At All Costs

by David Weber

  "So they aren't going to reach their originally projected firing points until after the LACs' get close enough to start killing pods," he said.

  "No, sir, they aren't. And," Inchman turned her head to meet Beach's eyes, "if they're close enough to kill pods, they're also close enough to kill all our orbital platforms on their side of the planet."

  "Are the LACs on profile for a zero-zero approach?"

  "Yes, Sir. They'll hit turnover on their current profile in about twenty minutes."

  "Crap." Beach drummed on the arm of his command chair for a moment, then shrugged.

  "So much for using the Cimeterres against Alpha. Contact Captain Abercrombie. Order him to reverse course and engage the Manties' LACs."

  "Aye, Sir."

  "At least they'll meet far enough from their battlecruisers and cruisers to be out of standard shipboard weapons range," Commander Randall observed quietly.

  "That should help some," Beach agreed, although both of them knew it wouldn't make a great deal of difference. Gaston System Command had three hundred and twenty Cimeterre-class LACs. The Manty attack force had just over two hundred Shrike and Ferret-class LACs, and they must know about the "Triple Ripple" by now. Given the difference in the basic capabilities of the two sides, Beach's LACs were about to face a painful exchange rate.

  In theory, Beach could have moved his battlecruisers out to support them, since the Manty LACs would have to enter the reach of his own shorter-ranged shipboard missiles. But that would have required him to come out from behind the planet and expose his ships to MDM fire.

  He couldn't do that. And so he sat in his command chair, watching the plot, as his Cimeterres swept around and headed directly towards their much more dangerous foes.

  * * *

  "Vector change!" Lieutenant Veronika Chernitskaya announced. "Their LACs are coming back around, Skipper."

  "They have to protect their pods, Vicki," Captain Tremain replied philosophically. "Frankly, I'm a bit surprised they didn't make the move sooner."

  "Probably didn't like the odds, Skip," Chief Harkness replied from HMLAC Dacoit's engineering station. "Might've taken whoever's in command a few minutes to decide he had to bite the bullet and do it anyway."

  Tremain nodded, but his attention was focused on Dacoit's plot as the tight formation of Havenite LACs accelerated towards his own formation at almost seven hundred gravities. Numerically, the odds were better than three-to-two in the Havenites' favor; in terms of actual combat power, they weren't even close. Examination of the Havenite light attack craft captured at the Battle of Sidemore made it clear the Cimeterres carried carried more missiles than even a Ferret, but those missiles were much less capable than those in Tremain's LACs' magazines. And the Havenites had nothing remotely comparable to the massive grasers built into his Shrikes.

  Of course, it didn't take weapons that powerful just to kill another LAC. Anything would kill a LAC... assuming it could score a hit in the first place. But the Havenites' sidewalls and EW were both far inferior to their Manticoran counterparts, and none of the Cimeterres at Sidemore had mounted a bow or stern wall at all. Worse, from the Havenites' perspective-though they might not realize it yet-six of Tremain's squadrons were Grayson Katanas.

  Designed specifically as "space superiority" LACs, the Katanas were the Alliance's conceptual equivalent of the Cimeterre itself. Unlike the Cimeterre, however, the Katana incorporated all of the Alliance's tech advantages. It was smaller than its Havenite rival-and also faster, more maneuverable, far better protected, with enormously superior electronic warfare capabilities and the LAC-sized version of the new bow wall "buckler," and equipped with what were for all intents and purposes a trio of superdreadnought point defense laser clusters, in addition to the Grayson-designed Viper anti-LAC missile.

  The Viper was about two-thirds the size of a standard LAC missile, but it was quite different. It carried a much smaller warhead, without the multiple lasing rods of a conventional warhead, in order to incorporate significantly better seekers and an enhanced AI. And it also was designed for engagements at much shorter ranges. Engagements in which massive acceleration, agility, and the ability to reach targets quickly were vastly more important than endurance. Which was why the Viper used the same drive systems as the Mark 31 counter-missile.

  "Central, Dagger One," he said to Dacoit's com system. A tone sounded in his earbug as the AI which had replaced the regular communications officer aboard the highly automated LACs routed his transmission to Commander Crispus Dillinger, the senior Katana Squadron CO.

  "Dagger One, Ramrod," Tremain said, identifying himself as the Third Carrier Squadron's COLAC.

  "Ramrod, Dagger One," Dillinger's voice came back instantly.

  "They're coming to meet us after all, Chris. I think it's time your people took center stage. We'll go with Bushwhack Three."

  "Ramrod, Dagger One copies Bushwhack Three."

  "Go get them," Tremain replied. "Ramrod, clear."

  * * *

  Captain Boniface Abercrombie watched the Manticoran LACs on the plot of his command LAC. He didn't much care for the odds. The Cimeterre was a pure attrition unit, designed to overpower the individual superiority of its Manty opponents by means of massive numerical superiority. Abercrombie knew Admiral Foraker and her staff were working furiously to improve the Cimeterre's capabilities in the Republic's second-generation light attack craft, but the limitations of their tech base, even with the rumored upgrades from the Erewhonese, meant her teams simply couldn't match the Manties' capabilities.

