Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  Beowulf

  Beowulf System

  Take that, bastards!

  Corey McAvoy snarled viciously as the block ship impeller wedges came up. Few if any of those freighters would survive the next few seconds, and he knew it. But they didn’t have to survive to do their jobs. And in the meantime…

  Holmon-Sanders and Alice Truman had left almost five hundred LACs behind when TF 32 headed off to the terminus. Only about half of them were close enough to intervene in the attack, and even they had poor counter-missile solutions, by and large. But they also had a lot of CMs and no reason to conserve them, and McAvoy watched them streak across the display, chewing into the Solly missile stream.

  Their interception angle was bad, coming in from the side rather than the head-on approach which gave counter-missiles their best intercept percentages. Considering all their disadvantages, they did quite well, but over seven hundred of the Hasta final stages got by them.

  They tore down upon the block ships, but those block ships had no more investment in their personal survival than SB Q-12 or the Hastas themselves. They simply obeyed the remote commands, brought up their wedges, and rolled ship.

  They weren’t perfectly placed, because no one had expected an actual attack or predicted the point at which the Hastas would go active. But the defenders had known the threat axis and Task Force 790’s ops plan had depended on stealth and misdirection, not evasive routing. Besides, given the long ballistic phase, the Hastas had to come in on close to a direct bearing from their launch point. That meant the block ships were in roughly the right spots when McAvoy brought them online…and that there’d been no time or way for Lyang-tau Rutgers to update his attack missiles’ profiles to avoid them. At least a dozen of them protected every one of the Hastas’ targets—two dozen of them guarding each of Ivaldi’s most critical installations—and as they rolled ship, bringing their wedges perpendicular to the Hastas’ approach, they built a wall in space. Not a single wall, but a series of them—individual shields, impeller wedges twice as wide as usual as their nodes were ruinously overloaded.

  Now the surviving Hastas reached attack range.

  Their AIs were the most capable any Solarian missile had ever carried. The men and women who’d programmed their attack profiles hadn’t anticipated the block ships, but they’d been very clear about what did and did not constitute legitimate targets. The AIs noted that all of those legitimate targets had disappeared, and their vectors altered abruptly as they scattered, dodging wildly in their efforts to avoid the obstacles in their path and reacquire their targets.

  Most of them failed. Unable to clear the barricading impeller wedges before impact—and precluded from choosing alternate targets by the targeting commands designed to avoid strikes on the Beowulf habitats—they didn’t even fire on the block ships. They simply rammed into those wedges and disappeared forever. But not all of them did.

  Corey McAvoy swore viciously as Ivaldi of Beowulf’s number two nano farm took a half dozen direct hits and disintegrated. Entire modules shattered or went spinning off from the vortex of destruction, and then one of the central power plants exploded and wiped the entire platform—and all five thousand workers aboard it—from the face of the universe. Nano Farm Number One took at least one hit of its own, but that was peripheral. The damage was nothing to sneer at, but it should be easily repaired and it was unlikely to significantly impact the facility’s production rate. Far more important to McAvoy at the moment, less than a hundred of its personnel were killed.

  And that was it.

  Not a single hit got through to the missile production lines!

  “Well done, everyone!” Gabriel Caddell-Markham said from McAvoy’s com display. “Well done!”

  SLNS Québec

  Task Force 790

  Beowulf System

  “Damage evaluation?” Vincent Capriotti demanded harshly.

  “Impossible to say, Sir,” Angelica Helland answered for Lyang-tau Rutgers. The ops officer was far too busy as Québec shuddered to the sawtooth vibration of launching counter-missiles. “We won’t know till we hear from the light-speed platforms, and—”

  She flipped her head at the tactical plot and the missile icons ripping through TF 790’s outer defensive zone. Their covering EW systems were incredible, better even than Capriotti’s staff had projected from the Hypatia reports.

