At All Costs

by David Weber

  One the other hand....

  "All right, Serena," he said quietly. "Think with me here. They're covering up big time with LACs, and they aren't sending a single hyper-capable unit after us. What does that suggest to you?"

  "That we don't want to get much closer to them, Sir?" the chief of staff suggested with a tight grin, and he snorted a chuckle.

  "Besides that," he said.

  "Well," she frowned thoughtfully, running one hand over her hair, "I'd say they're probably trying to use the LACs as much to blind us, keep us guessing about what's going on on the Junction, as to actually defend it. Which suggests they're doing something they think we wouldn't like. Like bringing bunches of big, nasty ships through from Trevor's Star."

  "Yes, it does. But what do you get when you add the fact that no one is heading our way? No battlecruisers or heavy cruisers swanning around trying to nail us, or at least push us further away from the Junction?"

  "That they're bringing through wallers, not screen elements," Taverner said after a second or two.

  "Exactly." It was Diamato's turn to frown. "Much as we may hate to admit it, a one-on-one engagement with one of us would be a Manty BC skipper's wet dream. So if they're not sending them after us, then they must've had wallers in place and ready to start coming through almost immediately, instead. And they're going right on doing it. Which suggests they have quite a few of them on call."

  He frowned some more, then looked over his shoulder at his com officer.

  "Record for transmission to Guerriere, attention Captain DeLaney."

  * * *

  "So Kuzak or Harrington-or both-are officially on their way, Boss," Molly DeLaney said quietly, and Tourville nodded.

  "So far, so good," he agreed, and looked at Adamson.

  "Start deploying the donkeys, Frazier," he said.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  "Sir, their acceleration's dropping," Captain Gwynett said.

  D'Orville stepped across to her console, accompanied by Captain Ayrault, and she looked up at him.

  "How much is it coming down?" he asked.

  "Only about a half a KPS2, so far, Sir."

  "What the hell are they up to now?" Ayrault wondered aloud.

  "Putting pods on tow, maybe," D'Orville replied.

  "I suppose that could be it, Sir," Gwynett raid. "Their pods are almost as stealthy as ours are, and the recon platforms wouldn't be able to see them at this range. But those are superdreadnoughts. They'd have to have an awful lot of tractors to be able to tow so many pods they'd have to tow them outside their wedges."

  D'Orville nodded. Pods towed inside a ship's wedge didn't degrade its acceleration. That, after all, was exactly what his own pre-pod designs were doing with the tractor-equipped pods glued to their hulls. But superdreadnought wedges were huge; for the Peeps to be towing so many pods they couldn't fit them all inside their wedges, they'd have to have hundreds of tractors per ship. So they had to be up to something else.

  But what?

  "Maybe they've got tech problems," Ayrault suggested. "Could be one of their SDs has lost a couple of beta nodes and had to reduce accel. The others might be reducing so she can stay in company."

  "Possible," D'Orville conceded. "Or it could be even simpler than that. Maybe they've just decided to ease off on their compensator margins now that they know we're coming out to meet them."

  Ayrault nodded, but D'Orville wasn't really satisfied with his own hypothesis. It made sense, but it just didn't feel right, somehow.

  "How far do you want to close before opening fire, Sir?" Gwynett asked, after a moment, and he looked back down at her. Despite the fact that he and Ayrault were standing right beside her, she had to pitch her voice very low to keep it from being overheard, because it was very quiet on HMS Invictus' flag bridge. Everyone had had time to realize what was going to happen, and fear hung in the background. There was no panic, no hesitation, but they knew what they faced, and the people on that bridge wanted to live just as much as anyone else. The knowledge that they very probably wouldn't was a cold, invisible weight, pressing down upon them.

  D'Orville knew it, and he wished there was something he could say or do. Not to make the fear go away, because no one could have done that. But to tell them how much they meant to him, how bitterly he regretted taking them on this death ride.

  "We have to make them count," he told Gwynett, equally quietly. "We know our accuracy and penaids are better, but we've still got to get in close. They're going to bury us whenever we open fire, and according to the recon drones, every single one of their wallers is a pod design. They aren't going to face the same 'use them or lose them' constraints we are.

  "So we're either going to wait until they open fire, or else until the range drops to sixty-five million klicks."

  Gwynett looked at him for a moment, then nodded slowly.

  "I know. I know," he said softly. "But we've got to get our hits through at all costs. We've got to, Madelyn. If we don't, all of this," a slight motion of his head, almost as much imagined as seen, indicated his flag bridge and the fleet beyond it, "is for nothing."

  "Yes, Sir. I understand."

  "Which fire plan do you want to use, Sir?" Ayrault asked.

  "We'll go with Avalanche," D'Orville said grimly. "Madelyn, I want you to start shifting formation to Sierra Three. How many LACs have managed to overtake us?"

  "Just over thirty-five hundred so far, Sir. Another five hundred will be here by the time we reach the range you've specified."

  "How many are Katanas?"

