At All Costs

by David Weber

  Harrington. "The Salamander" herself, coming straight down his throat with a pair of SD(P)s while four more came right up his backside, and armed with the advantage of detailed tactical scans of the star system and his own defensive forces. No wonder she was "confident!"

  "But, Sir-!" Tucker protested, and Milligan smiled grimly.

  "George, for what it matters-and, at this particular moment, it doesn't matter a whole hell of a lot-my career crashlanded the instant those ships came over the hyper wall. I realize that, unlike the previous management, Admiral Theisman's unlikely to have me shot for something that obviously wasn't my fault, but someone's still going to have to carry the can for this one, and I'm elected. Under the circumstances, it's not going to make things much worse for me personally if I do what she's suggesting. And, in case you've forgotten, there are over six thousand people aboard these two obsolete, piece-of-crap battleships, alone. I'm not sure I'd take a lot of consolation from the knowledge that I got them killed for absolutely no return. In fact, what I most regret right now, is that I didn't simply order them all to turn tail and run from the outset."

  "You couldn't do that, Sir."

  "I could have, and I damned well should have! Not that it would've done much good, given her approach vectors, although at least the LACs might have been able to stay away from her," Milligan said with quiet, intense bitterness. Then he inhaled deeply.

  "Inform Captain Beauchamp that he's to coordinate the missile pod engagement from dirt-side," he said flatly. "Then instruct the LAC crews to return immediately to their launch platforms. They're to abandon and evacuate to the planetary surface, and the platform skippers are to set their demolition charges and accompany them."

  Tucker was staring at him in something like shock, but Milligan continued steadily.

  "In the meantime, I'll contact Admiral Harrington. I'll accept her offer on behalf of our mobile units, and we'll abandon ship."

  "Sir!"

  "God damn it, George!" Milligan grated. "I am not going to get thousands of people killed for nothing! I won't do it. We'll take our best shot with the missile pods, but those ships-" he jabbed his finger at the hostile icons "-can kill anything we have from outside any range where we can even shoot back. Our 'main combatants' don't have MDMs, and our LACs are Cimeterres, not frigging Shrikes. They'd never live to reach their own range of superdreadnoughts without MDM support to cover their approach. We're fucked, and nothing we can do can change that. Do you understand me?"

  "Yes, Sir," Tucker said finally, slowly, and turned away.

  "Communications," Milligan said heavily, "raise Admiral Harrington for me."

  * * *

  "There they go, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, and Honor nodded. Her remote sensor arrays were close enough to see the drive signatures of the Havenite warships' small craft. Individual life pods were much harder to detect, even at that range and even with Manticoran sensors, but their beacons showed as a fine green haze of diamond dust glittering around the warship icons, and the ships themselves had struck their wedges five minutes earlier.

  "That isn't a happy man over there," Mercedes Brigham murmured, and Honor looked at her.

  "I've been in his shoes, Mercedes. When I ordered Alistair to surrender his ship. It isn't easy, however hopeless the situation might be. Milligan showed a lot of moral courage when he accepted my offer, although I doubt most of his critics will see it that way."

  "From his tone, I think he agrees with you, Ma'am.

  Honor snorted softly at Brigham's understatement. Milligan had actually thanked her for offering an out which would spare his people's lives, but he'd looked-and sounded-like a man chewing ground glass.

  "I noticed he didn't say anything about any missile pods, Your Grace," Jaruwalski observed quietly.

  "No, he didn't, did he?" Honor looked at her opns officer. Jaruwalski was as professionally focused as ever, but Honor tasted something very like frustration under the younger woman's surface. That wasn't exactly the right word for the emotion, but it came close. Andrea Jaruwalski was no more enamored of killing people just to kill them than Honor was, but the tactician in her couldn't help... regretting the lost opportunity to carry through with their neatly planned mousetrap and finish off the enemy ships herself.

  "I didn't ask him to stand down the pods, either, Andrea," Honor continued. "Mostly because I knew he'd refuse, just as you or I would have in his position. If I'd made the stand down of all of his defenses a precondition for my offer, he would have rejected it."

  "It might have been worth a try, anyway, Your Grace." Jaruwalski's tone was mostly humorous, but she grimaced and gestured at one of the secondary plots. "We're beginning to pick up active targeting emissions. A lot of them."

  "As expected." Honor examined the indicated plot. "Actually," she said after a moment, "there aren't as many as I'd expected. I wonder if that means they're as light on pods as they were on ships?"

  "We can hope, Ma'am," Brigham said. "Of course-"

  "There go the scuttling charges, Commodore Jaruwalski!"

  Honor and both her staffers turned towards the main plot once more. The range was still long enough that in the visual display, the brief, bright stars which once had been warships of the Republic of Haven were little more than short-lived, brilliant pinpricks. The presentation in the plot was even less dramatic than that. Seven crimson icons simply blinked once, and disappeared.

