At All Costs

by David Weber

  "So," Caparelli said, "looking at every pod-laying waller we can scrape up between us, Grayson, and the Andies, and including all of the Andy SD(P)s currently in commission as fully effective units, we have a total of two hundred and thirty-two. Assuming our construction times hold up, and allowing for working up time, we can have a total of just over four hundred within the next eleven to eighteen months. We can add about a hundred and sixty pod-laying battlecruisers to that total, but they can't stand in the wall against proper superdreadnoughts. That's an impressive number, but the Havenites have some pretty impressive numbers of their own."

  "Yes," Elizabeth said, looking intently at Admiral Givens. "I saw a precis of your revised strength estimates last week, Admiral, but it didn't include the basis for your revisions. Is the situation really that bad?"

  "That's impossible to say with certainty, Your Majesty," Givens replied. "I'm not trying to cover myself, and I stand by the numbers in the most recent report, but until the shooting's over, we can't do an actual nose count to prove it. I'm sorry it's taken this long to produce the report in the first place, but we still have a certain amount of reorganizing to do over at ONI."

  Elizabeth grimaced, her eyes hard, at the oblique reference to Admiral Francis Jurgensen's disastrous tenure as Second Space Lord.

  "Our human-intelligence sources in the Republic are considerably weaker than they used to be," the admiral continued. "Partly, that's due to the political changes there. Quite a few of the people supplying information to us were doing so because of their opposition to the old r‚gime, and their motivation to continue to work with us largely disappeared along with Saint-Just. Others, who we'd managed to buy or suborn, lost their access when they were purged by the new management. And, unfortunately, under the Janacek Admiralty, ONI hadn't assigned a high priority to building new networks. In fairness, doing so under the new circumstances would have been difficult, time-consuming, and probably expensive."

  Elizabeth's agate-hard eyes flickered, but she didn't seem disposed to entertain any excuses for the unfortunate Jurgensen's failures.

  "At any rate," Givens went on, "there are serious holes in our information-gathering capabilities. And I have to admit that Pierre and Saint-Just managed to build this entire shipbuilding complex of theirs, wherever it is, on my watch, without my getting so much as a sniff of it. We're looking for it hard, scouting every system we can think of, but so far, we haven't found it. Which is more than mildly irritating, given the resources we're committing to the effort. On the other hand, the way they've spread out their building capacity since Theisman first went public about the Peep pod-layers, Bolthole is becoming steadily less of an absolutely critical node for them.

  "But bearing in mind the limits on our intel ability, and counting only the new ships we've actually observed, and making allowances for errors in post-battle reports, we're estimating that they must have a minimum of three hundred pod-layers currently in commission. We know they had at least two hundred old-style superdreadnoughts in service, as well, plus another hundred or so in reserve, but it's the pod-layers that pose the critical threat. If they do have three hundred in service at this time, then they have approximately one and a half times as many as we and the Graysons do. It drops to about one-point-three-to-one in their favor if we include all of the completed Andermani SD(P)s. By our best estimate of the differences between their current hardware and our own, that equates to near parity between the two sides, but they've got much more strategic depth than we do."

  "That depth tips the strategic balance significantly in their favor, Your Majesty," Caparelli put in. "They can afford to concentrate their forces for offensive operations to a far greater extent than we can. We can't afford to allow them the opportunity to take out the industrial capacity here in the Star Kingdom or in Grayson, and that means we're forced to maintain sufficient strength in those systems to deter a serious attack. As Pat says, we don't even know where this 'Bolthole' of theirs is, so there's no way we could do the same thing to their infrastructure. We could hurt them badly in several places, if we uncovered enough to go after them, but without at least Bolthole's location, we can't cripple them the way they could cripple us."

  "I understand," Elizabeth said, nodding, and reached out to scratch Ariel between the ears. "But you're estimating an enormous growth in their total numbers, Admiral Givens."

  "Yes, Your Majesty, we are," Givens admitted bleakly. "The problem is that we've uncovered evidence that even before Theisman shot Saint-Just, they'd been stockpiling huge numbers of components. We'd picked up on that before Buttercup, but we'd never been able to figure out where they were going or why. Then, after the Cromarty Assassination and the cease-fire-" if Elizabeth's eyes had been hard before, they could have been used to cut diamonds now "-the Admiralty stopped worrying about it. We'd never been able to confirm it was happening in the first place, and it seemed irrelevant in light of our technical and tactical superiority.

  "However, after examining the wreckage from Her Grace's victory at Sidemore, we've determined that even though the SD(P)s Haven deployed for the attack were new-build, new-design ships, they used existing, off-the-shelf components wherever possible. Obviously, many of their systems had to be new-construction, but the truth is, that probably at least eighty-five percent of the design was based on existing hardware. Exactly what they appear to have been stockpiling. Our numbers for what they squirreled away are nowhere near as precise as I'd like, but allowing for a twenty-five percent overestimate, and assuming the stockpiled items represent only seventy percent of the new ships' total requirements, they could still have an additional four hundred to four hundred and fifty under construction at 'Bolthole' alone. And, of course, there's no way for us to estimate how far along in the construction process those ships might be."