  Five thousand missiles had launched against TF 790. Five hundred were pure EW and penaid platforms and another 550 were Mark 23-E control missiles, with no warhead of any sort. Of the 3,950 actual attack birds, 3,107 broke past the CMs and hurtled into the teeth of the last-ditch laser clusters at a closing velocity of well over eighty-one percent of light-speed.

  The laser clusters took down 1,206 more of them. There was no way for Helland or Capriotti to know it, but their defenses’ performance was by far the best any Solarian force had yet achieved against an Allied missile attack.

  It just wasn’t good enough.

  Nineteen hundred Mark 23s broke through everything TF 790 had. Pinpoint precision couldn’t be expected at that velocity, especially with no telemetry updates in the last eleven minutes of their flight. But unlike anyone else’s missiles, the Mark 23-E control missile had been specifically designed to operate well beyond telemetry range—even FTL telemetry range—of any mothership. The Mark-23s were far more capable even than the SLN’s new Hastas, and each Mark 23-E in that salvo had formed a separate data sharing node, communicating all across the salvo, sharing the sensor data from its missiles’ sensors with all of the others and integrating all of that data into a coherent picture of the battlefield which more myopic missiles operating in isolation could never have matched.

  The consequences were cataclysmic.

  Access Boom

  Industrial Annex No. 6

  Beowulf Alpha

  Beowulf System

  “Yes!” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou hissed.

  He’d finally gotten the undersized com display in the bare-bones compartment tied into the same feed as the far larger display in the Jennifer O’Toole Room—just in time to watch the mailed fist of Corey McAvoy’s Mark 23s crash down on TF 790. Of Vincent Capriotti’s four hundred-plus battlecruisers, thirty-seven survived to cross the limit outbound. He couldn’t tell how many of the ships whose impeller signatures had just disappeared might still survive—more or less—as crippled hulks, but he knew very few of the Sollies who’d just attacked his star system were going home again.

  None of which made the casualties Beowulf had suffered any less painful. True, they could have been enormously worse, but what they had were quite bad enough.

  Bark Chewer’s Bane’s hiss mirrored his own. The ’cat didn’t have to understand the display’s icons to realize what had just happened, and while the two of them might not share Honor’s or White Haven’s adoption bond, they’d been together quite a while now. He recognized the treecat’s vengeful satisfaction as Bark Chewer’s Bane sat on the edge of the bare desk beside him, and he reached out to stroke his friend’s silken fur.

  “They put some thought into this,” White Haven said, leaning against the bulkhead behind Benton-Ramirez y Chou and looking over his shoulder. There wasn’t another chair. This was—technically—a satellite management station, but from the looks of things no one had used it in a long, long time. Which, he reflected, given the state of the lift shafts it theoretically served shouldn’t have surprised him.

  “I mean, they put a lot of thought into it,” he said thoughtfully, cradling Samantha in his arms, as Benton-Ramirez y Chou turned his head to look up at him. “What worries me the most is that they clearly knew exactly what they were gunning for. If Corey hadn’t deployed the inner-system block ships despite the fact that we all ‘knew’ they were going for Cassandra, it damned well would’ve worked. It’s not like we didn’t get hurt anyway, I know that, but the truth is we were incredibly lucky, Jacques.”

  “I know,” the Beowulfer acknowledged. “And you’re righ
t—they did know exactly what to target. The question in my mind is how old their data was. I mean, was it from someone that got repatriated after the referendum, or are they still getting information feeds from right here in Beowulf?”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.” White Haven nodded. “On the one hand, I guess it really doesn’t matter all that much, but I really would like to know. And if there is an ongoing information flow—”

  “If there is, we need to find it and plug it,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou finished for him. “I’d say that’s going to be more up my alley than yours, though.”

  “No argument there.” White Haven snorted. “Believe me, all I want to do is to get a damned maintenance crew out here to spring us so I can get started on just that!”

