Uncompromising Honor - eARC

by David Weber

  They didn’t even try to talk to us, he thought bleakly. Not a word. They just came in, blew Ning-ju’s squadron to bits, and then sat there for a damned hour, letting us sweat. And the whole time, they were planning on this.

  Maridors Haeckle was one of the Solarian officers who’d never bought the official line about the Mesa Atrocity. He’d met several Manticoran officers, including Admiral James Webster, the assassinated Manticoran ambassador to the League, and none of them had been homicidal maniacs. He didn’t know what had happened in Mesa, but he’d been certain he knew what hadn’t happened, because it had been impossible to imagine those officers deliberately slaughtering millions of civilians.

  Now he found himself wondering if he’d been wrong…and what was about to happen to the star system of mankind’s birth if he had.

  * * *

  The Mark 23s raced away from Grand Fleet, accelerating at a steady 46,000 gravities. Six minutes later, still more than 312,000,000 kilometers short of Naval Station Ganymede, their impellers shut down and they drove ballistically onward at fifty-five percent of light-speed.

  * * *

  “If ONI’s current estimate of Manty missile performance is accurate—and it would be nice if it finally was, given the price Admiral Capriotti paid to get us the numbers—they should light off again in about twenty-eight minutes, Sir,” Captain Tsukatani said quietly, and Haeckle nodded.

  Their own Cataphracts would take longer. Assuming, as Tsukatani said, that ONI’s numbers were finally accurate, the Manties’ total time-of-flight at nineteen light-minutes would be on the order of thirty-seven minutes. The Cataphracts’ first-stage impellers would burn out sooner and at a lower velocity, which meant their ballistic phase would 56,000,000 kilometers longer than the incoming birds and that they’d require almost twice as long to cover it: fifty-five minutes as opposed to the Manties’ twenty-eight.

  Which meant that even though they’d fired within twenty seconds of one another, the Manties’ laser heads would reach Ganymede almost twenty-one minutes before his Cataphracts could reach attack range of them.

  Central Command Center

  Admiralty Building

  City of Old Chicago

  Old Earth

  Sol System

  “What do you make of all this, Sir?”

  Willis Jennings spoke softly, pitching his voice too low to be overheard even in the Central Command Center buried eighty floors beneath the Admiralty Building. CCC was dimly lit, as always, and had the hush associated in Jennings’s experience only with churches and military command centers in the midst of crisis.

  “If you’d asked me that three days ago, I might not have been as worried as I am now,” Winston Kingsford responded equally softly to his chief of staff’s question. “I might’ve been surprised, even after Fabius, given how hard they’ve tried to convince everyone we’re the aggressors, and I probably would’ve figured they intended to trash Ganymede as a reprisal for what we tried to do to Ivaldi. Of course, one reason I would’ve been surprised if they’d tried anything more ambitious is that I would’ve believed that bastard Gweon’s estimate on how ‘short of ammunition’ they were.”

  Jennings grunted. Kingsford and Gaddis had come up with a crude but simple technique for testing loyalties. The CNO had called Jennings in, and Gaddis and Okiku had “arrested him,” exactly as they’d “arrested Gweon.” Instead of dropping dead, Jennings had been coldly furious at having been accused of treason, at which point Kingsford had explained what was actually happening. He’d made no effort to hide how glad he’d been to confirm his chief of staff’s loyalty—not simply to the League, but to him—and they’d set out to clear as many other senior officers as they could. Finding excuses to get them into Kingsford’s office—or somewhere else where they could be “arrested” without any witnesses—wasn’t easy, and they’d just about run out of pretexts.

  But at least they’d managed to test twenty-six of them, so far…and five of them had reacted exactly the way Gweon had.

  That was a frightening percentage, but as Colonel Okiku had pointed out, they were beginning with officers in the positions which would have been most valuable to the Other Guys. Under the circumstances, it was only to be expected that the other side would have concentrated its efforts on putting its own people into them, which undoubtedly explained why the percentage had been so high.

