At All Costs

by David Weber

  "Have your people noticed that cluster of blips in Charlie-Two-Seven?" Henke asked, after nodding a welcome to Goodrick.

  "You mean the ones just to system north of the refitting platform?" She nodded again, and he shrugged. "We've seen them, but so far we've put them down as just orbital clutter. You know how sloppy a lot of civilian facilities are about disposing of their trash."

  "Tell me about it," Henke said sourly. "In this case, though, I don't think that's what it is." Goodrick raised his eyebrows, and she grimaced. "The arrays aren't getting very clear returns off of them. In fact, it looks to us over here as if that could be because we're not supposed to."

  "Low-signature platforms?" Truman asked.

  "Definitely a possibility," Henke agreed. "Especially if you look at how they're distributed. Captain LaCosta's tactical section agrees with us that they look like what could be missile pods dispersed just widely enough to clear their birds' impeller wedges when they launch."

  Goodrick was leaning over a secondary display, re-examining the sensor data for himself. Now he looked up and nodded to Truman.

  "I think Admiral Henke has a point, Ma'am," he said. "As a matter of fact, it looks to me like what we're seeing here could be just a portion of the entire pattern. I'd say there's a good chance they've got a lot more of them than we've actually picked up."

  "Well, we expected something like it," Truman observed. She considered for a moment, then shrugged. "I don't think it really changes anything, Wraith. But launch an additional shell of arrays and pass the word to Scotty. I want them sweeping the space in front of him like a fine tooth comb, and I want him tied directly into their take."

  "Yes, Ma'am. I'll get right on it."

  Goodrick began issuing orders, and Truman nodded to Henke over the com.

  "Good catch, Mike. Aside from that, how are things looking from your side?"

  "Nominal, so far." Henke's smile was unpleasant. "I know it's on a lot smaller scale, but I think we're about to get a tiny bit of our own back for Grendelsbane."

  "That's what we came for," Truman agreed, and leaned back in her command chair, studying the plot.

  Given Eighth Fleet's command structure, she was actually wearing three separate "hats." She was Honor's second-in-command and carrier commander; the commanding officer of CLAC Squadron Three; and the CO of CarRon 3's first division, the carriers Werewolf and Chimera. Of course, two of those three slots weren't especially relevant just now, she thought, watching Werewolf's and Chimera's LACs moving steadily away from their carriers. And, speaking as the commander of the first division-and the senior officer of the Gaston attack force-things seemed to be going quite well at the moment.

  Knock on wood, she reminded herself. Knock on wood.

  * * *

  "They're coming right in on us, Sir," Commander Inchman said flatly.

  "But they aren't closing into standard missile range, are they, Sandra?" Beach observed, standing at her shoulder and looking down at the icons on her plot.

  "Their hyper-capable units aren't, Sir; it looks like they're decelerating to rest relative to the planet at about one light minute. But their LACs are still boring straight in."

  "And if anyone thinks they're going to leave our hyper-capable units intact to shoot at their LACs, they're dreaming," Myron Randall muttered from behind the rear admiral.

  "Probably not," Beach agreed grimly, and Randall colored slightly. Obviously, he hadn't realized he'd spoken loudly enough for his admiral to overhear.

  "On the other hand," Beach continued, "they are going to come into range of our missile pods." He showed his teeth in what only the most myopic might have called a smile. "Pity they didn't wait another couple of months."

  "You've got that right, Sir," Inchman agreed, her voice harsh with angry frustration.

  "Maybe, and maybe not, Sandra." Beach put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. "Odds are Supply would've been sending us their regrets again."

  He understood Inchman's frustration-and anger-perfectly. The additional pods they'd been promised would have increased their long-range missile power hugely. Then again, they'd been "promised" for quite some time.

  "I know, Sir. It's just-" Inchman bit off what she'd been about to say, and Beach sighed.

  "They're shipping them to the front line systems as quickly as they can, Sandra. Someone's got to suck hind teat when quantities are limited. And to be fair, if you'd been in charge of prioritizing deliveries, would you have predicted an attack on Gaston, of all damned places?"

  "No, Sir," she admitted.

  "So we do the best we can with what we've got," Beach said as philosophically as he could. He looked over his shoulder at Randall.

  "How long until we can get underway, Myron?"

  "Another twelve minutes," Randall said, after checking his chrono quickly. "Captain Steigert's engineers are doing their best, but-"

  "Understood." Beach gave a bitter chuckle, and squeezed Inchman's shoulder again. "If I'd listened to Sandra, at least I'd have had our impellers at a higher state of readiness."

  He brooded down at the ops officer's plot, then drew a deep breath and turned away.

  "They'll be in range to engage us in another thirty-five minutes, even if we just sit here in orbit. To be honest, if I thought it would do any good, I'd order all of our hyper-capable units to just bug out."

  Randall looked at him with an expression which mingled surprise and disapproval, and Beach snorted.

