Mission of Honor-ARC

by David Weber

  On the other hand, there were only ten of those ghosts. Even if every one of them was a superdreadnought, Crandall's force still outnumbered the enemy by a margin of almost seven-to-one, and even if every single story about Manticoran capabilities proved accurate, those were still crushing odds. And if, as seemed much more likely, they were simply more of those outsized battlecruisers, Bautista's confident expectation of a rapid, devastating victory was amply justified.

  Shavarshyan wondered if he was the only one who felt dismay at that prospect. He'd continued to hope the Manties might recognize the insanity of taking on the entire Solarian League. Both sides had painted themselves thoroughly into corners, yet he'd hoped—almost prayed—that Medusa would recognize she was dealing with a maniac. That Crandall really would destroy every single Manticoran ship in the star system unless the Manticoran governor gave her what she wanted.

  But it would appear Medusa was just as done talking as Crandall. Despite the horrific odds, she'd declined to take the only escape available to her uniformed men and women, and now Hago Shavarshyan was going to be an unwilling party to their massacre. That was bad enough, yet what was going to happen when word of this reached the capital system of the Star Empire of Manticore would be even worse. When the SLN did come face-to-face with a true Manticoran battle fleet—when Manty superdreadnoughts squared off against their Solarian counterparts in anything remotely resembling even numbers—the carnage was going to be incredible. Whatever Crandall and Bautista thought, he knew better, and so did Ou-yang Zhing-wei. And the inevitability of the League's final victory was going to be very cold consolation to the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and children of the thousands of people who were going to be killed first.

  It was like watching helplessly from an orbiting satellite as an airbus loaded with schoolchildren plummeted directly towards a mountainside, and even though none of it had been his decision, he felt contaminated—unclean—as the eagerness of Crandall, Bautista, and the others like them flowed about him.

  At least it should be fairly quick, he thought grimly as the battle boards at Ou-yang's station flickered from the amber of standby to the unblinking blood-red of readiness. Then he grimaced at his own reflection. Sure it'll be "quick;" and isn't it a hell of a thing when that's the best I can think of?

  * * *

  "So much for any last-minue outbreak of sanity on their side."

  Captain Loretta Shoupe looked up from her displays and wondered if Augustus Khumalo was as aware as she was of how calm his voice sounded. She glanced at his profile as he studied the icons in HMS Hercules' flag bridge master plot, and the calmness of his expression, the steadiness of his eyes, were not the surprise they once would have been.

  He's grown, she thought, with a possessive pride whose fierceness did surprise her a bit, even now. He's no happier about this than anyone else, but if there's a gram of hesitation anywhere in him, I can't see it.

  "Well," Khumalo said with more than a little regret, "I suppose it's time." He raised his voice slightly. "Communications, pass the word to Tristram. Instruct Commander Kaplan to execute Paul Revere. Then contact Commodore Terekhov and inform him that Code Yankee is now in effect. Captain Saunders," he looked down at the command chair com display tied into Hercules' command deck, "tactical command is passing to Commodore Terekhov at this time."

  "Yes, Sir," Vicotria Saunders replied, and he sat back in his chair. Much as it galled him to admit it, Quentin Saint-James' fire control was far better suited to manage modern missile fire than his aged flagship's antiquated systems. He'd actually considered shifting his flag in order to exercise tactical command himself, and a part of him wished he had, even now. But efficiency was more important than getting his own combat command ticket punched. And Augustus Khumalo was too self honest to pretend he was in Aivars Terekhov's league as a combat commander.

  * * *

  "Signal from Hercules, Ma'am," Lieutenant Wanda O'Reilly announced. "Execute Paul Revere."

  "Acknowledged," Naomi Kaplan replied. O'Reilly was the closest thing HMS Tristram's officer complement had to a genuine problem child, but there was no trace of her occasional petulance in that crisp report. Kaplan gave her a nod of approval, then looked at Abigail Hearns.

  "Is your sensor data fully updated, Guns?"

  "We're just finishing an update from Commodore Terekhov now, Ma'am," Abigail replied, watching the waterfall graphic rising steadily on one of her side displays. "Estimate fifteen seconds to complete the upload."