  Chill silence hovered in the conference room. Honor tasted the grim awareness of what those numbers meant radiating from her fellow naval officers. Elizabeth and the Prime Minister were deeply concerned, but the full impact didn't appear to have hit them yet.

  "Excuse me, Pat," she said, after a moment, "but I noticed you said they could have that many ships under construction 'at Bolthole alone.'"

  "Yes, I did, Your Grace." Givens nodded. "Obviously, until they announced the existence of their own pod-layers, all their construction was carried out under conditions of maximum secrecy-the entire rationale for Bolthole in the first place. But as soon as Theisman announced they had SD(P)s of their own, they began preparations to lay down additional units in other shipyards. Our estimate is that they're probably looking at longer construction times in the older yards, not to mention the fact that they had to set up all of the long-lead items and get organized before they could begin construction there at all. Nonetheless, we have indications from various sources that they have somewhere in the vicinity of an additional four hundred new units under construction at Nouveau Paris and two or three other of their central systems. That's the bad news. The good news is that although the Pritchart Administration authorized their construction the better part of a T-year ago, they only really hit their stride about four months ago. Which means it's going to take them at least another two and a half T-years to complete any of them. So they're not a factor in the immediate gap between our numbers and theirs."

  "That may be, Pat," Hamish said, "but the thought of looking at twelve hundred SD(P)s in a couple of years doesn't exactly fill me with joyous enthusiasm."

  "But, with all due respect, Admiral Givens," his brother said, "how realistic is your estimate in fiscal terms?" Givens looked at him, and Grantville smiled thinly. "As Duke Cromarty's Chancellor of the Exchequer I enjoyed quite a bit of experience of just how difficult it was for us to pay for hundreds of new superdreadnoughts, and the Havenite economy is still a long way from anything I'd call healthy. They may have laid down all the ships you're talking about, but will they be able to sustain the building program without an economic collapse?"

  "That, Prime Minister, is
outside my own area of expertise," Givens admitted. "The financial analysts attached to ONI believe they can, indeed, complete all or a high percentage of the total projected current program-or, rather, our estimate of what that program is. They're going to have to make some hard decisions about what not to build to pull it off, but they have many times the star systems we do. Despite our much higher per capita income, their absolute budgets are at least as big, or bigger, than our own, and their manpower costs are far lower. It's certainly possible that trying to complete this program would indeed lead to the economic collapse of the Republic. Which, on a long-term basis, could be good or bad from our perspective. My own feeling, however, is that we dare not count on that outcome. Especially not given how much of Havenite strategy under the Legislaturalist r‚gime was based on seizing Manticore and our wormhole junction specifically as a revenue source. The new r‚gime might well be willing to go deeply into debt if it believes that by doing so it can succeed where Harris, Pierre, and Saint-Just failed."

  Baron Grantville nodded, but he clearly wasn't fully convinced, and Honor tasted his deep reservations about Givens' estimates.

  "So what do we do?" Elizabeth asked simply after silence had lingered for several seconds.

  "For the immediate future, we're effectively forced to stand primarily on the defensive," Hamish said. "I don't like it, and neither does Sir Thomas, but that's simply the reality we face. We're still working on ways in which we might be able to modify that defensive stance in order to put at least some pressure on Haven, and we'll be discussing those possibilities with Admiral Harrington and her staff over the next several days. Hopefully, we'll come up with something that will prevent the other side from retaining sole possession of the strategic initiative, but we'll probably still be forced to adopt a mainly reactive stance until our own new construction begins to come forward in large numbers."

  Something else flickered behind his thoughts. Honor caught just a trace of it, too little to even begin to estimate what it was, but it seemed to carry a flavor of wariness and apprehensive disappointment. Whatever it was, no trace of it shadowed his voice as he continued.

  "We're also engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of our building options. One of the very few things the Janacek Admiralty did right-by accident, I'm sure-was to leave Vice Admiral Toscarelli at BuShips. I doubt they would have done it if they'd realized what he was actually up to over there, although I may be doing Chakrabarti a disservice. He may have known exactly what Toscarelli was doing.

  "At any rate, despite the official Janacek position that there was no need to build anything other than LACs and commerce-protection units, Toscarelli and his people managed to get the Saganami-C approved as a 'modification' of the existing Saganami design, rather than as a totally new class which represents as significant a tactical departure for cruisers as the Medusa-class represented for superdreadnoughts. He also managed to get the design for the new Nike-class battlecruisers and Agamemnon-class BC(P)s approved. We only have the lead ship of the Nike-class about to commission, and only six of the Agamemnons, but there are six more Agamemnons already in the pipeline. Almost more importantly, most of the construction kinks have been worked out of both designs, and they can be put into rapid series production quickly. Then there's the new Medusa-B-class SD(P). It was authorized by Chakrabarti solely as a paper study, but Toscarelli took it to the detailed blueprint stage. It's a significant improvement on the Invictus design, but we'd be looking at an additional delay of six to ten months to put a completely new design into production rather than simply building repeat Invictus-class ships."

