Ashes Of Victory hh-9

by David Weber

  * * *

  Citizen Admiral Dimitri accepted another cup of coffee from a signals yeoman. It was good coffee, brewed just the way he liked it, and it tasted like corrosion-strength industrial cleaner. Not too surprisingly, he supposed. Five hours and thirty-eight minutes had passed since the Manties' translation, and the bastards had come the next best thing to four hundred and sixty million kilometers in that time. They were down to just a hair over fifteen million klicks from Enki, decelerating now, and their velocity was back down to a little over ninety-three hundred KPS.

  He still didn't understand their approach course, and his brain continued to pick at its apparent illogic like a tongue probing a sore tooth. No doubt they were coming in heavy with pods — he certainly would have been in their place!—but Manty SDs could pull a lot more than three hundred gees, even with full pod loads on tow. So why had they wasted so much time? And why hadn't they gone for a least-time course at whatever accel they were willing to use? The logical thing for them to have done would have been to translate into n-space on a heading which would have pinned Enki between them and Barnett. As it was, they'd not only come in too far out and too slowly, but they were actually approaching Enki's position to intercept at a shallow angle. At the moment, their icons and those of the mobile units positioned to intercept them weren't even on anything approaching a direct line with the blue dot that marked Enki's position.

  It all looked and felt dreadfully unorthodox, which was enough to make Dimitri instantly suspicious, especially knowing that if that was Eighth Fleet out there, he was up against White Haven, who had systematically kicked the crap out of every Republican CO he'd ever faced. Which suggested there had to be some reason for the Manties' apparently inept and clumsy approach, except that try as he might, Dimitri couldn't come up with a single one that made any sort of sense. It was almost as if White Haven were intentionally making certain the defenders had plenty of time to concentrate their full forces to meet him, but that was ridiculous. Granted, Manty hardware was superior, but there were limits in all things. Not even Manties could be ballsy enough to deliberately throw away any chance of catching him before he could concentrate. Any flag officer worth his braid schemed furiously in search of some way to catch the defenders with their forces still spread out so he could engage and crush them in detail rather than facing all of them at once!

  But that seemed to be exactly what White Haven wasn't doing, Dimitri thought irritably, then shrugged. In another twelve minutes it would no longer matter what the Manty CO thought he was doing, because the range would be down to six million klicks. Given the geometry of the Manties' approach vector, they would be in his powered missile envelope — technically speaking — for at least two minutes before that, but against Manty electronic warfare, even six million klicks against a closing enemy might be a little optimistic. Which meant he and his people were going to have to take their lumps from the Manties before any of their own birds got home. But he'd be sending the mine-armed drones out in another four minutes, and at least he ought to be able to flush all of his pods before any of the incoming arrived, and—

  A shrill, strident alarm sliced through the war room's tense calm like a buzz saw.

  * * *

  "Coming down on fifteen million kilometers, Sir," Trevor Haggerston said quietly, and White Haven nodded.

  "Anything more on those unidentified bogies?" he asked.

  "We still can't be positive, but it looks like most of them are missile pods, Sir. We're a bit more puzzled by some of the others, though. They're smaller than pods, but they seem to be bigger than individual missiles ought to be. About the size of a deep recon drone, actually."

  "I see." The earl frowned, then shrugged. Missiles or drones, a saturation pattern of heavy warheads should take them out with proximity kills handily enough... and before they could do anything nasty.

  The Peeps obviously didn't know it, but they'd been in his powered missile range for well over an hour, assuming he'd been willing to go for low-powered drive settings, but even with his RDs hovering just beyond the range of the Peeps' weapons, targeting solutions would have been very poor at sixty-five million kilometers... not to mention that flight time would have been the next best thing to nine minutes. That was plenty of time for an alert captain to roll ship and take the brunt of the incoming fire on his wedge, and even with Ghost Rider's EW goodies along for company, it might have given the defenders time to achieve effective point defense solutions.