  "Very well." Kaplan turned to Lieutenant Hosea Simpkins, her astrogator and, like Abigail, one of her Grayson officers. "Astro, unless Tactical's update hits a glitch, execute Paul Revere in twenty-five seconds."

  "Aye, aye, Ma'am. Execute Paul Revere in twenty-five seconds from . . . now."

  * * *

  Tristram disappeared from normal-space forty light-minutes outside the Spindle hyper limit without fuss or bother. Unlike the translation from hyper-space into normal-space, a stationary upward translation left no betraying footprint behind, and she materialized almost exactly where she was supposed to be in the alpha bands.

  "Fleet challenge, Ma'am!" O'Reilly announced.

  "Reply," Kaplan ordered calmly.

  "Replying, aye, Ma'am," the com officer acknowledged, and triggered Tristram's transponder code.

  That transponder had been locked down, for fairly obvious reasons, while the destroyer hid outside Crandall's massive task force. And while Kaplan didn't really anticipate any itchy trigger fingers among the rest of Tenth Fleet's tactical officers, she still felt a profound sense of relief when HMS Artemis acknowledged her identity. Unlike Sandra Crandall, Naomi Kaplan had an excellent appreciation of just how much firepower was waiting for her.

  "Very well, Guns," she said, once Tristram's right to be there had been confirmed. "Send the data."

  "Aye, aye, Ma'am. Sending now."

  * * *

  "Lord, what an arrogant bitch," Michelle Henke said quietly, standing between Dominica Adenauer and Cynthia Lecter as the three of them studied the data Tristram had just transmitted to Artemis.

  "And this is a surprise because—?" Lecter asked equally quietly, and Michelle snorted in bitter amusement.

  "More a case of a confirmation I didn't really want," she acknowledged "I did think she might at least inform the Governor her time limit had officially expired, though."

  "With all due respect, Ma'am, I don't see where it makes much difference." Lecter twitched her shoulders slightly. "It's obvious the same people who picked Byng also picked her, and whether she's here as a knowing cat's-paw or got selected because she's just as stupid as he was, we all knew what she was here for from the outset."

  Michelle nodded. And Cindy was right. She had known why Crandall was here, and all of her own planning had been predicated on that knowledge. Yet that didn't diminish the undeniable flicker of fury she felt as she contemplated Crandall's dismissive arrogance.

  No, that's not being quite fair to yourself, girl, she thought. Sure, part of you is pissed off because even though the overconfident idiot is doing exactly what you predicted when you made your own plans—exactly what you want her to do, if she's stupid enough to attack in the first place—you resent being taken so lightly. Because it's part and parcel of the kind of arrogance you've seen out of so many Sollies. But what really pisses you off is that she doesn't give a single solitary damn about all the people she's about to get killed. Of course, her lips skinned back in a hexapuma's hunting snarl, at the moment she's thoroughly convinced that none of the people in question are going to be hers. And she doesn't know she took long enough getting here for the Apollo pods to beat her, either.

  Her smile turned even thinner and colder for a moment as she contemplated how the arrival of those pods had changed her initial defensive planning. But then she put that reflection aside and concentrated on the data in front of her. There hadn't been any changes she could see, although a few additional details had been added
to the initial report HMS Ivanhoe had delivered three days ago. Mostly little stuff, like additional data on individual ships' electronic and gravitic emissions.

  As she'd expected, the various destroyers' emissions signatures varied widely, which wasn't surprising given how much the Rampart and War Harvest classes had been refitted over their lifetimes. The heavier ships' emissions were much closer to their "book" profiles, though. Hercules' CIC had easily tagged the individual units of Rear Admiral Gordon Nelson's battlecruiser squadron, since they'd lifted his ships' electronic fingerprints out of the data they'd captured from Byng's task force. And although they didn't have hard individual IDs on the other battlecruiser squadron, it was obvious all of them were Nevadas.

