by David Weber
Especially if he could suck them inside the hyper limit to keep them from simply translating out on him."
Honor frowned and rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She considered for several seconds, then lowered her hand to point a long index finger at McGinley.
"If I understand correctly, you disagree with Jasper not over what would constitute a rational Peep strategy but over Theisman's probable resources. Is that correct?"
"Essentially," McGinley agreed. "So far we don't have any reports of attacks on convoys in the area, so I'm also inclined to doubt that the Peeps have caught onto our new shipping patterns yet, but that's a minor point. If, in fact, they have the strength to punch out one of our pickets even temporarily, there's no question but that it would be the smart move on their part. Not only would they get the shot at incoming traffic that Jaspers just described, but they'd also have an excellent opportunity to inflict significant losses on the picket they attacked. I simply find it difficult to believe that they're willing to pour more capital ships down a rat hole for a system they can't hope to hold in the end. And even if they did send him any substantial reinforcements, I question whether or not Theisman would dare risk them in some sort of unauthorized forward operation."
"Thomas Theisman might fool you, Marcia," Honor murmured. She rocked her chair back and forth for several thoughtful moments, then focused once more on McGinley.
"You may well be right about Barnett's resources," she said, "but I think Jasper has his finger on our worst potential danger. Whether it actually happens or not, we have to assume it's at least possible that the enemy will choose to attack our forward pickets rather than carry out search and destroy operations against convoys between star systems. How do we protect ourselves against both possibilities?"
"If we had a larger escort, I'd vote for the Sarnow Deployment," McGinley replied promptly, and Honor nodded once more.
Any commerce raider knew that the best chance to hit a merchantman (or a convoy of them) was immediately after it translated from hyper— to normal-space, before its sensors had time to locate potential threats and while its velocity was at its lowest. Since the general volumes in which traffic was likely to make translation could be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy, placing a raider in position to hit merchantmen at their most vulnerable wasn't particularly difficult. Covering all probable target areas might require a goodly number of hulls, but their actual placement was straightforward.
By the same token, the best relative position from which to attack a convoy, whether in hyper— or n-space, was from directly ahead of it, where its velocity would carry it straight towards you. The execution of any effective evasion maneuver would require its ships to overcome a potentially enormous relative closing velocity, and no vast, lumbering merchantman, with its commercial grade inertial compensator and impellers, could match the acceleration and maneuverability of a warship. As a consequence, raiders preferred to get ahead of a convoy and let it come to them.
The classic defensive gambit was for the escort commander to place the majority of her strength ahead of her charges, so as to put her warships between them and the most probable axis of threat while one or two pickets watched the rear as a hedge against the lesser threat of a raider overtaking from astern. Against pirates, whose primary goal was to take prizes (and those prizes' cargoes) intact, that remained RMN convoy doctrine, but against Peep commerce raiders, the Navy had adopted the new strategy proposed by Vice Admiral Mark Sarnow. Instead of massing the escorts ahead, they were concentrated on the flanks and astern of the convoy, with relatively weak scouting elements deployed at least thirty to forty minutes of flight time ahead of the entire formation.
It made sense, given that Peeps, unlike pirates, were interested only in denying a convoys cargo to the Alliance. They might prefer capturing it, but simply destroying it would do the job just as well, so from their perspective, it only made sense to open fire the moment they reached attack range of the merchies, which, in turn, made it imperative for the escorts to keep them out of range. The new doctrine placed the escorts' main fighting strength in a position which let them use their superior speed to intercept a threat coming in on any attack vector, and the forward scouting elements served to "sanitize" the convoys projected course in order to prevent surprises. It also, of course, meant that the ships assigned to break trail were the most exposed units of the escort, but that couldn't be helped, and the scouts should have time to fall back on the main body of the escort before they could be overwhelmed in isolation.
That, at least, was the theory, and Honor's own experience suggested that it should work effectively. Unfortunately, as McGinley had just implied, her understrength squadron lacked the numbers to deploy multiple units ahead without unacceptably weakening the close-in escort. That meant that whoever she put out there was going to be dangerously exposed, with no one to watch his or her back.
She considered briefly, then looked at McKeon.
"Alistair?" she invited, and the heavyset captain leaned forward to brace his forearms on the table.
"I agree that the worst thing the Peeps could do from our perspective would be to punch out one of our system pickets. Commander McGinley may well be right that they don't have the strength to do it, but I think Lieutenant Mayhew is right about Theisman. As you may recall," he smiled wryly, "you and I have both had the pleasure of making his acquaintance. If he's got enough firepower to give him a realistic chance at a system raid, he'll go for it unless someone higher up the chain specifically orders him not to.
"At the same time, I don't think it matters a great deal to us which strategy he adopts. Commander McGinley is correct that a Sarnow Deployment will give us the best coverage against either possibility."