  "If we're looking at a two-year window of vulnerability," the Prime Minister asked, "why not consider building smaller units? I know we haven't built any dreadnoughts since before the first war, but given that were talking about pod-laying designs, shouldn't it be possible to build an effective DN(P)? Units that size could be built much more rapidly, couldn't they?"

  "Yes, and no, Prime Minister," Caparelli said formally. "Construction time on a dreadnought runs about eighty percent of the construction time on a superdreadnought. In theory, that means we could build one in about eighteen months rather than twenty-three. Unfortunately, we don't have a DN(P) design. We'd have to produce one from scratch, then get it into construction, with all the delays always attendant on the introduction of a completely new class. We'd probably be looking at a minimum of three T-years from the moment we began work to the moment we completed the first unit, which means it would take six months longer to build the first of the smaller ships. Thereafter, we could, indeed, build them faster, but if we're prepared to use dispersed yards and build 'Grayson-style,' we can build as many superdreadnoughts simultaneously as we can fund. So it doesn't seem to us over at Admiralty House that there's any advantage in designing a smaller, less capable unit when it would actually delay our building programs."

  "There's no way we can speed construction?" Grantville asked. All of the uniformed officers-and his brother-looked at him, and he shrugged. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to question your professional judgment, but the Graysons managed to get their first SD(P) built in under fifteen months."

  "Yes, they did," Hamish replied. "But to complete her to their new schedule, which had a little something to do with Honor's supposed execution, they pulled out all the stops. In fact, they diverted major components from older-style SDs to the new designs. The Harrington's fusion plants , for instance-all of them were diverted from two of their Steadholder Denevski-class ships, which delayed their completion by almost eight months. We can't do that here because we don't have the new construction to divert components from. But that's pretty much what ONI is saying the Havenites have been doing with those stockpiled components Admiral Givens was just talking about."

  "I understand," William said. He grimaced-in disappointment, not in anger-as Caparelli and his brother demolished his suggestions. "I hadn't considered the dreadnought notion from the aspect of design time," he added.

  "We do have some additional potential force multipliers in the pipeline," Hamish said after a moment, with a slight edge of caution. "I've been very impressed with what Sonja Hemphill and Toscarelli have been coming up with ever since Sonja took over at BuWeaps."

  He shook his head, his expression somewhat bemused, as if he couldn't quite believe what he was saying about the Admiral who had been his personal bˆte noire for literally decades.

  "I don't want anybody counting on miracle weapons," he continued, the note of caution in his voice stronger than before. "Specifically, at this time, we don't see anything on the horizon that will equate to the sort of quantum leap in capabilities Ghost Rider and the MDM represented. It's always hard to project the impact of new technologies until you actually have them in hand, so I could be wrong about that, but I'd prefer to err on the side of caution at a time like this. And don't forget that any improvements we may make will be offset, at least to some extent, by Havenite improvements based on the examples of our own hardware they must have captured during their offensive and, I'm sure, idea all their own. Their Admiral Foraker, for example, appears to be a fiendishly clever innovator. Having said all of that, however, Sonja and Toscarelli are looking at several developments which could have at least as significant an impact on our relative combat capabilities as the introduction of the Keyhole platforms."

  "And while we're talking about things the Janacek Admiralty did right for the wrong reasons," Caparelli put in, "his mania for using LACs as a panacea has at least guaranteed that the LAC assembly line was in full swing when the penny dropped. We foresee no bottlenecks in LAC or missile pod production, including the new system-defense pods and setting up our own lines to produce the Graydson's Vipers. There may be some problems we haven't foreseen with the new munitions BuWeaps has in the pipeline, but production of our existing weapons should be ample for our needs. It's going to take us a while to build up to full speed for the system-defense units, but we can probably build LACs faster than we can train crews fo
r them. They won't help us out a lot against an intact wall of battle, but they'll give us a high degree of scouting and rear area coverage which should at least allow us to economize on hyper-capable pickets."

  "Which just about sums up the military side of our options," Hamish said, and Honor tasted another flash of that disappointment from him. This time there was an answering flicker, one of stubborn exasperation, from Elizabeth. And an echo of it from William Alexander, as well.

  "Yes, I suppose it does," Elizabeth agreed, with a very slight but unmistakable note of finality. Then she glanced at her chrono.

  "And it sums it up just in time," she said more briskly, with a wry grimace. "Honor, you and Willie and I-and you, Hamish-have a dinner appointment in the Crown Chancery in about twenty minutes. So," she smiled at Honor, "let's be about it, you three!"

  Chapter Eight

  "Anything from Admiral Duval, Serena?" Rear Admiral Oliver Diamato, Republic of Haven Navy, asked quietly.