  Besides, there was no need to do any such thing. He still had over twelve minutes before he entered the Peeps' effective envelope, and each of his Harrington/Medusas could get off sixty six-pod salvos in that time. That was over a hundred and eleven thousand missiles from the SD(P)s alone, and they weren't alone, and he checked his plot one last time

  Between the input from his drones and the long, unhurried time his fire control officers had been given to refine their data, his ships had tight locks on most of the Peep capital ships. Of course, "tight lock" at this sort of range didn't mean what it would have at lower ranges, and accuracy was going to suffer accordingly. On the other hand, the Peeps hadn't yet deployed a single decoy, and their jammers were only beginning to come on line. Which made sense, if they wanted to avoid putting too much time on their EW systems' clocks. Unfortunately, this time it was going to be fatal.

  "Very well, Commander Haggerston," he said formally. "You may fire."

  * * *

  Citizen Admiral Dimitri's mug hit the floor and shattered, but he never noticed. Neither the sound of breaking china nor the sudden pool of steaming coffee registered even peripherally, for he could not be seeing what he saw.

  But the sensors and the computers didn't care what their human masters thought. They insisted on presenting the preposterous data anyway, and Dimitri heard other voices, several shrill with rising panic, as the war room's normal discipline disintegrated as completely as his broken cup. It was inexcusable. They were trained military men and women, manning the nerve center of the system's entire defense structure. Above all else, it was their primary duty to remain calm and collected, exerting the control over their combat units upon which any hope of victory depended.

  But Dimitri couldn't blame them, and even if he could have, it wouldn't have mattered. No conceivable calm, collected response could have affected the outcome of this battle in the least.

  No one in the history of interstellar warfare had ever seen anything like the massive salvo coming in on his ships. Those missiles were turning out at least ninety-six thousand gravities, launched from pods and shipboard tubes which were themselves moving at over nine thousand kilometers per second, and that didn't even consider the initial velocity imparted to them by their launchers' grav drivers. A corner of Dimitri's brain wanted to believe the Manties had gone suddenly insane and thrown away their entire opening salvo at a range from which hits would be impossible. That the incredible acceleration those missiles were cranking meant they could not possibly have more than a minute of drive endurance. That they would be dead, unable to maneuver against his evading units, when they reached the ends of their runs.

  But one thing the Earl of White Haven was not was insane. If he'd launched from that range, then his birds had the range to attack effectively... and none of Dimitri's did.

  He watched numbly as the missiles roared down on his wall. The entire front of the salvo was a solid wall of jamming and decoys, and he clamped his jaw as he pictured the panic and terror crashing through the men and women on those ships. His men and women. He'd put them out there in the sober expectation that their ships would be destroyed, that many — even most — of them would be killed. But he'd at least believed they would be able to strike back before they died. Now their point defense couldn't even see the missiles coming to kill them.

  It seemed to take forever, and he heard someone groan behind him as the Manty wall belched a second salvo, just as heavy as the first. Which was also impossible. That had to be the firepower of a f
ull pod load out for every ship in White Haven's wall. He couldn't have still more of them in tow! But apparently no one had told the Manties what they could and couldn't do, and yet a third launch followed.

  The first massive wave of missiles crashed over his wall, and his numb brain noted yet another difference from the norm. The tactical realities of towed pods meant each fleet had no real choice but to commit the full weight of its pods in the first salvo, because any that didn't fire in the first exchange were virtually certain to suffer proximity kills from the enemy's fire. They were normally concentrated on the enemy vessels for whom the firing fleet had the best firing solutions, as well, because firing at extreme range rather than waiting until the enemy had irradiated your weapons into uselessness meant even the best solutions were none too good.