  Kingsford didn’t want to think about how the Other Guys would react when they noticed their people inside the Admiralty’s upper echelons were disappearing, and if he was honest, he’d also been more than a little shaken by how efficiently Gaddis and Lieutenant Colonel Weng had made the bodies in question do that disappearing. It made him wonder where—and why—they’d learned to conceal corpses so proficiently.

  Not even they could keep someone on the other side from noticing the sudden, unprecedented rate of absenteeism eventually, however. They could, however, hope that each of the recently deceased had been assigned to his or her own, unique controller as a security measure. That was the way Kingsford would have done it, anyway, especially for moles in such critical positions, assuming he’d had enough controls to make it work. And if they had, that might mean no one on the other side was in a position to realize how many of their agents had just gone missing. Each control would realize his mole had gone dark; he just wouldn’t realize so many others had done the same thing, which would mean they probably had more time in hand than he was afraid they did. Relying on that could have unfortunate consequences, however.

  Still, if Weng Zhing-hwan and Lupe Blanton were correct, they should have at least a brief bubble before the Other Guys could change strategies in response even if they’d already noticed their vanishing moles. As Blanton had pointed out, decision-making and communication loops were the Achilles’ heel of any interstellar conspiracy. So, logically, it should take the other side’s leadership quite some time—presumably, several weeks, at least—to find out they’d lost track of Gweon and his fellows and do something about it.

  Unfortunately, Kingsford rather thought Gaddis and Daud al-Fanudahi had made a lot of sense when they’d pointed out in reply that whoever the Other Guys were, they’d been running their interstellar conspiracy for a long time. It was entirely possible they’d learned from experience that successful dinosaurs needed secondary brains at frequent intervals and built in contingency plans at the local level. Whether or not those plans had ever visualized the possibility of having their network rolled up from the top down was another question. No doubt it would have been an entertaining one to debate over a good bottle of whiskey, had it been a purely theoretical possibility.

  Under the circumstances, he’d been anything but entertained by the possibility.

  And now this.

  “If al-Fanudahi and Teague’s worst-case scenario for what happened in Beowulf after we left applies, though,” he continued, “I don’t think they’re likely to settle for hitting Ganymede.”

  “Maybe not, Sir. But Ganymede’s not exactly naked, you know. And if they want more than Ganymede, they’ll have to come inside the limit. When they do, their options decrease. They won’t be able to hyper out of harm’s way, and we’ve got a hell of a lot more Cataphracts covering the inner system than Haeckle has out at NSG.”

  “Do they really have to come inside?” Kingsford asked softly.

  Jennings raised his eyebrows, and the CNO snorted.

  “Capriotti didn’t need to cross the limit in Fabius,” he pointed out. “He only did it to divert their attention from the Hastas, and everything we’ve seen suggests their fire control is even better than Hasta’s. Not as stealthy, no, but considerably more capable when it comes to actually hitting things. So what if they’re perfectly prepared to sit outside the limit and just blaze away at the inner system?”

  “Sir, there are over a billion people spread between the inner-system habitats!” Jennings protested.

  “And how many million were spread between the Beowulf habitats?” Kingsford sho
ok his head. “I think we’d better all pray they’re more concerned about avoiding collateral deaths than we were.”

  Central Command

  NSG Able-One

  Naval Station Ganymede

  Sol System

  Solarian League

  “Missile activation!” Lieutenant McGill sang out, shattering the intense silence. “Enemy missiles have reactivated! Range three-six-point-seven-five million kilometers! Time to attack range, one hundred eighty seconds!”

  Right on schedule, Haeckle thought grimly. So at least ONI did finally get something right. Not that it’s going to do us any good.

