At All Costs

by David Weber

  "Aye, Ma'am," McGwire said formally.

  "Then turn the Squadron around. We've got time to get out of the system before the Manties can range on us, but only if we start now. Any civilian starships who can evade are to do the same thing, but if the Manties bring them into range and order them to halt, they are to obey immediately. Make certain that's clearly understood."

  "And the LACs, Ma'am?" McGwire's voice was completely nonjudgmental as Carmouche announced her intention of abandoning the star system to the enemy.

  "They're to return to base immediately, and those bases' personnel are to be evacuated dirt-side as rapidly as possible. After which they'll blow their fusion plants," she replied flatly. "I wish we had the personnel lift to pick up Diego's crews in passing, but we don't. And I very much doubt the Manties brought along transports to haul prisoners home with them, anyway."

  "That would require a bit of gall, Ma'am," McGwire agreed. "On the other hand, look how close to Haven they're operating. I'm afraid gall is one thing they obviously aren't short on."

  * * *

  "Well, this is an anticlimax," Alistair McKeon observed to his chief of staff.

  "ONI can't get it right all the time, Sir," Commander Orndorff said. "The last time we looked, there was a substantial picket here. Obviously, times have changed." She shrugged philosophically. She was a substantial woman, who produced a substantial shrug, and the treecat on her shoulder flirted his tail in agreement with his person's observation.

  "As if you know anything about intelligence appreciations!" McKeon told the 'cat.

  "Banshee made it all the way through the Crusher with me, Sir," Orndorff pointed out. "You might be surprised what he picked up along the way."

  "I might at that," McKeon agreed, chuckling as he remembered the first treecat he'd ever met. Then he shook himself.

  "All right, CIC is confident about its tracking data?" he asked.

  "Yes, Sir," another voice said. It belonged to Commander Alekan Slowacki, McKeon's ops officer and a relative newcomer to his command team. Now Slowacki gestured at the master plot's display of the Fordyce System, indicating a small cluster of red dots accelerating rapidly towards the hyper limit.

  "That's all seven of the heavy cruisers Venturer's arrays picked up, Sir," he continued. "And this," he pointed to another swarm of ruby light chips, "is over a hundred LACs returning to base." He shook his head. "Their system commander, whoever he is, hasn't commed us to announce he's standing down, but he's obviously intelligent enough to know what would happen if he didn't."

  "And their missile pods?"

  "No word on those, Sir. Probably the reason the system CO hasn't contacted you directly," Slowacki said. "He's not prepared to stand them down, as well, and he's afraid you might insist he do so."

  "Damned straight I would," McKeon half-growled. Then he shook his head. "Not that I'd be inclined to commit any atrocities if he declined. Mind you, it'd tempting, but Duchess Harrington would feed me to Nimitz, one bite at a time if I did anything like that!"

  "That's probably an understatement, Sir," Orndorff said with a ghost of a smile.

  "Whatever." McKeon brooded over the plot for several more seconds, then nodded decisively.

  "Okay. They're abandoning the system-or, at least, they aren't going to defend it with anything except the pods-and according to Venturer and Mandrake, they don't have more than a hundred or so of those. I'm going to assume they have at least twice as many as we've actually found, however. And if they don't want to get their LACs killed, I don't see any reason we should get ours killed, either. Contact Admiral Corsini. I want only the Katanas deployed, strictly in the missile defense role. We'll take Intransigent and Elizabeth in, covered by Gottmeyer's cruisers and the Katanas. Corsini is to retain Atchison's cruiser division and the destroyers as a screen for the carriers and stay outside the hyper limit. If any unpleasant strangers appear, she's too immediately withdraw and return directly to Trevor's Star."

  "We could probably sweep up the pieces faster with a couple of LAC groups, Sir," Orndorff pointed out in a diplomatic tone, and McKeon nodded.

  "Yes, we could. On the other hand, a couple of SD(P)s can wipe out every significant platform out there in less than fifteen minutes if we have to. I'm not going to send in the LACs while holding the wallers out of missile range, and if I'm going to take the division in anyway, there's no point exposing Shrikes and Ferrets to potential lucky hits from the pods. If it takes us a little longer to do the job this way, so be it."

  "Aye, aye, Sir," Orndorff said, and waved Slowacki towards the flag bridge's com section.

  * * *

  Captain Arakel Hovanian, acting commodore of the 93rd Destroyer Squadron, Republican Navy, glared at the master plot showing the icons of four CLACs, four battlecruisers, and seven destroyers and light cruisers sweeping inward from the hyper limit of the Des Moines System.

  "Sir, Governor Bruckheimer is on the com," Commander Ellen Stokley, the skipper of the destroyer RHNS Racer and Hovanian's flag captain said quietly.

  "Switch it to my display," Hovanian directed, and the small com flatscreen filled with the image of Governor Arnold Bruckheimer as the commodore slid into his command chair.

  "Commodore Hovanian," the Governor said without preamble. "What the hell are you still doing here?"

  "I beg your pardon?" Hovanian's eyes narrowed in surprise.