  All of that tended to result in massive overkill on a relatively low number of targets, but that wasn't happening this time. No, this time the Manties had allocated their fire with lethal precision. There were well over three thousand missiles in the first wave. Many of them were jammers or decoys, but many were not, and Hamish Alexander's fire plan had allocated a hundred and fifty laser heads to each Peep ship of the wall. His targets' hopelessly jammed and confused defenses stopped no more than ten percent of the incoming fire, and Havenite capital ships shuddered and heaved, belching atmosphere and debris and water vapor as massive, bomb-pumped lasers slammed into them. Hulls spat glowing splinters as massive armor yielded, and fresh, dreadful bursts of light pocked Citizen Admiral Dimitri's wall as fusion bottles began to fail.

  But even as the SDs and DNs reeled and died under the pounding, a second, equally massive wave of missiles was on its way. This one ignored the surviving, mangled ships of the wall. Its missiles went for Dimitri's lighter, more fragile battleships and battlecruisers, even heavy and light cruisers. Fewer of them went after each target, but even a battleship could take no more than a handful of hits from such heavy laser heads... and none of them could begin to match the point defense capability of a ship of the wall.

  The third wave bypassed the mobile units completely to swoop towards Enki's orbital defenses. They ignored the fortresses, but their conventional nuclear warheads detonated in a blinding, meticulously precise wall of plasma and fury that killed every unprotected satellite, missile pod, and drone in Enki orbit.

  And then, as if to cap the insanity, a tidal wave of LACs — well over fifteen hundred of them — erupted from stealth, already in energy range of the broken wreckage which had once been a fleet. They swept in, firing savagely, and a single pass reduced every unit of Dimitri's wall to drifting hulks... or worse. The LACs were at least close enough that his fortresses could fire on them, but their EW was almost as good as the capital ships, and they deployed shoals of jammers and decoys of their own. Even the missiles which got through to them seemed to detonate completely uselessly. It was as if the impossible little vessels' wedges had no throat or kilt to attack!

  The LACs had obviously planned their approach maneuver very carefully. Their velocity relative to their victims had been very low, no more than fifteen hundred KPS, and their vector had been designed to cross the base track of Dimitri's wall at an angle that carried them away from his forts and his own LACs. A few squadrons of the latter were in position to at least try to intercept, but those who did vanished in vicious fireballs as hurricanes of lighter but still lethal missiles ripped into their faces. Then the Manty LACs — Esther McQueen's much derided "super LACs," Dimitri thought numbly — disappeared back into the invisibility of their stealth systems. And just to make certain they got away clean, that impossible Manty wall of battle blanketed the battle area with a solid cone of decoys and jammers which made it impossible for any of the surviving defenders to lock onto the fleet, elusive little targets.

  Alec Dimitri stared in horror at the display from which every single starship of his fleet had been wiped without ever managing to fire a single shot. Not one. And as he stared at the spreading patterns of life pods, someone touched him on the shoulder.

  He flinched, then turned quickly, and his com officer stepped back from whatever she saw in his eyes. But he stopped, made himself inhale deeply, and forced the lumpy muscles along his jaw to relax.

  There was no more shouting, no more cries of disbelief, in the war room. There was only deep and utter silence, and his voice sounded unnaturally loud in his own ears when he made himself speak.

  "What is it, Jendra?"

  "I—" The citizen commander swallowed hard. "It's a message from the Manties, Citizen Admiral," she said then. "It was addressed to Citizen Admiral Theisman. I guess they don't know he's not here." She was rambling, and her jaw tightened as she forced herself back under control. "It's from their commander, Citizen Admiral."

  "White Haven?" The question came out almost incuriously, but that wasn't the way he felt, and his eyes narrowed at her nod. "What sort of message?"

  "It came in in the clear, Citizen Admiral," she said, and held out a message board. He took it from her and punched the play button, and a man in the black-and-gold of a Manticoran admiral looked out of the holographic display at him. He was dark haired and broad shouldered... and his hard eyes were the coldest blue Alec Dimitri had ever seen.