  "I'm not positive, Sir. Under half-I know that much."

  "I wish we had more," D'Orville said, "but what we have is all we've got. Pull them forward and spread them vertically. I want their Vipers positioned for the best firing arcs we can build."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "And set up your firing sequences to have the older ships deploy their pods first. We'll try to hold the internal pods as long as we can. I want the Keyhole ships to manage as many of the other units' pods as possible in the opening salvos."

  "Yes, Sir. I understand."

  "Good, Madelyn. Good." D'Orville patted her gently on the shoulder. "I'll let you get on with it, then."

  "Yes, Sir," Captain Gwynett said.

  * * *

  "We're in range, Admiral," Commander Adamson pointed out, and Lester Tourville nodded.

  "I'm aware of that, Frazier, thank you."

  "Yes, Sir."

  Tourville tipped back in his command chair and glanced at Molly DeLaney.

  "So Tom was right," he said quietly.

  "It looks that way," DeLaney agreed, and Tourville wondered if the relief hidden behind her calm expression could possibly be as great as the one roaring through him.

  He looked at the master plot, with its sprawl of light codes. Second Fleet had been accelerating towards Sphinx for the last hour. Given the system's geometry, Tourville's present vector cut a chord at an angle of almost exactly forty-five degrees to the outer wall of the hugely elongated, "skinny" resonance zone. His phalanx of superdreadnoughts, was up to 18,560 KPS, relative to the system primary, and they'd traveled over 35,600,000 kilometers. The Manties' Home Fleet had been under acceleration for only forty-seven minutes, on an almost exactly reciprocal course, but with its higher base acceleration, its velocity relative to the primary was already up to better than 17,000 KPS, and it had traveled just over 24,000,000 kilometers from its initial station.

  Although Tourville's command was still almost half an hour from its turnover point for a zero/zero intercept of Sphinx, the range between the opposing forces had fallen to just a shade over 84,000,000 kilometers, and their closing speed was up to 45,569 KPS. That geometry gave Tourville's MDMs an effective range of better than 85,369,000 kilometers, which, as Frazier Adamson had just observed, meant they were in extreme missile range of Home Fleet.

  But Manticoran MDMs' acceleration rate was just over thirty-four KPS2 higher than his birds could pull. That gave them a
current effective range of better than 90,370,000 kilometers, which meant he'd been in their effective range for over two minutes.

  "It doesn't just look like he was right," he told DeLaney after a moment. "He was. If they had those God awful missiles, they'd already be launching. They'd have spent the last ten minutes doing nothing but rolling pods, and they'd be punching them down our throats right this instant, not letting us close into our own effective range."

  "You don't think they might just be letting the range fall a little more for their own fire control, Boss?"

  "That's exactly what they're doing, which is why I know they don't have the new missiles. They've got less than a hundred wallers over there. Even assuming they've got heavy external pod loads-which they very well could, despite their accel, if NavInt's right about their new pod designs-they're outnumbered better than two-to-one. They wouldn't be closing straight into salvos the size they know we can throw if they had any choice at all. But they don't. They've got to get closer to improve their accuracy, just like we do."

  "It's going to be ugly when we do open fire," Delaney said quietly, and Tourville nodded again.

  "That it certainly is," he agreed grimly. "On the other hand, we planned for it, didn't we?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  Tourville studied the icons of the oncoming Home Fleet superdreadnoughts for another few moments, then looked at a secondary display and shook his head in admiration. He'd always known Shannon Foraker had a talent for thinking outside the box. Way back when she'd been his operations officer, he'd recognized her knack for coming up with solutions which simply didn't occur to other people-concepts so elegantly simple everyone wondered why they hadn't thought of them.

  When NavInt reported that the new Manty pods incorporated onboard tractors as a way to allow their pre-pod ships to tow greater numbers of them, it had seemed impossible for the Republic to respond. Their pods were already too big, and they had too limited a power budget, to permit the designers to cram a tractor into them (and power the damned thing), as well. But Shannon had decided to turn the problem on its head. Instead of fitting additional tractors into the pods, she'd come up with the "donkey." That was what everyone was calling it, although it had a suitably esoteric alphabet-soup designation, and it was another of those elegantly simple Foraker specialties.

  Instead of the typically Manty bells-and-whistles approach of putting the tractor inside the pod, Shannon had simply built a very stealthy pod-sized platform which consisted of nothing except a solid mass of tractor beams and a receiver for beamed power from the ships which deployed it. Each "donkey" had the capacity to tow ten pods, and a Sovereign of Space-class SD(P) had enough tractors to tow twenty of them. Better yet, they could actually be ganged together, as long as all the pods in the gang could be lined up for power transmission from the mother ship. In theory, they could have been stacked three tiers deep, with each donkey towing ten more donkeys, each towing ten more donkeys, each....