  He checked the seals on his skinsuit with his right hand as he stood beside Pataloeshti, helmet tucked in the crook of his left elbow. Part of him was tempted to go ahead and helmet up, but that wasn’t the sort of example an admiral was supposed to set. Besides, there wasn’t much point to it. While the big compartment was buried deep at the heart of NSG Able-One, Ganymede Station’s main platform, that was unlikely to be sufficient protection against laser heads as powerful as the Manties and their friends threw around. Putting on his helmet wouldn’t help a lot if Central Command took a direct hit of that magnitude. In the event that they took damage but were fortunate enough not to be hit directly—and despite its size, Central Command was a relatively small target, compared to the rest of the platform—there ought to be time to don his helmet before it depressurized completely.

  It was amazing how long three minutes could be, he thought, watching the plot’s icons streak towards them. He felt himself tightening internally, his stomach clenching, his leg muscles trying to quiver with the ancient fight-or-flight reaction. But neither fight nor flight was an option, so he simply stood there, waiting.

  * * *

  Counter-missiles began to launch, and Naval Station Ganymede was no mere task force, or even a fleet. It had always been liberally provided with counter-missile launchers, and their numbers had been vastly increased as the SLN began—dimly—to recognize the nature of the threat it faced. Every one of the hundreds of warships in Ganymede orbit vomited counter fire, as well, and literally thousands of counter-missiles streaked to meet the Mark 23s.

  But this was an old game for the Grand Alliance, and no other navy in the galaxy could match their missile crews’ expertise. Dazzlers flared all along that wavefront of missiles, and Dragon’s Teeth sprang to life, filling space with false targets while the real threats bored in behind the Dazzlers.

  There were twenty-seven hundred missiles in Grand Fleet’s launch. Honor could have fired many times that many, but she’d elected to use only three hundred of her Mark 17 flatpack pods. She was, after all, making a point.

  Three hundred of those missiles were Mark 23-Es, following behind their more lethal brethren with no warheads of their own. Of the other twenty-four hundred, Andrea Jaruwalski had dedicated a full quarter as EW and penaid platforms. So there were a total of “only” eighteen hundred actual shipkillers in that tide of death.

  Naval Station Ganymede fired well over two hundred thousand counter-missiles at them, backed by more than four thousand point defense clusters, most far larger than any mobile structure mounted. They were more powerful, there were more of them, and their software had been continuously tweaked since the Battle of New Tuscany.

  And they still weren’t good enough.

  The defenders killed 811 Mark 23s, but 260 of them were penetration platforms. In the end, 1,249 of the most powerful laser heads ever deployed punched straight through the very best the Solarian League Navy could throw at them. They drove in on their targets and then, in one perfectly synchronized instant, they detonated.

  HMS Imperator

  Sol System

  “Ghost Rider confirms detonation,” Andrea Jaruwalski announced. “It looks good, overall, Your Grace, but it’ll be a few minutes before the detailed evaluation comes in.”

  “Good,” Honor said. “Time to attack for their birds?”

  “Nineteen minutes, Your Grace.”

  “Rafe,” Honor looked at the bulkhead screen tied into Imperator’s command deck, “set the translation clock for seventeen and a half minutes from now.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Central Command

  NSG Able-One

  Naval Station Ganymede

  Sol System

  Solarian League

  He was still alive.

  That was Maridors Haeckle’s first incredulous thought. He was alive.

  He felt himself inhale, heard the same sounds of surprise sweeping through the rest of Central Command, and turned disbelievingly to his chief of staff.

  Pataloeshti was still staring at the plot, trying to understand why they were alive, and Haeckle gave himself a shake.

  “Status,” he heard someone else say, using his voice.

  “We’re—” Captain Tsukatani began, then stopped. He bent over his own terminal, tapping keys, then straightened and turned to face Haeckle.

  “Admiral,” he said very carefully, “the main platforms didn’t take a single hit. We lost two destroyers and a heavy cruiser, but I think that was a mistake in their targeting.”

  “A mistake?” Pataloeshti repeated.

  “Yes, Sir—a mistake. They didn’t hit any of our other active ships, and with all those battlecruisers and superdreadnoughts in orbit, I don’t see how they could have missed them all unless they’d tried really hard.”

  “But, in that case, what—?”