  "Of course I would, Myron! It might not be particularly glorious, but if those are pod-laying battlecruisers out there-and their deceleration profile certainly suggests they are-then we're truly and royally screwed. Dying gloriously sounds good in bad historical novels. Speaking for myself, I think doing it in real life when you don't have to is fucking stupid, and it irritates the hell out of me that we don't appear to have any choice."

  He couldn't quite keep the bitterness out of his voice, but he drew another breath and gave himself a mental shake.

  "Since we can't avoid action with them, and since we can't match their engagement range, I want all of our ships moved around to the far side of the planet. We'll keep it between us and them as long as we can."

  Randall looked vaguely rebellious. He didn't say anything, but Beach read his thoughts without much difficulty.

  "No, it's not particularly glorious. And I doubt it's going to make a lot of difference in the end, for that matter. But if whoever's in command over there is feeling particularly stupid, he may send in his LACs to flush us out of cover. If he does, we might actually manage to pick a few of them off. Even if he doesn't, he'll have to maneuver his MDM-capable units to clear the planet if he wants a shot at us. For that matter, he may decline to fire from extended range at us at all, if we're close enough to the planet."

  "I think the Admiral has a point, Myron," Inchman said. Both men looked at her, and she shrugged. "Given all the other irons the Manties have in the fire right now, they certainly aren't going to court a violation of the Eridani Edict, and even their MDMs' targeting discrimination is pretty shaky at long range. This is our best chance to at least draw them into a range where we'll get to shoot back."

  * * *

  "They're pulling back behind the planet, Ma'am," Commander Oliver Manfredi said.

  "Not very obliging of them," Michelle Henke observed dryly, and Manfredi chuckled without much humor.

  Henke smiled and tipped back in her command chair, steepling her fingers under her chin in a posture she'd seen Honor assume scores of times. She couldn't say the Peep CO's choice of tactics was totally unexpected, but that didn't make it any more welcome.

  "All right, Oliver," she told her golden-haired chief of staff after a moment. "Make sure Dame Alice has that information, and inform her that unless she disapproves my actions, I intend to execute Grand Divide."

  "Aye, Ma'am," Manfredi replied.

  The chief of staff's own smile creased his classically chiseled features and showed perfect white
teeth, and Henke suppressed a mental laugh as he turned towards Lieutenant Kaminski, her communications officer. It wasn't anything Manfredi had done; it was simply the way he looked. He was as competent as he was decorative, but he really ought to have been on Truman's staff, not Henke's. For some reason, Alice Truman always seemed to have an executive officer, or a chief of staff, or a flag captain who was as golden-haired and blue-eyed as she was.

  But not this time, Henke thought with amused satisfaction. This time, I've got him... not to mention the rest of my "harem."

  It was harder not to laugh this time. Unlike her friend Honor, Truman had always enjoyed an... energetic love-life, although she'd never allowed it to spill over on to her professional life. This time, though, it had been Honor's turn to twit her from the moment Henke had invited her to dinner aboard Ajax and she'd laid eyes on Henke's assembled staff. Manfredi was certainly the most gorgeous of her staffers, but every single one of them was male, and there wasn't a homely one in the bunch.

  She pushed the thought aside and straightened in her chair. Grand Divide was the approach she'd worked out with her staff to deal with a situation like this one. It wasn't a perfect solution, but that was because there weren't any "perfect solutions." It was just the best available.

  She glanced at the master plot, watching the projected vectors of her ships began to shift. She had only four of her six battlecruisers actually under her own command-her third division, HMS Hector and HMS Achilles-had been attached to Samuel Mikl¢s' force for the attack on Tambourin, which left her only Agamemnon, Ajax (her own flagship), and the second division's Priam and Patrocles. They had four of the Edward Saganami-class heavy cruisers in support, including Henke's old ship, the Saganami herself, but none of them were equipped to fire internally launched MDMs. On the other hand, they did have several dozen of the new-style missile pods tractored to their hulls.

  Now Agamemnon and Ajax, accompanied by two of the heavy cruisers, began to angle away from Priam, Patrocles, and the other two heavy cruisers. By spreading her forces, she ought to be able to bring the defenders' starships under fire with at least one of them. After all, the opposition Commander couldn't keep the planet between her ships and everybody. But it meant Henke would probably be able to engage with only half her total platforms. Worse, it meant her two attack groups were moving steadily out of mutual support range for missile defense.

  If the destroyers which had scouted the system had detected larger numbers of deployed missile pods, Henke would never have dared put Grand Divide into action. Even against the number of pods the destroyers had detected, she was risking significant damage. But they couldn't take out the system's industrial base without going in close, not when virtually all of it orbited the system's inhabited planet. Which meant the defending ships had to be neutralized first.

  Well, at least it should be interesting, she told herself.

  * * *

  "They are splitting up, Sir," Inchman reported. Her in-system sensor platforms had the Manticoran units under observation, and she indicated the changing vector analyses under the icons of the two diverging cruiser forces. "CIC is designating this force Alpha and this one Beta."

