War of Honor

by David Weber

  The exact verb didn't matter all that much to the men and women who would do the killing and the dying, and as he sat in his command chair and listened to the quiet, efficient murmur of his staff, he felt the cold wind of all that mortality blowing through the chinks in his soul. He was about to do something he'd already done once before, in a star system named Basilisk. He'd had no choice then, and he had even less of one now, but that didn't mean he looked forward to it.

  He checked the time again.

  Fifteen minutes.

  * * *

  "Perimeter Security has bogeys, Admiral!"

  Niall MacDonnell turned quickly from his conversation with Earl White Haven at his ops officer's announcement.

  "They just made their alpha translations," Commander William Tatnall continued. "We're still getting a preliminary count on their transit signatures, but there are a lot of them."

  MacDonnell felt White Haven standing behind him and sensed how difficult it was for the earl to keep his mouth shut. But White Haven had assured him before they ever departed from Yeltsin's Star that despite any questions of relative seniority, he had no intention of backseat driving. This was MacDonnell's command, not his, he'd said, and he was as good as his word now.

  "Locus and vector?" MacDonnell asked.

  "They made translation right on the hyper limit for a least-time course to San Martin," Commander David Clairdon, his chief of staff, amplified quickly.

  "Any sign of anything headed for the terminus?" the admiral pressed.

  "Not at this time, Sir," Clairdon replied carefully, and MacDonnell smiled thinly at the unspoken "yet" everyone on the flag bridge heard in Clairdon's tone.

  The admiral turned back to the main plot as the glittering light codes of the bogeys' hyper footprints appeared upon it. Clairdon was certainly right about their position and course. And Tatnall was right, too—there were "a lot of them."

  "CIC makes it over eighty of the wall, Sir," Tatnall announced a moment later, as if he couldn't quite believe the numbers himself. "Uh, they say that's a minimal estimate," he added.

  "Sweet Tester," MacDonnell heard someone mutter. Which, he decided, reflected his own reaction quite well.

  There was no way to tell how many of those ships were SD(P)s and how many were pre-pod designs. If he were Thomas Theisman, there'd be as many of the former and as few of the latter as he could possibly arrange. Either way, it sounded as if the Peeps had sent a force twice as powerful as the one they had expected to face. And 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 sy
stem."

  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.

  The only real problem with that neat little theory was that there seemed to be too many ships in that second force. Giscard had studied Kuzak's record, and he had a lively respect for her strategic judgment. If she'd split her forces to cover two objectives in the first place, she would have placed the larger force to cover the more important one. And in this instance, there was no comparison between the value—politically and morally, as well as economically—of defending San Martin's citizens as opposed to a wormhole terminus. So if one force was going to be more powerful than the other, then the one in front of him ought to be substantially more numerous than the one behind him, yet CIC's estimate suggested that the trailer was damned nearly the size of Kuzak's entire fleet.

  But if it wasn't the second half of Third Fleet, then what was it, and what was it doing here? Could it be a detachment from their Home Fleet that had simply happened to be in range for a crash Junction transit? That was certainly possible, although a part of him rejected the possibility. It would have been too much like history repeating itself. That was exactly how White Haven had reached Basilisk in time to keep Giscard from taking out the terminus there when he'd raided that system. But the possibility of a coincidence like that happening a second time was remote, to say the least.

  No. If there really was a second force out there, then it had been deliberately placed there ahead of time. Only that didn't make a lot of sense, either . . . unless he assumed that they'd somehow guessed what was coming. Which should have been impossible. On the other hand, he couldn't even begin to count the number of "top secret" plans which had somehow been compromised in the long history of military operations.

  But even if it were a force from their Home Fleet, how bad could that be? They didn't have enough SD(P)s in Home Fleet to significantly affect the odds here, and rushing in pre-pod SDs would be suicidal. But they'd know that, too. So where—?

  "I wonder," he murmured, and turned back to Gozzi. "We need to nail this down, Marius. Send the LACs in closer."

  "Sir, if they get any closer and this is what it looks like, they're going to be awfully vulnerable," the chief of staff reminded him quietly.