  Current doctrine called for engaging Manty LACs at minimum odds of four-to-one. Even at that level, Republican casualties would probably be heavy in a straight-up fight. It was hard to say for certain, because the only LAC-on-LAC engagements so far had been dominated by the Republic's surprise "Triple Ripple" tactic. But the MDM missile profiles employed against Captain Schneider at Zanzibar were chilling proof the Manties knew all about the Ripple. They'd undoubtedly adjusted their LAC tactics even more than their MDM doctrine, and Abercrombie didn't look forward to being the first Republican COLAC to discover exactly how they had.

  Unfortunately, it appeared he didn't have any choice.

  "Stand by for Zizka," he said tautly. Lieutenant Banacek, his tactical officer, looked at him, and he shrugged. "I don't know if they're going to give us the opportunity to use it, but if they do, I want it ready."

  "Yes, Sir," Banacek acknowledged.

  "It's more likely we'll be looking at a close-in dogfight," Abercrombie continued. "I want squadron discipline maintained. They're going to have the range advantage, and our point defense is going to have to carry the load until we get close enough to hurt them."

  "Understood, Sir." There was the slightest edge of a tremor in Banacek's voice, but her gray eyes were steady, and Abercrombie gave her a tight smile of approval.

  * * *

  "Range four-point-six-eight million klicks. Closing velocity one-two-thousand KPS."

  Commander Crispus Dillinger, call sign "Dagger One," grunted in acknowledgment of Lieutenant Gilmore's report while his brain whirred steadily, balancing variables and possibilities.

  At their closing velocity, the missile geometry extended their powered missile envelope at launch by almost five hundred thousand kilometers from the 3.6 million kilometers the Viper could attain from rest. Which meant they'd be in extreme range in another thirty-five seconds.

  He wondered why the Peeps hadn't fired yet. The one drawback of the Viper was that its maximum range was little more than half that of a more conventional anti-ship missile. In theory, that had given the Peeps almost three minutes in which they could have fired upon their opponents without taking return fire. From the Katanas, at least; if they'd opened fire from that far out, the Ferrets backing the Dagger squadrons would have replied in kind.

  Probably holding their own birds as long as we'll let them, he thought. All the indications are that their accuracy sucks compared to ours, and their tac cr
ews have to baby them more on the way in, so they've got to worry more about light-speed transmission lags. They'll want to get to as short a range as they can in order to maximize their hit probabilities. And they may think they can get away with that damned EMP maneuver of theirs. If they do, it's time we... disabused them of the notion.

  "All Daggers, Dagger One," he said over the net. "Bushwhack Three is confirmed. Repeat, Bravo-Whiskey-Three is confirmed. Stand by to initiate launch sequence on command."

  Acknowledgments came back from his squadron commanders, and he felt himself settling deeper into his flight couch as the range flashed downwards. Then he nodded sharply to Gilmore.

  "Initiate!" she said sharply. "Repeat, initiate!"

  * * *

  "Missile separation!" Lieutenant Banacek called out. "Multiple missile separations. Flight time... seventy-five seconds?"

  Disbelief burned in her voice as her computers reported the enormous acceleration rate of the incoming missiles, and Boniface Abercrombie didn't blame her a bit.

  "Christ," somebody whispered, and Abercrombie felt his own jaw tighten.

  "So that's their answer to the Ripple," his XO said quietly, bitterly.

  "That's got to be Katanas launching," Abercrombie replied, almost calmly. He'd wondered what the infernally inventive Graysons had come up with. NavInt had managed to confirm that they had, indeed, developed a dedicated space control LAC, but no one in the Republic had had any idea exactly what they'd done.

  Until now.

  "They can't sustain that kind of accel for long," the XO said. "It's got to be some adaptation of a counter-missile."

  Abercrombie nodded, never taking his eyes from the plot.

  "They'll be short-legged," he agreed. "But they're going to be a real bitch to stop. Worse, they're launching staggered."

  It was the XO's turn to nod. He and Abercrombie had discussed it often enough, and it seemed the Manties-or Graysons, as the case might be-had come up with the same solution to the Ripple as they had. They weren't going to let their onboard sensors be blinded again; that part had been a no-brainer, once the Manties realized what had been done to them. Nor were they going to expose their decoys and EW platforms any sooner than they must, and it was a given that they'd have spread their remote recon platforms as widely as possible in order to get them outside the Ripple's area of effect.

  And now they'd taken Zizka out of the equation, as well, by the simplest expedient of all. They knew Republican missile defense doctrine, especially for LACs, relied more on mass and volume than individual accuracy, so they'd realized it was less the density of a missile salvo than its duration which really mattered. At any sort of extended range, Abercrombie's LACs had no choice but to attempt to saturate the incoming missile patterns rather than attempting to pick off individual threats, the way Manty missile-defense crews would have. So it wasn't really necessary for the Manties to achieve the sort of precise time-on-target concentrations which would have been used to saturate more sophisticated defenses. Or, to put it another way, Abercrombie's defenses were too crude to be significantly degraded by that sort of sophistication.