  "They're going to pincer us," Beach grunted. "About what I expected. Too bad they didn't just go ahead and send in the LACs as beaters."

  "But look at this, Sir," Randall said, indicating the red arrows of projected vectors. "They may be going to try to open clear lines of sight to us, but on their current headings, the range will be less than seven million klicks."

  "So they are a little nervous about Eridani violations," Beach observed, and smiled humorlessly. "On the other hand, our ships' best powered envelope from rest is under two million. Not a huge improvement."

  "Except that we haven't fired any of our orbital pods yet, Sir," Inchman pointed out. "And the closer they come before we do, the better our firing solutions are going to be."

  "True." Beach nodded and frowned thoughtfully down at the plot. "I know doctrine says to kill the CLACs as our first priority in a situation like this one," he said, after a moment, "but they aren't being obliging enough to bring them in closer. If we had more pods, if we could get a better salvo density, it might still make sense to go after them, first. Under the circumstances, though, I think we'll hold our fire as long as we can, then concentrate it all on Alpha. Run your firing solutions accordingly, Sandra."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "And while we're waiting, Myron," Beach turned to the chief of staff, "tell the LACs to continue to fall back. If they can, I want them drifting towards system east."

  "You want them in position to hit Alpha if the pods actually get through, Sir?"

  "Exactly."

  "What about us, Sir?" Randall waved one hand at the icons representing Beach's battlecruisers.

  "It's tempting, but it wouldn't work." Beach shook his head. "We're too far away. Even at our best acceleration, it would take us over an hour to get into our range of them. Unless the pods and the LACs do a hell of a lot better than I expect, they'd pick us off with MDMs before we ever reached them. Worse, as soon as we left the planetary shadow, Beta would nail us." He shook his head again. "No. We stay put, using the planet for cover against Beta. If we can hammer Alpha, so much the better, but we can't afford to get out into deeper water against sharks like these."

  * * *

  "That's a pretty cool customer over there, Ma'am," Commander Manfredi said.

  "That it is, Oliver," Henke agreed. "I don't think it's going to do her a lot of good in the end, though. She's obviously decided to play it all the way out, but she's holding a losing hand."

  She swivelled her command chair to face Lieutenant Commander Stackpole, her operations officer.

  "John, I think she's going to hold fire on her pods to the last possible minute. I know I would, in her place. And notice the way her LACs are shifting oh so casually over to flank our vector."

  "You think he's going to concentrate on us and ignore the carriers, Ma'am?"

  "It's what I'd do. She can't possibly hope to kill them, anyway, and she's not going to beat off our attack. So the only thing left for her to do is to inflict whatever losses she realistically can. Which means us."

  Stackpole considered it for a moment. Although he was physically attractive-taller than Honor and almost as dark as Henke herself, with high cheekbones and a powerful nose-he was nowhere near as decorative as Manfredi's holo-star good looks. He was probably, however, even better at his job.

  "You're thinking about the pods, aren't you, Ma'am?"

  "I am."

  "Well," he said thoughtfully, "we've still only picked up a couple of hundred of them. With hard locks, I mean. CIC's projecting general zones for about twice that many, but we don't have anything we could use for reliable targeting information on them. We could kill most of those we've actually found with proximity warheads, but they're all awfully close to the planet, Ma'am."

  "Too close," Henke agreed. "Especially for MDMs at this range. We might have a nasty accident, and Duchess Harrington wouldn't like that."

  "No, Ma'am, she wouldn't," Stackpole agreed with feeling.

  Honor had made it abundantly, one might almost say painfully, clear that she would not be amused by anything which might be remotely construed as a violation of the Eridani Edict's prohibitions, even by accident. And if smacking an inhabited planet, however accidentally, with a ninety-five-ton missile moving at fifty percent of light-speed couldn't be construed as using a "weapon of mass destruction" against it, very few things could be.

  "I think we've still got to find a way to make them use them at longer-range, though," Henke said. "Albert."

  "Yes, Ma'am?" Lieutenant Kaminski replied.

  "Message to Admiral Truman. My compliments, and I would appreciate it if she could order the LACs to go after the pods."

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  "Antonio."

  "Yes, Ma'am?" Lieutenant Commander Braga, her astrogator, responded.

  "Compute us a
new course. I want to end up in the same spots, but assuming the Admiral agrees to let the LAC jockeys kill pods for us, I want to reduce our acceleration to give them more time."

  "Yes, Ma'am. How much more time?"

  * * *

  "They've reduced their acceleration, Sir."

  Beach swung his command chair to face Commander Inchman.

  "By how much?"

  "Almost fifty percent," Inchman replied.

  "And their LACs?"

  "Changing course and coming straight in on the planet, Sir." It was apparent from Inchman's tone that she'd anticipated her admiral's second question, and Beach nodded unhappily.