  "I realize that," Giscard acknowledged. "And I don't like it a whole lot more than you do. But we have to know. This is the largest single task force of Operation Thunderbolt. If the Manties have somehow figured out what we're up to, this would be the one place they'd try hardest to set a trap for us. Don't forget what they did to Admiral Parnell at Yeltsin's Star at the beginning of the war. And whether they deliberately set it up as a trap or not, we can't afford to get ourselves enveloped by a superior force. If we take heavy losses here, we could be in serious trouble until Admiral Tourville gets back from Silesia. Or, at least, until Admiral Foraker and Bolthole can make up our losses. If we have to risk some LACs, or even deliberately sacrifice them, to ensure that doesn't happen, then I'm afraid we'll simply have to do it."

  "Yes, Sir."

  * * *

  "They know we're here," Commander Tatnall said positively, and MacDonnell nodded.

  He'd hoped that the Peeps wouldn't spot them until it was too late. Although it had become evident that there were actually at least a hundred capital ships in the Havenite task force, he remained confident that his task force and Third Fleet, with almost a hundred SD(P)s and fifty pre-pod SDs between them, could take them. The small, fast impeller signatures which proved that the Peeps did have CLACs, after all, had caused him to raise his estimate of the losses he and Kuzak would probably suffer, but that hadn't affected his fundamental confidence. Not with the hundreds of planet-based LACs the Janacek Admiralty had deployed to back up Third Fleet as relations with the Republic worsened steadily. He knew they could take them . . . and that White Haven shared his confidence.

  But in order to defeat them, he and Kuzak had to be able to get at them in the first place, and if they cut and ran for it, the chances of catching up to them would be poor at best.

  He glowered at the display, where the steadily, if cautiously, advancing impeller signatures of scouting LACs crept ever closer to his own stealthed units. The question wasn't whether or not they knew he was here—it was whether or not they knew what he had. If they did realize that he was coming in behind them with another forty SD(P)s, plus carriers, anyone but idiots would disengage in a moment, and those probing LACs were going to provide their commander with that information before very much longer. However good his own EW and however poor Peep sensor suites might be, he couldn't hide from them if the range fell much further. Of course, it was always possible that they already had him. There was no way for anyone to be certain how much Shannon Foraker might have managed to improve their sensors in the last three or four years. But if they hadn't managed to lock up his units yet they might not know just how powerful his force was.

  "Contact Ararat," he told Clairdon. "Tell Captain Davis that I want him to . . . discourage those LACs."

  The chief of staff looked at him for a moment, then nodded, and MacDonnell turned back to his plot. Ararat was o
ne of the Covington-class CLACs. Somewhat larger than the RMN's carriers, the Covingtons carried twenty-five percent more LACs, and unlike the RMN, the GSN had developed the Katana-class LAC, specifically designed for the "dogfighting" role. The Graysons had begun from the assumption that eventually someone else was going to produce their own LACs and carriers for them. When that time came, the GSN intended to be ready . . . especially since the RMN's "space superiority LAC" project had been one of the casualties of the Janacek cuts.

  He heard Clairdon passing on his instructions, and then he nodded in satisfaction as the green diamond chips of Ararat's LACs suddenly blinked into existence less than eight minutes after he'd given the initial order.

  * * *

  Javier Giscard's scouting LACs realized they were doomed the instant Ararat launched. There were only fifteen of the recon platforms, each of them only lightly armed, and there were over a hundred and twenty LACs coming at them. Worse, their own vectors were almost directly towards the enemy vessels.

  There was no way they could possibly escape, and so they pressed on, accelerating directly towards the Graysons in an effort to at least get close enough to see the enemy clearly before they died.

  * * *

  Giscard knew exactly what they were doing, and a knife seemed to turn in his heart as he watched them do it. Nothing he could do at this point would affect what was about to happen to them. But he was the man who'd deliberately sent them out to die, and even though he knew he'd been right—that he would do the same thing again under the same circumstances, even knowing the outcome—that didn't make it hurt any less.

  He watched his people accelerate, rushing to meet their deaths rather than fight for every instant of life they could cling to. He watched the red icons of their killers sweep towards them even as their sensors reached out and confirmed one capital impeller signature after another. He saw the missile storm that blotted them from the heavens. And then, finally, he turned away and made himself meet Captain Gozzi's eyes.