  "Admiral Theisman," the Manty said flatly, "I call upon you to surrender this system and your surviving units immediately. We have just demonstrated that we can and will destroy any and all armed units, ships or forts, in this system without exposing our own vessels to return fire. I take no pleasure in slaughtering men and women who cannot fight back. That will not prevent me from doing precisely that, however, if you refuse to surrender, for I have no intention of exposing my own people to needless casualties. You have five minutes to accept my terms and surrender your command. If you have not done so by the end of that time, my units will resume fire... and we both know what the result will be. I await your response. White Haven, out."

  The display blanked. Dimitri stared at it for several seconds, his stocky body sagging around its bones. Then he handed the message board back to the com officer, squared his shoulders, turned to Sandra Connors, and made himself say the unthinkable.

  "Ma'am," his quiet voice cut the silence like a knife, "I see no alternative." He inhaled deeply, then went on. "I request permission to surrender my command to the enemy."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  "Citizen Admiral Theisman, report to the bridge! Citizen Admiral Theisman, report to the bridge at once!"

  Thomas Theisman's head jerked up from his book viewer as Citizen Lieutenant Jackson's voice rattled from the speakers. Theisman had been less than overwhelmed by Jackson when he first boarded the citizen lieutenant's boat. Not that he'd thought the man couldn't handle his present duties. In fact, Jackson was, in many ways, what Theisman considered the perfect courier commander: stolid, phlegmatic, predictable, and utterly incurious. Men like that were never tempted to tamper with or snoop around among the sensitive documents in their computers. From a security perspective, that was wonderful, but it didn't exactly recommend them for any job except that of a postman.

  But the voice jarring from the intercom was anything but phlegmatic, and Theisman didn't even think about hesitating. Aboard a ship this small he could reach the bridge almost as quickly as he could have screened it, and he dropped the book viewer and was out his cabin hatch and thundering down the passage before it hit the decksole.

  What in God's name can his problem be? The question crackled in Theisman's brain as he pounded towards the ladder. The passage here from Barnett was so routine, Denis and I almost died of boredom, and his translation back into n-space was obviously nominal. So what in hell is going on?!

  He vaulted up the ladder onto the bridge, and his eyes automatically darted to the main view screen. It was in tactical mode, and his blood ran cold as he saw the two battlecruisers. They were barely three million kilometers distant, and their icons radiated the vicious, strobing rays of radar and lidar while a warning signal warbled.
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br />   My God, he thought almost calmly, they've got us locked up for missile fire!

  He felt Citizen Lieutenant Jackson behind him and glanced over his shoulder. The dispatch boat's CO was white-faced and sweating, and his hands trembled visibly.

  "What is it, Citizen Lieutenant?" Theisman made his voice as deep and calm as he could, and wished he could project that calm directly into Jackson's brain without the clumsy interface of language.

  "I-I don't know, C-C-Citizen Admiral," the citizen lieutenant stuttered. Then his chest swelled as he sucked in a huge breath. When he exhaled once more, it looked as if some of the calmness Theisman had tried to will into him must have taken, and he cleared his throat.

  "All I know is that we made transit as usual, and everything seemed just fine, until all of a sudden those two—" he jabbed a finger at the battlecruisers on the plot "—lit us up and ordered me to cut my accel immediately or be destroyed. So I did that," he astonished Theisman with a tight, death's head grin, "and then they demanded my ID all over again. I sent it to them, and they... they said they didn't accept it, Citizen Admiral! They ordered me to leave the system! But I told them I couldn't. That I had you and Citizen Commissioner LePic aboard and I was supposed to deliver you to the capital. But they said no one — no regular Navy ships, that is — were getting through, and when I insisted my instructions came directly from the Octagon and the Committee, they ordered me to get you on the com in person, and... and..."

  His voice trailed off, and he raised both hands in a gesture of helplessness. It was hardly the picture of a decisive CO, but if his account was even half accurate, Theisman could hardly fault him for that. The citizen admiral felt sweat popping out along his own hairline, but he made himself nod calmly, then turned and beckoned the com officer out of her chair. She hastened to obey, scrambling up as if to put as much distance as physically possible between her and the com station, and Theisman took her place.