  Cargo Container H&L 1007-9-463(h)

  Freight Hub No. 7

  Bay 16-Beta

  Beowulf Gamma

  Beowulf System

  The cargo container had been parked in its storage slot two local days after it had been dropped off. It had been there ever since, waiting for a representative of Stickel & Lyman, one of Beowulf’s larger manufacturers of small craft and shuttles, to collect it. The manifest chip listed its contents as an Archon III cargo shuttle’s fusion bottle, which explained its large size and mass. And, obviously, it was exactly the sort of shipment Stickel & Lyman might expect or, for that matter, be sending to someone else.

  The only problem was that Stickel & Lyman had never heard of it, and the S&L tracking number in the manifest chip was completely bogus.

  In fact, it contained a laser-pumped nuclear bomb.

  The security scans had missed it entirely, exactly as the people who’d actually shipped it had expected. It wouldn’t have been readily detectable as a weapon under any circumstances, since it contained no radioactive elements and the fusing lasers were a legitimate part of the shuttle power plant. The power supply and the actual hydrogen pellet were concealed inside the bottle itself, and the bottle’s walls had blocked the scanning systems.

  And so it had sat there, waiting to be claimed by someone who didn’t even know it existed.

  * * *

  Harold Simmons-Gilchrest listened to the cheering all around him and tried not to spit on the deck. His instructions had been unambiguous, but his control hadn’t told him—or hadn’t been able to tell him, perhaps—exactly when the Sollies would get around to attacking, and he’d been away from his station at the critical moment.

  There’d always been a possibility—a probability, really—of that happening, but Simmons-Gilchrest was the third-shift cargo master for the Beowulf Gamma habitat’s number seven freight hub. It would have taken someone pretty damned senior to get in his way when he insisted on reporting for duty in the face of such an unanticipated emergency. It was just his misfortune that it had taken over an hour for him to physically get here, which meant he hadn’t been able to send the signal at the moment he was supposed to. Still, while his control had emphasized that it would be far better to transmit it while Solly missiles were actually flying, she’d also said it wouldn’t be the end of the universe if Simmons-Gilchrest was off a little.

  He reminded himself of that now as he unlocked the number pad and entered the long, complicated command on his console. He’d been placed in Beowulf over forty T-years ago, and despite the excitement of knowing the Detweiler Plan had finally been launched, his had been a terminally boring assignment. He was confident the intelligence data he sent up the line was valuable, but he doubted it was of earthshaking importance, and he’d come to the conclusion that he was one of the countless agents who’d spend their entire careers on the periphery: valuable, dedicated, conscientious, and with damn-all to show for it at the end of the day. So he’d felt an undeniable surge of adrenaline when his control told him he’d been activated as a vital component of a major operation. She hadn’t told him what that operation was, although the fact that it was supposed to coordinate with a Solly attack on the system—assuming the Sollies ever got off their arses and launched the damned thing—had underscored its importance. He had no idea what his transmission would accomplish, but whatever it was, he was pretty damned sure the Beowulfers around him would never forget it.

  Even if they never knew he was the one who’d done it…whatever the hell it was!

  He smiled at that thought and hit the transmit button.

  * * *

  Cargo Container H&L 1007-9-463(h) received the command and implemented it.

  Twenty-seven seconds later, Beowulf Gamma, the third largest orbital habitat in the Beowulf System, ceased to exist, along with 9.5 million human beings…including a Mesan gamma line named Harold Simmons-Gilchrest.

  System Defense HQ

  City of Columbia

  Beowulf

  Beowulf System

  Someone inhaled sharply behind Corey McAvoy.

  He could never decide, later, why that single, sharp inhalation sent such a sudden, instinctive stab of dread through him. It wasn’t all that loud, and there’d been no reason to expect additional bad news, given the Sollies’ decisive defeat. The lives they’d lost had been painful, a higher price than he’d ever have wanted to pay, and yet the admiral’s part of his brain—the cold part the human being in him so often disliked—had told him it was a ludicrously low price compared to the one which might have been demanded. So, no—there’d been no reason at all for that icy flash that told him not to turn around, not to ask who the sound had come from.