  “It looks like they took out at least ninety percent of the superdreadnoughts in Reserve One.”

  “The Reserve?” This time it was Haeckle, and Tsukatani nodded.

  “They have to have done it on purpose, Sir. Not only that, they punched their birds right through our defensive envelope to reach them, and they didn’t have to do that. They brought them into range of our CMs and every one of our platforms’ point defense clusters, and with their laserheads’ standoff range, they could’ve stayed entirely out of our counter-missile envelope, far less laser range, if they’d wanted to.”

  “A message,” Haeckle said softly. “They were sending a message.”

  His brain raced. He hadn’t even thought about the thousands of obsolescent superdreadnoughts parked in the twenty-four, equidistantly spaced clusters riding Jupiter orbit with Ganymede. Why should he have? If the Manties had proved one thing, it was that those pre-pod fossils were deathtraps waiting to happen. They knew that even better than the SLN, so why in God’s name should they have even considered wasting missile fire on ships which were already inevitably destined for the breakers?

  Because it let them prove that they could have killed all of our active ships just as easily. The realization went through him like a dagger of ice. It was a demonstration of just how defenseless we are. And proof that they can snuff out NSG anytime they damned well feel like it.

  He stood there, staring at Tsukatani, then sucked in a sudden breath.

  “Abort the attack!” he snapped.

  Tsukatani blinked, then darted a look at the tactical board.

  “We can’t, Sir,” he said. “We’re seventeen and a half minutes from attack range.”

  Haeckle swallowed hard. It would have taken nineteen minutes for the self-destruct command to catch up with the Cataphracts. And that meant the Manties were going to think he’d missed their message.

  He turned sickly back to the plot, watching the icons.

  HMS Imperator

  Sol System

  “One hundred seconds to attack range, Your Grace.”

  Captain Jaruwalski seemed remarkably calm about it.

  “Translation in seventy-five seconds,” Rafe Cardones announced from his command deck, and Honor reached up to caress Nimitz’s ears.

  Central Command

  NSG Able-One

  Naval Station Ganymede

  Sol System

  Solarian League

  “Sir, the Manties have translated out!” Tsukatani said sharply, and Haeckle felt himse
lf sag around his bones.

  He supposed a true naval officer shouldn’t feel such profound relief when his enemies escaped unscathed. Particularly when they did it so tauntingly, waiting until the last minute to disappear into hyper. It was the equivalent of thumbing their noses in his face, yet he’d never been happier to see something in his entire life.

  “Let’s get a transmission off to Admiral Kingsford,” he said. “Append our detailed sensor records.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Haeckle nodded, then crossed to the command chair he’d ignored for the last couple of hours. Pataloeshti followed him, and he racked his helmet on the side of the chair, then leaned back with a sigh.

  “I’d just as soon not do that again, Sir,” Pataloeshti said quietly, standing beside him, and Haeckle chuckled harshly.

  “It beats hell out of what we might’ve been doing instead,” he pointed out.

  “What do you think their next move is, Sir?”

  “I suppose that depends on where they jumped to,” Haeckle said. “If they did what I think they did, it won’t be long.”

  He smiled thinly and sat back, legs crossed, and waited.

  * * *

  “Hyper footprint!” Lieutenant McGill said sharply. “Many hyper footprints, range approximately seven light-minutes.”

  Alarms sounded—quite unnecessarily, after McGill’s announcement—and Haeckle straightened in his chair.

  “A little closer than I’d expected, really,” he said as he watched the last of the invaders come over the alpha wall and back into phase with the rest of reality almost exactly twenty-two and a half minutes after they’d left it.

  It was a dazzling display of astrogation, he thought—a perfectly aligned micro-jump barely seventeen light-minutes long—that left the attackers still almost three light-minutes outside Jupiter’s hyper-limit. Of course, it would take fifteen or sixteen minutes for their wallers’ generators to cycle and allow them to translate out again, and that meant—in theory—that the Cataphracts still in his warships’ magazines could have reached them well before they could escape again.