"And just who do we put on point?" Captain Greentree's question could have been a challenge, worded as it was, but his tone was mild, and he'd cut to the heart of Honors own concerns. "We don't have enough hulls to put as many as the Book calls for out in front, not unless we reduce our flank strength and defeat the entire point of the deployment," the flag captain went on. "If we had a few destroyers along things would be different; we could put two or three of them up front to cover one another's backs. As it is, though, we'd have to detail a single ship, and whoever we stick out there will be badly exposed. He'll be much too far ahead for us to cover him if he's attacked."
"True enough," McKeon agreed. "But our first responsibility is to the convoy. If it comes right down to it, any escort is expendable, and a Sarnow deployment will stretch the convoy's sensor envelope by a good nine light-minutes. Even those of us who don't have built in FTL coms have recon drones that do, and that means the picket will be able to see any bad guys and report them to the flagship long before they see the flagship. At worst, that should at least let us keep the merchies clear of them; at best, we'll have a pretty fair shot of sucking any weak raiding force into an ambush of our own."
"I don't disagree," Greentree said. "I'm simply asking who we put out in front."
"That's the easy part." McKeon grinned. "I'd say Prince Adrian is the only logical choice, wouldn't you?"
Greentree opened his mouth, then closed it, and Honor felt his irritation, not at McKeon, but at McKeon's logic. She not only felt it but understood it, for like Greentree, she would much prefer to take point herself. Position of maximum risk or no, it was also the one from which the escort would most probably have its first glimpse of any oncoming threat. Any good tactician hungered to be able to gauge the situation for herself, not through someone else’s reports. Besides, she hated the thought of sending people into any danger she couldn't share with them. It was irrational, and a weakness she knew a flag officer had to learn to overcome, but that didn't make it any less real.
Yet, like Greentree, she knew McKeon was right. The entire point was to extend the squadron’s sensor reach and trip any traps in the convoys path, and if she couldn't be there herself, which she couldn't; her command responsibilities precluded exposing her flags
hip unnecessarily, McKeon was the best person for the job. Not only was he her second-in-command, but she trusted his judgment implicitly. And, perhaps just as importantly, he knew her well enough to be willing to use that judgment in a time-critical situation without waiting for permission.
"All right," she said. Her calm soprano gave no sign of the thoughts which had flowed through her mind, and she nodded crisply. "Alistair is right, Thomas. We'll put Prince Adrian on point." Greentree nodded, and she switched her gaze back to Venizelos. "From Marcia’s original comments, I gather that we've received hard numbers on the convoy. Do we have an actual ship list yet?"
"There are still a couple of blanks, Ma'am," the chief of staff replied. "We should have them filled by fifteen-thirty, though. My understanding is that they're all present in Yeltsin but that Logistics Command is still deciding exactly which ships to load the last of the Samovar garrison's supplies aboard."
"Good. Howard..." she turned to her com officer "...once we have a complete list, I want you to contact the master of each ship on it. Invite him and his exec to a meeting here aboard Alvarez at, oh, call it nineteen hundred hours."
"Yes, My Lady."
"Marcia, between now and then I want you and Andy to rough out a Sarnow deployment for the squadron. Assume Prince Adrian will take point and assign Magician to watch the back door."
"Yes, Ma'am."
Honor sat for a long moment, rubbing her nose once more as she tried to decide if that was everything that needed saying. Then she looked at Mayhew.
"That was a good job of pointing out an alternate interpretation of ONIs analyses, Jasper. Sometimes we forget to think about the person behind the rank on the other side." Greentree and McKeon nodded firmly, echoing her approval, and she felt the lieutenants pleasure. Perhaps even more importantly, she also sensed the lack of resentment in Marcia McGinley’s emotions. A lot of staff officers would have been angry with a junior who dared not only to disagree with her but actually to convince their commodore that he was right and she was wrong. It was good to know McGinley wasn't one of them.
Honor started to rise, officially bringing the meeting to a close, but then she stopped. There was one other point that needed to be dealt with, and she drew a deep breath and steeled her nerve. "Carson?"
"Yes, My Lady?" The flag lieutenant seemed to quiver in his chair, as if it required a physical effort not to spring to his feet and snap to attention.
"I'll be inviting the convoy's skippers to join me for supper when they come aboard," she said. "Please get hold of my steward and see to the arrangements."
"Yes, My Lady!" the ensign said sharply, and the burst of determined enthusiasm which flooded from him over Honors link to Nimitz was almost frightening.
But not, she reflected silently, as frightening as the potential for disaster in letting Carson anywhere near a table covered with food. If he can make that much mess with a single pitcher of water, what couldn't he do with an entire formal dinner? But at least, she told herself hopefully, he'll have Mac to ride herd on him. So how bad can it be?