  There was an impressive uniformity among the superdreadnoughts, as well. All but seven of them were Scientist-class ships, and all seven of the others were members of the Vega class, which were basically only repeat Scientists with a couple of additional missile tubes in each broadside. By the standards of the prewar Royal Manticoran Navy, they weren't that bad a design, although the first of the Scientists had been built long enough ago that they'd still been equipped with projectile-firing point defense systems. At least all of these ships seemed to have been upgraded to laser clusters since, judging from the detailed passive scans Augustus Khumalo's Ghost Rider platforms had pulled in. And it was painfully obvious that even now the Sollies didn't begin to grasp just how capable—and stealthy—the Ghost Rider recon drones actually were. To be sure, the really close passes had been purely ballistic, with no active emissions to betray their presence, but even so they shouldn't have been able to get in close enough to literally read ships' names off their hulls without someone noticing something.

  Don't complain, she told herself firmly, and considered the armament readouts on Crandall's ships.

  The Scientists were 6.8 million-ton units with thirty-two missile tubes, twenty-four lasers, and twenty-six grasers in each broadside. That was a heavier—or, at least, more numerous—energy broadside than any modern Manticoran or Grayson superdreadnought would have mounted. On the other hand, they had only sixteen counter-missile tubes and thirty-two point defense stations in each broadside, whereas Artemis, although technically only a battlecruiser, had thirty-two CM tubes and thirty much heavier and much more capable point defense clusters. Even the Saganami-Cs had twenty tubes and twenty-four clusters in each broadside, and given the fact that Michelle Henke had absolutely no intention of straying into energy range of her opponents, that imbalance was just likely to prove fatal for Admiral Sandra Crandall.

  Stay out of energy range, hell, Michelle thought astringently. I'm going to stay clear out of her missile envelope, too!

  "I wonder if Crandall's superstitious?" she mused. Adenauer looked up from the plot and raised one eyebrow, and Michelle chuckled coldly.

  "You didn't recognize her flagship's name, Dominica?"

  The ops officer shook her head, and it was Lecter's turn to chuckle.

  "This is the sixth Joseph Buckley they've built," she said, "and I've got to wonder why even Sollies haven't learned from that much history. It hasn't been exactly the luckiest name in the SLN's history."

  "Well, fair's fair, Cindy," Michelle pointed out. "They didn't name any of them for the luckiest scientist in history, either."

  "Is that your understatement for the day, Ma'am?" Lecter asked, and this time Adenauer chuckled, too, as the name finally clicked for her, as well.

  Dr. Joseph Buckley had been a major figure in the development of the original impeller drive on Beowulf in the thirteenth century. Unhappily, he hadn't been one of the more fortunate figures. He'd been a critical part of the original developmental team in 1246, but he'd had a reputation among his peers even then for being as eratic as he was brilliant, and he'd been determined to prove it was accurate. Although Adrienne Warshawski was to develop the Warshawski sail only twenty-seven years later, Buckley had been too impatient to wait around. Instead, he'd insisted that with the proper adjustment, the impeller wedge itself could be safely inserted into a hyper-space gravity wave.

  Although several of his contemporaries had acknowledged the theoretical brilliance of his work, none had been prepared to endorse his conclusions. Unfazed by his peers' lack of confidence, Buckley—whose considerable store of patents had made him a wealthy man—had designed and built his own test vessel, the Dahak, named for a figure out of Babylonian mythology. With a volunteer crew embarked, he'd set out to demonstrate the validity of his work.

  The attempt, while spectacular, had not been a success. In fact, the imagery which had been recorded by the Dahak's escorts still turned up in slow motion in HD compilations of the most awe-inspiring disaster footage in galactic history.

  While Buckley undeniably deserved to be commemorated alongside such other greats as Warshawski and Radhakrishnan, and despite the huge body of other work he'd left behind, it was the dramatic nature of his demise for which he was best remembered. And his various namesakes in SLN service had fared little better than he himself had. Of the current ship's predecessors, only one had survived to be withdrawn from service and decommissioned.

  "Actually, only three of them were lost on active service, Cindy," Michelle pointed out.

  "Four, if you count the battlecruiser, Ma'am," Lecter argued respectfully.

  "Well, all right. I'd forgotten about her." Michelle shrugged. "Still, I don't think it's exactly fair to blame the 'Buckley Curse' for a ship lost 'to causes unknown', though."

  "Why? Because having witnesses makes it more final? Or because faulty fusion bottles and wedge-on-wedge collisions are more spectacular?"

