. Not before they make it across the limit. Alfredo's could intercept, but we can't support them.'

Honor nodded—not in agreement, but in acknowledgment of unpalatable reality. She'd sprung her trap perfectly and savaged the Havenites brutally. Her own losses were painful, but only a fraction of what she'd done to them, and she knew it. But even so, almost half of the enemy fleet was going to escape. They'd held together with too much discipline, and their missile defense doctrine had proven too hard a nut to crack without more MDM firepower then she had. And even if her LACs had been able to intercept, she knew what would happen if she committed them against the close-in defenses which had so badly blunted her missile attack.

Which was the reason she couldn't possibly commit Alfredo's LACs to an unsupported attack.

'You're right—both of you,' she said after a moment. She looked back at her plot, where only a handful of missiles continued to launch from the shattered ranks of the Havenite fleet. The enemy was decisively routed and broken, but even though every bone in her body longed to run the survivors down and complete their destruction, she knew she couldn't do it.

'We'll continue the pursuit.' Her soprano was calm, giving no more hint of her intense frustration than it did of the pain of her own losses. 'Alistair, I want you to reprioritize our missile fire. We're not going to be able to hammer our way through those defenses by saturating them, so I want you to slow your rate of fire and pick your targets carefully. Use delayed activation launches to thicken your broadsides while the pods last and try to concentrate on SDs with undamaged impellers. If we can slow some more of them down, our older ships of the wall can take them out as we overhaul, or else we can commit Alice's LACs to deal with them as we go by.'

'Yes, Ma'am,' McKeon acknowledged.

'Alice, I know you're frustrated by not getting your LACs into this yet,' Honor went on, 'but at least half a dozen of those Havenite ships are going to be too slow and too beat up to get away from you. When you're free to commit to go in after them, I want you to be sure to offer them the chance to surrender first. They're a long way from home and badly hurt, and I don't want to kill anyone who wants to give up.'

'Of course,' Truman agreed.

'Very well then.' Honor sat back in her command chair and nodded to both of her senior subordinates. 'Harper will pass similar instructions to Alfredo. In the meantime, we have a battle to finish up. So let's be about it, People.'

Chapter Fifty Nine

The planet of Manticore was a blue-and-white-swirled beauty as the pinnace from GSNS Seneca Gilmore swooped into its outermost atmosphere. Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, sat in its large passenger compartment, alone but for her three- man security team, and watched the seas of featureless white turn into fluffy, wind-textured billows of cloud as the pinnace swept lower and lower towards the City of Landing.

It was a short flight, the last leg of the journey home from Sidemore which had begun two weeks earlier