  "I asked you what the hell you're still doing here," Bruckheimer repeated flatly. "Aside from the very high probability of getting yourself and all of your personnel killed, that is?"

  "Governor, I'm responsible for the defense of this system, and-"

  "And if you try to defend it, you're going to fail," Bruckheimer interrupted brusquely. "I can still read a tactical plot, you know."

  Hovanian had opened his mouth to reply hotly, but he closed it again with a click at the reminder that Bruckheimer was a retired admiral.

  "Better," Bruckheimer said a bit more conversationally. Then he cocked his head to one side, his eyes compassionate. "Commodore-Arakel-you just got dropped straight into the crapper through absolutely no fault of your own. If they'd waited another three weeks, we'd have had some significant reinforcements waiting for them. But they didn't, and you don't have a single capital ship under your command. There are exactly twenty-six Cimeterres in this entire star system; I know even better than you just how thin our missile pods are stretched; and you've got less than half your own squadron present for duty. There's no way you're going to stop this with three destroyers, and," Bruckheimer's voice hardened around the edges once more, "if you try-and survive the experience-I will personally see you court-martialed. Do I make myself clear?"

  "Yes, Sir," Hovanian said after a long, still moment. "Yes, Sir. You do."

  "Good." Bruckheimer ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair and grimaced. "We're going to have to come up with some sort of response to this strategy of theirs, but I'm damned if I know what the Octagon's going to do about it. In the meantime, get your people out of here before they all get killed."

  "Aye, Sir," Hovanian said. He nodded to Stokely, who began issuing the necessary orders, then looked back at Bruckheimer. "And... thank you, Sir," he said to the man who had just saved his life.

  * * *

  "I wonder what other systems they're hitting today?" Admiral Bressand said.

  "Maybe they aren't hitting any other systems, Sir," Commander Claudette Guyard, his chief of staff said.

  "Oh, please, Claudette!" Bressand shook his head.

  "I didn't say I thought they weren't, Sir. I just pointed out a possibility."

  "Theoretically, anything is possible," Bressand said. "Some things, however, are more likely-or, conversely, less likely-than others."

  "True, but-"

  Guyard paused as Lieutenant Commander Krenckel appeared quietly at her elbow.

  "Yes, Ludwig?" she said.

  "We've confirmed it," Bressand's ops officer said. "Assuming they haven't decided to tr
y to spoof our identification for some reason, two of those ships are definitely a pair of the Invictuses that hit Hera. I'm guessing one of them is the Manties' Eighth Fleet's flagship."

  "Which means we probably are about to play host to 'the Salamander' herself," Guyard observed. "There's an honor-you should pardon the pun-I could have done without."

  "You and me both," Bressand said, remembering his conversation with Poykkonen. "Not that it's going to take any tactical genius to kick the crap out of us with this kind of force imbalance."

  "Maybe not, Sir," Krenckel said. "On the other hand, there's a sort of backhanded compliment in getting pounded by the other side's best."

  "Did I ever mention that you're a very strange man, Ludwig?" Guyard asked.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  "It looks like we caught them with their pants down, doesn't it?" Vice Admiral Dame Alice Truman observed as her Task Force Eighty-One accelerated steadily in-system towards Vespasien, the inhabited planet of the Chantilly System.

  "Yes, it does," Michelle Henke agreed from the vice admiral's com. "Of course, I have this sneaky suspicion that it's supposed to look that way."

  "Why, Admiral Henke! I hadn't realized you had such a broad streak of paranoia."

  "It comes from associating with people like you and Her Grace," Henke said dryly. Then she continued more seriously. "As Honor keeps pointing out, the Peeps aren't stupid. And this time around, they don't have political masters insisting they act as if they were. They haven't had time to reinforce heavily, but Chantilly is a jucier target than Gaston was. It should have been more heavily defended to begin with, and they sure as hell had more hyper-capable units in-system than the three destroyers our arrays have picked up. Which suggests to my naturally suspicious mind that as soon as they realized we'd inserted those arrays, they went to full-court stealth on their main combatants."

  "It's what I'd do," Truman agreed. She drummed lightly on the arm of her command chair for a few moments, then shrugged. "Our arrays are good, but their stealth systems have gotten a lot better, and any star system represents a huge volume. If you were going to hide your defensive task force, where would you put it?"

  "It's got to be close enough to protect the near-planet platforms," Henke replied. "Ninety percent of the system's industry's concentrated there, so there's no point deploying to defend any other area. Greyhound and Whippet swept the entire volume on this side of Vespasien very carefully, though. Even assuming they were stealthed, our arrays probably would have spotted them. But they have to base their deployment plans on the probability that we'll go for a least-time approach and figure they'll adjust if we do something else, instead. So, if I were looking for a good hiding place, I'd probably put my units on this side of the primary, but inside Vespasien's orbit. Far enough in-system the other side's remotes would have to do a fly-by on the planet, and all of the bunches and bunches of recon platforms of my own I'd have concentrated covering the inner system, before they could see me. But close enough so I could build an intercept vector headed out to meet an attack short of the planet."

  "More or less what I was thinking," Truman murmured.