  "They're certainly more in keeping with the original's final voyage," Michelle pointed out.

  "All right, I'll grant that much," Lecter agreed. "And, actually, I suppose losing only four of them—or three, if we go with your list—in the better part of seven hundred T-years probably isn't really proof the Curse exists. And I'm not an especially superstitious gal myself. But having said all that, I wouldn't care to serve aboard one of them! And especially not"—her smile disappeared and her eyes darkened—"if I was sailing into what promised to be ugliest war my navy'd ever fought."

  "Neither would I," Michelle acknowledged. "On the other hand, she doesn't think that's what she's doing, now does she?"

  * * *

  Sir Aivars Terekhov sat in his command chair on HMS Quentin Saint-James' flag bridge and thought about the last time he he'd taken a Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser into combat. By most navies' standards, the odds he faced were even worse this time, but he wasn't really interested in most navies' standards. Unlike Ou-yang Zhing-wei and Hago Shavarshyan, he knew precisely what those ten "sensor ghosts" they'd been picking up actually were.

  Four of them were the CLACs Pegasus, Hippogriff, Troll, and Goblin, with the next best thing to four hundred LACs embarked. As stealthy as the Manticoran Alliance's light attack craft were, four CLACs were much smaller sensor targets than all those LACs would have been if they'd been deployed, which meant they could be more readily concealed or, at least, that their natures could be readily disguised, while they remained in their shipboard bays.

  Two more of the "ghosts" were ammunition ships, stuffed to the deckhead with Apollo missile pods crammed full of fusion-powered Mark 23 and Mark 23-E MDMs. And the other four were Scotty Tremaine's cruisers: Alistair McKeon, Madelyn Hoffman, Canopus, and Trebuchet.

  You just keep right on coming, Admiral Crandall, Terekhov thought coldly. You don't even begin to realize just how much you've got us exactly where we want you . . . but you're about to find out.

  "Sir, Admiral Khumalo would like to speak to you," Lieutenant Atalante Montella, his communications officer, said quietly.

  "Put him on my display, Atalante."

  "Yes, Sir."

  A moment later, Augustus Khumalo's face appeared on the tiny com screen deployed from Terekhov's command chair.

  "Good afternoon, Sir," he said.

  "Go
od afternoon, Aivars," Khumalo acknowledged. The admiral looked considerably calmer than Terekhov suspected he actually was, and there was little sign of tension in his deep voice.

  "As you can see," Khumalo continued, "our friend Crandall at least has the virtue of punctuality."

  "I suppose anyone has to have at least some positive qualities, Sir."

  "You may have been disabused of that supposition by the time you're my age," Khumalo replied with a thin smile. "At any rate, assuming she maintains her current acceleration and heads for a zero/zero intercept with the planet, she probably expects to be joining us here in about four hours. Of course, she doesn't expect any of us to still be alive when she gets here."

  "Life is full of disappointments, Sir."

  "My own thought exactly." Khumalo's teeth showed briefly. Then he twitched his shoulders in a sort of abbreviated shrug. "Admiral Enderby is launching his birds now. As soon as they're all clear of the bays, he'll pull the carriers further back in-system to keep them out from underfoot, and Commander Badmachin is rolling pods. Unless Admiral Gold Peak decides differently, it looks like we'll be going with Agincourt."

  "Understood, Sir."

  "In that case, I'll leave you to it," Khumalo said with a nod. "Khumalo, clear."

  He disappeared from Terekhov's com screen, and Terekhov returned his attention to Quentin Saint-James' master plot. In many ways, he supposed, Oversteegen's Nikes might have been a better choice than his own heavy cruisers, given that the Nike was equipped with Keyhole, and the Saganami-C wasn't. In fact, before the ammunition ships Aetna and Vesuvius had arrived with their massive loads of Apollo pods, the Nikes would have been in orbit around Flax while the Saganami-Cs played the part of the beaters coming along behind the quarry. The cruisers still had a lot of control links, however. Almost certainly enough of them, coupled with Apollo, to show Crandall the error of her ways.

  And if there isn't, he thought grimly, there's always Admiral Gold Peak, isn't there?