  The bright ruby light chips representing the Herrick System's LACs were still there, but they continued to accelerate steadily away from Honor's ships, obviously bound-as Commodore Milligan had promised-for their base platforms.

  "You think they'll turn around if their missile pods get lucky, Ma'am? Brigham asked softly, gazing at the retiring light attack craft.

  "That's hard to say." Honor considered the question for a few seconds, then shrugged. "Their pods would have to get awfully lucky to make any difference. If those were Shrikes or Ferrets, it might be different, but they aren't."

  "Missile launch!" a Plotting rating announced suddenly. "Multiple missile launches! Time to impact four-point-six minutes!"

  * * *

  "Captain Beauchamp has launched, Commodore!"

  Tom Milligan looked up at the announcement. He'd been staring moodily and silently out the pinnace's viewport, gazing out into the endless emptiness which had swallowed up the dispersing plasma of his command. Now he shoved himself out of his seat and stepped quickly to the cramped command deck's hatch.

  A pinnace's sensor capability wasn't particularly good at the best of times, and the display was far too small to show much detail, but he could see the wavefront of Beauchamp's outgoing missiles. He'd been surprised when Harrington hadn't tried to insist that he agree to stand them down, as well. In her place, he certainly would have at least made the attempt. Unless, of course, her scouting destroyers had managed to tell her just how threadbare all of Hera's defenses were.

  * * *

  "Estimate eleven hundred-I say again, one-one-zero-zero-inbound," Plotting reported. "Target is Second Division."

  "Makes sense," Brigham said quietly. "We're closer to most of their platforms, and two superdreadnoughts have to have less missile defense than four of them."

  Honor didn't respond. In fact, she was almost certain her chief of staff didn't even realize she'd spoken aloud.

  The tornado of multidrive missiles howled towards them, and whoever had programmed their launch times and accelerations had done her job well. Despite how widely separated many of the launching pods were, their coordination was flawless. All of those missiles would arrive on target simultaneously as a single, tightly focused hammer blow.

  The quiet murmur of voices behind her grew louder, more clipped and intense, as Jaruwalski's plotting parties and tactical crews concentrated on their tasks. Not that there was a great deal for them to actually do at this moment. Everything an admiral's staff could do for a situation like this had to happen earlier, in the planning and training s
tages, when the crews of the individual ships of the admiral's command were learning what was expected of them, and how to perform it.

  As Imperator, Intolerant, and their screening heavy cruisers were performing it now.

  As little as five or six T-years earlier, that many missiles, fired at a mere pair of superdreadnoughts, would have been both enormous and deadly. Today, it was different. In an era of pod-laying ships of the wall, missile densities like that had become something defense planners had to take into the routine calculations.

  Doctrine and hardware had required major modifications, and the modifying process was an ongoing one. The Mark 31 counter-missiles Honor's ships were firing represented significant improvements even over the Mark 30 counter-missiles her command had used as recently as the Battle of Sidemore, only months before. Their insanely powerful wedges were capable of sustaining accelerations of up to 130,000 for as much as seventy-five seconds, which gave them a powered range from rest of almost 3.6 million kilometers.

  Kill numbers at such extreme ranges were problematical, to say the least, and the incoming Havenite missiles were equipped with the very best penetration aids and EW systems Shannon Foraker could build into them. That made them much, much better than anything the People's Navy had possessed during the First Havenite War, but BuShips and BuWeaps hadn't precisely been letting grass grow under their feet, either, Honor thought grimly. Her ships mounted at least three times as many counter-missile launchers as ships of their classes had mounted before the advent of pod-based combat.

  Their telemetry and control links had been increased by an even higher factor, and each of her ships had deployed additional Mark 20 electronics platforms at the ends of dedicated tractor beams. Nicknamed "Keyhole" by the Navy, the Mark 20 wasn't a traditional tethered decoy, or even an additional sensor platform or Ghost Rider EW platform. These platforms were placed much further from the ships which had launched them, and they had only one function-to serve as fire control telemetry relays. They extended well beyond the boundaries of their motherships' impeller wedges, like an old-style wet-navy submarine's periscope, and they gave the tactical crews aboard those ships the ability to look "down" past the blinding interference of their own outgoing counter-missiles' wedges.

  To a civilian, that might have sounded like a small thing, but the implications were huge. The Keyhole platforms were massive and expensive, but they allowed a ship to control multiple counter-missiles for each dedicated shipboard fire control "slot." And they also allowed counter-missile launches to be much more tightly spaced, which added significant depth to the antimissile engagement envelope.

  And as a final refinement, the grav-pulse com-equipped reconnaissance arrays deployed in a shell three and a half million kilometers out watched the incoming missiles' EW with eagle eyes, and their FTL data streams provided the missile defense crews aboard Honor's ships a priceless eleven-second advantage. Although the missile controllers and their AIs were still limited to light-speed telemetry links, they were able to refine and update targeting solutions with much greater speed and precision than had ever been possible before.