  If Lester Tourville had so chosen, his two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts could-in theory-have towed 4.8 million pods. Except for the minor fact that the drag would have reduced them to negative acceleration numbers. Not to mention the fact that he didn't begin to have the power transmission capability to feed that many donkeys. Still, he could tow quite a lot of them, and the readiness numbers on the display gave him a sense of profound satisfaction. He studied them a moment longer, then looked at Lieutenant Anita Eisenberg, his absurdly youthful communications officer.

  "What's the latest from Admiral Diamato, Ace?"

  "No change, Sir. He still can't get a clear look. Their fortresses and the LACs deployed to cover the Junction are picking off his recon platforms before they get close enough for that. But he still hasn't seen any hyper-capable units headed his way, and he's positive they're still coming through from Trevor's Star. No one's started in-system yet, though."

  "Thank you," Tourville said, and cocked an eyebrow at DeLaney.

  The chief of staff clearly had been running through the same mental math he had, and she grimaced.

  "They've been coming through for over forty-five minutes now, Boss. By my calculations, that means at least twenty-four wallers so far."

  "And it means they're planning on bringing through a lot more than that," Tourville agreed. "They could have put twenty-seven through in a mass transit and been headed after us over half an hour ago. The only reason to delay this long is because they figure they can't afford to lock the Junction down... because they've got one hell of a lot more than twenty-seven wallers waiting to come up our backside."

  "Still, Boss, if I were them, I might be thinking about sending some of the ships I've already got through the Junction after us."

  "No way." Tourville shook his head. "I wish to hell they would, but the Manties picked their best people to command Home Fleet, Third Fleet, and Eighth Fleet. I've studied NavInt's files on all three of them, and they aren't going to cooperate with our plans worth a damn.

  "D'Orville's probably the most conventional thinker of the three, but he's also got the simplest equation... and plenty of guts. He can't let us get any closer to Sphinx than he can possibly help, so he's going to hit us head on, as far out as he can. He's going to get clobbered. In fact, I'll be surprised if any of his superdreadnoughts survive. But like you just said, it's going to be ugly for both sides, and our own losses are going to be heavy. He knows that, and he probably figures he can score at least a one-for-one exchange rate, despite the tonnage ratios. I think he may be being a little optimistic, but not very much. So given the combat strength he thinks he's up against, he probably figures he'll hurt us so badly we won't be able to close through the fixed inner-system defenses and missile pods. And if his analysis of the balance of forces was correct, he'd be right."

  Tourville and his chief of staff looked at one another, and this time their smiles were hard. It was entirely possible RHNS Guerriere would be among the "heavy losses" the admiral had just predicted his fleet was going to suffer. But at this moment, an even exchange rate was actually heavily in the Republic's favor in the merciless mathematics of war... and those losses were also part of the bait in the trap Thomas Theisman and his Octagon planning staff had crafted.

  "Kuzak's more of a free-thinker than D'Orville," Tourville continued. "I'm sure what she's doing right now has their Admiralty's approval, but even if it didn't, she'd do it anyway, on her own initiative. She knows exactly what's going to happen to D'Orville, and to us, and she knows she can't possibly get here in time to affect that outcome. So she's not going to split up her forces and send them in where we could chop them up in detail. Yes, she could've sent a couple of battle squadrons ahead, micro-jumped out to the side and then come back in directly behind us, assuming their astrogation was good enough. But unless she's got those new missiles, any small force she sent after us would get torn apart by the weight of fire we could send back at it.

  "So, she's going to wait until she gets everything she's got through the Junction. Then she's going to do her micro-jumping and come in behind us-or more likely on our flank, especially, if we're driven back from Sphinx by our losses-as quickly as she can. She'll be too far behind to overhaul us, even with her acceleration advantage, if she has to come in astern, but she'll figure to put enough time pressure on us to limit the amount of damage we can do. At least, she'll figure, she can keep us from moving on from Sphinx to Manticore, and that would save about seventy percent of the system's total industry.

  "The fact that she's waiting is the conclusive proof that she doesn't have any-or not very many, at least-of the new missiles, either. If she had a couple of battle squadrons equipped with them, then it would have made enormous sense to send them in, even in isolation. Their accuracy advantage would have been crushing enough to let them do heavy damage to us before we ever met D'Orville. Probably not enough to stop us, but maybe enough to even the odds between us and Home Fleet."

  "And what about Harrington, Boss?" DeLaney asked quietly, wh
en he paused.

  "Harrington's probably the most dangerous of the lot," Tourville said, "and not just because we know Eighth Fleet's reequipped with at least some of the new missiles. She's got more actual combat experience than D'Orville or Kuzak, and she's sneaky as hell.

  "But what's happening out at the Junction is tempting me to hope we filled an inside straight on the draw. If Eighth Fleet had been in position to intervene, Kuzak wouldn't be coming through the Junction; Harrington would, and we'd have had two or three of her battle squadrons ripping our ass off already. Assuming of course that Admiral Chin didn't have a little to say about it. So it's beginning to look as if Eighth Fleet really may be off on an operation of its own. I'm not planning on counting on that just yet-there could be any number of other explanations-but that's not going to keep me from hoping."