  But he was an admiral, and so he turned away from his conversation with Caddell-Markham anyway, and found Cheryl Dunstan-Meyers staring at him, her green eyes huge with shocked horror.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Beowulf Gamma, Sir.” Unlike his, her voice was hoarse, stunned.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s…gone, Sir. It’s just—” She shook her head. “It’s just gone.”

  Her voice quivered, almost breaking, on the final word, and he looked at her in confusion. What could she possibly—?

  Then his eyes strayed to the master plot, and the mental question chopped off brutal, guillotine suddenness.

  “How?” he snapped instead.

  “I don’t know, Sir.” Dunstan-Meyers was one of the most professional officers Corey McAvoy had ever met, but those green eyes suddenly welled with tears. “I don’t know!” She shook her head again. “We got all the missiles—I know there weren’t any left! But…but—”

  She broke off, her face pale, and McAvoy looked past her shoulder at the display where almost ten million of the civilians he was supposed to protect had just died.

  Planetary Director’s Office

  City of Columbia

  Beowulf

  “My God, Gabe!” Chyang Benton-Ramirez’s face was bloodless. “My God, my God! What the hell just happened?!”

  “I don’t know,” Caddell-Markham’s dark complexion showed his shock less obviously, but his eyes were stunned looking. “Nobody does! Or not yet, at least.”

  “But, the missiles…”

  “That’s the one thing we know it wasn’t,” Caddell-Markham said grimly.

  “But if it wasn’t—?”

  “Our best guess up here—and it’s what Corey’s working on, too, I think—is that it had to be internal.” The defense director’s voice was crushed gravel. “Somebody got a bomb aboard. One powerful enough to take out a seven billion-ton habitat. That’s the only way it could’ve happened.”

  “But who—?”

  “It was the Alignment, Sir,” Patricia Givens said, standing beside Caddell-Markham with Sir Thomas Caparelli and Judah Yanakov. Michael Mayhew stood on the defense director’s other side, his face like iron.

  “We can’t prove it—yet,” Givens continued, reaching up to press one hand to Strong Mind’s flattened ears. “It’s the only answer, though.”

  “Not the Sollies?”

  “No, Mister Chairman.” Givens shook her head sharply. “That’s the one thing I’m absolutely sure of
.”

  Benton-Ramirez raised his eyebrows, and the second space lord nodded to the woman standing at her elbow.

  “Commander Lassaline, my chief of staff, Sir,” she said. “She’s been coordinating with your local intelligence people.” She turned to look at the commander. “You want to take this, Terry?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Commander Lassaline’s face was tight with tension, but her eyes were clear and focused, Benton-Ramirez thought.

  “Sir,” she said, speaking directly to him, “if the Sollies had wanted to do this—and if they could’ve gotten a bomb aboard—they’d never have committed that many ships to an open attack and taken such massive losses. They wouldn’t have needed to. For that matter, they would have wanted their navy as far away as possible when the bomb went off. My God, Sir—this is an even worse Eridani violation than the Yawata Strike! Total casualties are already high, even with the surviving block ships already in position to intercept wreckage before it de-orbits and kills anybody dirtside, but in terms of a cold-blooded, deliberate mass-casualty strike on a nonmilitary target, this is probably the worst violation since the Edict was promulgated! This single bomb’s killed more people than the worst-case estimate for all the ‘Mesa Atrocity’ explosions combined! There is no way—no way in hell—the Sollies would’ve done something like this while they’re so busy beating us over the head about Mesa.”

  Benton-Ramirez nodded slowly. Her analysis made sense, although the reason for such an attack made none. Unless—

  “You think they could have intended for this explosion to be simultaneous with the Sollies’ strike on Ivaldi?”

  Givens glanced at her military colleagues, then back out of the display at him.

  “I think that’s possible, Sir. Probable, even. I don’t know why they’d’ve done it at all, but it certainly looks like it was intended to coincide with the attack. I don’t know whether that’s because they were looking for some kind of deniability or because they wanted to saddle the Sollies with responsibility for some reason. But I can’t help thinking there was something else behind it, as well.”