  So the Manties had staggered their launches, spreading them out in time, and seeded their attack birds with their damnably effective EW platforms. Coupled with the impossibly high speed of the attack missiles themselves, those decoys and jammers were going to degrade point defense kill probabilities catastrophically. And by stretching out their launch envelope, by creating what was effectively a missile stream, rather than a single, crushing hammer blow, they'd made it impossible for a single Ripple launch to kill more than a fraction of their total attack. Worse, the LACs who'd launched the Ripple could no more see through it than vessels on the other side could, and Abercrombie couldn't afford to further hamstring his missile defense by providing the enemy with the opportunity to effectively attack "out of the sun."

  A part of him cried out to issue orders, enforce his will on the engagement, do something to give his people a better chance. But there was no time for that, no last-minute adjustments that would have any impact on what was unfolding. For all intents and purposes, he was a passenger now, waiting to see how well his battle plan worked.

  He didn't entertain very high hopes in that regard.

  * * *

  Commander Dillinger's missiles streaked towards the Havenite LACs.

  It was the first time they'd ever been used against live targets, and even Dillinger was a bit surprised by how well they performed. Their AIs were better than those of any previous missile remotely close to their size, and those AIs had been carefully optimized to go after small, fast, fragile targets. They were far more capable of independent engagements, with less need for telemetry links to the vessels which had launched them. After all, LAC EW-or, at least, the Havenite version of it-was much less capable than that of a starship. There was less need for fire control officers to correct for the sort of sophisticated razzle-dazzle larger ships could perform, and their shorter powered envelope meant the Vipers' sensors had a much better look at their target when they were launched.

  In effect, they were launch-and-forget weapons, which saw to their own midcourse corrections, and the Katanas were free to maneuver, and to employ all of their fire control links for counter-missiles, once they'd gotten the Vipers away.

  And it was obvious the Peeps hadn't had a clue that they were going to face attack missiles whose acceleration had just been increased by forty-two percent. The incoming Vipers were actually over thirty percent faster than the counter-missiles trying to kill them.

  * * *

  Boniface Abercrombie listened to the combat chatter, jaw clamped as he heard the consternation-in all too many cases the outright panic-of missile-defense crews who'd suddenly discovered all of their defensive programs' threat parameters were out of date. He turned his head, watching Banacek working frantically, trying to update her tracking and threat prioritization in the seventy-odd seconds she had.

  Then he looked away. Not even Shannon Foraker could have pulled that one off, he thought grimly.

  * * *

  Each Katana fired twenty-five Vipers.

  The six Dagger squadrons between them put eighteen hundred of them into space over a thirty-second window, and they scorched through the shell of Havenite counter-missiles like white-hot awls.

  Some of them were killed.

  A few of the counter-missiles-a very few-managed to discriminate between real threats and the false targets of the Dragons Teeth platforms. Managed to see through the blinding strobes of jamming. Managed to steer themselves and their wedges into the path of the preposterously fleet attackers. But they were the exception. Most of the kills were attained only because even against an attack like this, Shannon Foraker's layered defense was at least partially effective. There were simply so many counter-missiles that blind chance meant some of them had to find and kill Vipers.

  Under the circumstances, any kills were an impressive achievement... but the counter-missiles managed to actually stop less than three hundred.

  Laser clusters began to fire as the Vipers scorched in, clearly visible to fire control at last as they broke clear of the blinding interference of outgoing counter-missile wedges. The missile-defense crews were highly trained, highly disciplined. A substantial percentage were veterans of the bloody multi-sided civil war Thomas Theisman had fought against breakaway adherents of the old r‚gime. Even now, very few of them panicked, and they stood to their stations, firing steadily, doing their best.

  But their best wasn't good enough. Their fire control software simply wasn't up to the challenge, couldn't react quickly enough, to missiles capable of that sort of acceleration. Not at such short range, not without more time to adjust.

  Vipers broke past the last, desperate shield of laser fire, and warheads began to detonate.

  * * *

  "Oh my God," Sandra Inchman whispered, her face white as her surveillance platforms showed Cimeterre after Cimeterre disappearing from her pl
ot. They went not by ones or twos, but by tens.

  Captain Abercrombie's was one of the first to die, but he'd kept his tactical uplink on-line to the very end. Inchman could scarcely believe the acceleration numbers, yet she had no choice but to believe as the brutally efficient massacre wiped away the Gaston System's total LAC force in less than three minutes.

  Everette Beach sat frozen in his command chair. His swarthy face was the color of cold gravy, and his hands were pincers clamped on the armrests of his chair.

  "I can't-" Commander Randall paused and cleared his throat. "I can't believe that," he said.

  "Believe it," Beach rasped. He closed his eyes for a moment, then thrust himself up out of the chair.

  "I knew we were going to lose them," he said flatly. "But I never would have sent them in if I'd even guessed they wouldn't kill a single Manty."