  Shannon Foraker had been forced to rely on mass and sheer numbers, to build a wall in space using thousands of weapons whose individual accuracy was very low. Manticore had approached the problem from a different direction, relying on its technological advantages and superior technique.

  The first counter-missile launch killed only a hundred and six of the incoming MDMs. The second, intercepting them less than ten seconds later killed another hundred. But the third launch, with almost twenty seconds for its controllers to react, killed three hundred.

  * * *

  Tom Milligan turned away from the pinnace's tiny display without a word. He returned to his seat, staring out the viewport once again, and his expression was bleak.

  One hit, he thought. Surely one frigging hit wasn't too much to ask for!

  But the Republic hadn't gotten it. Only forty of Beauchamp's MDMs had broken through the Manties' counter-missiles, and the point defense laser clusters-whose numbers also seemed to have been hugely increased-had blasted those threadbare survivors out of existence well short of attack range.

  We knew they were improving their antimissile doctrine, but nothing I ever saw suggested that they'd improved it this much! And it's going to play hell with our system defense doctrine.

  Hera's defenses had been weak, even by the existing standards of the Republican Navy. He should have had at least three times the missile pods he'd actually been able to deploy, and they ought to have been backed up by a much stronger LAC force, at a bare minimum. But given what he'd just seen, even the defensive strength he ought to have had wouldn't have stopped Harrington.

  I've never failed this completely at anything before in my life, he thought bitterly. At least I didn't get all of my people killed for nothing, but just at the moment, that's pretty cold comfort.

  He stared broodingly into the endless ebon infinity of space. It looked so peaceful out there, so calm. And that cold, merciless vista was infinitely preferable to what was about to happen closer to the life-giving beacon of the star called Hera.

  * * *

  "That's the last of them, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said. "They may have some additional pods squirreled away, but if they could have reached us with more of them, they would have. Anything else they throw our way will be lighter, easier to handle."

  Honor didn't respond for several seconds. She was gazing into her plot, her eyes picking out the icons of orbital factories, extraction facilities, power satellites, warehouses. By the standards of a wealthy star system like the Manticore home system, or of a major transportation node, like one of the Junction's termini, Hera's orbital and deep-space facilities might seem sparse, but they still represented decades of investment. They were where people worked, what powered over half the star system's economy. They represented literally billions of dollars of investment, and even more earning potential, all in a star nation struggling doggedly to overcome more than a century of ongoing economic disaster.

  And she was here to destroy them. All of them.

  "One of the platforms in planetary orbit just blew up, Ma'am," Brigham reported. Honor looked at her, and the chief of staff pointed into the plot, indicating the icon of the platform in question.

  "That one," she said. "According to CIC, it was one of the LAC basing platforms, so it looks like they're making good on Milligan's stand down order."

  "Yes, it does." Honor's chocolate eyes were sad, and her fingers caressed Nimitz's silken coat while she drew strength from the bright, fierce power of his support and love, but her voice was calm, unshadowed.

  "All right, Mercedes, Andrea," she said after a moment, turning her command chair to face them. "We came to wreck this system's space-going economy, and it would appear the way is clear. So let's be about it."

  Chapter Twenty

  "What the hell are those things?" Rear Admiral Beach murmured. Behind him, he could hear the disciplined bedlam as his communications staff coordinated the evacuation of Gaston's deep-space industrial infrastructure, but his attention was focused on two of the tentatively identified Manty battlecruisers.

  "They've got to be battlecruisers," Commander Myron Randall, his chief of staff, replied.

  "I know that," Beach said, just a bit impatiently. "But look at the tonnage estimates. According to CIC, these things mass dammed close to two million tons. That's a big dammed battlecruiser, Myron!"

  "The Graysons' Courvoisier IIs mass over a million tons," Randall pointed out.

  "Which is still considerably smaller than these are." Beach shook his head. "I'll bet you this is the Manties' version of a pod-laying battlecruiser."

  "Wonderful," Randall muttered.

  "Well," Beach said, glancing at the shoals of LACs which had launched themselves from the incoming CLACs, "how much worse can it get, Myron? We've got three hundred Cimeterres, the missile pods, and four battlecruisers. I don't think the fact that th
ey've brought along some of their newer toys is going to make a lot of difference in the long run."

  * * *

  "Message from Admiral Henke, Ma'am."

  "Put it on my tertiary display," Dame Alice Truman replied, and a moment later Michelle Henke's ebony face appeared on the tiny flatscreen by Truman's knee.

  "Mike," the vice admiral greeted her.

  "Admiral," Henke responded.

  "To what do I owe the honor?"

  "We've been going over the fresh data from Intruder's platforms over here, Ma'am. Have your people noticed that odd little cluster of blips they're picking up in Charlie-Two-Seven now that they've gone active?"

  "Just a minute, Mike." Truman looked up from the display, and beckoned to her chief of staff. Captain Goodrick crossed to her immediately, and she waved him forward into the field of her own com pickup. "Would you repeat that for Wraith, Mike?"