The answer to her last question suggested itself to her, and she shuddered at the very thought.
Chapter Ten
"Will you look at that" Yuri Bogdanovich murmured almost reverently. "Its actually working!"
"Your surprise is hardly becoming, Yuri," Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville chided from within a cloud of cigar smoke. "And now that I think about it, it displays an appalling lack of confidence in our operations officer."
"You're right, Citizen Rear Admiral." Bogdanovich turned from his contemplation of the main holo sphere to bow in Shannon Foraker's direction. "Im still surprised, you understand," he went on, "but that's just because the Manties keep sneaking up on us. And may I say, Shannon, that it's a pleasure to be the ones doing the sneaking for a change!"
"Here, here!" Karen Lowe muttered, and a chorus of laughter, muted, and mostly a bit more nervous than its authors would care to have admitted, ran around the bridge.
People's Commissioner Honeker listened appreciatively. He heard the anxiety within it, but he also knew how rare any sign of levity at a time like this had become for the People’s Navy. He wasn't immune to ambition of his own, and once the domestic situation had stabilized enough, he intended to pursue a civilian political career, where having a stint as commissioner to a successful officer like Tourville on his record was going to look very good. Yet in fairness to him, he was more impressed with the citizen rear admiral's ability to motivate people to fight than he was by his own career prospects.
"How much longer, Citizen Commander Foraker?" he asked quietly. Foraker tapped numbers into a keypad, then studied the results for a moment.
"Assuming I've estimated their sensor platform availability correctly and that they really put the ones they had where I'm predicting, Sir, and assuming NavInt's estimate of their passive sensor capability is close to accurate, they should be in a position to begin picking us up within the next seven and a half hours," she said. "Of course, we're not emitting a thing, which will make their job a lot harder. As far as active sensors are concerned, the only ones I'm picking up at the moment are a long, long way outside detection ranges, and they look like standard navigation radars, civilian radars, from local intrasystem traffic."
"No active military sensors at all?" Honeker couldn't quite keep the skepticism out of his voice, and Foraker shrugged.
"Sir, any star system's a mighty big fishpond, and our approach course was designed to stay well clear of the ecliptic to avoid blundering into any of the local traffic’s sensor envelopes. Unless a starship already has a pretty good idea about where another ship is hiding, its active sensor reach is simply too short for any realistically useful sweeps. That's one of the things that makes the Manties' remotes such pains. Their sensor arrays, signal amplification, and dedicated software are better than any of our shipboard systems can come close to matching, and just to be on the safe side, they like to seed the things so densely and generate so much overlap that active sensors can pick up anyone who tries to sneak through. Which doesn't even mention the fact that an intact sensor net lets them shut down their mobile systems completely and rely on relayed data without revealing their own positions. But everything we've seen so far supports the theory that they're short on platforms, and we'll pick up any active sensor emissions long before they can get a useful return off of us."
Honeker's grunt was as much an apology for doubting her as an acceptance of her explanation, for she'd been very careful not to add, "I already told you that, dummy!" And the fact was that she had explained the entire plan in detail after she, Bogdanovich, and Lowe had worked out the final points.
Tourville’s squadron was doing something which was virtually unheard of: moving deeper and deeper into an enemy-held system without a single scout deployed to probe its line of advance. Instead, all four battlecruisers and all of their attached units were gathered into the tightest possible formation and coasting ballistically towards an interception with Samovar... and so far, it seemed clear that no one had seen them at all.
It was always possible Bogdanovich and Foraker were wrong about that, Honeker mused. Manty stealth systems were better than those of the People’s Navy, and it was at least possible that the entire Allied picket force was headed straight for Count Tilly and her consorts at this very moment. It seemed unlikely, however, for as Foraker had just pointed out, so far the squadron had yet to take a single active sensor hit, and only active sensors stood any realistic chance of picking them up.
"What the...?" Lieutenant Holden Singer frowned at his display, then made a tiny adjustment. His frown deepened, and he scratched his nose with a perplexed finger.
"What is it?" Commander Dillinger, HMS Enchanters executive officer, crossed the bridge to peer over Singers shoulder.
"Not sure, Sir." Singer stopped scratching his nose and reached to one side, never taking his eyes from the display as he ran his fingers down a bank of touchpad controls with the p
recision of a blind concert pianist. The display shifted as the heavy cruisers com lasers queried the other units tied into her tactical net for additional sensor data, and Singer made a disgusted sound. A single data code hung in the displays holo projection, but it wasn't the crisp, clear icon of a known starship. Instead, it was the weak, flickering amber of a possible, completely unidentified contact.
"Well?" Dillinger prompted, and Singer shook his head.
"Probably just a sensor ghost, Sir," he said, but he sounded unsure of his own conclusion.