  "To be perfectly honest, I'm less concerned about their warships than I am about their pre-deployed pods," Henke said. "They didn't have a huge number of them in Gaston, but that's the most cost-effective area-denial system they've got. And we found out in Gaston that they're a lot harder to spot than we thought they'd be. It's pretty obvious-assuming we're right about where their starships are-that whoever's in command here's a pretty cool customer. Sneaky, too. I don't like to think about what someone like that could do with a big enough stack of system defense pods if she put her mind to it."

  * * *

  "Do you think their scouts spotted us, Ivan?"

  "It's too soon to say, Ma'am," Commander deCastro replied. "If they got close enough, if they looked in the right direction-if they got lucky-then, yes. They probably know exactly where we are. But nothing Leonardo's sensor crews have picked up suggests they did."

  And we both know it's not going to make a lot of difference, either way, he thought, looking affectionately at his admiral.

  "I guess it's just the principle of the thing," Admiral Bellefeuille said whimsically, as if she'd heard what he carefully hadn't said. "Whether it does any good or not, knowing we managed to at least surprise them would do wonders for my own morale."

  "Well, in that case, let's assume they're surprised until and unless we know differently, Ma'am."

  * * *

  "So I want you to take point, Captain ," Michelle Henke said.

  "I'm honored," the tall, gangly man at the other end of the com link drawled in a maddening aristocratic accent. "Be interestin' t' see how well she does in her first action, too."

  "She's got a lot to live up to," Henke said.

  "I know," Captain (senior grade) Michael Oversteegen agreed. "In fact, I believe someone may have mentioned t' me in passin' that the last Nike's first captain and XO had a little somethin' t' do with that."

  "We tried, Captain. We tried."

  Despite Oversteegen's sometimes infuriating mannerisms and sublime-one might reasonably say arrogant-self-confidence, Henke had always rather liked him. The differences between their families' political backgrounds only made that liking even more ironic, as had the fact that their fathers had loathed one another cordially. But not even the Earl of Gold Peak had ever questioned Michael Oversteegen's competence or nerve, and she was glad he was senior to Captain Franklin Hanover, Hector's CO. She liked Hanover, and he was a good, solid man. But he wasn't Michael Oversteegen, and Oversteegen's seniority gave him command of Henke's third division. If ever there'd been a case of the right man in the right place, this was it, and she watched Nike and Hector crack on a few more gravities of acceleration.

  Winston Bradshaw and his two Saganami-class cruisers-HMS Edward Saganami and HMS Quentin Saint-James-closed up on Truman's carriers, while Henke herself, with Ajax, Agamemnon, and the light cruisers Amun, Anhur, and Bastet followed in Oversteegen's wake. She didn't want the interval between her own ships and Oversteegen's division to get too great, but she wanted at least a few more seconds to react to any traps or ambushes Oversteegen might trip. And she wanted to be sure she kept her ships and the four squadrons of Katanas providing her close cover between Oversteegen and the two hundred-plus Peep LACs shadowing the Manticoran ships.

  She looked at the tiny icons of the LACs on her plot, and once again, she was tempted to roll pods. The small vessels were well within her powered missile envelope, but far enough out accuracy would be even lower than usual against LACs, and Agamemnons weren't wallers. They had to watch their ammunition consumption carefully.

  * * *

  "I don't think they do know where we are, Ma'am," deCastro said. "It looks like they may suspect, though. And I'd say it's pretty definite that someone's figured out we're pretending we're a hole in space somewhere."

  "Pity," Bellefeuille a replied. "I'd hoped they'd keep coming all fat and happy. Anyone care to speculate on whether or not they've deployed additional recon drones?"

  * * *

  "Anythin' on the drones yet, Joel?"

  "Not yet, Sir. Betty is still steering them into position."

  Commander Joel Blumenthal had moved up from tactical officer to exec when Captain Oversteegen had to give up HMS Gauntlet in order to assume command of Nike. Linda Watson, Oversteegen's XO in Gauntlet had no longer been available, since she'd received a long overdue promotion of her own to captain and taken over his old ship. And, despite some people's possible qualms, Oversteegen had brought along the newly promoted Lieutenant Commander Betty Gohr to replace Blumenthal as Nike's brand spanking new tactical officer. Competition for any slot on Nike's command deck had been fierce, but Michael Oversteegen had a knack for getting the bridge crew he wanted.

  Which probably, Blumenthal reflected, had something to do with the results he consistently produced.

  "I believe Admiral Henke'
s correctly deduced the other side's most probable position," Oversteegen said now, tipping back in his command chair with a thoughtful expression. "The question in my mind is precisely what they hope t' accomplish."

  "I imagine not getting shot at for as long as possible is pretty high on their list, Sir," Blumenthal said dryly, and Oversteegen gave one of the explosive snorts he used instead of a chuckle.

  "No doubt it is," he said after a moment. "At th' same time, if that was all they wanted, th' simplest thing for them t' have done would be t' have simply decamped. No." He shook his head. "They've got somethin' more than that in mind."

  He pondered for a few more moments, then looked at Lieutenant Commander Gohr.

  "Have we confirmed Greyhound and Whippet's numbers on the pods they did detect, Betty?"